The Exception (49 page)

‘I’m not running anywhere. Burglars don’t usually carry guns. If you’re found with anything like that on you, the jail sentence is tripled.’ The man is wearing a long black coat with pyjamas sticking out underneath. He’s probably a neighbour called in by Henrik.

The man has brought a flashlight. He shines it towards the study window, but Iben manages to move out of sight just in time. He shouts in the direction of the window: ‘You there!
Looking forward to three months inside, hey? Maybe five! And that’s on top of whatever else is waiting for you.’

Iben could kick herself. Why did she even think about breaking into the house? She should’ve known it could only go one way.

The light’s beam travels across the ceiling. She takes care to keep out of the way and settles down on the floor, leaning against the wall with her knees drawn up. She is shaking.

Neither of the two men has mentioned phoning the police, presumably because one of them has already done so. The police could be here any moment.

A sleepy child speaks on the other side of the door. It’s a boy. ‘What are you doing?’

Henrik answers his son. ‘Your daddy has caught a burglar.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s locked in the computer room.’

‘Wow.’

The next voice is Anne-Lise’s. ‘NO!’

‘Why, what? Mummy?’

‘You mustn’t go so close to the door.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because. Stay over here, next to me.’

‘Can he shoot through the door?’

Anne-Lise speaks quietly. ‘No, darling, he can’t.’

Iben waits until the cone of light leaves the window for a few seconds, then throws herself across the desk and grabs her jacket and shoes from the window hook. The man in the garden hears her and shines the light back in the window, but Iben is already lying flat on the desk.

The boy speaks again. ‘Why can’t I go over there? Is he going to come out?’

‘I just want you to stay here by me. I know, let’s go into your room.’

‘No-oo … Mummy, I don’t want to.’

‘Yes! Come on.’

Iben pulls her sweater off and rummages in the pockets of her jacket for the hood and scarf. She ties the scarf over her face and pulls the hood well down over her forehead, trying to make sure that not a single strand of her blonde hair is showing. After buttoning her jacket, she ties the sweater round the bottom of it. The effect she wants is slim hips and a bulky upper body in the hope that she might be mistaken for a man.

She jumps up on the desk and stands in front of the open window. What chance does she have? Everything is so high in this old villa. Even though she’s just on the first floor, the ground seems very far down.

The man shouts at her again. ‘Jumping? Don’t do it. You’ll break your legs.’ He pulls quickly at the dog’s lead. ‘And if you don’t, Skipper here will get you anyway!’

The police might be just a minute away, but Iben crawls back into the room. There’s a mess of electrical cords under the desk. She pulls two extension leads out of the mains socket and ties them together. The result is a kind of rope, at least six metres long.

Anne-Lise is apparently still hovering in the hallway, but her voice is at a safe distance from the door. ‘What if there are two of them?’

‘There aren’t. I spotted this one downstairs.’

Anne-Lise sounds quite different from when she’s in the office. ‘What do you think? Will he jump?’

‘I don’t think so. Besides, Lars is there with his dog.’

Iben opens the upper part of the window and climbs back up onto the sill. Now she grasps the crosspiece between the upper and lower windows and stands with her entire body on the outside of the house. Stretching, she can just grab hold of the gutter that runs along the roof.

The man named Lars calls out: ‘Hey! Stop!’ He speaks into his mobile. ‘The man is trying to get onto the roof. I bet he’s high on something. It’s a little guy. I don’t like this, it looks bad.’

He calls out: ‘Get back inside! Prison is better than what you’re trying.’

Iben manages to place one foot on the upper edge of the open window and heaves herself up. She tests the gutter. It seems solid. She moves one more step along and then tries to propel herself farther onto the roof, but a dangling edge of her sweater gets caught. She hangs on to an attic window sill while she tries to free herself.

Lars talks to Henrik again: ‘Better pull down your attic steps. The police will have to get up there to catch him.’

She wastes a lot of time fiddling with the sweater, but in the end it tears. She looks at the large hole with relief. Supported by the attic window she crawls up to the roof ridge, taking care to stay as flat as possible even though she is out of Lars’s sight. She can’t see him either.

She pulls the scarf down. The wind fans her skin.

The villa is too enormous for Lars to be on the lookout everywhere. It should be possible to find a place where Iben can climb down and escape before he sees her. Then she sees him in front of the house. He has walked farther away to keep an eye on her. He sweeps his flashlight over part of the roof. Hurriedly she pushes the scarf back across her face, just in case.

There are lights on in two neighbouring houses. One of them presumably belongs to Lars, but maybe another man is on his way.

Iben knows she needs to use the cords to get down now, but she doesn’t dare. Instead she crawls until she is midway along the ridge of the roof. Lars won’t be able to figure out where she’s going next. But Henrik might open an attic window. And the police will arrive. And maybe more neighbours. More dogs.

Jump now.

Now.

Still she hesitates. Will the knot hold the leads together? She pulls them out of her pocket and tugs at them to check the knot.

She thinks of Rasmus, remembering how she found him.

She thinks of what will happen if her sweater or her jacket catches something – maybe the gutter again – or if she slips on the tiles.

A light comes on in the nearby attic windows. Car headlights are approaching fast. It can only be the police car.

Now.

She slides down to a dark attic window at the back of the house. Supported by its frame, she makes a noose at one end of the cord, places it around the window frame and tightens it. Holding on to the cord, she descends to the edge of the roof.

She wants to reach the ground quickly, before the others have time to find her, but she hasn’t counted on just how slippery the thin plastic cable will be. She hits the first knot, barely managing to hold on, and then slides full speed down the next length. Her plan to stop halfway to assess where she is and choose the best spot to land fails.

When she reaches the last stretch of cord, it whips back into her hands and she can’t hold on. Iben lands behind the house, next to a washing rack and some garden furniture. Her feet, knees and hands crash against the flagstones.

I’ve survived, she thinks. That is the first thought to go through her head and it makes her feel ecstatic.

She gets up. A tall fence is only a few metres away.

She pushes the garden table over to the fence and tries to jump up. She can’t. There’s a sharp pain in her right foot. She crawls up onto the table, then onto the fence. She hauls herself down the other side, putting her weight on her arms and her left foot.

She looks around at the unfamiliar garden, but when she hears voices nearby she pushes herself through a hole at the bottom of the hedge to a garden next door. The voices seem to be moving off in the opposite direction.

The pain in her foot is excruciating. Her hands hurt too. Examining her palms she realises that the cable has ripped her gloves and even cut into her skin.

When the voices die away it is still dark.

Her bike is hidden in a driveway just down the road.

She gets up and limps towards it, thinking: I have something for Malene. Now we’re even.

‘She’s such a liar! It’s lies, all of it!’

Reading this stuff makes Iben furious. She kicks her good foot hard against the mattress. She has taken a couple of painkillers, but the bump in her other foot still causes a shooting pain. This makes her even angrier.

Iben was too much on edge to sleep when she came home. She has brought her laptop to bed and the screen is covered in text.

Monday morning. I’ve been at the DCGI for two months now. I walk into their place. No one asks about my weekend, no one bothers about the trip I told them about last week. Simply nothing!

I just say ‘Hi’, sounding relaxed. I’m trying to forget what they were like last week, to give them another chance, a fresh start. Just to do this one little thing: pop into their shared office and – ‘Hi!’ Camilla says ‘Hi’ too. Iben says not a word.

They don’t bother to look at me. I stand there for a while, hoping for a little attention or something, ready to say a few words about what I’ve done, what a nice time we had, how the sun shone … something, anything!

It takes three minutes and I’m back where I started. Dumped in the middle of all the misery I had managed to ignore for a while. It’s that quick …

Anne-Lise’s CD is not password-protected. Iben takes a deep breath and opens another file.

It’s quite obvious that they insist on seeing me as ‘the librarian’, a dull figure nobody needs take any notice of. They want me to behave in character and are prepared to do everything they can to force me to. It really angers them if I look attractive or say something interesting because it makes it harder for them to cut me out.

During the lunch hour, Iben fought with Camilla. I’m positive that the reason was that she had caught Camilla chatting to me. Nobody is allowed to talk to me, Iben and Malene will see to that all right.

Every time I’ve been away I forget how appallingly awful it is. When I’m not surrounded by it, I simply can’t believe what it’s like. How can anyone be so evil? I don’t get it!

Iben tosses and turns again. Luckily the two large, empty mugs and the soup plate are on the small table by her bed. She leans back and wipes the sweat off her forehead with the duvet cover. She still hasn’t recovered. It’s quarter past eight in the morning. She hasn’t slept and within the next hour she must be at work, behaving normally.

After getting home on the suburban train, the first thing Iben did was to take painkillers and run herself a hot bath. She drank a mug of cocoa in the bath and then made herself a large bowl of oatmeal, mixed with raisins, nuts and skimmed milk. Then she went to bed.

As far as she knows, she left nothing behind in Anne-Lise’s house that could identify her. No one recognised her – seemingly, no one even realised that the intruder was a woman. But you never know.

She can’t risk seeing the doctor today. If her foot doesn’t get better in a few days, she’ll have to act as if the accident has just occurred. Before then, Anne-Lise will have seen her in perfect shape.

She opens another file, written only a few weeks ago.

I must hold on to the belief that the others aren’t justified. I must remember that. They have no right to decide that I should be eliminated. But when they say I don’t get on with people, it’s true. Or so it seems – I don’t, not with the Centre’s users or my colleagues. It’s all such a mess. Once upon a time I thought I was easy to work with, but maybe everyone was just pretending.

At times I think I should phone up my old library and ask if they really did like having me on the team. They would say yes, of course, but would that too be a lie? I’ll never know.

Iben’s nausea won’t go away. It’s easy to see from the diary that Anne-Lise is sick – probably some form of paranoia, with attendant delusions. Iben decides to phone Grith this evening and discuss the more precise clinical diagnosis. But even if you know that, it’s still shocking to see this distorted view of yourself. The fact that it’s all down in writing, and in such a detailed, elaborate way, makes it all the more persuasive.

After failing to sleep earlier, Iben drops off while she’s sitting on the loo. She calls the office to say she’ll be in late. Just forty-five minutes, she says, and for once she gives in and takes a taxi to work.

As soon as she steps out on the fifth-floor landing, the security camera will pick up her image. They’ll be able to see her and they mustn’t realise that her foot hurts like hell. There must be no hint that she’s feeling sick and hasn’t slept all night or that she’s just read Anne-Lise’s insane ramblings about herself and everybody else in the office. She stares defiantly at the camera and presses the doorbell. They let her in. Iben smiles and says ‘Hello’. The piercing pain in her right heel and ankle makes her reluctant to take a single step, but she can’t just stand there. She walks to the familiar row of hooks to hang up her jacket as best as she can.

Maybe this is how it is for Malene. She endures terrible pain at times and now she also fights to hide the fact that she barely sleeps for grieving over Rasmus. Before his death, Malene would talk to Iben about her fear of being disabled and alone. Sooner or later she could be wheelchair-bound, unable to get to work or to have children.

When Rasmus died, the future Malene dreaded seemed to close in. She stopped speaking about her arthritis. Instead she talks endlessly about how wonderful Rasmus was, contrasting his superhuman qualities with her own shortcomings. It was her behaviour that drove him away. She follows this up with more attacks on Anne-Lise – how she ruined their life together and then drove Rasmus to an early death. It was possible, after all, she argues, that Anne-Lise poured oil on the steps and even gave Rasmus a shove.

OK, it’s not likely – but it’s possible.

Late one night, Iben had slipped and mentioned to Malene that she thought she had heard a woman’s voice in the stairway just before Rasmus fell. Malene returned to this so often and with such fervour that Iben regretted ever having breathed a word about it. After a couple of weeks of these stories, they were becoming just the tiniest bit unbearable.

Crossing the floor, Iben feels that she’s putting on quite a good show, even managing to chat about this and that.

But Malene notices at once that something is up. Her eyes widen. ‘Iben, what’s the matter?’