Dove
DOVE Printer · Inkwell Street, Mercantile Canal Ward
The shop at the far end of Inkwell Street has a narrow frontage and no sign. If you need to know what it is, you already know. If you don’t know, the absence of a sign is the answer to your question.
Dove is approximately fifty-five, small in build, and ink-stained in the permanent way of someone for whom ink is less an occupational hazard than a natural condition. He runs a print shop — a proof press visible through the window to those who look, which not everyone does, which is probably the point. He asks no unnecessary questions. This is not indifference. It is a considered professional position maintained consistently across a very long career, and it is one of the reasons that career has been long.
He has been a source of information and quiet assistance to Brass & Bone Investigations since before Brass & Bone Investigations existed as such — nine of Tim Blackwood’s nineteen years in the Watch, and every year of private practice since. The nature of that assistance varies with the requirements of the case. What does not vary is the reliability, the discretion, and the complete absence of unnecessary commentary on either.
He keeps records. Where he keeps them is his own business, and the particular quality of that location is that they cannot be removed from it by anyone other than Dove himself. This has proven, on more than one occasion, to be precisely the right arrangement.
Nala does something in his shop that Tim has been unable to classify for twenty years. He has stopped trying. Some things are simply what they are, and Dove’s shop is one of them — a place that functions exactly as it appears to function, and considerably more besides, and does not explain itself to anyone.
He handled the notification packet that closed the Understone case. He did this without being asked twice, without commentary, and without any observable curiosity about the contents beyond what was necessary to ensure correct delivery. The case closed. This is what Dove does.