Kiss of Death. Paul Finch

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