Assassin's Creed: Underworld (12 page)

The night after the body was discovered, The Ghost
glanced into the graveyard as he always did on his way home from the dig, and as usual his eyes
sought out the gravestone through which Ethan communicated, and as usual it was …

Ah, no it wasn’t. Not tonight. It was
leaning to the right.
Danger
. Which to The Ghost meant something significant. Not that
he was being followed by Cavanagh’s men. He already knew that. But Ethan was around,
keeping tabs on him still.

But to more pressing matters. There were indeed
men following him. One of them had left the dig a few minutes before him. As the shift-change
bell rang, The Ghost had seen Marchant nod discreetly to one of the three hired hands who were
constantly to be found hanging around the office or on the dig. Their names were Hardy, Smith
and Other Hardy – Cavanagh’s own predilection for using his surname had either
rubbed off on his men or been imposed upon them – and they were passed off as payroll
security. The other men called them ‘punishers’, a certain breed who were expert at
giving out a good hiding if you greased their palm with silver. But while The Ghost didn’t
doubt they were punishers of a sort, he also knew them for what they really were: Templar
strongarms. They
were professionals too. Big men, they were fit and alert;
they didn’t spend their time cracking jokes or whistling at the prostitutes who hung
around the perimeter fence touting for business. They kept their minds on the job.

But they weren’t
that
good, as the
commencement of their covert pursuit of The Ghost proved; they weren’t good enough to hide
from him. The man who left at Marchant’s signal – Other Hardy – was next to be
seen leaning on a barrow wearing a look of studied disinterest, like he wasn’t really
scanning the crowds of departing workers that thronged the street for his quarry. When he caught
sight of The Ghost, Other Hardy pushed himself off his barrow and moved on with a walk that
could only be described as an ‘amble’, like he wasn’t really set on staying
just the right distance ahead of The Ghost.

Meanwhile, there would be another man behind him.
Probably two: Smith and Hardy. And that was good, thought The Ghost, because that was just where
he wanted them.

I hope you like a nice long walk, my
friends
, he said to himself, and then he spent the rest of the journey speeding up and
slowing down, setting himself the challenge of making life as difficult as possible for his
pursuers without actually tipping them off that he knew they were there.

Until, at last, he reached the tunnel. He’d
long since left the crowds behind, of course. Ahead of him, Other Hardy was an almost lone
figure now, as The Ghost approached the shaft. Some way away, the man stopped, making a pretence
of needing to tie his bootlace, as The Ghost took the steps down into the tunnel rotunda. He
had spent his day underground, and now he would spend his night there too.

Reaching the bottom, The Ghost stood among the
neglected statues and careworn features – once so swanky and plush, now rotting –
and gazed upwards, making a show of enjoying the view. Sure enough, he sensed figures on the
steps above him pushing themselves into the shadows. He smiled. Good. This was good. He wanted
them to see where he lived.

‘Some men may come in the next few
days,’ he told Maggie later. By then he had checked on Charlie and given him bread, and
he’d attended to Jake, pleased to see the old lag’s leg was on the mend. And with
those two tasks complete, he had continued further along, deeper into the sepulchral darkness of
the tunnel, picking his way past alcoves crammed with rag-swaddled bodies.

Some of them slept; some stared at him with wide
white eyes from inside their unwelcoming hidey-holes, silently watching him pass; and some
greeted him with a wave – ‘Hello, Bharat’, ‘Hello, lad’ – or
perhaps a simple blinked salute.

Some he knew by name, others from their jobs:
Olly, for example, was a ‘pure-finder’, which meant he collected dog shit to sell on
Bermondsey Market, but who had a tendency to bring his work home with him. The Ghost held his
nose as he passed Olly, but raised a short wave anyhow. Many of them had candles, and he was
grateful for the light; many did not, and lay shivering in the dark, alone with their pain,
weeping as they awaited
the crispy dawn and the beginning of another day of
soul-destroying survival in London – the world’s most advanced city. The shining
jewel of Her Majesty’s great empire.

And then he reached Maggie, who tended a small
fire. She would have been doing so most of the evening, ladling broth into the bowls of any
tunnel inhabitant who came asking. They all received their food, or ‘scran’ as it
was known, with a mixture of gratitude and devotion, and left thanking Maggie and singing her
praises; but mostly they all looked fearfully beyond her to where the light lost its battle with
the shadows, and darkness reigned literally and metaphorically, and they thanked God for the
young Indian man who some of them knew as Bharat and some of them knew as Maggie’s lad,
who had brought order to the tunnel, and made it so that they could sleep more easily in their
alcoves at night.

And there they sat, side by side, Maggie and The
Ghost with their backs against the damp tunnel wall and the dying fire at their feet.
Maggie’s knees were pulled up and she hugged herself for warmth. Her long grey hair
– ‘my witchy hair’, she called it – lay over the fabric of a filthy grey
skirt, and though her boots had no laces she said she preferred them that way. She hated feeling
‘trussed up’, she always said. Once upon a time, long ago – ‘before you
were even a glint in your daddy’s nutsack’ – she’d seen pictures of
Oriental ladies with bound feet, and after that she’d never worn laces in her boots again.
She felt things keenly for her fellow man, did Maggie.

Now her features rearranged themselves into a
picture
of apprehension and concern. ‘And why,’ she asked,
‘will men be coming for you?’

‘They’ll be asking questions about
me,’ The Ghost told her, ‘and they may well be pointed in your direction.’

She gave an indignant harrumph. ‘Well, I
bloody well hope so. They bloody well
ought
to be.’

As well as helping others, Maggie liked people to
know about it. She liked her efforts to be recognized.

‘I’m sure they will,’ said The
Ghost with a smile. ‘And I would like to ask you to be careful about what you
say.’

She looked sharply at him. ‘What do you
mean?’

‘I mean that there will be others who live
in the tunnel who will say that I protect you from the thieves and vagabonds who live further
along, and that is acceptable; they will paint a picture of me of a man who is no stranger to
violence and I have no problem with that. What I don’t want is for these men to be
furnished with an exaggerated account of my abilities as a fighter.’

She dropped her voice. ‘I’ve seen you
in action, don’t forget. There ain’t no exaggerating your abilities as a
fighter.’

‘That’s exactly what I mean, Maggie.
That’s exactly the sort of thing I don’t want you to say. A man of violence but not
necessarily a man of great skill, do I make myself understood?’

‘I’m getting there.’

‘They are likely to ask you exactly how we
met, but … Tell them what you like. Tell them you found me drunk in a gutter. Just
don’t tell them about what happened at the churchyard.’

She reached for his hand. Her weathered hand was
almost the colour of his own. ‘You’re not in any trouble, are
you, Bharat?’

‘I’m touched you should
worry.’

She chuckled. ‘Oh, like I say, I’ve
seen you in action. It’s the others who should worry, but …’

His head dropped. ‘But …?’

‘But I also saw you hesitate when you had
that murderous little toff bang to rights, and I saw the fight drain out of you, just as surely
as if you’d been uncorked. I saw someone who’s very good at dealing death but
ain’t got no heart for doing it. Now, I’ve met lots of evil bastards with a sadistic
streak long as your arm, who would go knocking your teeth out of your mouth just because they
had too many ales and fancied swinging their arm. Evil bastards who loved dishing out pain but
only to those weaker and more vulnerable than themselves. Christ only knows, I’ve been
married to two of them. And what’s more, I’ve seen men who was good at fighting and
could handle themselves if a brawl broke out, and who would do what they had to do given the
circumstances, and maybe take a grim pride in their work, and maybe not.

‘But what I ain’t
never
seen
is a man so good at fighting as you, who had so little stomach for it.’

The Ghost watched as she shook her head in
disbelief, her grey hair sweeping her skirts. ‘I’ve thought about that an awful lot,
young man, believe you me. I’ve wondered if maybe you was a deserter from the army but not
out of cowardice – oh no, I’ve never seen a man so brave – but because
you’re one of them, what d’you call it?
Conscientious objectors.
Well, the
truth of it is, that I don’t know, and
from the sounds of what
you’re saying now, it’s probably best I don’t, but what I do know is that
you’ve got a big heart and there’s no room in this world for people with a heart
like yours. This world eats up people with hearts like yours. Eat them up and spits them out.
You ask if I worry? Yes, my boy, I worry. You ask why? That’s why.’

As he waited with the other men for their shift to
begin, The Ghost wondered if the Templars had found what they were looking for, this artefact
left by a civilization before our own, a buried time capsule awaiting discovery. What tremendous
power might it have?

His mind went back to Amritsar as it so often did
– his memories were all he had now and he would revisit them with all the reverence of a
devout man before a religious shrine – and he thought of the Koh-i-Noor diamond and the
spectacular all-powerful lightshow it had revealed, as though providing a portal to other
worlds, deeper knowledge, more profound understanding – a map for mankind to find a better
world.

But if it fell into the wrong hands?

He dreaded to think. But into his mind came
unbidden images of enslavement. He saw every man and woman ground down like those at the tunnel,
virtual slaves to be spat at and looked down upon, treated as something less than human by
grinning masters who ruled from plushly appointed buildings. Men who took symbols and twisted
their meaning to meet their own ideology. He saw agony and anguish. He saw a world without
hope.

The bell rang, and the new shift barely
acknowledged the departing men as they met like two opposing armies
who
couldn’t be bothered to fight, passing one another on the mud, clutching their precious
tools. Next The Ghost descended a series of ladders into the shaft, walking along the line until
he came to the face, where the digging and scooping and carrying continued – it never
really stopped – and soon he was filthy. Soon they all were. There were no divisions of
colour in the underground; there was just whether you could work and how fast. There was only a
cheerful or encouraging word for the man next door.

Bells were supposed to denote the passing of
time, tolling on the hour. But either Marchant didn’t enforce their ringing or The Ghost
didn’t hear them, because time simply trudged on without demarcation. Dig, dig, dig. The
noise was the incessant scrape and clang of spades and pickaxes and the chatter of men along the
line, certain voices louder than the others, the comedians who, they say, kept the other’s
spirits up.

Most men preferred working on the cranes. They
saw more sunlight. The metronomic to and fro of the crane served as a clock, denoting the
passing of time that was absent in the trench. But not The Ghost. Down here seemed like a
respite from all that.
Dig, dig, dig
, like an automaton. Mind wandering to home, to
where he was Jayadeep again.

Besides, he was used to being underground.

‘Well, if it isn’t Police Constable 72
Aubrey Shaw of Covent Garden’s F Division,’ said Abberline, ‘all the way out
here in Regent Street.’

A red-faced, rotund and rather glum-looking
peeler looked up from his mug and peered balefully at Abberline, a moustache of ale-froth
gleaming on his top lip.

‘Well,’ he sneered back, ‘if it
isn’t Police Constable 58 Frederick Abberline of Marylebone’s D Division, also some
way out of his jurisdiction, who can take his insinuations and stick them where the sun
don’t shine.’

‘Who’s insinuating?’ said
Abberline. ‘I’m coming straight out and saying that you’re skiving, mate, and
I’ve caught you bang to rights.’

It was true. Both constables were a long way out
of their respective patches, since they were in the Green Man pub on Regent Street. Abberline
had thought he might find Aubrey here, seeing as how he wasn’t to be found on his patch
and had a name as something of a regular. Aubrey was fond of cricket, and the Green Man was a
haunt of players and enthusiasts. In the window were bats and stumps and other cricket
paraphernalia, which no doubt suited Aubrey fine, as he could savour his ale without members of
the public peering through the glass and seeing a peeler apparently enjoying a boozy break.

‘Anyway, I’m
not skiving.’

‘Well, what do you call it then? Skiving,
sloping off, showing a clean pair of heels to the Green Man to sink a brace of ales –
it’s all much the same thing, ain’t it?’

Aubrey’s shoulders sank. ‘It
ain’t skiving, and it ain’t sloping off. It’s more like skulking. No, wait a
minute, it’s
sulking
. That’s what it is.’

‘And why would you feel the need to sulk,
Aubs, eh?’ Abberline took a seat at the bar beside him. A barman wearing a clean white
apron approached, but Abberline waved him away, because Fresh-faced Freddie didn’t drink
on duty.

Beside him, Aubrey had unbuttoned the top pocket
of his tunic to take out a folded piece of paper that he handed to Abberline. A crude imitation
of a newspaper screamer was handwritten across the top of the page. ‘Have You Seen This
Man?’ it said, while below it was a charcoal drawing of a man in robes carrying an
improbably long knife.

‘The blokes at the station are having a lot
of laughs at my expense, I can tell you,’ said Aubrey ruefully.

‘Why would that be?’

‘A double murder in the Rookery. I expect
you’ve heard about it. I have a witness that saw –’

‘A man in robes. Yes, I did
hear.’

Aubrey threw up his hands in exasperation.
‘See? This is exactly what I mean. The whole of bloody London knows all about my strange
robed man with the very long knife. The whole of bloody London knows I’m
looking
for a man in fancy robes with a long knife, but no bugger apart from
some
old crone in the rookery has actually seen him. Mind you …’ He looked sideways at
Abberline. ‘They all know about your missing body too, Freddie. Matter of fact, and
you’ll have to forgive me for thinking this, but since I heard about Freddie
Abberline’s incredible disappearing corpse, I did rather hope it might take the heat off
me.’

Abberline gave a dry laugh. ‘And no such
luck?’

‘No such luck. That’s why
you’re here, is it? You’re skulking too?’

‘No. And as a matter of fact your robed man
has cropped up in my missing-body case, would you believe?’

Aubrey’s look of open incredulity was
instantly replaced by another of derision. ‘Oh yes, I know your game.’ He looked
over Abberline’s shoulder as though expecting to see pranksters come chortling from the
shadows of the pub. ‘Who put you up to this?’

‘Oh do pipe down, Aubs. I’m telling
you that I believe in your robed man. That’s something, isn’t it?’

‘Well, you’d be the first.
You’d be practically the only one. Like I say, apart from the crone, nobody else has seen
a robed man. I’ve asked every trader in Covent Garden Market. I must have asked half of
the Rookery, and you would think that a robed man with an enormously long knife would stand out,
wouldn’t you? Eye-catching like. But no. Nobody’s seen him. Nobody apart from that
one witness. It’s like he just appeared – and then disappeared.’

Abberline thought. For some reason that chimed
with how he felt about the stranger at Belle Isle – a mysterious figure within the mist,
his motives just as much a mystery. ‘So who are your marks?’ he asked.

‘One of them was a
lowlife went by the name of Boot. Petty thief. Runner for various East End gangs.’

‘No stranger to the blade, no
doubt.’

‘Yeah, but, no … Actually, he was
shot.’

‘He was shot? What about the other
one?’

‘Ah, here’s where it gets sad,
Freddie. It was a little girl. Got in the way, looks like.’

‘And was she shot too?’

Aubrey threw him a look. ‘Most people take
a second to reflect on the tragedy of a little girl being gunned down, Freddie.’

‘Ah, so she
was
shot?’

‘Yeah, she was shot.’

‘Right, so a witness saw a man in robes,
carrying what looked like a wickedly long blade?’

‘Thin as well, this blade. More like one of
them fencing swords. Like a rapier.’

‘Not for cutting. For combat. For stabbing.
Yet this man Boot and the little girl were both shot?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So you’re looking for a mysterious
robed figure who shot two people with a knife?’

‘Ooh, me sides, I think you’ve split
’em.’

Abberline sighed. ‘Was the gun ever
found?’

‘No.’

And now the younger peeler was thinking about the
gun he’d found on the body. He was thinking about the puncture wound he found on the body.

‘You only had the one witness?’

‘Another one, who only saw a bloke running
away.’

‘Was he wearing funny
robes?’

‘The witness or the guy running
away?’

‘The guy running away.’

‘No.’

‘So he could be the shooter?’

Aubrey looked at him, a little shame-faced.
‘Well, he could be I suppose. Never really thought about it. I had the knife-carrying
figure in the robes to occupy me, didn’t I?’

Abberline threw up his hands. ‘Bloody hell,
Aubs. Come on, sup up. You and me are going back to the Rookery.’

An hour later and poor old Aubrey Shaw was even
more despondent. His first witness, the crone who’d seen the man in robes, was nowhere to
be found. ‘She’s disappeared, just like the mythical knifeman,’ Aubrey was
bemoaning, although both men knew that such was the itinerant life of the slums that she’d
probably just packed up and moved on.

Thank God for small mercies, then, that they were
able to find the second witness. Abberline thought he might have had a broken man on his hands
otherwise.

‘Here she is,’ said Aubrey through
the side of his mouth as they approached number 32. There on the steps of a tall
smoke-discoloured and flat-fronted tenement sat a defeated woman. She gazed at them with eyes
shorn of all emotion. She held a baby to one bare breast.

Aubrey coughed and looked down. Abberline
desperately wanted to be worldly but failed, and he too felt himself colouring as he found
something of great interest
in a line of washing nearby. Both men did what
a gentleman should do in such circumstances. They took off their hats.

‘Excuse me, madam,’ said Abberline.
‘I believe you talked to my colleague here, Police Constable Aubrey Shaw, upon the matter
of something you may have seen on the night of an horrific double murder right here in the
Rookery. Would I be correct in making such an assumption?’

‘Saints preserve us.’ She smiled
through teeth like timeworn gravestones. ‘Don’t you talk pretty?’

Abberline wasn’t sure if she was taking the
piss or genuinely being nice, but her face had lit a little, and her eyes softened, so he
pressed home the advantage. ‘Madam, did you see some fellow running down this very street
on the night of the murder?’

She seemed to think, looking down at the
baby’s head. She adjusted the infant on her nipple then returned her attention to the two
peelers on the steps below. ‘That I did.’

‘And he was just running, was
he?’

‘That he was.’

‘Can you describe him?’

She sniffed haughtily. ‘Like I told your
friend there, I don’t think I could describe him, no. Not without a couple of pennies
like.’

Frowning, Abberline turned to Aubrey, ‘You
mean to tell me you could have got a description but for a few pennies?’

‘It was all about the bloke with the robes,
wasn’t it?’ Aubrey raised his hands defensively, colouring even more than usual.

‘All about you being a tight-arse more
like.’

‘How was I to know
you’d suddenly get all interested in some bloke running in the street? Matter of fact, why
are
you so bleedin’ interested? He probably just saw the blood, or better still
the bloke with the knife, and thought he’d do well to make himself scarce. Wouldn’t
you?’

Abberline had stopped listening. He was already
climbing the steps to press coins into the woman’s palm, gallantly averting his face from
her naked breast as he did so. ‘Now, can you tell me what he looked like?’

She looked down at her hand as though wondering
whether to quibble but then decided against it. ‘He were a bloke in a suit with a big
puffy moustache like what Prince Albert used to wear before he up and died, God rest his soul.
And he had big thick side whiskers down here, bit like yours.’

‘And tell me, madam, was he carrying
anything?’

She looked shifty. Afraid.

Abberline leaned forward, still keeping his eyes
primly averted but able to speak into the woman’s ear. ‘Was he carrying a revolver,
by any chance?’

With her eyes she said yes. Abberline thanked her
with his, and then withdrew.

As he and Aubrey made their way out of the slum,
Abberline was ebullient. ‘You see what this means, Aubs? It means that more than likely
your running man and my corpse is the same bloke. And your man in robes is the same man who
turned up at Belle Isle. This, my friend could crack the case wide open.’

‘Thank God for that,’ sighed Aubrey.
‘Just maybe I’ll be able to restore my reputation.’

Abberline sighed as well.
‘There’s also the small matter of truth and justice, Aubrey. Let’s not forget
that, eh?’

And in return the older man gave him a look that
said,
You may be keen but you have an awful lot to learn
, saying, ‘Truth and
justice ain’t gonna bring that little girl back, Freddie.’

Back at the station Abberline badgered Aubrey
into asking the desk sergeant for the logbook, and as Aubrey went to make what he described as a
‘well-earned brew’ Abberline sat it on a lectern, hoisted himself up to a tall
chair, and began leafing through the heavy pages in search of persons reported missing on the
night of …

Ah. There it was. Bloody hell. Just one in this
area. A man whose wife had made the report the evening after the night in question. He’d
gone out to – oh, this was good – the Rookery, telling her he had a bit of business
to attend to, and that he’d be back soon. Only he hadn’t turned up.

His name was Robert Waugh. He lived not far from
here.

‘Aubs,’ said Abberline, as the other
PC returned to the front desk, two steaming mugs of tea in his fists. ‘No time for that,
we’ve got a house call to make. We’re going to the home of Robert Waugh.’