Assassin's Creed: Underworld (14 page)

They rubbed along without too much strife, but
even so Abberline and Aubrey weren’t exactly crazy about one another. For a start,
Abberline thought rather poorly of Aubrey’s qualities as a police constable, while for his
part Aubrey reckoned Abberline might learn a thing or two about basic human compassion.

Aubrey had returned to the point earlier, as the
two of them made their way to the address of Mr and Mrs Waugh on Bedford Square.

‘The job’s about people too, you
know, Freddie,’ he told his companion as they threaded through the hustle and bustle of
Tottenham Court Road. ‘Serving truth and justice is all very well. But what about serving
the people?’

‘That’s what the rules is there for,
Aubrey,’ Abberline reminded him. ‘Rules is for the good of everybody.’

They skirted rival pure-finders who were about to
brawl over a particularly sizeable pile of dog shit but stopped when they saw the peelers
approaching and made a showy pretence of looking like old pals. Aubrey frowned at them as they
passed.

‘That’s as maybe,’ Aubrey said,
when they were past and it was safe to exhale. ‘Just as long as you don’t start
putting the rules first and the good of everybody second, is what I’m saying. Besides
which, it’s not always so cut
and dried, is it? After all, if our
theory’s right, then your man with the gun shot down a little girl in cold blood.
Where’s the justice in apprehending the man who killed her killer?’

‘Well, let’s get to the truth of the
matter first, shall we? And then we’ll question the justice of it all.’

They had reached their destination, a deceptively
handsome flat-fronted Georgian house in an appealing square of other deceptively handsome
flat-fronted houses. It was just close enough to Tottenham Court Road for the square’s no
doubt smartly attired residents to reach their offices each day, but far enough away so that the
noise of the thoroughfare was a distant hubbub rather than the never-ending clamour that might
send a person mad if they had to live on top of it.

The two bobbies stood with their thumbs in their
belts regarding the house in question. Shutters at the bay window were closed. A light at the
window above the front door was the only sign of life. As they trod the steps to knock,
Abberline wondered if Mrs Waugh was inside now, weeping as she pined for her husband …

‘Where is he, that bastard?’

Abberline had been correct in one regard. Mrs
Waugh was indeed inside the house. When she opened the door it was clear from her flour-covered
face that she was mid-baking. But as for weeping and pining?

‘Come on,’ she demanded of the two
peelers on her doorstep. She had the appearance of a well-fed butcher’s wife, complete
with ruddy complexion and a white apron
bearing stains of unknown
provenance. ‘Where the bloody hell is he?’

‘We don’t know …’ started
Abberline, sent off-guard by her ferocity.

It wasn’t the best way to begin, and sure
enough Mrs Waugh – at least, they assumed it was Mrs Waugh, unless Mr Waugh had an
exceptionally bad-tempered and insolent housekeeper – was sent into a spin.

‘What do you mean, you don’t know
where he is? Why are you coming here then? You should be out there, looking for him.’ She
threw up her hands in frustration and dismay, turned away from the door and stomped off up the
hall, muttering to herself as she went, leaving flour footprints on the terracotta tiles.

Abberline and Aubrey looked at one another,
Abberline giving Aubrey a look up and down. ‘Just your type,’ he smiled.

‘Oh, give over,’ said Aubrey.
‘Are we going in or what?’

They closed the door behind them, throwing the
bolt before following the sound of feminine distress to the kitchen. There they found her
already using a rolling pin to take out her frustration on a vast mound of dough, pounding at it
furiously and almost obscured by clouds of flour.

Hanging nearby was a photograph of Mrs Waugh with
the man whose body Abberline had lost.
They were in the right place.
Abberline nudged
Aubrey in the ribs and gave him a nod.

‘Madam,’ he began, trying again with
what he hoped was a little more composure. ‘A man matching your husband’s
description was seen in the vicinity of the Rookery at the scene of a
–’

‘Well, he was on his way to the Rookery the
night he went missing, so that’s about right,’ she said, continuing to work at the
dough with the rolling pin.

This was the new middle class, mused Abberline.
They ate just as well as the high-borns but did it all themselves. Then something occurred to
him.

‘What trade was your husband in?’ he
asked.

‘He was a photographer,’ she replied
in a tone of voice that left them in no doubt what she thought of
that
particular
profession.

‘A photographer, eh?’ said Abberline.
‘And what business does a photographer have in the Rookery then?’

Still pounding, she fixed Abberline with a
contemptuous look. ‘Are you having me on? How am I supposed to bleeding know what business
he has in the Rookery at any sort of hour? He don’t tell me what he’s doing, and to
be quite frank with you, I don’t bother asking.’

There was something about her protestations that
were a little too theatrical for Abberline’s liking, but he put that to one side for a
second. ‘Aren’t you worried about your husband, Mrs Waugh?’

She shrugged. ‘Not especially. How would
you feel if your wife went and made herself scarce? You’d probably throw a party,
wouldn’t you?’

‘I’m not married.’

‘Well, come back to me when you are and
we’ll have this talk again.’

‘All right then. If
you’re not worried about him, then how come you reported him missing?’

Indignation made Mrs Waugh’s voice rise,
and she was already fairly indignant. ‘Because who’s going to pay for all this if
he’s bleedin’ missing?’

‘My point being, Mrs Waugh, that the
Rookery is a dangerous place at the best of times and perhaps not somewhere that a respectable
photographer like your husband might want to visit.’

‘Well,’ she snapped back,
‘perhaps that’s why he took his barker.’

Abberline and Aubrey shared a look, barely able
to believe their ears.

‘He took his gun, did he?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Yes, except, Mrs Waugh, the man matching
your husband’s description who was seen in the vicinity of the Rookery may or may not have
been involved in a shooting.’

Now at last she set down the rolling pin.
‘I see,’ she said gravely.

‘It would be a great help to us if you
could tell us what your husband might have been doing in the Rookery. What was the purpose of
his visit? Was he there to meet somebody for example? Apart from his barker did he take anything
with him? Did he tell you what time to expect him back?’

She ignored all the questions. Pinning Abberline
with her gaze, she said, ‘This shooting that occurred. Was anybody hurt?’

‘There were two confirmed fatalities, Mrs
Waugh. A little
girl –’ he watched as the woman winced, closing
her eyes, absorbing the pain – ‘and a street thug who went by the name of
Boot.’

She opened her eyes again. ‘Boot? Robert
was on his way to meet Boot. As far as I know, Boot was a business associate.’

‘I’m sorry, I thought you just said
he never told you about his business and you never asked?’

‘Well, I picked up the odd thing,
didn’t I? Any road up, he was on his way there for some kind of deal …’

‘A deal?’

Her eyes darted. She had already said too much.
‘Yes, well, he’s a photographer. He …’

‘… takes pictures,’ said
Abberline. ‘Yes, that’s what photographers do. Photographers take pictures of men
and their wives and the children of men and their wives. Big crinolines, buffed-up boots,
buttoned-up jackets and uncomfortably starched collars, grim and forbidding looks into the
camera, all that kind of thing. That’s what photographers do. They don’t do deals in
slums with street thugs after dark.’

‘Wait a second, you haven’t said yet
– if there were two confirmed deaths, does that mean Robert’s still
alive?’

Again, Abberline and Aubrey shared a look.
‘I’m afraid our most likely theory at the moment is that your husband may have been
killed by a second assailant. In fact, I was wondering if you have a photograph of him, so I can
confirm if his body was found at the Metropolitan line dig in the north.’

Him asking was a formality so he could break the
news,
but it was at the mention of the Metropolitan line that a dark look
passed across her face. ‘Oh, lummy,’ she said, shaking her head with the terrible
inevitability of it all. ‘I always said he was getting in too deep there. I always knew he
was playing with fire.’

Trying to contain his excitement, and as far as
Police Constable Aubrey Shaw was concerned not succeeding in the slightest, Abberline leapt on
her words. ‘What do you mean “too deep”. Tell me exactly what you know, Mrs
Waugh …’

The Waughs’ kitchen window was tall and as
black as night, like a stained-glass window without the stained glass. As Mrs Waugh looked at
him, about to speak, something there caught Abberline’s eye.

And a second later the window exploded.

There was a split second of indecision before The
Ghost decided he couldn’t have the blood of two innocent peelers on his hands, and he made
his move.

In the end he gambled on two things: his own
marksmanship, and Mrs Waugh making enough noise to wake the dead.

He was not disappointed in either respect.

Two objectives: to save the peelers and to
prevent them from seeing either him, Marchant or Hardy. He cast around for a stone, found a
large pebble fringing a flower bed nearby and slipped it into his palm, and then, as he saw
Hardy tense and the silver blade rise in the doorway, he made his move.

The Ghost wore only rags, nothing to protect him
from the glass, so when he hit the window at full force he felt what seemed like a thousand
knife cuts as he crashed through glass and splintered wood and to a crockery table on the other
side.

A single lamp hung from the ceiling, the only
light source in the room, and The Ghost let fly with his pebble at the same time as he crashed
through the window and his aim was true and the light blinked out and night fell like swift
death in the room at exactly the same time as a shout went up and Mrs Waugh started
screaming.

Dislodged crockery fell and
smashed and added to the din but The Ghost was already on the move, and he propelled himself to
a draining board, going round Mrs Waugh to the peelers by traversing the room without touching
the floor, like the games children play – like a game he himself had played at home in
Amritsar. Another jump from the draining board took him to the peelers, neither of whom saw or
heard him or had time to react, as he landed on the tiles just in front of them, and delivered
two quick throat-punches, felling first Abberline, and then his companion, all done in a matter
of half a second, and all done to the accompaniment of screams from Mrs Waugh.

It was over in a trice. Nobody but The Ghost knew
what was happening and that suited the young man fine. Confusion was his friend.

‘Grab her,’ he commanded. Hardy and
Marchant had come barging into the room and The Ghost saw the fury of denial on Hardy’s
face. ‘Grab her before she brings other rozzers running.’

Then Marchant was barking orders like he was a
man in charge and not a man who was hopelessly confused about a situation that had spun
irretrievably out of his control. ‘You heard him. Grab her! Blooming well shut her
up!’ And perhaps grateful for the chance to carry out a little violence, Hardy strode
across the room to where Mrs Waugh stood screaming, and The Ghost saw the flash of brass
knuckles and he turned his head away as Mrs Waugh’s screams abruptly stopped.

It took all three of them to carry her out of the
house and bundle her in the Clarence. The Ghost made sure he
was the last
to leave, and closed the front door behind him.

In the house an icy wind blew through the smashed
window of the kitchen. On the floor the two peelers lay out cold.

It was a day of recrimination.

The name Bharat Singh came bouncing down the
shaft and into the tunnel, and The Ghost once again scaled the ladders and made his way across
the planks to the office. There sat Cavanagh, just as he had the day before, and there stood
Marchant, Hardy, Smith and Other Hardy, just as they had the day before.

Only things were different now. Where yesterday
Hardy had looked at The Ghost with curiosity at best, now he gazed at him with unmasked hatred;
Marchant too regarded him with new interest.

‘I have some important news for you, young
Bharat,’ said Cavanagh with hooded eyes. ‘You are to be promoted. No more working in
the tunnel. No more labouring in the trench. From now on you will work under Marchant here,
putting your reading and writing skills to good use. Congratulations, you have achieved
everything your father would have wanted.’

It was a fictional father’s admiration that
Cavanagh mocked, but that didn’t stop The Ghost feeling a twinge of something approaching
pure hatred for him.

‘You may ask why,’ continued
Cavanagh. ‘Why have you been promoted? It appears from talking to Mrs Waugh that
everything you told us was correct. And as I’m sure you are
already
aware, Mr Smith here recovered a photographic plate from your hole at the Thames Tunnel.
Therefore, your first task is to carry out the sentence of death on the treacherous Mr Waugh.
Only, of course, that sentence has already been carried out, and you have proved yourself in my
eyes.’

The Ghost nodded. ‘Thank you, sir. What of
my victim’s widow?’

‘She’s been taken care of.’

The Ghost kept his face blank but chalked up one
more innocent.

Meanwhile, from behind him, Hardy cleared his
throat.

Cavanagh acknowledged him, turning his attention
to The Ghost. ‘Mr Hardy here feels aggrieved about your actions last night. Neither seem
quite sure what happened.’ At this he looked hard at Marchant and then at Hardy.
‘But both are agreed that you acted impulsively and put them at risk.’

The Ghost opened his mouth, about to defend
himself.

‘But …’ Cavanagh held out a
hand to stop him. ‘I happen to disagree with Mr Marchant and Mr Hardy. We had a body
discovered at the dig, which raises questions. The last thing we need is two dead constables as
well. There are only a certain amount of questions we can withstand. You, Mr Hardy, should know
better.’

‘That’s as may be,’ growled
Hardy, ‘but the lad went rogue. It was agreed that Mr Marchant and me would take the
kitchen and he would stop anybody leaving from the rear. He smashed through a bloody window,
guv. It wasn’t exactly stealthy, know what I mean?’

Cavanagh gave a thin smile. ‘Something
tells me our newest employee knew exactly what he was doing.’