The Exception Read online

  ‘But the bank staff should have told her. It’s unacceptable. Her adviser is giving us all a bad name. What’s he doing? She clearly hasn’t had any advice whatsoever.’

  Just like Camilla, Iben is paid less than Anne-Lise, but the difference is smaller. They are all paid according to public-service scales and, even though Iben and Malene earn good money in recognition of their educational qualifications, Anne-Lise is ahead owing to her seniority.

  Iben is paying off her university loans in instalments. She buys her food mainly at the Nørrebro branch of upmarket Føtex and her books at Athenaeum, the university booksellers. She is a member of both Greenpeace and Amnesty International and subscribes to Information and The Week. Apart from these debits, she hardly ever spends any money. She has paid seven café bills at a place called the Metro Bar and once bought something unspecified from the kiosk on Roskilde Station. There is just one irregularity: a string of transfers to accounts in the USA, UK and Germany.

  ‘Can you work out who is receiving the money?’ Anne-Lise asks.

  ‘Not from the statement, but there are ways. Leave it with me.’

  In the last three months alone she has made thirteen transfers to seven separate accounts.

  ‘She buys books about genocide and psychiatry on the Internet, but there is no obvious reason why she would use seven different booksellers. So what can it be?’

  They’re both aware that foreign anonymiser sites charge their users. The person who sent the threatening emails would have had to pay fees. Henrik and Anne-Lise don’t need to remind each other of this. ‘If it’s not that, then what else could she have been buying on the Internet that often?’

  A smile flits over Henrik’s face. ‘I get sent spam all the time trying to sell me pornography. Perhaps she goes in for that kind of thing?’

  Anne-Lise giggles at the thought of earnest Iben surfing the net in search of erotic sites. It’s so out of character.

  ‘But it could be payments for access to things like chat rooms or dating sites.’

  Anne-Lise associates looking for company on the Internet with loneliness. Anne-Lise only sees Iben with Malene, the two of them behaving like a couple of teenage girls. She has never thought of either of them as lonely. But what’s it like for Iben outside work? She doesn’t have a man. She rarely speaks of other female friends.

  Henrik and Anne-Lise move on to Malene’s statement. She has overdraft protection, but exceeds the limit just about every other month. It goes without saying that she is a member of Amnesty International and Greenpeace, subscribes to Information and The Week, and is paying off her student loans. She draws heavily on her interest-free account at the very chic furniture store Illums and has made several payments for designer clothes, mostly bought in the small, fashionable shops clustered along the lanes off Strøget. Malene rarely uses supermarkets, presumably because she favours delis and ethnic greengrocers. She has paid restaurant bills a few times, and visited a nightclub once. That evening she withdrew cash four times.

  Malene’s debits are understandable enough, but one of her sources of income is mysterious. Now and then, three to four thousand kroner are transferred into her account from an unspecified private source – just the back-up she needs to cover her spending. Anne-Lise takes note.

  ‘Ha!’

  Henrik puts down his cordial. ‘What?’

  ‘Come on! Isn’t it obvious?’

  Henrik hesitates. ‘Anne-Lise, I checked these transfers. They are made from an account in Kolding that belongs to a woman called Jytte Jensen.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’ Anne-Lise knows it’s unreasonable to feel disappointed.

  ‘Jytte Jensen is probably Malene’s mother. I must say, I had the impression that Malene’s mother was just a secretary who retired early and wasn’t well off. Malene says she grew up poor.’

  ‘So what was it you thought was so obvious just now?’

  ‘It’s … I don’t know.’ She’s reluctant to say it, but Henrik insists.

  ‘I thought Malene … was seeing someone. A rich man. And he paid her for it.’

  Henrik dislikes Malene too, but thinks Anne-Lise has gone a bit overboard. He leans back on the sofa, irritated. ‘Anne-Lise, really … just because she dresses the way she does?’

  Anne-Lise reaches out to him. ‘No, no. Of course not. And the money comes from her mother. So there.’ She strokes his upper arm. ‘That is, from her impoverished mother, who is always broke …’

  31

  A few days after the business with Malene’s medicine, a policeman phones the Centre to let them know that there has been a new development in the email case.

  Camilla, who takes the call, switches it through to Paul at once and then tells the others. Iben and Malene get up from their desks and walk over to stand by Paul’s door. Anne-Lise joins them from the library and they wait anxiously.

  When Paul finally emerges, he tells them that the CIA has been casting around Chicago’s large Serbian community and has arrested two former private soldiers who have a record of war crimes. Interrogated, one of the men admitted to having sent emails to DCGI.

  Paul is deluged with questions.

  ‘Did he do it on his own?’

  ‘Are they keeping him in prison?’

  ‘Did he really want to kill us?’

  ‘Does he know Mirko Zigic?’

  ‘Why send the threats just to us? He didn’t write to other people, did he?’

  Paul says that he doesn’t have any answers. He has told them everything he knows. There are powerful forces at work out there, chasing Mirko Zigic and his associates. The three brief emails to DCGI have somehow taken on international importance.

  Malene phones the police herself, but gets no more information. Iben meanwhile makes a call to the US embassy, but they don’t have anything to add either. The women then ring various institutions in the USA and, finally, their contacts in other genocide centres worldwide. Despite their efforts, they get nowhere.

  While the others get more and more worked up, Anne-Lise withdraws to the library and sits looking at the photo of Henrik and the children on her desk. The emails never caused her to feel afraid. But she simply doesn’t believe the alleged statement by that war criminal. Without a doubt, his ‘confession’ was the result of a fair amount of pressure. In her own mind, she’s certain that whoever wrote the emails had inside knowledge of the Centre and, as far as she’s concerned, nothing has changed.

  She listens as the others discuss the ways that an unknown war criminal living in Chicago could possibly have had access to Malene’s tablets, and whether it could have been him who rigged up the blood trap in the library. Their conversation is suitably polite because the library door is of course still open. They discuss the blood on Anne-Lise’s bookshelf, sounding as if they had had nothing to do with putting it there.

  Anne-Lise notes the line they take when they go on to tell lies about Malene’s medicine. Obviously, the likeliest explanation by far is that Malene herself mixed up the pills by accident, but she’s making a great show of being persecuted. It reminds Anne-Lise of someone who has lost, say, a wallet and fusses endlessly about who could have stolen it and why – until it turns up in their jacket pocket. Camilla and Iben must notice this too, but no one argues with Malene.

  In the weeks that follow the admission by the Serb soldier, Malene, Iben and Camilla change their attitude towards Anne-Lise.

  Until now, their hostility has been confusing and Anne-Lise occasionally wondered if she and they hadn’t misjudged each other somehow. Maybe, she told herself, it’s all just an enormous misunderstanding. At times, one of them would suddenly be friendly to her, as if they had always wished her well, and the aggression was just a figment of her imagination.

  Not now. They don’t need to be frightened of what Iben might have called ‘Anne-Lise’s dissociated murderous identity’ any more. They’re free to destroy her and the knives are clearly out. Their goal is to make her leave. Long-term sick leave would suit
them. Too bad if it damages her and makes it impossible for her to work again.

  One afternoon, weeks after Malene mixed up her pills, she is waiting in the corridor when Anne-Lise comes out from the bathroom. She starts to hum a few lines of a song louder than necessary, and at first it seems pointless.

  But then it becomes obvious that it’s a signal.

  Anne-Lise hears somebody in the library react. It’s easy to recognise Iben’s footsteps as she hurriedly leaves the library through the door into the Winter Garden. When Anne-Lise passes Malene in the corridor, Malene meets her eyes and smiles broadly, as if Anne-Lise would think their snooping was just good, clean fun. As if they were all simply playing a game together.

  The moment Anne-Lise gets to her desk she spots what Iben has been up to. This morning Anne-Lise brought in a few cuttings from her garden and put the twigs in a tall glass of water to liven the place up. The vase is leaning now, because Iben has put a pad of Post-it notes and a biro underneath it. If Anne-Lise accidentally gives the desk even the tiniest shove, the container will topple.

  She advances gingerly and repositions the vase. A pile of valuable papers has been saved.

  There’s no point in complaining to Paul: she realises that she has already been to see him too often. Also, it’s clear to her that it would make things easier for him if she simply went away and didn’t come back. So far he has had enough integrity not to tell her this to her face, but he doesn’t openly support her in the way he used to.

  All she can do is put up with the situation and keep quiet until the day comes when they merge with Human Rights. And then she can do what Yngve said – she must confront them.

  Anne-Lise stands up, takes in a deep breath and closes her eyes a couple of times. She feels no tears. She has a sensation of her skin being very thick, heavy and armour-plated like a rhinoceros’s.

  She steps through the doorway into the Winter Garden. Standing there, she looks down at the two women sitting at their desks. Iben glances at Malene. The look in her eyes says ‘We’ve got her now’, and she doesn’t give a damn if Anne-Lise notices.

  Anne-Lise begins to say her piece, resigned, knowing that she has been here before. ‘Can’t we just behave like professionals? – you know: I don’t interfere with you and you don’t interfere with me. Then we could concentrate on our work without wasting our energy on … other things.’

  Malene’s inviting smile doesn’t change. ‘Anne-Lise, that would make for such a cold atmosphere and we wouldn’t want that. We are colleagues, after all.’

  ‘Just stop doing these things. You know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Iben backs her up. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know well enough.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. You do. Don’t go into other people’s rooms just to cause trouble.’

  ‘Why should we …’

  ‘Anne-Lise, I don’t understand what you mean. Please explain.’

  They manage to make her describe what she thought they had done, step by step. They listen, ready to reply in unison.

  ‘No. No, we’d never do that. Whatever makes you think we would?’

  Their voices and body language bubble with laughter, giving their game away. They are enjoying this. They’d just as soon slit my throat if they thought they could get away with it, Anne-Lise thinks. It’s even better fun for them now that I’m on to them.

  Every night this last week Anne-Lise has had the same nightmares. She is thrown into the crater of a volcano, or strapped down on a table and tortured with red-hot iron bars driven through her flesh, or impaled and hung up in a tree. All the time Iben’s and Malene’s huge mouths, twisted and grinning, open wider and wider in anticipation of Anne-Lise’s demise.

  She has woken up and wandered about, trying to shake off the dreams. She has stroked the heads of her sleeping children. She has gone downstairs to the sitting room and stared at the trees outside the window. Gradually, the lingering sensations of the hot iron touching her, or her body sinking into the lava inside the volcano, evaporate.

  Later, when she falls asleep from sheer exhaustion, the nightmares return and she awakes abruptly as she sees again the rows of teeth between their pulled-back lips.

  ‘Your Post-it pad must’ve slipped under the glass,’ Malene reasons, ‘and you were too busy to notice. How annoying! I mean, you could’ve slopped water over everything.’

  Iben is shuffling her feet, searching for something like a lost shoe. Next she starts looking under the table, sending an unmistakable signal that the whole thing is beginning to bore her.

  Malene becomes distracted too. She looks across the desk at Iben. ‘What’s under the table? What are you looking for?’

  Anne-Lise glances at Camilla, who appears to be completely absorbed in her work.

  Camilla behaves as if she weren’t there at all. Anne-Lise feels like crossing the floor and shouting in her ear: ‘Are you aware of what’s going on? Do you even care? Would you be pleased if I died too?’ But Anne-Lise doesn’t dare provoke her.

  Maybe Camilla’s inertia is a survival strategy that she learned to save herself. Maybe Camilla would have a breakdown if someone were to force her to take notice of what is going on in the office, right under her very nose. Maybe her unstable mind would give way to lethal rage – awaken a personality capable of email death threats.

  Camilla and the others look away from Anne-Lise, and she returns to the library.

  Later that afternoon, the DCGI board member Tatiana Blumenfeld has arranged to come and pick up some reference material Anne-Lise has found for her. Tatiana knows everyone in human-rights research in Denmark. It matters if she takes you seriously regardless of which organisation you work for. She is also one of the few academics who makes use of Anne-Lise’s expertise.

  Tatiana is a tiny woman in her sixties with jet-black hair. She arrives at the board meetings wearing tight black trousers and vivid, unique sweaters. She dashes along the corridors with remarkably long strides for such a small person. The machinegun clatter of her smart, extremely high-heeled shoes can be heard from afar. Although Anne-Lise has never seen Tatiana with a cigarette, her skin is that of a lifelong chain-smoker.

  When Tatiana was a student of psychoanalysis, she laid the foundations for a theory about the therapeutic management of children who had been imprisoned in concentration camps and subjected to torture or forced to watch their close relatives being tortured or murdered. Tatiana developed her theory from her analyses of camp children’s drawings and her research led first to a doctorate and then to a tenured post in the Department of Psychology at Copenhagen University. She has also become an associate of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, or IRCT, a highly regarded organisation.

  Anne-Lise still doesn’t feel close to Tatiana. What she knows about her she learned mostly through Tatiana’s friend and assistant Lea. Anne-Lise and Lea met at the Bosnia conference and, during a lunch together, Lea spoke glowingly about her boss.

  The doorbell rings. The image on their computer screens shows Tatiana waiting outside on the landing. Anne-Lise keys in the security code and goes to meet her visitor; she wants to usher her through to the library before the others have a chance to descend upon her. But no sooner does Tatiana step into the Winter Garden than Malene and Iben are by her side.

  ‘You must come and see the new photos we’ve put up,’ Iben says, smiling.

  They turn and lead the way to the notice board, Tatiana between them. She steps forward, catches sight of Anne-Lise and calls out: ‘Anne-Lise! I’m just going to have a peek at their crazy pictures!’

  Of all the people she has met in this place, Anne-Lise has found Tatiana to be the nicest. Her impulse is to protect Tatiana from her venomous colleagues, but then, she knows that Malene and Iben won’t want to show their ill will in front of the esteemed guest.

  Tatiana exclaims at one of the new pictures. ‘Oh, look! It’s your old libr
arian! How sweet of you! Do you miss her?’

  She is looking at a photograph of the woman whose emails showed just how intensely she detested working at DCGI. Some time last week, Iben had scanned an old photograph of their ex-librarian and printed an enlarged version to pin up on the wall.

  ‘We do. But have a closer look. We have lots of pictures of our favourite people.’

  Tatiana takes Malene’s prompt and moves closer to the board. She puts on her reading glasses. ‘No … it’s me! I look so odd. It’s Rome, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. Ole gave it to us. He was there too.’

  Tatiana is amused. She puts her coat on Malene’s chair and leans forward to examine the picture.

  ‘It was at the conference. God, I look completely sozzled.’

  At this, she glances quickly at Anne-Lise, apparently alarmed, but with a hint of compassion. Anne-Lise doesn’t understand what her expression means.

  Iben comes closer to Tatiana. ‘Never! You wouldn’t drink too much at work!’

  She smiles at Anne-Lise now, but continues to address Tatiana. ‘No one would ever think that about you. It’s just the heat and the bright light. You look a bit flushed, that’s all. And your smile is great. Everyone can see you’re happy.’

  Anne-Lise tries to get a word in with Tatiana too. She finds it hard to sound relaxed and friendly, sensing Iben’s and Malene’s intense desire for her to disappear.

  Iben is very good at entertaining visitors and Malene is excellent. A quarter of an hour later the little group is still chatting in front of the notice board.

  Iben mentions the plan to merge DCGI and DIHR, sounding troubled as she explains.

  Tatiana is sympathetic. ‘Yes, I see. Such a shame. Are you really worried about it?’

  ‘Yes, we are.’

  Tatiana nods sympathetically and looks concerned. ‘I understand, believe me. This is such an efficient office and so very pleasant too. It’s a great pity. But don’t worry, you’re sure to keep your present jobs inside the new organisation too.’ She goes on to talk about her experience of other institutional mergers. ‘I suspect Paul will be the most put out. After all, he’ll have someone else as his boss.’