The Killing - 01 - The Killing (3 page)

‘Then it wouldn’t be a secret.’

He walked down the stairs into the depot. She followed.

Trucks and men, pallets and shrink-wrapped goods, inventory lists and timetables.

The floorboards always creaked. Maybe she’d cried out. They’d heard. She could see it in their grinning faces. Vagn Skærbæk, Theis’s oldest friend, who predated even her, tipped an imaginary hat.

‘Tell me!’ she ordered, taking his old black leather coat from the hook.

Birk Larsen put on the jacket, pulled out the familiar black woollen cap, set it on his head. Red on the inside, black on the out. He seemed to live inside this uniform. It made him look like a truculent red-chested bull seal, happy with his territory, ready to fight off all intruders.

A glance at the clipboard, a tick against a destination, then he called Vagn Skærbæk to the nearest van. Scarlet too, and like the uniforms it had the name Birk Larsen on the side. Like the red Christiania tricycle with the box on it that Skærbæk kept running eighteen years after they bought it to ferry Nanna round the city.

Birk Larsen. Patriarch of a modest, happy dynasty. King of his small quarter in Vesterbro.

One clap of his giant hands, barked orders. Then he left.

Pernille Birk Larsen stood there till the men went back to work. There was a tax return to finish. Money to be paid and that was never welcome. Money to be hidden too. No one gave the government everything if they could help it.

We need no more secrets, Theis
, she thought.

Beneath Absalon’s golden statue, beneath the bell-tower turret and castellated roofline, against the red-brick, turreted fortress that was the Rådhus, Copenhagen City Hall, stood three posters.

Kirsten Eller, Troels Hartmann, Poul Bremer. Smiling as only politicians can.

Eller, the woman, thin lips tight together in something close to a smirk. The Centre Party, forever stuck in a philosophical no man’s land, hoping to cling to one side or the other then catch the crumbs that slip from the master’s table.

Below her Poul Bremer beamed out at the city he owned. Lord Mayor of Copenhagen for twelve years, a plump and comfortable statesman, close to the Parliamentarians who held the purse strings, attuned to the fickle opinions of his shiftless party troops, familiar with the scattered network of backers and supporters who followed his every word. Black jacket, white shirt, subtle grey silk tie, businesslike black spectacles, Bremer at sixty-five wore the friendly disposition of everyone’s favourite uncle, the generous bringer of gifts and favours, the clever relative with all the secrets, all the knowledge.

Then Troels Hartmann.

The young one. The handsome one. The politician women looked at and secretly admired.

He wore the Liberal colours. Blue suit, blue shirt, open at the neck. Hartmann, forty-two, boyish with his Nordic good looks, though in his clear cobalt eyes a hint of pain escaped the photographer’s lens. A good man, the picture said. A new generation vigorously chasing out the old, bringing with it fresh ideas, the promise of change. Part way there since, thanks to the voting system, he ran with energy and vision the city’s Education Department. Mayor already, if only of its schools and colleges.

Three politicians about to fight each other for the crown of Copenhagen, the capital city, a sprawling metropolis where more than a fifth of Denmark’s five and a half million natives lived and worked, bickered and fought. Young and old, Danish-born and recent, sometimes half-welcome, immigrant. Honest and diligent, idle and corrupt. A city like any other.

Eller the outsider whose only chance was to cut the best deal she could. Hartmann young, idealistic. Naive his foes would say, bravely hoping to knock Poul Bremer, the grandee of city politics, from the perch the old man called his own.

In the chill November afternoon their faces beamed at the camera, for the press, for the people in the street. Past the smoke-stained ornamental windows of the red-brick castle called the Rådhus, in the galleried corridors and cell-like chambers where politicians gathered to whisper and plot, life was different.

Behind the fixed and artificial smiles a war was under way.

Shining wood. Long slender leaded windows. Leather furniture. Gilt and mosaics and paintings. The smell of polished mahogany.

Posters of Hartmann stood everywhere, leaning against walls, ready to go out to the city. On the desk, in a wooden frame, a portrait of his wife on her hospital bed, placid, brave and beautiful a month before she died. Next to it a photograph of John F. Kennedy and a doe-eyed Jackie in the White House. A band played in the background admiring them. She was smiling in a beautiful silk evening dress. Kennedy was talking to her, saying something private in her ear.

The White House, days before Dallas.

In his private office Troels Hartmann looked at the photos, then the desk calendar.

Monday morning. Three of the longest weeks of his political life ahead. The first of an endless succession of meetings.

Hartmann’s two closest aides sat on the other side of the desk, laptops before them, going through the day’s agenda. Morten Weber, campaign manager, friend since college. Committed, quiet, solitary, intense. Forty-four, unruly curly hair beneath a growing bald patch, a kind, intense and neglected face, roving eyes behind cheap gold-rimmed glasses. Never knew what he looked like or cared. For the last week he’d seemed to live in the same shabby creased jacket that didn’t match his trousers. Happiest in the minutiae of committee paper and cutting deals in smoke-filled rooms.

Sometimes he’d roll his office chair away from the table, propel himself into a quiet corner, take out his needle and insulin, pull his shirt from his waistband and jab a shot into his flabby white belly. Then slide back into the argument, tucking himself back in without losing a single thread.

Rie Skovgaard, the political adviser, always pretended not to notice.

Hartmann’s mind wandered from Weber’s tally of the appointments. He found himself torn from the world of politics for a moment. Thirty-two, angular, intense face, attractive more than beautiful. Combative, strident, always elegant. Today she wore a tightly cut green suit. Expensive. Her dark hair she seemed to take from that photo on Hartmann’s desk. Jackie Kennedy around 1963, long and curving into her slender neck, seemingly casual though not a strand was ever out of place.

The ‘presidential-funeral cut’ Weber called it, but only behind her back. Rie Skovgaard hadn’t looked that way when she arrived.

Morten Weber was the son of a schoolteacher from Aarhus. Skovgaard came with better connections. Her father was an influential backbench MP. Before she moved to the Liberals she was an account executive with the Copenhagen office of a New York-based advertising agency. Now she pitched him, his image, his ideas, much the way she once sold life insurance and supermarket chains.

An unlikely team, awkward sometimes. Did she envy Weber? The fact that he preceded her by two decades, working his way up the Liberal Party secretariat, the backroom man while Hartmann’s handsome smile and fetching ways brought in the publicity and votes?

Rie Skovgaard was a newcomer, scenting opportunity, bored by ideology.

‘The debate this lunchtime. We need posters at the school,’ she said in a calm, clear professional voice. ‘We need—’

‘It’s done,’ Weber replied, waving his fingers at the computer.

It was a dull day. Rain and cloud. The office gave out onto the front of the Palace Hotel. At night its blue neon sign cast an odd light on the room.

‘I sent a car out there first thing.’

She folded her skinny arms.

‘You think of everything, Morten.’

‘I need to.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Bremer.’ Weber muttered the name as if it were an expletive. ‘He didn’t own this city by accident.’

Hartmann came back to the conversation.

‘He won’t own it for much longer.’

‘Did you see the latest poll numbers?’ Skovgaard asked.

‘They look good,’ Hartmann answered with a nod. ‘Better than we hoped for.’

Morten Weber shook his head.

‘Bremer’s seen them too. He won’t sit on his comfy arse and let his kingdom slip through his fingers. This debate at lunchtime, Troels. It’s a school. Home ground. The media will be there.’

‘Talk education,’ Skovgaard cut in. ‘We’ve asked for extra funds to put in more computers. Better access to the net. Bremer blocked the allocation. Now absenteeism’s up twenty per cent. We can throw that at him . . .’

‘Blocked it personally?’ Hartmann asked. ‘You know that?’

A subtle, teasing smile.

‘I managed to get hold of some confidential minutes.’

Like a guilty schoolgirl Skovgaard waved her delicate hands over the documents in front of her.

‘It’s there in black and white. I can leak this if I have to. I’m finding lots we can throw at him.’

‘Can we avoid this kind of crap, please?’ Weber asked with an ill-disguised peevishness. ‘People expect better of us.’

‘People expect us to lose, Morten,’ Skovgaard replied straight away. ‘I’m trying to change that.’

‘Rie . . .’

‘We’ll get there,’ Hartmann interrupted. ‘And we’ll do it properly. I had a meeting with Kirsten Eller over breakfast. I think they want to play.’

The two of them went silent. Then Skovgaard asked, ‘They’re interested in an alliance?’

‘With Kirsten Eller?’ Weber grumbled. ‘Jesus. Talk about a deal with the devil . . .’

Hartmann leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, felt happier than he had in days.

‘These are different times, Morten. Poul Bremer’s starting to lose support. If Kirsten throws her not inconsiderable weight behind us . . .’

‘We’ve got a coalition that holds the majority,’ Skovgaard added brightly.

‘We need to think this through,’ Weber said.

His phone rang. He walked to the window to take the call.

Troels Hartmann skimmed the papers she’d prepared for him, a briefing for the debate.

Skovgaard moved her chair next to his so they could read them together.

‘You don’t need my help, do you? You came up with these ideas. We’re just reminding you what you think.’

‘I need reminding. I lost my watch! A good watch. A . . .’

Skovgaard nudged him. The silver Rolex was in her hand, held discreetly beneath the table so no one else could see.

She opened his fingers and pressed it into his palm.

‘I found it under my bed. I can’t imagine how it got there. Can you?’

Hartmann slipped the Rolex onto his wrist.

Weber came back from the window, phone in hand, looking worried.

‘It’s the mayor’s secretary. Bremer wants to see you.’

‘About what?’

‘I don’t know. He wants to see you now.’

‘Fifteen minutes,’ Hartmann said, checking the time. ‘I’m not at his beck and call.’

Weber looked puzzled.

‘You told me you’d lost your watch.’

‘Fifteen minutes,’ Hartmann repeated.

The hallways ran everywhere, long and gleaming, frescoes of battles and ceremonies above them, grand figures in armour staring down at the figures beetling along beneath.

‘You don’t look happy,’ Hartmann said as they walked to the Lord Mayor’s quarters.

‘Happy? I’m your campaign manager. We’re three weeks from an election. You’re forming alliances without even telling me. What do you want? A song, a dance and a joke?’

‘You think Bremer knows? About Kirsten Eller?’

‘Poul Bremer can hear you mumbling in your sleep. Besides, if you’re Kirsten Eller trying to cut a deal . . . do you only offer it to one side?’

Hartmann stood outside the council chamber door.

‘Leave this to me, Morten. I’ll find out.’

Poul Bremer was in shirtsleeves standing on the podium by the ceremonial chair he’d occupied these past twelve years. Jovial on the phone.

Hartmann walked ahead and picked up the book on the table by the mike. A biography of Cicero. And listened, as he was meant to.

‘Yes, yes. Hear me out.’ That deep and generous laugh, Bremer’s breathy blessing on those he favoured. ‘You’ll be in the government next. A minister. I predict it and I’m never wrong.’ A glance at his visitor. ‘Sorry . . . I must go.’

Bremer took the deputy’s seat. Not the Lord Mayor’s.

‘You’ve read the book, Troels?’

‘No. Sorry.’

‘Take it. An instructive gift. It reminds us the one thing we learn from history is . . . we learn nothing from history.’ He had the voice and manner of a genial schoolmaster, honed across the years. ‘Cicero was a fine man. Would have gone far if he’d bided his time.’

‘It looks heavy going.’

‘Come and sit with me.’ Bremer beckoned to the seat beside him. The Lord Mayor’s. The throne. ‘Try it for size. It doesn’t belong to anyone. Not even me, whatever you think.’

Hartmann went along with the joke. Fell onto the hard polished wood. Smelled the mahogany, the scent of power. Looked around the chamber with its semicircle of empty councillors’ seats, flat-screen monitors and voting buttons in front of them.