Death In Oslo

THURSDAY 19 MAY 2005
I

At first, when Helen Lardahl Bentley opened her eyes, she had no idea where she was.

She was lying in an uncomfortable position. Her right hand was squashed under her cheek and had gone to sleep. She sat up gingerly. Her body felt stiff and she tried to shake some life into her arm. She had to close her eyes to fight a sudden bout of dizziness, and then she remembered what had happened.

The dizziness passed. Her head still felt strange and light, but when she carefully stretched her arms and legs, she realised that she was not seriously injured. Even the wound on her temple felt better. She ran her fingertips over the bump and could feel that it was smaller than when she had fallen asleep.

Fallen asleep.

The last thing she remembered was that she had taken the woman in the wheelchair by the hand. She had promised…

Did I fall asleep on my feet? Did I faint?

It was only now that she realised she was still as dirty. The stench immediately became unbearable. Using her left hand as a support against the back of the sofa, she slowly levered herself up. She had to get washed.

‘Good morning, Madam President,’ a female voice said quietly from the doorway.

‘Good morning,’ Helen Bentley replied in surprise.

‘I was just out in the kitchen making some coffee.’

‘Have you… did you sit up all night?’

‘Yes.’ The woman in the wheelchair smiled. ‘Thought you might have concussion, so I woke you up a couple of times during the night. You were pretty groggy. Would you like some?’

She held out a steaming cup.

Madam President waved it away with her free hand.

‘I want to shower,’ she said. ‘And if I’m not…’ She seemed confused for a moment, and ran her hand over her eyes. ‘If I’m not mistaken, you offered me some clean clothes.’

‘Of course. Can you manage by yourself, or should I wake Mary?’

‘Mary?’ mumbled the President. ‘That was the… housekeeper?’

‘Yes, that’s right. And my name is Hanne Wilhelmsen. You’ve probably forgotten. You can call me Hanne.’

‘Hannah,’ the President repeated.

‘Near enough.’

Helen Bentley took a few tentative steps. Her knees were shaking, but her legs held up. She looked askance at the other woman.

‘Where am I going?’

‘Follow me,’ was Hanne Wilhelmsen’s friendly reply as she rolled towards the door.

‘Have you…’

The President stopped and followed. The dawn light outside told her that it must still be very early. But she had already been there quite some time. Several hours at least. The woman in the wheelchair had obviously kept her promise. She hadn’t let anyone know. Helen Bentley could still do what she had to before raising the alarm. It was still possible to work the whole thing out, but to do that, no one must know she was still alive.

‘What’s the time?’ she asked as Hanne Wilhelmsen opened the bathroom door. ‘How long have I…’

She had to lean against the door frame for support.

‘Quarter past four,’ Hanne replied. ‘You’ve been asleep for about six hours. I’m sure that’s not enough.’

‘It’s a lot more than I usually get,’ the President said and managed a smile.

The bathroom was impressive. A double-width sunken bath dominated the room. It was almost a small pool. The President could make out something that looked like a radio and something that was definitely a small TV screen in the unusually spacious shower cabinet beside the bath. The floor was covered in oriental-patterned mosaics, and an enormous mirror with an elaborate gilded wooden frame hung above the two marble sinks.

Helen Bentley thought she remembered the woman saying that she was a retired policewoman. There certainly wasn’t much in this flat that had been bought on a policeman’s salary. Unless this was the only country in the world that paid its police what they were actually worth.

‘Make yourself at home,’ Hanne Wilhelmsen said. ‘There are towels in the cupboard over there. I’ll put some clothes outside the door, so you can get them when you’re ready. Just take the time you need.’

She rolled her chair out of the bathroom again and shut the door.

It took Madam President a while to get undressed. Her muscles were still tender and sore. For a moment she was unsure what to do with the soiled clothes, before she noticed that Hanne had put a folded bin liner by one of the sinks.

What a strange woman, thought the President. ‘But weren’t there two of them? Three, with the housekeeper.’

She was naked now. She stuffed the clothes into the bin liner and tied it carefully. What she really wanted was a bath, but a shower was probably more sensible, given how dirty she was.

The warm water poured from a showerhead that was about the size of a dinner plate. Helen Bentley groaned, partly from pleasure and partly from the pain that coursed through her body as she leant her head back so the water would wash over her face.

There was another woman there last night. Helen Bentley remembered it clearly now. Someone who wanted to tell the police. The two women had spoken together in Norwegian, and she hadn’t been able to make out anything, other than a word that sounded like police. The woman in the wheelchair must have won the argument.

The shower was helping.

It was like purification in every sense. She turned the tap on full. The pressure increased noticeably. The jets of water felt like arrows massaging her skin. She gasped. Filled her mouth with water so she could hardly breathe, then spat it out, let everything run over her. She scrubbed herself thoroughly with a hemp glove that felt coarse and comforting on her hand. Her skin went red. Bright red from the hot water and flaming red from the hemp glove. Her cuts stung intensely when the water hit them.

She had stood exactly like this that late autumn evening in 1984, the evening she had never shared with anyone and that therefore no one must know about.

She had showered for nearly forty minutes when she got home. It was midnight. She remembered that clearly. She had scrubbed herself with a loofah until she bled, as if it were possible to scrape a visual impression off your skin. Make it vanish for ever. The hot water had run out, but she’d stayed in the freezing cascades until Christopher had come in and asked with some concern if she was going to get Billie ready for bed.

It had been raining outside. The rain had poured from the skies in deafening sheets that hammered on the tarmac, on the car, on the roofs and trees and the playground over the road from the house, where a swing swung backwards and forwards on the gusts of wind, and a woman had been standing waiting.

She wanted Billie back.

Helen’s daughter had been born to another woman. But all the papers were in order.

She remembered screaming, All the papers are in order, and she remembered pulling her purse from her bag and waving it in front of the other woman’s pale, determined face: How much do you want? How much do I need to pay you not to do this to me?

It wasn’t about the money, Billie’s biological mother said.

She knew that the papers were valid, she said, but they said nothing about Billie’s father. And he had come back now.

She said that with a slight smile, a vaguely triumphant expression, as if she had won a competition and couldn’t help boasting about it.

Father! Father! You never said anything about the father! You said you weren’t sure, and that in any case, the guy was gone, over the hills, an irresponsible slob, and you wouldn’t want Billie to be exposed to him. You said you wanted what was best for Billie, and that was for her to come and live with us, with Christopher and me, and that all the papers were in order. You even signed them! You signed, and Billie has her own room now, a room with pink wallpaper and a white crib with a mobile that she can reach out and touch, which makes her smile.

The father wanted to look after both of them, the woman said. She had to shout in the howling storm. He wanted to look after Billie and Billie’s real mother. Biological fathers had rights too. She was stupid not to have given his name when Billie was born, because then all this could have been avoided. She apologised. But that was the situation now. Her boyfriend was out of prison and had come back to her. Things had changed. Surely being a lawyer, Helen Bentley would understand that.

She unfortunately had to have Billie back now.

Madam President laid her palms against the tiles.

She couldn’t bear to remember. For over twenty years she had tried to suppress the memory of her panic as she turned away from the woman and ran towards the car on the other side of the road. She wanted to get the diamond necklace that her father had given her earlier that evening. They had been celebrating Billie, and her father’s face had been flushed and sweaty, and he had laughed and laughed about his little granddaughter, while everyone exclaimed how beautiful she was, how cute, little Billie Lardahl Bentley.

The necklace was still in the glove compartment, and maybe Helen could use the diamonds and a credit card to buy her child again.

Two credit cards. Three. Take them all!

But while she was fumbling with the car key and trying to hold back the tears and panic that were threatening to overwhelm her, she heard the loud thump. A frightening, solid sound that made her turn in time to see a body in a red raincoat sail through the air. Then she heard another thud through the rain as the woman hit the tarmac.

A small sports car spun off round the corner. Helen Bentley didn’t even register the colour. All was quiet.

Helen no longer heard the rain. She didn’t hear anything. Slowly and mechanically she walked across the road. When she was a few metres from the red-coated woman she stopped.

She was lying in such a peculiar position. So twisted and unnatural, and even in the poor light from the street lamp, Helen could see the blood pouring from a wound on her head. It mixed with the rainwater and became a dark river that twisted its way to the gutter. The woman’s eyes were wide open and her mouth was moving.

‘Help me.’

Helen Lardahl Bentley took a couple of steps back.

Then she turned and ran to the car, pulled open the door, jumped in and drove off. She drove home, and stood in the shower for forty minutes, scrubbing herself with a loofah until she bled.

They never heard any more from Billie’s biological mother. And almost exactly twenty years later, on a November night in 2004, Helen Lardahl Bentley was pronounced the winner of the presidential election in the US. Her daughter stood with her on the podium, a tall, blonde young woman who had never made her parents anything but proud.

Madam President pulled off the hemp glove, took down a bottle of shampoo and soaped her hair. It made her eyes sting. But it felt good. It broke up the image of the injured woman lying on the wet tarmac, with her head covered in blood and muck.

Jeffrey Hunter had shown her a letter when he woke her in the hotel room, silently and far too early. She was confused and he had put his finger on her lips in a disconcertingly intimate manner.

They knew about the child, it said. They would expose her secret. She had to go with Jeffrey. The Trojan Horse was operative and they would disclose her secret and destroy her.

The letter was signed by Warren Scifford.

Helen Bentley mentally grabbed the name and clung on to it. She clenched her teeth and let the water fall on her face.

Warren Scifford.

She wasn’t going to think about the woman in the red raincoat. She had to think about Warren. And him alone. She had to focus. She rotated slowly in the shower and let the water pummel her aching back. She lowered her head and breathed in deeply. In and out.

Verus amicus rara avis.

A true friend is a rare bird.

That was what had convinced her. Only Warren knew about the inscription on the back of the watch that she had given him after the election. He was an old, good friend and had contacted her before the final televised debate with George W. Bush. The opinion polls had been in favour of the presiding president for several days prior to the debate. She was still in the lead, but the Texan was catching up. His security rhetoric was starting to hit home with the public. He presented himself as a man of action, balanced with the experience and insight needed by a country at war and in crisis. He represented continuity. You knew what you were getting, which was hardly true of Helen Bentley, inexperienced in foreign affairs as she was.

‘You have to let go of Arabian Port Management,’ Warren had said and taken her by the hands.

All her advisers, internal and external, had told her the same. They had all insisted. They had ranted and pleaded: the time wasn’t right. Later perhaps, when there was more water under the bridge after 9/11. But not now.

She refused to back down. The Dubai-based, Saudi-owned operations company was sound and efficient, and had run ports all over the world, from Okinawa to London. The two companies, one of them British, that had until now managed some of the biggest ports in the States, were interested in selling. Arabian Port Management wanted to buy them both. One would give them the operation of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia; the other covered Charleston, Savannah, Houston and Mobile. In other words, the Arabic company would have considerable control over all the most important ports on the east coast and in the Gulf.

Helen Lardahl Bentley thought that it was a good idea.

For a start, it was the best company, by far the most profitable and the one with most expertise. The sale would also play a significant role in normalising relations with powers in the Middle East that it was in the interests of the US to be on good terms with. In addition, it would help to rebuild respect for good Arab-Americans, which was perhaps the important thing for Helen Bentley.

She felt they had suffered enough, and stubbornly stuck to her guns. She had had meetings with the top management of the Arabic company, and even though she wasn’t stupid enough to promise anything, she had clearly signalled her goodwill. She was particularly pleased that the company, despite any uncertainty regarding approval of the sale, had already invested heavily on American soil, in order to be as primed as possible for a future takeover.

Warren had spoken quietly. He hadn’t let go of her hands. He looked straight into her eyes when he said: ‘I support your intention. Wholeheartedly. But you will never achieve it if you ruin your chances now. You have to launch a counterattack, Helen. You have to hit back at Bush where he least expects it. I’ve spent years analysing the man. I know him as well as anyone can, without actually meeting him. He also wants this sale to be concluded! It’s just he’s experienced enough not to make it public yet. He knows that it will trigger an emotional response that’s not to be played with. You have to expose him. You have to catch him out. Now listen, this is what you should do…’

Finally she felt clean.

Her skin was stinging and the bathroom was full of warm steam. She stepped out of the shower cabinet and grabbed a towel. When she had wrapped it round her body, she took a smaller towel and wound it round her head. With her left hand, she rubbed a clear circle in the condensation on the mirror.

The blood on her face was gone. The bump was still obvious, but her eye had opened again. Her wrists were in fact the worst. The small strips of plastic had cut so far into her skin that there were deep open wounds in several places. She would have to ask for some disinfectant, and hopefully they would have some proper bandages.

She had followed Warren’s advice. Albeit with considerable doubt.

In reply to the presenter’s question on how she viewed the security threat in connection with the sale of key American infrastructure, she had looked straight into the camera and given an impassioned and inspiring forty-five-second call for people to fraternise with ‘our Arab friends’, and then talked about the importance of nurturing a fundamental American value and right, that of equality, no matter where in the world your ancestors hailed from, and which religion they practised.

Then she had stopped to draw breath. A glance over at the presiding president made her realise that Warren had been absolutely right. President Bush was smiling the smile of a victor. He shrugged in that peculiar way of his, with his hands leading from his body. He was sure of what was coming.

He got something completely different.

But, Helen Bentley continued calmly, it was a very different matter when it came to infrastructure. She was of the view that nothing should be sold to anyone who was not American, or at least a close ally. She said that the ultimate goal had to be that everything, from the highways and airports to ports, customs stations, border checkpoints and railways, should always and for ever be owned, operated and managed by American interests.

For the purposes of national security.

And finally, she added with a fleeting smile, that it would of course take a long time and require great political will to achieve this. Not least as President George Bush himself had said he was warmly in favour of selling to Arab interests, in an internal document that she then held up to the camera for a few seconds before putting it back on the lectern and gesturing to the presenter that she was finished.

Helen Lardahl Bentley won the debate by eleven percentage points. A week later, she became ‘Madam President’, thus fulfilling a dream she had had for more than ten years. Warren Scifford was appointed as the head of the newly established BSC Unit shortly after.

The position was not a reward.

The watch was.

And he had abused it. He had tricked her with her own declaration of eternal friendship.

Verus amicus rara avis. It had proved to be truer than she thought.

She went over to the door and opened it carefully. There was a folded pile of clothes just outside as promised. As quickly as her aching body would allow, she bent down, snatched up the pile and closed the door again. Then she locked it.

The underwear was completely new. The labels were still attached. She noted this kind gesture, before putting the bra and panties on. The jeans also looked new and were a perfect fit. When she put on the pale pink cashmere V-necked sweater, she felt the fibres scratching at the cuts on her wrists.

She stood looking at herself in the mirror. The ventilation fan had dispensed with most of the steam and the bathroom was already a few degrees cooler than when she’d got out of the shower five minutes ago. From force of habit, she considered for a moment putting on some make-up. There was an open lacquered Japanese box by the sink, full of cosmetics. But she decided against it. Her lips were still swollen and the cut on her lower lip would look ridiculous if she was to put lipstick on.

Many years ago, during Bill Clinton’s first term in office, Hillary Rodham Clinton had invited Helen Bentley to lunch. It was the first time that they had met in more personal circumstances, and Helen remembered that she had been extremely nervous. It was only a few weeks since she had taken her seat in the Senate, and she had had more than enough on her plate, learning about all the customs and etiquette that a young and insignificant senator had to know in order to survive more than a few hours on Capitol Hill. Lunch with the First Lady was a dream. Hillary had been just as personable, attentive and interested as her supporters said she was. The arrogant, cool and calculating person that her enemies made her out to be was not in evidence. She did, of course, want something, just as everyone in Washington always wanted something. But on the whole, Helen Bentley got the impression that Hillary Rodham Clinton wished her well. She wanted her to feel comfortable and confident in her new environment. And if, in addition, Senator Bentley would be willing to read through a document about a health reform that would benefit middle America, she would make the First Lady very happy indeed.

Helen Bentley remembered it well.

They got up after the meal. Hillary Clinton looked discreetly at her watch, gave Helen a formal peck on the cheek and shook her hand.

‘One more thing,’ she said, still holding her hand. ‘You can’t trust anyone in this world. Except one person, your husband. As long as he is your husband, he’s the only person who will always want the best for you. The only one you can trust. Never forget that.’

Helen had never forgotten it.

On the 19th of August 1998, Bill Clinton admitted that he had betrayed not only the entire world, but also his wife. A couple of weeks later, Helen bumped into Hillary Clinton in a corridor in the West Wing, following a meeting at the White House. The First Lady had just come back from Martha’s Vineyard, where the presidential family had sought refuge from the storm. She had stopped and taken Helen by the hand, just as she had during their first meeting, many years before.

‘I’m sorry, Hillary. I’m truly sorry for you and Chelsea.’

Mrs Clinton said nothing. Her eyes were red. Her mouth trembled. She managed to smile, nodded and let go of Helen’s hand before moving on, proud, straight-backed, meeting the eye of anyone who dared to look.

Helen Lardahl Bentley had never forgotten the advice of the President’s wife, but she had not followed it. Helen couldn’t live without trusting someone. Nor could she have set course for the country’s top position without a handful of loyal staff, whom she trusted implicitly. An exclusive group of good friends who wished her well.

Warren Scifford had been one of them.

That was what she had always believed. But he was lying. He had betrayed her, and the lie was bigger than him.

Because he couldn’t know what he claimed in the letter the Trojans knew. No one knew. Not even Christopher. It was her secret, her burden, and she had carried it alone for more than twenty years.

It was totally incomprehensible, and it was only the panic, the paralysing, overwhelming fear that engulfed her when Jeffrey Hunter showed her the letter that had prevented her from seeing that.

Warren was lying. Something was very wrong.

No one could know.

Her teeth felt like they were covered in fur and she had a bad taste in her mouth. She looked timidly around the bathroom. There, she saw it by the mirror. Hanne Wilhelmsen had put out a glass for her, with a new toothbrush and a half-used tube of toothpaste in it. She struggled with the obstinate packaging and cut herself on the plastic before managing to extract the toothbrush.

President Bentley bared her teeth at the mirror.

‘You bastard!’ she whispered. ‘May you burn in hell, Warren Scifford! That’s the only place for people like you!’