The Exception (64 page)

Only one brightly lit object stands out against the dark – a large, white shape: a houseboat. It is moving away from the quay. The mooring ropes have been pulled in and its decks seem completely abandoned. It is about to sail away, to leave them, but it is slow. They can still leap on board.

Iben overtakes Malene, whose arthritic feet must be hurting her badly. A few seconds more and then Zigic will be almost on
top of them and everything will be over for them both.

Iben reaches the dock and leaps. She lands on the deck. Now, rescue Malene. There’s only one short moment to spare. She turns to reach out for her friend.

Iben has a vision of a scene set in Gunnar’s flat. Malene and Gunnar are together, damp with sweat, in his bed.

Does she hesitate for just a moment too long before reaching out? She doesn’t know. How long before she acts? Two seconds, or three? She doesn’t know. Perhaps she doesn’t hesitate at all.

And now the distance is too great. Malene can’t jump.

She screams.

Iben stands under the bright spotlight on the small area of the deck. In front of her, a white steel wall with one door set in it. She pulls at the handle. It’s locked.

What? Fucking what? The houseboat is only three metres from the quay, moving so slowly it’s practically standing still.

She runs the few steps to the other side. The deck is barred there and she can get no further. She runs back. Barred again. She hammers on the door.

This boat will not mean freedom and survival. It is a floating cage. She climbs up a ladder welded to the white wall. She hangs onto the boat’s flank, illuminated, like a black dot on a huge sheet of paper. She is just a few metres from Zigic’s gun.

She keeps climbing while she looks over her shoulder. She watches. Zigic stops a few metres behind Malene. He raises his gun and aims. Iben moves on up, but it takes time to climb so many small rungs.

He is so close she can see his finger bending to press the trigger.

He has her now.

Iben shows up in good time. Today looks like one of the first proper days of spring. The brilliant sunlight brings out every crack in the pavement where she stands. Weeds will soon push up through the gaps.

Malene’s parents are the only other people who are present. Like Iben, they wait in silence, staring down the long one-way street. Cars should be coming into sight soon.

Over the last five days Malene’s mother has phoned Iben almost every evening. Malene’s parents arrived in Copenhagen yesterday and Iben went to meet them.

Not one day will pass when Malene’s parents won’t wonder why it was their daughter and not Iben. Even now they must lie awake at night, thinking that it should have been Iben.

As for herself, Iben watches
Animal Planet and
eats bowls of ice cream with marshmallows night after night. She thinks about what Malene did. In bed she twists and turns and thinks about what she herself did.

A green car shows up at the bottom of the street. Malene’s father and mother wave. When the car draws near them Iben recognises Malene’s aunt and her three children, whom she has met on her visits to Kolding with Malene.

Another thing that Iben has been pondering: Should she go into therapy again? But then, how will it help now?

More cars pull up. She must not be so nervous. Zigic can no longer come anywhere near her.

A whole fleet of police cars responded instantly to the shootings. Zigic was easy to arrest, hemmed in by the icy water and holding an empty gun. The disk Zigic had removed presented a much harder case. Detectives searched Zigic, his car, the
wastepaper baskets and corridors of the Ministry, the rubbish bins in the yard and every other possible spot. Police divers combed the bottom of the canal several times. The disk was never found, but the man in the denim suit survived Iben’s gunshot and told the Serb police where to find Zigic’s computer. The data it held was sufficient to round up almost the entire organisation.

Malene’s aunt hugs her parents and, after a few quiet words, moves on to Iben.

‘Iben, this must be hard for you.’

‘Yes. It is.’

‘And you have much to be grateful for.’

‘Believe me, I know.’

The uncle talks to her too, as do other members of Malene’s family. Iben looks down at her feet. Do they see anything in her face? What are they thinking?

Frederik gets out of a taxi and catches sight of her. He walks quickly towards her, stumbles on the kerb, and saves himself by taking a couple of running steps.

Everyone has come: Malene’s friends as well as colleagues, Rasmus’s family, and of course Camilla, Anne-Lise, Paul and members of the DCGI board.

A transport van pulls up to lower two women in wheelchairs. Iben has never seen them before. Presumably they knew Malene from the Association for Young Arthritic People.

At last she spots Gunnar climbing out of another taxi. She observes his black suit, which looks new and expensive. His eyes are bloodshot and so swollen that his whole face looks different. She has been visiting him at the hospital over the last few days. Iben walks inside the chapel with Gunnar. She knows the music and hymns that Malene’s mother has chosen. All of them echo inside her head.

‘What happened on the quayside was an exception and I’m perfectly aware of it. In principle, it shouldn’t have happened. Her
every instinct would have urged her to save her own life. So, what she did was – exceptional. Incomprehensible. Against nature.’

It is the day after the funeral and Iben is seated in the DC GI Small Meeting Room. There is only one other person in the room: Dorte Jorgensen, the plump woman detective, who spoke to Iben after Rasmus’s fall.

Dorte frowns and closes the door firmly. Iben is being interrogated. She doesn’t intend to cave in to the tension that the detective is trying to create, but continues her line of thought.

‘It was nothing short of miraculous. The way human beings behave is subject to natural laws. Then, suddenly, from one moment to the next, an exception occurs. That I am alive is precisely because of such an exception, as extraordinary as an apple rising from the ground to attach itself to a branch on an apple-tree. Or a malignant tumour regressing and disappearing without trace. Or blood dripping from a statue of Christ.’

‘Interesting. Now, do you have any explanation for how the hard disk from Rasmus’s computer could’ve disappeared?’

‘I guess Zigic must have thrown it away somewhere in or around the Ministry.’

‘You see, it contains data about his organisation. We have searched everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Even the bottom of the canal. We’ve drawn a blank every time.’

‘Well, I really can’t…’ Dorte is getting on Iben’s nerves.

‘That hard disk contained not only data on Zigic. It also held the name of your email sender, who is based here in Denmark. It’s not too hard to see what I’m thinking, is it?’

‘I’m afraid it is. I don’t understand.’

‘I should have thought it was pretty obvious. The man you killed in the car could’ve had the disk in one of his pockets. And you could have taken it before you ran. In all that excitement, nobody searched you.’

‘But I’d have no reason …’

‘Well, now, that’s questionable.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘One possibility is that it was you who sent the emails and that a file on the disk proved it. Rasmus might even have told you he knew when you helped him move.’

‘But… why would I send anyone threatening emails?’

‘Why indeed? Why should anyone?’

‘I had no reason at all.’

Iben has heard from Malene’s mother that the police have sealed Malene’s flat and that they can’t start clearing it yet. And with the discovery that Zigic was in Denmark, the police are now considering the theory that Rasmus may have been murdered.

Dorte pauses deliberately before continuing. ‘The special something I sensed between you and Gunnar when you were both at the station – am I wrong about it?’

‘What do you mean?’

Iben knows that Dorte can see something in her face, and she scratches the bandages on her nose.

‘If, before the emails were sent, you had already fallen in love with the man who was Malene’s lover … it could’ve caused bad blood between you, couldn’t it?’

Iben can’t reply. She takes a deep breath.

‘Maybe you regretted sending the emails. Or maybe you didn’t. One way or the other, the spyware found you out and Rasmus told you.’

Does Dorte do this to other people she interrogates? Is making wild accusations part of her method, just to see if one of them hits home?

Iben tries to prevent herself sounding strained. ‘Look, it doesn’t make sense! Rasmus and I had a good time together that day. I helped him carry some of his things. There is no way we’d get along so well just minutes after he accused me of emailing death threats.’

Dorte’s eyes are still fixed on Iben. ‘You might have told him that your laptop had been left in the office and that Anne-Lise had access to it. That would calm him down. After all, Anne-Lise is the one you people tried to pin the emails on.’

Iben can’t think what to say.

Dorte rests her arms on the table. ‘But, if Anne-Lise did not have access to your computer at the time when the emails were sent, that could have been established the following day. And you would have lost your job, your old friend, and all hope of Gunnar ever becoming your lover.’

It’s unbelievable. This woman, Dorte JØrgensen, is installed here, in their lunch room, calmly accusing Iben of having killed her best friend’s partner! Surely she doesn’t go that far with everyone?

Iben feels like waving her arms about and shouting that this is all totally insane. Living through these last few weeks has upset her terribly and somehow she feels that Dorte might even be right.

She pinches her thigh to wake herself up. She must concentrate.

What did happen? Should I give myself up? Should I say I did it and serve a life sentence in prison?

Once more her mind conjures up an image that has recurred since the first time she met Gunnar. She is in his kitchen, cooking lots of nice dishes, he stands behind her and puts his arms round her. And his daughters come running in, laughing, from the sitting room.

Iben is not herself during the rest of the interrogation. When Dorte gets up, opens the door and walks into the hallway, she turns and speaks over her shoulder. ‘Well, Iben, we’ll take a look at that. It’s a good idea. Malene’s mother has mentioned that Malene kept writing letters to Rasmus after his death. We are definitely going to follow up that line of enquiry.’

On the pavement a little ahead of me a man in a wheelchair was being pushed along by his wife. I caught up with them. They both seemed quite elderly and were deep in discussion. Just as I passed, the woman spluttered with laughter. A little later I turned to look at them and they were both still talking at the same time, apparently sharing a story that they enjoyed hugely. And I came to think of Iben.

Rasmus, you were always loving and kind, helping me whenever I needed it. But I couldn’t help feeling that I was a nuisance to you. It was never like that with Iben.

At times when I couldn’t do a thing for myself and needed hospital treatment and had to be hauled downstairs to the taxi, she never acted as if she was sacrificing herself. I didn’t feel I was a problem. Or when she went shopping for me, helped me dress – things like that. For years she was with me and saw more of me than even you did. And all the while we had such a good time. We laughed a lot.

I hate her now for what she has made me suffer over these last few months. That’s a fact. But, I’ll never find a friend like her again. She really was special: an exception.

I remember one time when I was in the sitting room and you were in the kitchen. And suddenly I heard a crash.

At first I actually felt pleased. He’s dropped something, I thought. Maybe he’s poured boiling water all over his feet. Just for once, I thought, he’ll know what it’s like not
to have full control of your hands. But it didn’t take long at all before I started to worry.

I called out to you: ‘Oh, God! Rasmus? Did you drop something? Did you hurt yourself?’

Of course you didn’t know what had been going on inside my head. In its own small way, that moment seemed like the sort of Dissociative Identity Disorder that Iben was always talking about.

Rasmus, I am so very sorry about what happened on the stairs. I simply don’t know what came over me. You are the only one who knows how badly I feel about it. You are the only one who can understand.

God alone knows how much Iben heard. It wasn’t my intention to push you out through the window. I have no idea why it made me so blindly furious when you insisted that your spyware proved that I had sent those emails.

I gave you a shove. Nobody can be sorrier than I am now. Am I truly sick in the head, Rasmus? Is that it?

They’re sweet now. They speak to her and laugh with her. Everything has changed completely – so much so that Anne-Lise finds it hard to believe the way things were not so long ago.

Paul is different too, quite unlike his old self. He is in the office much more and is suddenly of the opinion that it is ‘simply natural that the functions of DCGI and DIHR should be coordinated’. He is no longer prepared to fight to maintain the independence of the Centre.

Anne-Lise cannot make him out. Only recently he did everything he could to help the Centre survive, even trying to force Frederik from the board. Was that some kind of macho thing? Could the reason be that any organisation only has room for one man of their kind?

The office was closed for the day after Malene’s death. The following day Iben brought in a red rose, which she placed on Malene’s desk. The next morning Iben replaced it with a fresh rose and again the next day. It was as if Iben believed that Malene was a saint and that her desk and chair were sacred.

When people turned up to use the library, Iben lectured them at length about how her own survival had been due to a ‘psychological miracle’. Paul told her repeatedly that if she felt like staying at home she should, but Iben didn’t seem to get the hint. Perhaps she wanted to be at work.