Wolf Angel, Mark Hobson [best free ebook reader for pc .txt] 📗

sag just then and she grabbed a stool and dragged it across, sitting down before she fell down.

“And your assistant?”

“I couldn’t see him. I thought he wasn’t around. Was quickly trying to tell myself that I’d imagined the whole thing, that I was overworked and tired. But then I heard him crying very faintly.”

Pieter stood quietly, waiting patiently for her to explain events in her own time.

“He was hiding inside one of the freezer units. There was a body in there with him, one of the gun attack victims, but he’d managed somehow to squeeze himself in there with it. The boy was so petrified that he decided it was preferable to hide in there rather than stay out here. Can you imagine that? He saw something so frightening that he chose to do that?”

Pieter couldn’t.

“If he saw that thing, in here.” Prisha’s chin started to tremble. She was on the verge of tears, and so she sucked in a big lungful of air in an attempt to steady her own fractured nerves.

When Pieter had arrived about ten minutes ago there had been total pandemonium in this part of the hospital. Doctors and medics were dashing here and there, and people were shouting and screaming hysterically.

He’d pushed his way through the crowd in time to see Prisha been comforted by her colleagues, with tears streaming down her face, pointing back towards the morgue behind her, mouthing something incoherent about bones and hands reaching for her. Pieter had squeezed himself into the morgue itself. Inside a pair of burly porters were attempting to restrain the young lab assistant, who was on the floor thrashing and kicking and biting at them, screaming himself hoarse. Eventually they had managed to drag him away, but only after a doctor had injected him with a sedative.

After they had left, Pieter had stood there and looked around, seeing the opened freezer unit with the body still laid inside, and the pile of old bones on the floor alongside the row of gurneys. There were five body bags still there, with the remains still neatly tagged and zipped up inside, and one opened bag draped half on the floor.

Now, listening to Prisha describe what had happened, he asked himself yet again: what the hell was going on?

CHAPTER 16

THE FINLAND OCCULT CONNECTION

Having earlier picked up a replacement car from the police car pool on Elandsgracht, Pieter drove himself back to HQ. Walking into his corner office, he was surprised to find Dyatlov and Floris de Kok waiting for him. Cluttering up much of the floor space were five or six large box files, some with their contents spilled out across the carpet. Adolf was on his hands and knees going through them methodically. Dyatlov had appropriated his desk and chair, where he had his own laptop opened out, the screen filled with writing.

“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