Kiss of Death

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.’

Chapter 4

Heck got back to SCU at Staples Corner, in Brent, early that afternoon. The first thing that struck him were how many more vehicles there were than was usual on a Monday. He prowled the crowded bays before managing to locate a parking space. It was just his luck, of course, after he’d manoeuvred his Megane into it, to realise that the car on his left was Gemma’s aquamarine Mercedes E-class, and not only that, that the detective super was currently on her way across the car park towards it, with one of the civvy secretaries.

As he watched them through his rear-view mirror, they opened the boot of Gemma’s Merc and humped out a couple of sealed boxes of paperwork. The secretary set off back across the car park, carting one of these. But Gemma waited with her arms folded.

Sighing, Heck climbed out.

‘And where’ve you been?’ she asked. ‘I’ve only been trying to contact you since lunchtime.’

‘Thought it might pay some dividends if I went to see a grass,’ he replied.

‘I gauged that from the scruffs.’

Heck hadn’t yet had time to change out of the paint-stained jeans, sweatshirt and work boots that he’d worn for the meeting with Snake.

‘Unofficially?’ she asked. ‘As in … on your own?’

He shrugged. ‘I was out and about, but I just had a thought to go and see him.’

She considered this, before nodding at the box by her feet, turning and heading back towards the personnel door.

Heck picked the box up and tagged along after her.

‘Who are we talking about?’ she said. ‘Wait, let me guess … Snake Fletcher?’

‘Of course.’

‘For crying out loud, Heck …’

‘Partly it was to reassure him. He was very happy that we’ve made his intel count.’

‘So would a lot of lowlifes be if all they had to do to get paid was drop dimes on their mates.’

‘Thing is …’ Heck knew he had to choose his next words carefully. ‘I don’t know … I thought it went too well, to be honest.’

She glanced at him quizzically. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The takedown at Little Milden,’ he said. ‘The Odinists turned up when Snake said they would. All five of them. We nabbed them. Each one banged to rights … we had enough evidence to charge them almost straight away. By the time we get to trial, we’ll have even more. They haven’t got a chance.’

They reached the personnel door, and Gemma tapped the combination into the keypad. ‘Murder cases aren’t always complex, you know.’

‘I understand that. I just can’t help feeling that we might have missed something.’

‘Is this your natural pessimism talking?’ she asked, as they went inside and she summoned the lift. ‘Or did Snake say something?’

‘No, he thinks we’ve got everyone.’

‘So you have no actual grounds for this concern?’

He shrugged.

‘I thought so.’ She folded her arms as they waited in the small lobby. ‘Heck, as always, your determination to bottom out every single job does you credit. But sometimes you make too much work for yourself. And for everyone else, including me. Which, as you can imagine, is not always appreciated. Now, it may be that something else comes up in due course regarding the Black Chapel, and if it does, we’ll follow it to the end of the line. But in the meantime, we’ve got another, equally big job on our desk. Heard about Operation Sledgehammer yet?’

‘Erm … Sledgehammer?’

‘I had a meeting at the Yard over the weekend, and another one this morning. We’re going to be doing some work with the Met’s Cold Case team.’

‘Oh …?’ Heck wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that.

‘Gwen Straker’s coming in on it.’

‘Oh … right.’ This was better news.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Heck and Gemma were at Bethnal Green, Straker was their DI, and an able and affable boss she’d been. He hadn’t seen much of her in recent years, but from gossip she was still one of the most popular supervisors in the Met. Heck was sure that the next question Gemma expected him to ask would be about this mysterious Operation Sledgehammer, but the good news about Gwen Straker notwithstanding, he wasn’t yet ready to dismiss the case they’d only recently closed.

‘I keep thinking about this black-metal band, Varulv,’ he said.

She regarded him carefully. There were lots of things about Heck’s reckless style of policing that worried Gemma immensely, but she’d learned through hard experience that his instincts could often be trusted.

‘Former black-metal band,’ she said. ‘Aren’t they in retirement?’

‘Yeah. Apparently, they live as country gents in the Highlands of Scotland.’

‘You are aware they were fully investigated by Kripos?’ she said. ‘I mean for that church-burning incident in Norway and the murder of the caretaker?’

‘I understand they were interviewed,’ Heck replied. ‘Not necessarily investigated.’

‘Either way, they were cleared of suspicion.’

‘I agree that, as far as we know, they didn’t commit any crime,’ he said. ‘But have you seen some of their song titles … some of their lyrics? It wouldn’t take a religious zealot to consider them a fairly malign influence.’

‘Heck … you’re a malign influence. Young detectives see the corners you cut, and they think “wow, this job’s a doddle”. And then they pull the same stunts, and because they don’t enjoy the luck of the devil, like you do, they end up wearing tall hats again. But ultimately, you never get hauled over the coals for it. You know why? Because you never told them to behave that way. It’s one hundred per cent their own fault. And it’s exactly the same with devil-worshipping idiots like the Black Chapel. Now, the cult leaders have all been charged, and like I say, if something else comes up … if one of them wants to do a deal, drop a few more names our way, we’ll be all ears. Until then, we’ve got other business, OK?’

‘Yeah, but I’m just wondering if I should do some follow-up work on this one.’

She regarded him blankly, unused to a lower rank – even Heck – completely ignoring her expressed viewpoint.

‘On the basis of what … a hunch, a wing and a prayer?’

‘Just let me run with it for a couple of weeks. See if I can dig anything up.’

‘Heck, you can’t touch Varulv anyway. They live in Scotland, they’re outside our jurisdiction.’

‘They may be outside our jurisdiction, but I can still touch them.’

‘No, no.’ She shook her head adamantly. ‘None of that. As it stands, the case against Lightfoot, Hapwood, Purdham, Renwick and Ulfskar is watertight. I’m not having you mucking things up by chucking your weight about in a foreign land.’

‘If nothing else, Varulv have encouraged all this. Ulfskar was one of their roadies. Should they just be allowed to go on as if …’

‘Heck, what don’t you understand about “no”? I need you here. In fact, I needed you here a couple of hours ago!’

The lift doors slid open. They stepped inside, and Gemma hit the button for the third floor, where SCU’s command suite and her personal office were located.

Heck stood alongside her and said nothing, but as they ascended, he pondered again the dark, black-metal entity that was Varulv. Powerful music could be a potent force, especially among the disenfranchised. But he’d never quite known anything like this, where a message of anger had been taken to such extremes. It was difficult to imagine its originators, who appeared to have spent their entire adult lives hatching this creed of hatred, simply sitting to one side while their minions were defeated, and taking no further action. After all, they’d first spread their deadly message in Norway, and having got away with it there, had moved to the UK, where the same thing had happened again, only worse.

‘You still with us?’ Gemma wondered.

‘Sorry,’ he responded. ‘I just don’t think this’ll be the last we hear from these guys.’

She visibly tried to keep a lid on her vexation.

‘And when we do hear from them again,’ he said, ‘I think it’s going to be seriously nasty.’

‘Unfortunately, Heck, serious nastiness is not in short supply at present. Which is what Operation Sledgehammer is all about … and as we’re reduced to having to do it in twos, that’s all the more reason why you can’t be spared.’

‘Sledgehammer?’ Heck was finally distracted from his ruminations. ‘We’re … we’re doing it in twos?’

‘Yes. That’s how few people we’ve got available. And you, meanwhile, want to waltz off into some distant Scottish sunset to collar someone purely on sus?’

‘Sorry, ma’am … what do you mean, we’re doing it in twos?’

‘That’s why I wanted you back here. Your new partner’s been waiting in my office for the last two hours or so.’

‘Partner?’ Heck tried not to sound too appalled by this.

‘Yeah. Now there’s a shocking concept, eh?’

The lift doors opened again, and Gemma strode onto the top floor, where many more bodies than usual were flowing back and forth, a lot of them tooled-up techies wandering in and out of the conference room.