Read Assassin's Creed: Underworld Online

Authors: Oliver Bowden

Tags: #Fiction, #Media Tie-In, #Action & Adventure, #Historical

Assassin's Creed: Underworld (9 page)

BOOK: Assassin's Creed: Underworld
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16

Two years later Jayadeep, now The Ghost in name
and deed, kneeled astride the upper-class pleasure-seeker in the churchyard at Marylebone and
raised the short sword ready to deliver the death blow.

And then, just as he had on the night of his
blooding, he froze.

His mind went back to Dani and the blood-streaked
dull gleam of his father’s blade inside the dying man’s mouth, and he saw again the
light blink out in Dani’s eyes and knew he had watched death: fast and brutal and
delivered remorselessly. And he could not bring himself to do it.

The toff saw his chance. The man had never fought
a fair fight in his life. Any military service would have been spent toasting his good fortune
in the officers’ mess while the lower orders went out to die in the name of his queen.
But, like any other living being, he had an instinct for living, and it told him that his
attacker’s moment of hesitation was his best chance to survive.

He bucked and writhed. He thrust his hips with
such sudden, desperate strength that it reminded The Ghost briefly of being back at home, taming
wild ponies. Then he found himself thrown to the side, still dazed, but with his mind sent in a
turmoil by this latest failure of nerve.
The sword tumbled from his fingers
and the toff made a dive for it, a cry of triumph escaping his lips at the same time.
‘Aha!’ And then the toff swung about, ready to use the blade on The Ghost, and as
amazed by the sudden favourable turn of events as he was enthusiastic to take advantage of them.
‘You little bastard,’ he spat as he lunged forward, arms straight, the point of the
sword aimed for The Ghost’s throat.

It never got there. From their left came a cry
and the night tore open to reveal the woman, her long grey hair flying as she came shrieking
from the darkness and barrelled into the toff with all her might.

As attacks went, it wasn’t pretty. It
wasn’t even decisive. But it was devastatingly effective and with a shout of surprise and
pain, the high-class yobbo was sent tumbling into the gravestones. He tried to raise the cutlass
again but the woman was there first, jumping on his sword arm and breaking it with an audible
snap and then using her other foot to stamp on his face so that for a second it looked as though
she was dancing on a carpet of toff.

The man pulled away, snarling, his face a mask of
fresh blood as he grabbed for the blade with his good arm and rose at the same time.
Off-balance, the woman fell, and the tables were suddenly turned again, the sword about to have
its say, but The Ghost had gathered his senses and he wasn’t about to let him finish what
he had started, and he struck, ramming the flat of his hand into the man’s shoulder, his
wounded arm, causing him to spin and scream in pain at the same time.

The scream was abruptly cut off as The Ghost
delivered
his second blow – the death strike – again with the
heel of the hand but this time even harder and into the spot just below the toff’s nose,
breaking it and sending fragments of bone into the brain, killing him instantly.

There was a
clump
as the unlucky
aristocrat hit his head on a gravestone on the way down and then came to rest on the untended
grass. Dark runnels of blood and brain fluid trickled from his nostrils. His eyelids flickered
as he died.

The Ghost stood, shoulders rising and falling to
catch his breath. Sprawled by a nearby headstone the old woman watched him, and for a long
moment the two of them regarded each other cautiously: this strange grey-haired old lady,
thin-faced and weathered and bloody from the beating, and this strange young Indian man, filthy
from his day’s work at the dig. Both were clad in torn and dirty clothes. Both exhausted
and bruised from battle.

‘You saved my life,’ he said
presently. The Ghost spoke softly. His words seemed to evaporate in the silence and gloom of the
graveyard, and the woman, feeling reassured that he wasn’t a man on a killing spree and
about to do her in with a final flourish of nocturnal bloodlust, pulled herself painfully up to
rest on one arm.

‘I was only able to save your life because
you saved mine,’ she said through broken teeth and raw and bloody lips.

He could tell she was badly injured. The way she
held a hand to her side, she had probably broken a rib or two. The wrong movement and it might
easily puncture a lung.

‘Can you breathe all right?’ He
scrambled over the body
of the toff to the grave marker where she lay and
put gentle hands to her flank.

‘Here,’ she protested, suddenly
flustered again, thinking maybe she might have been a bit premature in relaxing, ‘what the
bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘I’m trying to help you,’ he
said distractedly, feeling for broken bones, then adding, ‘You need to come with
me.’

‘Now, look here, you. Don’t you be
going and getting any ideas …’

‘What else do you suggest? We have a dead
man here and three injured men back there, and somewhere is yet another man who’s either
going to be looking for the constables or reinforcements or maybe both. And you’re
injured. Stay here by all means, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t.’

She looked at him warily. ‘Well, where are
you going to take me? Have you got a boarding house somewhere? You don’t look too
prosperous.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s not
quite a boarding house.’

At this he gave a wry smile, and to the woman,
whose name was Maggie, it was quite a sight to see, like the sun peeking through the clouds on
an overcast day. She was in her sixties but perhaps because he had saved her life and perhaps
because of that sun-and-moonlight smile, Maggie fell just a little bit under his spell, and she
accompanied him to the tunnel that very night. From him she learnt his name was Bharat. That he
worked as a labourer at those railway works up near Regents Park.

She rather took to life at the tunnel. At night
she and The Ghost slept in an alcove back to back for warmth: together, but alone with their
thoughts, and she never
gave much consideration to the men who they had met
that night. Two of them were too busy being fed by uncaring sanatorium staff to care, of course.
But two of them were still out there. The last bodyguard. The surviving toff. They too had seen
The Ghost in action. They too knew he was a most unusual young man.

17

When Abberline made a return trip to Belle Isle it
was with the ridicule of his fellow bobbies still ringing in his ears.

Not so long ago they’d been calling him
‘Fresh-faced Freddie’ on account of his enthusiasm and tireless pursuit of justice,
and on that score they were right: he had no wife or family; he was devoted to his job, and it
was true that he did regard his colleagues as men who could always be depended upon to take the
path of least resistance.

But what was it they were calling him now?
‘The nobody bobby’. ‘The cadaverless copper’. Or, with a slight
alteration: ‘the copper without a corpse’. None were witty or funny. In fact, as far
as Abberline could tell, they consisted solely of an alliterative connection between one word
for a dead body and another word for a law-enforcement officer. But even knowing that
didn’t help. It failed to alleviate the considerable pain of his colleagues’ taunts,
not to mention the fact that when all was said and done, they had a point. He had, after all,
lost
a body. And without a body there might as well have been no murder. Which meant

He really wanted to find that body.

Which was why he found himself traipsing back to
Belle Isle, without the benefit of a horse and cart this
time, but a little
wiser and more wary of any surprises the slum might have to offer. Over his shoulder was slung a
sack. In it his secret weapon.

He went deeper into Belle Isle, where the stench
from the factory and the slaughterhouse was almost overwhelming. Today the denizens of the
rookery were hidden by a dense fog. Proper slum fog, it billowed and boomed threateningly, and
within it danced flakes of soot as well as thicker, eddying clouds of lung-choking smoke.
Devil’s breath.

Every now and then Abberline would see shapes in
the fog, and he began to get a sense of figures gathering, tracking his progress as he came
deeper and deeper into this godforsaken land.

Good. That was just how he wanted it. He required
an audience for what came next.

By now he was at the spot where the children had
halted his cart and where, presumably, they had made the switch: his dead body for an equally
lifeless pony.

He stopped. ‘Ahoy there,’ he called,
catching himself by surprise, unsure what had compelled him to talk like a sailor.
‘You’ll remember me, no doubt. I’m the plum whose cadaver you
stole.’

It was possible he imagined it, but even so
– was that a
titter
he heard from within the veil of darkness?

‘I need to speak to the young lad who
petted my horse the other day. See, it occurs to me that someone put you up to that caper. And I
would dearly like to know who.’

The fog stayed silent. Its secrets safe.

‘Did he pay you?’ pressed Abberline.
‘Well, then I’ll pay
you again …’ He jingled coins
in his palm, the noise a soft, tinkling bell in the suffocating stillness.

There was a pause, and Abberline was about to
unveil his secret weapon when at last came a reply, and a young disembodied voice said,
‘We’re scared of what he’ll do.’

‘I understand that,’ replied
Abberline, peering into the murk in what he thought was the right direction. ‘He
threatened you, no doubt. But I’m afraid you find yourselves in a location known as
between a rock and a hard place, because if I leave here without the information I need, then
I’ll be coming back, and I won’t be alone. I’ll be returning with one of them
covered carts you see, the ones passing in and out of the workhouse gates …’ He
paused for dramatic effect. ‘On the other hand, if I’m given the information I want
then I’ll forget about the workhouse carts. I’ll leave this money behind, and
what’s more …’

And now he hoisted the sack from over his
shoulder, placed it on the ground and took a cricket bat and ball that he held up. ‘These
as well. No more playing cricket with a kitten’s head, not when you get your hands on
these little beauties. Cost a pretty penny, I can tell you – you won’t find a better
set.’

The response came again, causing Abberline to
jerk his head this way and that, feeling at a distinct disadvantage as he tried to pinpoint the
source of the sound.

‘We’re frightened of what he’ll
do,’ repeated the young voice. ‘He’s like a demon.’

Abberline felt his pulse quicken, knowing for
sure he’d been right to suspect something out of the ordinary about this murder.

‘I’ve made my
offer,’ he called back to his unseen intermediary. ‘On the one hand I have gifts. On
the other I have dire consequences. And I can tell you this: as well as returning with the
workhouse carts, I’ll put it about that I was given the information I needed anyway. The
wrath of this demon – and he’s not a demon, you know; he’s a man, just like me
– may well fall upon you anyway.’

He waited for the fog to make its decision.

At last it billowed and parted, and from it
stepped the same boy who had stopped him the other day. Dirty face. Rags. A hollowed-out, hungry
expression. This was a child whose appointment with the grave was surely imminent, and Abberline
felt bad for the way he and others like him were used and abused. He felt bad for threatening
them with the workhouse when threats and cold and hunger was all they knew.

‘I mean you no harm. You have my
word,’ he said. He laid down the bat and ball on the ground between them.

The boy looked down at the cricket gear then back
at the policeman. Abberline sensed the expectancy of the figures cloaked by the fog.
‘You’ll be angry we took your body,’ the boy said with the reticence and
caution of painful experience.

‘I’m not best pleased you took my
body, no, you’re right about that,’ conceded Abberline, ‘But listen, I
understand why you did it. And let me tell you this, if I were in your shoes right now, I would
have done the exact same thing. I’m not here to judge you. I just want the
truth.’

The boy took a step forward, more to acknowledge
a growing trust of Abberline than for any other reason.
‘There’s not much more to say, sir. You was right. We was paid to distract you in
your duties and trade the corpse for the pony. We wasn’t told why, and nor did we ask. A
handful of chink was what we got for delivering the body.’

‘And the gun?’

‘I didn’t see no gun, sir.’

‘It was in the dead man’s
pocket.’

‘Then it stayed with him, sir.’

‘And where did you deliver this
body?’

The boy hung his head. Instead of answering he
raised a hand to indicate where the horse slaughterers would have been, if not for the smog.
‘Some of us saw the man go in there with it, and then not long later come out without
it.’

‘And what did he look like, this
man?’ asked Abberline, trying to keep the eagerness out of his voice, and failing
miserably.

Not long later, the constable breathed a deep,
grateful sigh of relief as he left the choking fog of Belle Isle behind and made his way back to
the relatively clean air of his district. He was light some coins, a cricket bat and ball, but
his conscience was thankfully clean, and he had a description of this ‘demon’ whose
motives were so much a mystery. It was a description that rang bells. He’d heard talk of a
man dressed this way, this very particular – you might even say
‘idiosyncratic’ way – who had been involved in some ructions at the Rookery a
week or so ago.

Abberline found his pace increasing as it all
came back
to him. There was a bobby in another district he could speak to,
who might know something about this strange figure who should be easy to spot – a strange
figure who wore robes and a cowl over his head.

BOOK: Assassin's Creed: Underworld
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