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

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 one 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