Assassin's Creed: Underworld (16 page)

Months had passed since the events at the
Waughs’ home, and during those months Abberline had brooded. Occasionally he brooded
alone. Occasionally he had help in the form of Aubrey who, while not quite as brooding as
Abberline, did a little out of sympathy, as well as being glad of an ale or two in the Green
Man.

During these occasions, despondently hunched over
a table in the pub and trying not to stand out like two skiving bobbies, Aubrey would attempt to
lighten the mood with one of the best new music-hall jokes.

‘I say, I say, I say, Freddie, when is a
boat smaller than a bonnet?’

‘I don’t know. When is a boat smaller
than a bonnet?’

‘When it’s capsized.’

And sometimes he would try to lighten the mood
with one of the worst.

‘I say, I say, I say, Freddie. Why do
tailors always please their customers?’

‘I don’t know, why?’

‘Because it is their business to suit
people.’

And other times he would try to engage Abberline
in more profound and philosophical discussion.

‘It’s just one of those
things,’ he said one day.

‘But it’s not, though, is it?’
Abberline, who had long
since forgone his no-drinking-on-duty rule, drained
the rest of his pint. ‘If it was just one of those things I wouldn’t be so bothered.
Because you know what really irks me, Aubrey? It’s the not knowing. It’s the fact
that liars and murderers are walking around out there, thinking they got one over on the
peelers. No, what am I talking about? Not the peelers, because no bugger else apart from you and
me could give two hoots about robed men and missing bodies. Thinking they got one over on you
and me, is what it is.’

Aubrey shook his head sadly. ‘You know what
your problem is, Freddie? You want everything to be black and white. You want answers all the
time. And sometimes, you know, there just ain’t no answers, and there ain’t no black
and white; there’s just different shades of grey, which is to say that things are as murky
as the bottom of the Thames and just as rotten-smelling, but there ain’t nothing you can
do about the Thames and there ain’t nothing you can do about that either.’

‘No, you’re wrong.’ Abberline
stopped himself and reconsidered. ‘Well, all right, maybe you’re only half right.
There are shades of grey when it comes to right and wrong. I’ll give you that and stand
you a pint for your insights.’ He held up two fingers and was rewarded with a response
from across the room. ‘But you’re wrong about answers. There
are
answers.
And I want to know those answers.’

Aubrey nodded, tried to dredge up another joke,
but the only one he could think of was one with the punchline, ‘No noose is good
noose’, and he didn’t think that was
appropriate in the
circumstances. So instead they drank their next pint in silence, and did some more brooding.

Outside they went their separate ways along
Regent Street, and Abberline wondered if a man from the pub, who had seemed to be taking an
inordinate interest in them, would follow either him or Aubrey.

Glancing in the reflection of a shop window, he
saw that he was the lucky one.

‘So, how about you tell me why you’ve
been following me these past few days?’

It was an especially vexed Abberline who had led
his shadow up an alleyway on the New Road in order to confront him. Especially vexed because
that very morning he had been called into the division sergeant’s office and given a
telling-off. No, not just a telling-off, but a right old bollocking. And why? Because apparently
a certain Mr Cavanagh of the Metropolitan Railway – that dead-eyed bastard – had
made a complaint about him. According to him, Constable Abberline was spending a
disproportionate amount of time at the site. Making something of a nuisance of himself, he was,
what with his insinuations that Cavanagh and five of his employees were involved with a
murder.

And he was to stop that at once.

So, yes, an especially vexed Abberline, given
strength by his vexation was watching the man’s face turn purple above the blue serge of
his forearm. The man wore a dark suit and a bowler hat, a little tatty, but otherwise fairly
respectable-looking. In fact, thought Abberline, he was dressed not unlike one of the detectives
from the division.

Except Abberline knew all the detectives from the
division. He knew all the detectives for miles around, and
this pillock
wasn’t one of them. Which had made him wonder if it was a different kind of detective
altogether. With his other hand he frisked the man and came up with a small leather truncheon
that he slipped into his own tunic pocket.

‘Private dick, are we?’ said
Abberline.

In response the man nodded furiously. ‘Gak,
gak, gak,’ he tried to say.

Abberline relaxed his grip.

‘Yes, Constable Abberline, a private
detective is what I am, and one who might be of benefit to you, if you were to let me
speak,’ gasped the man against the wall.

Cautious but curious, Abberline let him go.
‘What’s your name?’ he demanded.

‘Leonard. Leonard Hazlewood.’

‘Right, now state your case, Mr Hazlewood,
and make it a good one.’

Hazlewood straightened himself up first,
adjusting his hat and his suit and his collar before he went on. ‘You’re right,
I’m a private detective in the employ of a member of the aristocracy, a viscount, if you
please, who pays well and doesn’t mind who he pays it to, if you know what I
mean.’

‘Yes, I know exactly what you mean. How
about I take you in for attempting to bribe a member of Her Majesty’s
constabulary?’

‘Who’s bribing anyone, constable? I
know my business, and I know that the other men at the division call you Fresh-faced Freddie,
and that you like to do things by the book, and that you don’t even take a drink on duty
…’

Abberline cleared his throat
guiltily.
Yeah, mate, if only you knew.
‘What of it?’

‘So I reckon you’d be just as
interested in solving a crime as you would be in lining your own pocket. Maybe even more so. And
that if I can help you do the one, while maybe also doing the other, then maybe that isn’t
a bribe so much as a gift in recognition of your sterling police work, such as a benefactor
might bestow.’

‘Just say what you have to say and say it
outright.’

‘This viscount of mine, him and his mate
were set upon not far from here, in the Marylebone churchyard. His mate was so viciously
attacked that he lost his life there.’

‘He didn’t have far to travel for his
burial then, did he?’

‘A somewhat off-colour joke, if you
don’t mind my saying so, constable.’

‘It’s an off-colour joke because I
know a load of codswallop when I hear it, and I’m hearing it now. If two members of the
aristocracy had been set upon in a graveyard and one of them killed right here in the division,
I think I’d have known about it, don’t you?’

‘Both my employer and the family of the
murdered man preferred not to report the matter, in a bid to keep it out of the public
spotlight.’

Abberline curled a lip. ‘Oh yes? Up to no
good, were they?’

‘I didn’t ask. I’ve simply been
appointed to find and detain their attacker.’

‘Detain, is it? And then what? Deliver him
into the hands of the police? Don’t make me laugh. Do him down or top him completely is
what you’ve got in mind.’

Hazlewood pulled a face.
‘Does it matter? The fact is that justice will be served.’

‘Justice is served by the courts,’
said Abberline – although these days he wondered if he still believed it.

‘Not always.’

‘You’re right. Not always. Not on
young nobles who get drunk, take a trollop or two into a graveyard and then find themselves
being rolled over by the ladies’ pimps, am I right? I mean, unless you’re trying to
tell me they was in there putting poppies on a grave? One thing you can always depend on the
aristocracy to do is get their jollies at the expense of the lower orders. Maybe the tables got
turned for once.’

The detective shrugged. ‘It wasn’t a
pimp. No simple cash carrier attacked my employer and killed his friend and disabled two of his
bodyguards …’

Abberline’s eyebrows shot up. ‘They
had
bodyguards
, eh? Bloody hell, you really know how to play on a man’s
sympathies you do, don’t you?’

Hazlewood frowned and tugged at his collar again.
His neck had reddened. This wasn’t going well. ‘This was a dangerous man, constable.
Hardly even a man, they say. And it would be in all of our best interests if he were to be off
the streets for good.’

Abberline was thinking of Aubrey’s
different shades of grey. He was thinking about justice and how that fitted into the picture
when two aristocrats took bodyguards for drunken jaunts into the less salubrious parts of town.
Why should he care if a lone man taught the bastards a lesson by giving them a good hiding? In
other words
a right
batty fang
. Abberline knew what Aubrey would
say. Good luck to the fella. More power to his bloody elbow.

For maybe the first time ever Abberline found not
that he didn’t care, but that him caring was in abnormally short supply. He chuckled.
‘And tell me, what did he look like, this man who was not even a man? I’ll keep an
eye out for … what? A monster, perhaps? Six-feet tall and armed to his jagged pointy
teeth, with talons for hands and a roar to split the night?’

The private detective rolled his eyes. ‘If
I didn’t know better I’d say you’d been drinking, constable. No, when I say
not quite a man, I don’t mean
more
than one, I mean a young lad.’

‘A young lad?’

‘That’s right. An Indian boy with
bare feet. And they say he fought like the devil. Quite the acrobat, he was.’

Abberline looked at him, suddenly serious as
everything else fell away and all other considerations were sidelined.

‘An acrobat, you say?’

The next day, The Ghost stood by the shaft,
overseeing the work. He clutched laced-up files full of dockets, manifests, schedules and work
rotas to his chest – Marchant had offloaded almost every aspect of his clerk’s work
on to The Ghost – and tending to them all was proving more taxing than anything he could
remember doing ever, and that included learning the finer points of the kukri with Ethan Frye.

One of the foremen approached, wiping his nose on
his sleeve. ‘Shall I toll for the shift change, Mr Singh?’

The Ghost looked at him without seeing, trying to
focus on words he wasn’t used to hearing, specifically the words ‘Mr Singh’.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said at last.
‘Thank you.’ And then he watched as the foreman touched a hand to his forelock and
stepped away, still not quite accustomed to this sudden change of events. ‘Indian’
was what they called him, the men, up until he started at his new post. But now … Mister
Singh. It had
respect
– power, even. Because, yes, what was respect, if not a
kind of power? For the first time in his life The Ghost could understand its allure and the
constant pursuit of it. For with power came money and influence and perhaps most importantly it
meant being heard, and these things were as seductive as love,
friendship
and family, probably more so, because they spoke to selfish ego rather than the gentle heart.

Yes
, he’d allowed himself to
think,
I could, in another world, get used to being called Mr Singh. I could come to truly
enjoy that
.

Indeed, he had no choice, what with his new
exalted position at the dig.

Through Marchant, Cavanagh had insisted The Ghost
smarten up. Hardy had handed him a brown-paper bundle. ‘Here you go, mate, some new kecks
and boots, a shirt and a jacket for you. Hat in there too, if you want it.’ That night at
the tunnel The Ghost had tried on his new ensemble for Maggie’s approval.

‘Well, what a swell, you look quite the man
about town,’ she told him when he was all togged up. ‘You’ll have all the
ladies after you – if they’re not already.’

The Ghost smiled and Maggie felt her heart open
at the sight of that smile, just as it had on the night they had met, and now, just as she had
then, she thought to herself,
If only I were forty years younger …

In the event, The Ghost had done away with the
hat. He never much liked his railwayman’s cap. He’d give it to someone further up
the tunnel. The trousers were way too short, and The Ghost thought this was probably
Hardy’s evil trick. But the punisher would have been disappointed to know that the shorter
trousers, flapping just above the ankle, suited The Ghost just fine. He gave the boots to
Maggie. She gleefully tore out the laces before putting them on. Her old ones she’d pass
to another tunnel dweller.

And the next day he went
back to the site, literally a changed man.

The work was demanding. All his time was spent
scratching out names and numbers on the various schedules Marchant presented to him, as well as
keeping up with the constantly changing shifts or liaising with the many foremen, some of whom
had taken ‘Indian’s appointment’ better than others. Interestingly, he’d
found that a sharp but soft word accompanied by a glance to the office was enough to set any
recalcitrant foreman straight. It wasn’t respect that ruled, he knew. It was fear.

Nevertheless, his primary purpose of being here
was not to ruminate on ideology or learn new workplace skills. It was to spy on behalf of the
Brotherhood, to ascertain exactly what the Templars were up to, and in that regard he’d
been slightly less successful. For a start his new work kept him busy; secondly, he rarely had
an excuse to visit the office where the plans were kept.

One day he had looked up from his vantage point
by the cranes to see Crawford Starrick and Lucy Thorne arrive, the two of them picking their way
across the mudflats before disappearing inside.

Now’s the time
, he had thought,
and trod across the mud to the office on the pretext of delivering some dockets – only to
be stopped by Smith and Other Hardy, the two punishers guarding the portal to the inner sanctum.
They’d taken the documents from him and sent him away. The Ghost’s introduction to
Cavanagh’s immediate circle was only theoretical, it seemed. Perhaps they were still
testing him; indeed, not long after that day was an incident that The Ghost
was still puzzling over.

It came one late afternoon when The Ghost
approached Marchant on the mudflats. Shouting to make himself heard over the racket of a steam
engine laden with spoil, he had tried to hand the site manager the rota, just as he did at the
end of every shift.

‘All in order, sir,’ he said,
indicating the hive of industry behind him: men were swarming on the cranes, buckets of earth
swinging black against the grey dwindling light of the day, filthy-faced navvies with spades and
pickaxes slung over their shoulders leaving the trench like defeated men on a retreat. The
conveyor rattling, always rattling.

But on this occasion, instead of taking the rota
as he would have done normally, Marchant shrugged and indicated the wooden site office behind
them.

‘In there,’ he said. ‘Leave it
on the side near the plans table. I’ll look at it later.’

His eyes betrayed nothing. The Ghost nodded
assent and made his way across. There was no Cavanagh. No Hardy, Smith, or Other Hardy. There
was just The Ghost stepping into the office, the heart of the operation, alone.

He stopped himself. This was a test. This was
surely a test. Conscious that Marchant might be timing him, he lit a lamp, then moved over to
the plans table.

Marchant had been very specific about that. The
plans table.

And sure enough, there, rolled up on the plans
table, were the plans.

Placing the lamp on the tabletop, The Ghost bent
to
inspect the rolled-up document. If it was a trap as he suspected then
this is how it would be laid, and …
there
, he saw it. A single black hair had
been left rolled into the plans, just the tip of it protruding. His heart hammering, he plucked
the hair out between his fingernails, and then, praying it would be the only trap they had set,
unrolled them.

There in front of him, were the designs for the
excavation and the building of the railway, but not the official designs. Those he had seen,
craning over the heads of fellow workmen as Charles Pearson and John Fowler gave presentations
on their baby. Those plans looked exactly like these but for one vital difference. They had the
crest of the Metropolitan Railway in the top right-hand corner. This set sported the crest of
the Knights Templar.

Marchant would be wondering where he was. Quickly
he scanned the drawings in front of him, eyes immediately going to a section of the dig –
in fact, the section they were currently digging. Here was a shaded circle. Inside that shaded
circle was another smaller Templar cross.

The Ghost rolled up the plans, replaced the hair,
extinguished the lamp and left the office. As he went with the image of the plans fresh in his
mind, his thoughts went back to the events of a few days ago, when boxes had been brought and a
makeshift stage built. Cavanagh had taken to it, with Marchant and the punishers standing at the
hem of his coat, and through a speaking trumpet had gone on to regretfully announce that there
had been some instances of theft from the site, that men’s tools had been stolen.

This had elicited a gasp.
The men cared about their tools as much as they did their families. More so, in many cases. The
Ghost had long since been in the habit of burying his own spade at a spot on the perimeter of
the dig, but for many men their spades and pickaxes weren’t just the means of their
livelihood, they were symbolic of it. When they walked through the streets with the tools of
their trade over their shoulders they walked tall with their heads held high, and passers-by
knew they were in the presence of a hard-working man, rather than just a dirty one. Thus, the
idea that some wretch was stealing tools, well, this fellow might as well have been stealing the
food from out of their mouths. Cavanagh had the men wrapped round his little finger, and his
proposal that workers would be searched as they left the site from now on was therefore met with
fewer than expected grumbles. Shift changes now took three times longer but at least the men
could be reassured that the Metropolitan Railway had their best interests at heart.

The Ghost hadn’t been fooled, but now he
knew exactly what lay behind the decision. It was because the excavation had finally reached the
shaded circle. The end was in sight and though the men were under strict orders to report any
unusual finds – with the promise of a reward to match the value of anything precious
– there was still a possibility that one of the labourers might simply purloin what he
found. Chances were the Templars were as clueless about this artefact as the Assassins were.
They were taking no chances.

And then, of course, there was the other issue,
the
small matter of the persistent Police Constable Abberline, who had been
turning up at the works and, according to Marchant, making accusations against him.
‘Don’t you worry,’ Marchant had told The Ghost. ‘We’ve got you
covered.’ The implication was that them ‘having him covered’ came with a
price.

He would see to it that he repaid them. Yes, he
would repay them.

But now Abberline had returned, and with him was
a consortium, two of whom he recognized – the other peeler, Aubrey, and the division
sergeant – and two he didn’t – a smartly dressed man who had a habit of
tugging at his collar, and a fourth man, who …

There was something about this fourth man that
The Ghost recognized. He looked closer now, feeling as though his brain was moving too slowly as
he tried to place him …

Marchant was walking towards him, coming closer,
hailing him with a weasel grin. ‘Oi, you’re needed over here …’

And still The Ghost was staring at the new
arrival, who had stood slightly apart from the group and was looking right back at him. As their
eyes met, they recognized one another.

He was the bodyguard from the graveyard.