Assassin's Creed: Underworld Read Online Free PDF Page A

horses, whose sense of smell and instinct must surely have warned them what
lay ahead, and in the factory they would be put to death, then the flesh boiled in copper vats
for cat food.
    Outside in the yards men stripped to the waist
used sledgehammers to break up bones, watched by ever-present groups of children clad in filthy
rags tinged yellow from the sulphur in the air.
    Abberline saw a group who had
obviously tired of watching – after all, it wasn’t an activity with an awful lot of
variety – and set up a game of cricket instead. Without the usual equipment they’d
improvised with part of an old bedstead for a bat, while the ball was … Abberline winced.
Oh God. They were using the decapitated head of a kitten.
    He was about to shout across to them, to urge
them for pity’s sake to use something else for a ball, when he became aware of a child who
had wandered in front of the cart, forcing him to pull up.
    ‘Oi,’ he called, waving an irate hand
at the young ruffian, ‘police business. Get out of the bleedin’ way.’
    But the scruffy urchin didn’t move.
‘Where are you off to, sir?’ he asked, taking the head of the horse in both hands,
stroking it. The sight softened Abberline’s heart a little, and he forgot his irritation
as the boy rubbed his fingertips over the animal’s ears, enjoying the rare intimacy of the
moment: boy and horse.
    ‘Where are you off to, sir?’ the boy
repeated, tearing his eyes off the horse and turning his urchin gaze on Abberline. ‘Not to
the knacker’s yard with this one, I hope. Say it ain’t so.’
    In his peripheral vision Abberline sensed a
movement and turned to see three other young scallywags climb beneath the fence and come on to
the road behind him.
Let them
, he thought.
Nothing of value back there
. Not
unless you counted a soggy corpse and the tarpaulin.
    ‘No, don’t worry yourself, son,
I’m off to the mortuary with a body on the back.’
    ‘A body, is it?’
This came from the rear. One of the new arrivals.
    A couple more children had arrived by now. A
little crowd of them milling around.
    ‘Oi, you, get out of it,’ warned
Abberline. ‘Nothing back there to interest you.’
    ‘Can we have a look, sir?’
    ‘No you bloody well can’t,’ he
called over his shoulder. ‘Now get out of it before you feel the business end of my
truncheon.’
    The first boy stood petting the horse still,
raising his face to speak to Abberline again. ‘Why is the police involved, sir? Did this
one meet a sticky end?’
    ‘You might say that,’ replied
Abberline, impatient now. ‘Stand aside, son, and let me past.’
    The cart bounced and jerked and he was about to
turn to admonish the kids who were obviously trying to peek beneath the tarpaulin, ghoulish
little sods, when it bounced again and this time Abberline, irritated and wanting to get the
hell out of Belle Isle, shook the reins decisively.
    ‘Walk on,’ he commanded. If the kid
stood in the way, well, that was his lookout.
    He drew forward and the child was forced to step
aside. As he passed, Abberline looked down to see the young urchin smiling inscrutably up at
him. ‘Good luck with your body, sir,’ he said, touching his knuckle to his forelock
in a derisive way that Abberline didn’t care for. In return he merely grunted and shook
the reins again, setting his face forward. He went past the rest of the houses to the mortuary
gate, where he coughed loudly to rouse aworker who’d been dozing on a
wooden chair and who tipped his hat and let him through into the yard.
    ‘What have we got here?’ said a
second mortuary worker as he emerged from a side door.
    Abberline had clambered down from the cart. At
the entrance, sleepyhead closed the gates, behind him the Belle Isle slum like a sooty
thumbprint on a window. ‘Body I need keeping cold for the coroner,’ replied
Abberline, securing the reins as the attendant went to the rear of the wagon, lifted the tarp,
peered beneath, then dropped it