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
