Not that he would have taken no for an answer. He was here to save the life of Jayadeep Mir, and he wasn’t leaving until the job was done.
Sure enough, his old friend regarded him warily, with eyes that were tired from worry and sleeplessness, face pinched and drawn. What must he have been going through? What agonies of torn loyalty, parental love and duty to the Brotherhood?
His worries had evidently relieved him of his obligations as a host. There was no offer of bread or olives or wine for Ethan, and certainly no warm greeting. The Assassin had been led through the cool marble corridors of the Mir household, disappointed not to catch sight of Pyara – he may have had an ally there – and then deposited in one of the back offices, a room he himself had once used for tutoring Jayadeep. Back then he’d chosen the room because of its spartan furniture and decoration. No distractions. Today, there wasn’t even hot tea. Just a simple woven wall covering, two straight-backed chairs where they sat, an unpolished table between them and an unmistakable atmosphere.
‘Don’t misinterpret my reasons for agreeing to see you, Ethan. I have something I need to ask you.’
Wary, hoping he might have had a chance to state his case, Ethan spread his hands. ‘Go on.’
‘I want to know, Ethan, how you intend to do it?’
‘How do I intend to do what?’
‘Free Jayadeep, of course. Do you plan to break him out of The Darkness or perhaps rescue him from the execution itself? How many Assassins’ lives do you plan to take in the process?’
The gaze of Arbaaz was flat and terrible.
‘I had rather hoped to talk to you about it first, Arbaaz, as one of my oldest and dearest friends.’
Arbaaz shook his head. ‘No. There is to be no discussion. And what’s more I must tell you that you will be under surveillance for the duration of what I hope is a short stay in Amritsar. The reason you are under surveillance is to ensure you don’t try to free Jayadeep.’
‘Why might I want to free Jayadeep, Arbaaz?’ asked Ethan softly, a reasonable tone in his voice.
The other man picked at a knot in the wood with his fingernail, regarding it as though he expected it to do something. ‘Because your life in the West has made you soft, Ethan. It’s why the Brotherhood in London is practically wiped out, and why you and George are mere insurgents compared to the Templar stranglehold.
‘You’re weak, Ethan. You have allowed your Brotherhood over the water to deteriorate to the point of irrelevancy and now you want to bring your progressive policies over here and you think I’ll let you.’
Ethan leaned forward. ‘Arbaaz, this is not about Templar versus Assassin. This is about Jayadeep.’
Arbaaz’s eyes slid away, clouding for just a moment. ‘Even more reason that he should pay the ultimate price for his …’
‘What?’
‘Misconduct.’ Arbaaz’s voice rose. ‘His misconduct, his incompetence, his negligence.’
‘He needn’t be executed.’
‘You see? You have come to plead for his life.’
Ethan shrugged. ‘I make no bones about it. I do come to plead for his life, but you misjudge me if you think me weak, or that I disapprove of the hard line you take. Quite the opposite, I admire your inner strength and resolve. This is, after all, your son we’re talking about. I know of no Assassin forced into such a difficult position as the one you find yourself in now, forced to put duty before family.’
Arbaaz gave him a sharp sideways look, as though unsure what to read into Ethan’s words. Seeing his old friend was genuine, his face folded. ‘I lose a son and wife too,’ he said in a voice that drowned in misery. ‘Pyara will never look at me again. She has made that perfectly clear.’
‘You need not make that sacrifice.’
‘How so?’
‘Banish him – banish him into my custody where I have an important job for him, one that, if it is successful, may help to restore the Brotherhood in London. An operation, Arbaaz, a covert operation for which Jayadeep, with his particular talents, is ideally suited. He need not die. Do you see? He can return to England with me and your honour will be satisfied. Suitable judgement will have been passed upon him, but he will live, Arbaaz. Not in the comfort to which he is accustomed, I grant you. What I have in mind involves extraordinarily reduced circumstances. But perhaps you will consider that part of his punishment. And after all, you needn’t tell that to Pyara. Simply that he is with me. I will be his handler.’
Praying for the right outcome, Ethan watched indecision flit across the other’s face.
‘I would need to talk to Hamid,’ said Arbaaz thoughtfully.
‘You would,’ said Ethan, and suppressed a burst of relief. Arbaaz had no desire to see Jayadeep put to the sword; Ethan was offering him a way out of a situation that would have torn his family apart, and all with no loss of face. ‘What’s more, I think you will find that conversation an easier one than you might imagine,’ continued Ethan. ‘I saw Ajay and Kulpreet today, and if their mood is representative of the Brotherhood as a whole, then they no more wish to see Jayadeep executed than you or I. Let the punishment be exile. There are many who consider it even worse than death.’
‘No,’ said Arbaaz.
Ethan started. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The punishment must be death.’
‘I don’t understand …’
‘If this assignation is as undercover as you suggest, then wouldn’t it be advantageous if the agent did not exist? Who can link him to Jayadeep Mir if Jayadeep Mir is dead?’
Ethan clapped his hands. ‘A ghost?’ he said happily. ‘That’s a stroke of genius, Arbaaz, worthy of the great Assassin I know.’
Arbaaz stood then, came round the table and finally took his old friend in an embrace. ‘Thank you, Ethan,’ he said as the Assassin stumbled clumsily to his feet. ‘Thank you for what you are doing.’
And Ethan left, thinking that, all in all, it had been a good afternoon’s work. He had not had to use the letter in his pocket, the one in which Arbaaz had explicitly rejected Ethan’s advice, a letter that proved that any charges of incompetence or negligence lay not with Jayadeep but with his father. What’s more, he had saved the life of a boy who was as close to his heart as his own two children, and quite possibly saved the marriage of Arbaaz and Pyara into the bargain.
Also, he had an agent, and not just any agent. The most promising Assassin it had ever been his fortune to train.
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 min
d 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 y
ou?’ 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.’
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