The Killing - 01 - The Killing Read Free Page B

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