Читать книгу Kiss of Death - Paul Finch - Страница 10

The impending threat to the National Crime Group felt as if it might be real. Heck was in no position to judge, or even voice opinions on the matter – but there was rarely smoke without fire, and there was an awful lot of smoke at present.

Almost certainly, there’d be pay and recruitment freezes, people would be expected to work longer hours for less, resources would likely be slashed, and maybe staff too. If the worst came to the worst – and certain folk were saying that the crisis was actually this bad – entire departments could be disbanded, and all personnel reassigned. On the face of it, the latter would seem unlikely, but it would be a sure way to make an awful lot of savings in one fell swoop. And in that regard, the National Crime Group, thus far untouched by the cutbacks, had to be a prime target.

It comprised three specialist branches: the Kidnap Squad, the Organised Crime Division and the Serial Crimes Unit. In the eyes of many, these were all luxuries the British police could ill afford, as they monopolised manpower and funds for relatively small gain. Even Heck had to admit that it didn’t look good in the stats when an SCU detective made maybe only four or five arrests per year. What matter that these were nearly always repeat serious offenders – serial murderers, rapists and the like – who may already have ruined countless lives and had the potential to continue doing exactly that? It was still only four or five villains off the street each year, compared to the forty or fifty that a divisional detective might account for, never mind the hundred or so claimed by the average uniform.

He tried to put it from his mind as he worked his Megane through the heavy mid-morning traffic in Dagenham, but it frustrated him no end. Several days had passed since the Black Chapel sting and yet the ominous stories about the unit’s potential fate continued, seemingly unaffected by these recent positive results. In the words of DS Eric Fisher, SCU’s main intel man, ‘Why should we expect preferential treatment just because we do our job?’ Heck supposed that Fisher had a point, but it was a job that few others could do.

Again though, he tried to dismiss it all. He’d always sought to ignore the internal politics of the police, especially high-end politics like this, mainly because it was hardly the sort of thing you’d expect of a ‘rogue angel’.

This unusual status referred to the roving commission Heck was often accorded during SCU enquiries. Another name for it, again of Gemma Piper’s invention, was ‘Minister Without Portfolio’. In a nutshell, this meant that he was rarely attached to any specific part of the investigation but instead was authorised to develop and chase down his own leads. This was a privilege he’d earned over many years, on the basis of having felt numerous quality collars on the back of his own analysis and intuition. But whether it would have happened under any other supervisor than Gemma was questionable.

Not that Gemma was his best friend at present, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason why. It was certain that the menacing sounds from the top floor had put her on edge. She’d been brusque and indifferent with him recently, if not downright vexed. Neutral observers might argue that this was their normal relationship – there’d been many times in the past when it felt like they were at daggers drawn, but this was usually because of procedural disputes, not as a matter of course. Lately, she’d been actively and protractedly cold with him, much more than was normal, and much, much more than she was with anyone else.

Heck puzzled over it as he left the A13 and joined the Heathway.

He hadn’t done anything especially wrong, as far as he knew. Quite the opposite, in fact. His own intel had laid the Black Chapel on a plate for them, for which he’d received minimal gratitude. He wondered if it could be down to his lack of enthusiasm for the recently appointed DI Reed, though on that front Gemma was more than making up for it herself.

He shook that thought from his head, aggravated in ways he couldn’t explain.

He was now on the edge of the Rimmington Hall estate and, inevitably, his mind moved to other things. St Agatha’s Roman Catholic Church was easy enough to find. It faced onto Rimmington Avenue from behind a tall wire-mesh fence. There’d be a car park behind it somewhere, but as this was August and the junior school next door was closed, there was nothing to stop him parking on the main road at the front.

St Agatha’s was an industrial-age structure, stark and functional, its brickwork ingrained with the smoke and soot of generations. After recent investigations, especially the pursuit of the Black Chapel, Heck felt as if he’d been spending a lot of time in and around churches. But the lichen-clad tombstones and ivy-hung chancels of rural Suffolk were a world away from this place. Not that St Agatha’s grim appearance made it seem any less incongruous that Jimmy ‘Snake’ Fletcher now hung out here, though it wouldn’t have been the first time in Heck’s experience that a half-hearted soul had only needed to be exposed once to the full viciousness of his chosen team before he went scuttling off to join the opposition.

That said, Fletcher was still lucky that the local parish priest had been sympathetic.

Heck didn’t bother trying the front door but walked down a side passage into a small yard at the back. On one side here stood the entrance to the presbytery; on the other stood St Agatha’s Church Hall.

The latter was a free-standing building, a single-storey with a prefab roof, and walls coated in white stucco. It was in regular use, and in fact its main entrance stood open now, so Heck ventured inside. Here, a door on the right led into the hall itself, an open space of bare floorboards and scattered school chairs. A door on the left revealed a short corridor with signposts for toilets. A whitewashed brick arch stood directly in front and, beyond that, a stairwell dropped out of view.

Heck descended. At the first turn in the stair, he saw a startling piece of graffiti on the facing wall. Some vandal had used venom-green paint to daub the words:

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here …

And underneath it:

… if you had any in the fucking first place

Heck understood the meaning of this when he looked right, to where the final flight of steps descended three or four feet, before connecting with a corridor built from bare brick and smelling strongly of mildew. Exposed piping, unlagged but dangling with cobwebs, ran the full length of it. Heck could just about see this thanks to the illumination provided by a series of grimy light bulbs mounted every ten yards in wire-mesh cages crusted with limescale. Some forty yards ahead, a pair of doorways led off opposite each other, and a little way beyond those, at the corridor’s far end, stood a closed door made of what looked like solid steel.

Heck walked forward, footsteps clicking on damp cement.

On reaching the facing doorways, he glanced into two squat brick rooms, in which massive cisterns churned quietly. He strode on towards the steel door. It was heavy, full of rivets and had no visible handle.

Just as he reached it, it slid open on its greased runner.

Snake Fletcher stood there, the eyes inscrutable behind the bottle-thick lenses of his heavy-framed glasses.

‘Welcome,’ he said.

‘Some welcome,’ Heck replied. ‘What’s wrong with the pub, or a park bench?’

‘I told you, Heck … I’m not going topside at the mo.’

‘Never had you down as the sort who scares easily.’

‘Then you don’t know me as well as you think, eh?’

That was most likely true, Heck conceded, as Snake withdrew into the dank chamber beyond the heavy door.

Some informants were interested in one thing only: the money they earned off the scalps of those fellow criminals they sent to their doom. Others were trying to pay off scores or remove rivals. But Snake didn’t seem to tick any of those boxes. And that had always troubled Heck about this case. If you couldn’t work someone out from the word ‘go’, if you’d never been able to fathom their purpose … how could you really trust them?

He’d first encountered the guy while working in Tower Hamlets Robbery. He’d pulled in a desperate youngster, Billy Fletcher, Snake’s little brother, for participating in a string of corner-shop stick-ups. There wasn’t much down for Billy at the time, but Heck had managed to persuade his colleagues that the young idiot had been drawn into the crimes through his heroin addiction. He’d also persuaded Billy to turn evidence, thus saving himself both from prison and underworld retribution. Snake hadn’t seen his brother for fifteen years now, as he was safely inside a witness protection scheme, but that didn’t matter to him. At least, the kid was still alive. And after that, Snake had always felt that Heck, of all the coppers in London, was someone he could trust.

But still … you could never afford to be totally sure of an informant’s motives.

It wasn’t as if Snake Fletcher was the most prepossessing-looking bloke.

The first time Heck had seen him, he’d made him for an over-the-hill metalhead: early forties, bespectacled, ratty hair and beard, faded tats on his gangling arms, ragged, oily denims. Now, fifteen years later, his image hadn’t changed much, except that he was thinner and greyer and had ditched the proto-biker gear for a set of dingy caretaker’s overalls. For all that, he still smelled strongly of cig smoke and sweat.

‘You having a cuppa, or what?’ he asked.

A bare bulb showed that his room was built from brick and crammed with unidentifiable clutter. If Snake himself had been pungent, the reek of dirty underclothes and soiled sheets, which spilled out of the subterranean hovel, was eye-watering.

‘I’ll come in,’ Heck said. ‘I’m not so bothered about the cuppa though. Nice welcome for all the God-fearing church folk, by the way.’

Snake chuckled. ‘You mean the “abandon all hope” thing? Yeah, some skank broke in about three weeks ago. Father Wilkin, he’s the parish priest … he asked me to clean it off, but I need to get some paint. It’s not a priority. He never comes down here, never mind any of the parishioners.’

Which was undoubtedly a good thing, Heck decided.

From its various mops, buckets, brushes, bottles of bleach and boxes of random junk, the room was clearly a caretaker’s lock-up. But Snake had also adapted it into a living space, even though it was small and windowless. He’d dragged in a truckle bed from somewhere (its sheets in a rumpled, filthy state), a few bits of second-hand furniture, and even a chemical toilet, though by its stench, this was sorely in need of emptying.

Snake sidled to a rickety sideboard on which streaky tea-making things sat among crumbs and puddles of spilled milk. ‘So, tell me … did you get them all?’

‘We’ve charged five men with various offences relating to the priest murders,’ Heck said. ‘They’re all been remanded in custody.’

Snake nodded, as he plugged his kettle in. ‘Names?’

‘Sherwin Lightfoot – still can’t get over that one – Michael Hapwood, Dennis Purdham, Jason Renwick and Ranald Ulfskar, aka Albert Jones. That’s all of them, yeah?’

‘Far as I’m aware.’

‘Well … they won’t be darkening any church doors in the near future.’

Snake spooned coffee granules into a mug. ‘I’ll be laying low for a while, all the same.’

‘No one knows you gave us the tip, if that’s what’s bothering you.’

‘They’ll be watching, though. Wondering.’ Snake shook his grizzled head. ‘If I’m not dutifully despondent about what’s happened to our worshipful leaders, they’ll ask themselves why.’

‘Who’s they?’ Heck asked. ‘You just said we’d got them all.’

‘You’ve got the hardcore. The fanatics. But there’re others.’

‘You mean other activists?’

‘Nah, there are no more priest killers. The rest are just gobshites. But … if Ulf and his nutters get off for any reason, someone’ll tell them what I’ve been up to.’

He continued to make his coffee. Heck watched him, curious.

‘Snake … you certain there’s no one else we should be looking at?’

‘No one who scares me as much as Ulf and his cronies. Sure you don’t want one?’

Heck shook his head and checked his phone, noting that he’d received a text from Gemma.

ETA office?

That had been nearly five minutes ago now, which meant she’d shortly be ringing him. He turned the device off and pulled up a chair. There was a crumpled magazine on top of it. It was a five-year-old edition of the extreme metal mag, HellzReign, now suitably dog-eared and stained with motorbike oil.

On the cover, father and son black-metallers, Karl and Eric Hellstrom, aka Varulv, posed in full concert regalia. The older looked particularly demonic, his craggy features eerily pale, a complexion offset by his flowing black hair and dense black beard and moustache, not to mention his sunken, green-tinged eyes. Only his head and upper body was visible, but he was clad in dark leather armour with roaring bear faces sculpted onto its shoulder pads, and in his left hand, he clutched a blood-spattered human skull. It was pure hokum, a Hollywood costume designer’s idea of how a Viking should have looked. The younger Hellstrom stood behind him. His hair and beard were blond, but he too wore black, sculpted leathers, and held his clenched fists crossed over his chest, a leather bracelet dangling with Gothic adornments – skulls, inverted crucifixes and wolf heads – encircling each brawny wrist. Behind the pair rose a curtain of flames, and over the top of that, in jagged, frozen letters, arched the headline: Real songs of ice and fire.

Ordinarily, you could write this off as typical rock band posturing, a bad-boy outfit doing their best to look mean and moody, with a bit of mysticism woven in to underline their high-fantasy credentials. The very name ‘Varulv’ was Old Norse for Werewolf. But there’d been nothing fantastical about the violence their malevolent influence had allegedly unleashed.

Heck glanced up. ‘How long were you involved with these guys?’

Snake lowered his mug. ‘Couple of years. I told you before … to me it was just music.’

Even now, with Snake’s intel having paid off, it occurred to Heck that he’d never really understood how it had taken the guy as long as it had to learn that the rock band he’d once idolised and, in fact, had road-crewed for, were so swept up in their Nordic-Aryan anger that they or their followers might actually have posed a genuine threat. Song titles like ‘Make More Martyrs’ and ‘Berserk, I Rule’ hadn’t hinted at a sweet and inclusive nature.

Heck flicked his way through the mag, finally coming to a full-page advert for Varulv’s first and apparently seminal album, Asatru. He wasn’t averse to listening to a bit of hard rock, himself, though his own preference was for the older-school style, not the consciously dark-hearted material of more recent times. Almost from first hearing about these guys, Heck had disliked Karl Hellstrom and his son as a pair of professional rabble-rousers who probably didn’t even believe the bigoted nonsense they preached. On the sleeve of Asatru, the artwork depicted a Catholic nun, naked, save for her wimple and cowl, nailed to a cross upside-down, while, behind her, horn-helmeted silhouettes raised axes against a backdrop of forked lightning strikes. If Heck remembered rightly, the album had been withdrawn from a number of British and American chain stores because of concerns about that cover, but this had only enhanced the record’s notoriety, and it had reached a huge audience via the underground circuit, cementing the band’s reputation as a major black-metal act.

He put the mag down. ‘You sure we shouldn’t be going after Varulv too?’

‘Be my guest,’ Snake said. ‘But you’d be wasting your time. You heard what happened up in Norway?’

Heck had, of course. In 2014, two Norwegian teenagers, and avowed Varulv loyalists, had set fire to an eleventh-century timber church near Tromsø, beating to death the site’s elderly custodian with a bat. Pinned to his body was a note calling for a war against ‘Christ-lovers and Semites’ in the form of direct quotes lifted from Varulv’s lyrics, putting the band deep in the spotlight.

‘They might have inspired that crime, but they weren’t physically connected to it,’ Snake said. ‘That was just headcases reacting badly to their message. And it took all sorts. Look at Ulfskar … he wasn’t some extremist metalhead. If anything, he came from a punk background. Varulv chucked their net widely. Some hard-line metallers, sure, some bikers, but skinheads too, white supremacists, all kinds of hyper-masculine malcontents. That Black Chapel business … that’s more Satanic than Odinist. Look at those four clowns who got locked up with Ulf. They weren’t roadies, like us … they weren’t even followers of the band. They were Ulf’s followers. I told you … coked-out dickheads lost in some dark fantasy. That shows how mixed up it’s all got.’

Heck didn’t take issue with this. It was true that Varulv had never been officially accused of involvement in the Tromsø outrage, not even as instigators. They were put under pressure by the Norwegian press, but they weren’t investigated to any serious degree.

‘If I recall,’ he said, ‘the band haven’t accepted any responsibility for the Tromsø incident, and they certainly didn’t offer an apology.’

Snake looked troubled by these notions, as if he too had been wondering about it and had not yet found a satisfactory explanation.

‘Maybe they didn’t lower themselves to respond,’ he finally said. ‘I mean, it happened in the States, didn’t it? Metal bands of an earlier era getting unfairly blamed for sending bad vibes, causing suicides and the like. It’s just bloodsucking lawyers trying to cash in on tragedy.’

‘And yet Varulv were forced to leave Norway.’

Snake shook his head. ‘That’s a myth. They still own property over there. They just settled here in the UK when they retired. Seems Karl Hellstrom always wanted a hunting estate up in Scotland, and now he’s got one. And it was after they settled up there when all this bad stuff really kicked off. I mean, that was in 2015. We’d all gone our separate ways by then, and it was three years later when I heard about these priest murders. It never entered my head that the band might actually be involved.’

‘But you had no hesitation in suspecting Ulfskar?’

Snake pondered. ‘He was always the most extreme of us … plus these killings were down in East Anglia, and that was his home patch. He’d gone back there, as far as I knew. The first priest, the one who got axed … I thought, nah, that won’t be Ulf. Probably just a robbery that’s gone wrong or something. But the second one … that was a bit nastier, wasn’t it? And then the third one, the woman … fuck me! After that, I felt certain Ulf was involved. He’d said stuff in the past, you see … about drugs, sex and rock and roll just being hedonistic crap. About talk being cheap. About no one believing we really hated these bastards until we took action against them. Back then, I thought it was just more talk …’

Heck had heard this story before, of course.

After the gruesome death of the third victim, Michaela Hanson, Snake, rather bravely, had made an effort to reacquaint with Ulfskar. He’d still had a contact number for him and had called, saying how empty his life was after the band. Ulfskar had replied that he would soon be down in London on business and was happy to hook up.

An uproarious drunken night had followed, much of which Snake captured on a concealed Dictaphone. There would always be questions about whether such non-approved evidence of private conversation would be admissible in court, but the tape, when Snake finally took it to Heck and Gemma, had been more than sufficient to catch their interest.

The conversation the cops listened to was very telling.

Initially, the twosome reminisced about the good old days on the road with the band, feasting on babes and booze, wild times when they’d got high and did crazy things. But they also recalled the firelit meetings they’d attended in woodland groves, and the ancient sites where they’d venerated long-forgotten northern gods. Then they expressed their enthusiasm for the right-wing forces marching in Europe and the US, and expressed hope that the white races of the world were finally getting their act together. It was around this point when Ulfskar first hinted at the existence of the Black Chapel, explaining that he and a few other like-minded guys were now taking direct action. He and Snake had once dreamed the dream, he said. But now he was making it real, following the creed to the letter – and if it didn’t kick off a revolution on its own, that wouldn’t matter. At least, it made them feel better.

‘Hey, I want in!’ Snake blurted on the tape.

‘You want in, Snakey … just like that?’

‘You were right. We dreamed it … but we never actually did it.’

‘I can’t take you on the next job, Snake. Not yet. I need you to sober up and think it through. Just steer well clear of Little Milden in Suffolk, on July 31.’

That had been all Snake had needed to know. After playing the tape to Heck and SCU, he’d told them about Ostara, an ancient Viking festival which fell on March 21. That was the night the first cleric had died. The other two murders had coincided with other pagan Nordic celebrations, Valpurgis on April 30 and Midsumarblot on June 21. They now had the date of the fourth one as well: Freysblot, which was July 31. And the location, Little Milden, where there was only one church: Milden St Paul’s.

Heck glanced again at the lurid cover to HellzReign.

‘But nah,’ Snake said again. ‘The Hellstroms aren’t involved. Why would they be? Much better to be the gurus who sit on the mountain and get the kudos without taking any of the risk. Anyway, when do I get paid?’

Heck tossed the magazine aside. ‘Soon as the Black Chapel get convicted.’

‘Look, Heck … don’t fuck this up, all right?’ The ex-roadie looked vaguely troubled. ‘We don’t want those five nutters walking free again. Let ’em rot in jail, so any other rootless, confused idiot toying with the same idea might realise that murder isn’t some bloody joke.’

‘Good luck with that,’ Heck said, standing. ‘We might have cleared the new Vikings off our streets, Snake, but I’ll tell you … there are people out there even as we speak, who, in their own minds at least, will have perfectly sound reasons for the total bloody mayhem they’re about to unleash.’