by Mark Hobson
“Have I been fired?” Pieter asked, looking at the mess.
“Sorry about this Van Dijk. It looks worse than it is, but Adolf here tells me he has everything in order.”
“We hear there was some weird things happening over at the hospital?” Floris asked in a somewhat excited state.
“There isn’t a suitable word to describe it. Bizarre, odd, inexplicable, take your pick.”
Floris waited for him to go on, but Pieter wouldn’t have known where to begin had he been inclined to fill them in on events, which he wasn’t. Instead he asked, “So what’s going on?”
“Better close the door,” Dyatlov told him. “And grab yourself a seat”
Pieter borrowed one from the squad room and rolled it through his doorway, closed the door, and sat down with the seat backed up against the door to keep it shut.
“Ok, you told me yesterday about some possible links to Scandinavia, particularly Finland. I said I’d ask some of my old contacts if they’d heard anything on the grapevine. Adolf told me about the signet rings and also the message on the wall near the first murder scene.” He held up a photo showing the Werewolf warning and symbol.
“That’s right. Interpol came back with a matching symbol connected to a series of murders there in the 1970’s. Far Right stuff.”
“Yes, Adolf here has pulled the files on those killings, and our friends in Helsinki have sent through everything they had at their end. They seemed surprised we were looking into that case, because as far as they are concerned it’s old news, the case solved and closed years ago. Which admittedly, going off the amount of info here they did a pretty thorough job, and caught the killers. No dispute there.”
“But there are links to our case?”
“Indirectly. Only in the sense that they were carried out by people of the same neo-Nazi persuasion. And ever since the Anders Breivik mass killings in Norway, our Scandinavian friends have really set to work sweeping up all of the skin-head Hitler fanatics, and cracking down on their activities. So as far as any current quasi-paramilitary training camps go, I’m afraid I’ve drawn a blank.”
He saw the look of disappointment on Pieter’s face, and quickly added, “But my guys are still checking that out. So something might turn up on that score. But listen, the murders themselves, you need to hear the details about them.”
He held out his hand to Adolf who passed up a thick cardboard file. “Everything was filed by hand on paper back then. We’re talking about the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s, before digitization. So it’s a long process going through it all, and I’m only about half way through the stuff. But it’s quite amazing the amount of work detectives did, the interviews, the door-to-door enquiries, vehicle registration checks, which they all wrote into their reports and put into their forms. It puts us modern cops to shame.” Adolf bent over and went back to work, thumbing his way through another large box.
Dyatlov took up the story again. “It’s not entirely clear when the murders first began. Throughout the 1970’s, like elsewhere in Europe, various Far-Right groups sprang up in Finland, and with them the number of racial attacks increased. These were reasonably low-key affairs initially, black or Asian kids being jumped in the street and beat up, racial slurs, the usual kind of thing. Then, in 1978, a new group popped up, a Hell’s Angels type group who started to make their presence felt by upping the ante.”
He leafed through several pages and then continued. “The first confirmed murder attributed to this group was in August 1978. An Asian shopkeeper was set upon by a number of men wearing leather jackets and motorbike helmets. He was beaten up with baseball bats and left on the floor of his shop. The place was ransacked but no money was stolen from the till. On the wall outside was sprayed a symbol – similar, but not identical, to the one near our first crime scene. The shopkeeper was in a coma for three days, after which he died. The Finnish police assumed that it was a racially-motivated beating that went just a bit too far.”
He passed a sheet of paper to Pieter. It was an old autopsy report, but in Finnish. Attached to it with paperclips were two colour crime-scene photographs. One showed the interior of the shop: all of the shelves had been turned over with their produce scattered across the shop aisles, and on the floor was a large pool of blood where the victim had been left. The second photograph was of the symbol spray-painted beside the entranceway.
“The second confirmed murder – they know it was definitely the same bunch of killers because again they left their calling card behind, the symbol – this one happened the following spring. On a quiet forest road about fifty miles northwest of Helsinki, an Asian driver was pulled from his car. His vehicle was set on fire, and the man was chained to the back of one of the motorbikes and dragged along behind it for several miles. Then he was stabbed over two hundred times. The blood spray patterns showed that he was still alive at the time. He also put up a hell of a fight, as he tried dragging himself along the roadway even whilst they were repeatedly stabbing him. The victim left a wife and three daughters.
More murders followed throughout the year. An Imam had his house firebombed while he and his wife slept upstairs. They both died.
Two black girls, aged fifteen and sixteen, were gang-raped, tied to a tree and bludgeoned with house bricks. This happened during the daytime in a park in central Helsinki. Nobody came forward with witness statements.
And so on. The details are all here in the file, most of it had been translated into Dutch so you can go through it later.”
Dyatlov paused, and Floris glanced up. “That’s when things started to change, and get even weirder as well. Tell him.”
“He’s right. Up to then it seemed that the Finnish police were dealing with an extreme right-wing bunch of Nazi fanatics. All of their victims fit the type to suggest this. But in late 1979 to early 1980, they broadened their attacks to include white people, both male and female. A young female teacher killed in her home – it turned out that she had a black boyfriend, so it was thought she may have been targeted for having what was referred to back then as an interracial relationship. Yet this was followed by three white factory workers gunned down in the street after finishing their shift. A white boy, aged two, snatched from his mother’s arms and thrown off a bridge into a river by a group of passing motorbike riders. And all connected, either by the symbol or the presence of this group of Hell’s Angels. Yet now, for the first time, the crimes were no longer been treated as racist attacks.”
“That would fit with our murders here,” Pieter interjected. “None of our victims fit one particular ethnicity group or age. A prostitute from East Europe possibly, that may have riled them, but none of the others anyway.”
Dyatlov nodded enthusiastically. “It turned out the cops in Helsinki were right. Fairly soon after, pretty much by chance in fact, they made a number of arrests, and their real motive,” he shook his head here in an expression of disbelief, “their real motive became clear.”
“They got lucky? Or they made a breakthrough?”
“Definitely the former. The drugs squad carried out a series of raids across the country, breaking up dealers supply chains and busting cannabis farms. One of these raids took place in a disused warehouse on Drumsӧ Island – back then this was part of the run-down docks, before the Yuppies moved in and turned it into a trendy yachting marina. Well, they smashed the doors down and took the people inside completely by surprise, but what they found in there wasn’t an illegal drugs operation but what the police described as a torture chamber. A group of bikers – yep, the exact same ones – had a guy strapped to a workbench and were sawing off his arms and legs. Nearby was a bucket filled with other amputated limbs from other victims, and in the corner and piled up like kindling, were three other bodies. What’s more, they were conducting some bizarre kind of ritual. Something satanic or occult is what it says here in the file, with pentagrams or pentangles or whatever the fuck they are called, and lots of naked people. And running the show was a fifty on
e year old woman.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“I kid you not. And wait for this. She was a Dutch national who had moved to Finland after the war. Going by the name of Gerdi.”
Pieter reached out for the file. “Give me that.” He stared at the police mugshot, which showed a grey-faced lady with straggly white hair and bulging eyes looking straight back at the camera.
“And they caught them purely by chance?”
“Yes. They had no specific leads. Something led them to think it was going to be just another ordinary drugs bust, but what they found was something completely unexpected. A fantastic stroke of luck. It does happen sometimes.”
“Like the cops who caught The Yorkshire Ripper.”
“Exactly.”
“So presumably there was a trial?”
“Yes, and it was quite a sensation at the time. All of the gory details came out and the press had a field day. Witnesses, the few they were, were threatened if they gave evidence, and some were later given new identities. Two of the jurors died in mysterious circumstances, they brought in experts on the occult and Wiccan magic, and there was talk of spells and curses. The Judge had some kind of mental breakdown: apparently he was found in his chambers one day babbling about strange smells and unearthly presences. Then, when they got onto the subject of motives, the main defendant, our friend Gerdi, she started on with some nonsense about opening portals to another dimension through the practice of ritualistic killings. Can you believe that rubbish? Throughout the course of the trial she was heard chanting incantations to herself.”
Dyatlov paused then, and looked closely at Pieter.
“Are you ok?” he asked, concerned. “You look pale Van Dijk.”
“I’m fine,” he replied irritably.
Dyatlov and Floris exchanged a look.
“From the sound of it they didn’t have much of a defence? That they were pretty much admitting to everything.”
“Oh, they tried to defend what they’d done, from their own warped sense of perspective. But it wasn’t the sort of legal defence that would stand up in court. Eventually their own lawyer just gave up and sat there squirming with embarrassment. It was obvious to everybody present that Gerdi was just batshit crazy.”
“Crazy yes,” put in Floris, “but very charismatic. She wasn’t the first or the last to have that kind of hold over people. Or to be convinced that what they were doing, or hoping to achieve, was perfectly normal and rational to themselves. Nurse Beverley Allitt killed children because she suffered from Mϋnchausen’s Disease by Proxy, and thought she would be treated like a hero by bringing them back to life. Joachim Kroll was a German cannibal who killed over a dozen people in the 1950’s and cut up their bodies to make a meat stew. Ed Gein turned his victims into lampshades and liked wearing human skin, and was the inspiration for Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill.”
“Yes, thank you Adolf. The verdicts were a foregone conclusion. Guilty as hell. All of the bikers were imprisoned for life with no parole, while Gerdi was sent to a lunatic asylum.”
“It says here that she killed herself a year later.” Pieter was looking at a grainy photo in the file he held, which showed the figure of a woman hanging in her cell. “In 1982.”
“And good riddance.”
Pieter closed the file and tossed it onto his desk.
“But the case was never fully closed, despite what the Finnish police say. Some of the top detectives who worked on the case remained convinced that, even though she was an evil bitch, she wasn’t the main mastermind behind the whole thing. That she was just a follower herself, like the biker gang, being used to do somebody else’s bidding.”
“The killings stopped with their convictions though?”
“Yes, in Finland at least. Perhaps the real culprits just went to ground. Look, I know it’s only a tenuous link to our case, but with the Dutch connection and the motive, it’s the best lead we have. And like Floris said earlier, he still has loads more papers to go through. He might find something else.”
“I appreciate what you’ve done. You’ve come up with some good details Adolf. Keep digging for more.”
Floris beamed up at him. He and Dyatlov started to clear up the boxes and loose papers lying around the office.
“That file has a condensed version of what we have found so far on this Finnish link. It’s also duplicated on this laptop here. Go through it, it has lots more detail than what I’ve just outlined.”
Pieter moved his chair from behind the door and let them out.
Alone again, Pieter reclaimed his desk and sat there going over their discussion.
Certainly the Finnish angle was worth pursuing. Perhaps he could speak to the senior investigator who handled the case back then, assuming he was still alive. Reading about old cases was always informative, but sometimes certain elements were lost or left out, especially the tiny nuances of a case, the feelings and thoughts of the people running the show. Personal theories would not always be recorded in the official files, particularly if they went against the accepted facts, and even more so once a case was closed with a successful conviction. Nothing beat talking to the actual people on the ground at the time.
He picked up the heavy file and flicked through it until he found the name of the senior investigator. There was no up-to-date contact details obviously, not for a case nearly forty years old, but there was a phone number for the Helsinki Police Foreign Liaison Office.
He was about to dial it when he noticed the time – 6:30pm
Best to wait until the morning.
Instead he went back to the segment of the file concerning the woman, Gerdi, the apparent leader of this group. Leader of their cult might be a better way of describing her. A cult with a bizarre and twisted outlook on life, obsessed with the occult.
There were a few more photos of her in addition to the police mugshot and picture of her body hanging in her cell. One showed her being taken into the courtroom, turning and grinning at the crowd of onlookers. Then there were a series of post mortem images, which he skipped through. Another one was taken on a family holiday when she was a young lady of about twenty, bending over to hold the hand of a toddler as they walked along a beach somewhere.
He guessed this must be her own child. Was she married? he wondered.
There was nothing in the file about her private life or marital status one way or the other, but there was something about her family. She’d had three children, one of which had passed away in the 1960’s from polio, and two grandchildren. No details apart from one name.
A grandson, born in 1990.
Just a Christian name.
Bartholomew.
Pieter gently lowered the file and placed it onto the desk. In his chest something icy gave his heart the smallest of squeezes.
Slowly he came to his feet, the chair’s legs scrapping backwards across the floor.
For about twenty seconds he stood motionless, not daring to blink or breathe.
HELSINKI – FINLAND. MAY 2002
The black Toyota with the tinted windows pulled up before the large security gate. The driver’s window rolled down and a black-suited arm reached out towards the intercom system fixed to one of the stone pillars. A moment later, with a quiet electric hum, the gates slowly swung open, and the car glided forward down the short driveway towards the ornate house.
Swinging around the turning circle before a set of wide steps, it drew to a halt, and the driver briskly jumped out to open the rear passenger door.
Three people stepped out. A smartly-dressed lady wearing an expensive looking coat and cream-coloured trousers, and two children, a boy and a girl.
The boy was the oldest, aged twelve, and full of confidence. He was quite tall for his age, if a little plump in the face. He stepped forward and then turned with an annoying sigh as he had to wait for the little girl who followed behind.
She was around six or seven years younger, and very pretty, with fine freckles across her nose, but wa
s very shy by nature, and the lady had to usher her along and encourage her up the steps with the boy.
At the top the double doors of the large townhouse were already open and they stepped into the gloomy interior, leaving the spring sunshine behind.
The house was mostly silent. It was mid-morning, but instead of the hustle and bustle that one might expect, the place was still and hushed. There were no staff, or pets, to welcome the visitors, just a large empty hallway and its grand staircase leading up to a landing above.
The lady led them upwards. Their footsteps were cushioned by the thick, red carpet underfoot. Lining the walls were a number of paintings. One showed a grand seascape, another was of a lake surrounded by a majestic forest. Another was a portrait of a fine-looking fellow, resplendent in his military uniform. The boy and the girl gawped at them open-mouthed as they climbed past, but as they neared the top their attention switched to the landing just ahead.
At the top a long hallway stretched before them leading to an open doorway at the end, and even before they approached they heard the beeps and electronic buzzes of medical equipment, the hiss and gurgle of respirators.
Now the boy hung back as well as the little girl, but the lady escorting them gently encouraged them forward.
“I will be right here. In you go, both of you.”
The room was carpeted in black, and the walls were of warm oak panelling. One whole side was dominated by a large, curved window, offering a panoramic view across the city.
At the centre was a king size bed surrounded by monitors and ventilators and syringe pumps, a resuscitator bag and a defibrillator and ICU screens.
On the bed, the dried-up old husk of a dying man.
The boy and the girl hesitated just inside the doorway. The room was large and spacious and beautifully adorned, with a high ceiling and fine furniture. In one corner was an ornate gilt mirror, and beyond it a private bathroom decorated with gold fittings and a grey slate floor. A bookcase was filled with old and rare volumes, preserved behind a glass front. But their attention was riveted on the man lying before them, and the sound of his slow and laboured breathing, which hissed through the oxygen mask hiding his features.
