The Exception Read online

  If she and Malene could be back on equal footing, like the old days, then it would be all right for Iben to phone Gunnar.

  The window next to the ladder isn’t closed properly, just secured with a hook. It’s somebody’s study. She sees a computer and a shelf full of magazine boxes and folders.

  Iben listens for sounds. There aren’t any. She won’t go in, of course – that isn’t part of her plan.

  She thinks of what she will tell Gunnar when she calls him. She leans farther across the window sill. Right in front of the window stands a large desk with stacks of papers and files. It’s too tempting. Iben pulls off her bulky jacket and hangs it on the edge of the open window. Then she takes off her shoes and hangs them by their laces on the window hook.

  She estimates the distance across the desk top and then from the desk to the door. The seconds spent crawling over the desk are the most critical. Afterwards she will put a chair under the door handle. If they try to get in, the chair should hold them off long enough for her to escape.

  She manages to climb in without any problems. Her thick, black winter gloves feel too warm, but she keeps them on. A wooden chair seems perfect for jamming the door shut, but she checks it to make sure. Putting the light on is out of the question, but it takes time to locate the computer’s volume knob in the dark. The bedrooms are likely to be on this first floor too and she doesn’t want the Windows start-up to wake somebody.

  The computer is password-protected and she tries everything she can think of, first pressing Enter, then keying in ‘Anne-Lise’, ‘Henrik’, their children’s names and their initials. Nothing works. She starts checking through the bookshelves. It’s difficult to read in the frail light and everything has to be brought close to the screen. Then she finds a lot of odds and ends – some coins, a battery, a plastic bag. Underneath the bag lies a small bicycle LED lamp. Its batteries are low, but the faint red glow it emits is better than nothing.

  With the help of the lamp she realises quickly that everything in here is related to Henrik’s job and his finances. There’s nothing here. This is as far as she’ll go. She knows she should get out now.

  She listens at the door. Still nothing.

  After gently extracting the chair from under the handle, she opens the door a fraction. It moves smoothly on its hinges. She peers through the crack, then opens the door a little wider. The floorboards are bound to creak in a house this old.

  Behind one of these doors Anne-Lise is sleeping at Henrik’s side. Her two children are asleep behind other doors. Iben hears a few grunts and, for a while, a man’s snoring. The noises come from behind the door furthest away.

  Only a few steps to the top of the stairs.

  If Henrik wakes up and sees her, it’ll be easy enough to run back to his study, jam the door shut and speed down the ladder.

  She tries her weight on the floor outside. It doesn’t creak. Sweeping the red light around the landing, she can see that they have had a smart new floor laid. She creeps towards the top of the stairs.

  From the ground-floor hall she walks into a room that was probably three rooms in the original design. The red light from her lamp is lost under the high ceiling.

  The first thing she looks for is a quick exit route. Two large French windows lead out into the garden, but they are locked and she would need a key to open them. The main door probably has the same kind of lock. They make it harder for a thief to get away and a burglar alarm less essential. If Iben needs to escape she will have to break the glass.

  She starts investigating the sitting room. The walls are white and a large sofa covered in black leather has been placed in the middle of the floor. Almost everything is in the style of the 1980s, including the blue Montana shelving system and the large, framed Walasse Ting print. Seeing the quality of everything in here, she’s certain that the Ting lithograph is an original.

  But still nothing to show Malene.

  The door to the dining room is open and so is the door between the dining room and the kitchen. The entire ground floor smells slightly of pizza and the floor is littered with small cars and toys. Iben tries to memorise where the cars are, so she won’t slip on them if she has to switch her lamp off and run.

  Here and there on the tables and shelves are bundles of old mail and other papers. She leafs through them: bills, notes from Ulrik’s football club, information leaflets from the Pensions Authority, messages from the Association of Librarians and a handful of old furniture catalogues.

  Then there’s the telephone. It has an answering machine. It’s not blinking, but there might still be some old messages stored. Fumbling in her thick winter gloves, Iben turns the sound down and presses Play.

  When the tape starts up she raises the volume just enough to hear what’s being said. A slurred woman’s voice begins uncertainly: ‘Jutta. If you … Well, I was, you know, talking to a friend and then I thought of you and …’

  An upper-class accent. She is high as a kite.

  ‘Anyway, remember the time we’d all gone round to … what was his name? And we’d just got the trousers, or at least I’d just got them. But she said we should go. And you were so smart and said we’d just arrived from Odense. Ha ha! It was brilliant. I thought about that just now. Because I’ve been talking to a friend and she didn’t think so at all.’

  The message rambles on for a while longer. Iben can’t make any sense of it. It’s weird, though. Why is a drunk woman confiding in Anne-Lise over the phone? Has Anne-Lise called her in the same state? Does Jutta know that Anne-Lise hits the bottle too?

  No more messages. The house is so silent that Iben has become uncertain about how loud any noise she makes is and how far it will travel.

  The stairs creak. She starts as if the sound were an explosion. Is someone coming downstairs? She takes a few long steps to reach the fireplace and grabs hold of the heavy poker. Iben would never use it against anyone – it would be as remote a possibility as pulling her knife on Anne-Lise or Henrik – but she needs a heavy implement to break the French windows. She has a vision of herself running through shards of glass into the dark garden.

  She switches off her lamp, takes up a position facing the glazed door and freezes on the spot, the poker raised. With any luck she’ll respond quickly if someone does come in, so that whoever it is won’t see anything – just a shadow slipping into the darkness.

  She listens intently. Henrik could be watching her from only a few metres away without her having heard a thing. Once more, she’s unable to distinguish whether the sounds are imagined or real. Faint noises from the bedroom, perhaps? Whispering? Like the voices she thought she heard before Rasmus fell.

  After a while she lowers the poker. Her hand and shoulder ache. Turning around, she tries to make out if someone is standing in the dark room.

  No one, it seems.

  She really must get out of the house.

  Still, she mustn’t miss the kitchen. There might be some sign of Anne-Lise’s alcoholism. She peers into the kitchen cupboards. There’s nothing as obvious as empty bottles of spirits.

  There is a magnetic calendar stuck on the fridge. In the light of the cycle lamp Iben reads all about Henrik and Anne-Lise’s dates. It says where they have been tonight. ‘A + H Meet in nursery. Re Clara.’ What’s that about? Why a meeting about their daughter?

  There’s nothing else of interest on the refrigerator door.

  The rubbish bin is stuffed with folded pizza cartons, but underneath them Iben finds a scrunched-up piece of paper with handwritten notes, partially soggy from the tomato sauce. She flattens the page between sheets of paper towels, which she is careful to put in her pocket.

  The writing isn’t Anne-Lise’s. It is in a small, precise hand with very straight uprights that slope slightly to the left. It must be Henrik’s.

  Meeting re C.

  It upsets us to hear about children hit by C. We want to apologise to their parents.

  What can we do to improve things?

  It is
true that Clara has been aggressive towards friends who have come home to play. (OK, we’ll accept that they call her ‘unusually aggressive’ but will stand for nothing stronger. Do not tell them about the episode with Victor in our house.)

  Stress this: Our willingness to cooperate. Remind them that we both turned up for the PTA day in August (try shifting talk away from the other meeting).

  Important – remember: we have not had any anger-management problems with Clara before and we both believe that she will get over this phase soon.

  (Agree with A-L in the car.)

  ONLY if necessary: That the family is angry about other matters and it might have affected Clara. Not angry at her. She is not to be blamed.

  No problems, that is, apart from her mother’s terrible situation at work.

  Stress that we’re optimistic.

  We hope that the Centre will become part of Human Rights, surely quite soon. Then A-L gets new colleagues. We’ll become stronger as …

  At this point the paper is too stained to read. The only other words she can read are ‘in confidence’.

  What a relief. She’s found something!

  With clumsy gloved fingers, she folds the notepaper and puts it into her jeans pocket too. She becomes aware of an itch on her shin, just above the strap for the knife. She tries to scratch it with the toes of her other foot but her knee bangs into the open door of a kitchen cabinet and it slams shut.

  On tiptoe she runs back to the sitting room and takes up the same position as before, the poker ready to smash the glazed garden doors. She stands absolutely still. Her heart is thumping and her mind is churning with fantasies about Henrik coming into the room brandishing a baseball bat … or maybe a gun.

  She must get back to the study, unless it’s already too late! There is no time to investigate the basement now.

  But as she stares out of the window, she discovers that something in the garden has changed. When she stood here earlier, she could see quite distinctly the straight silhouette of the nearest tree trunk. The trunk looks thicker now and its outline is irregular. Either something is leaning against the tree or someone is trying to hide behind it.

  Her heart hammers wildly in her chest and her mouth suddenly goes dry. She feels so faint that she is scared of falling over – someone has followed her here. She thinks at once of Omoro’s Kenyan friends. And she thinks of Mirko Zigic. He cut the arm off one of his victims and drew on the walls with her blood. He tied a cable round the neck of another woman and tightened it over a hook in the ceiling before he and his men raped her.

  Iben feels a cold sweat covering her whole body.

  She forces herself to think that she’s mistaken: it’s a play of the moonlight, or maybe it’s a different tree. There will be a simple explanation. Her fears are compulsive, irrational. She moves quickly towards the hall. She is close to the bottom of the staircase when she spots a door to the space under the stairs. Could she barricade herself in there if someone was waiting for her at the top of the stairs?

  She opens the door and takes a peek, switching on her little lamp. It’s another study. Papers are arranged in very orderly piles. It must be Anne-Lise’s work space.

  She should be getting out now, but she can’t miss the opportunity. She must have a look. She checks a whole series of drawers. No time to turn on the computer, but isn’t Anne-Lise likely to have made a back-up CD of her files?

  The battery in her lamp is about to die. The red light is fading gradually.

  Iben leafs through the stacks of papers, trying to leave them as tidy as before. It’s hard holding the lamp in one gloved hand and turning the sheets with the other.

  At last she finds a collection of CDs in a drawer. Those marked with dates are presumably back-ups. She doesn’t take the most recent so Anne-Lise won’t notice; instead she picks three disks from somewhere in the middle. Now she can leave.

  She returns the remaining CDs. A piece of paper has slipped to the back, squashed by all the other stuff in the drawer. She pulls it out. The lamplight is so weak she can hardly see the letters even when she holds the lamp immediately above it:

  … because of the fantasies of revenge against Iben and Malene. But more and more, they are turning against myself. The images are terrifyingly real and I’m part of them now, as if all three of us, Iben, Malene, me, are merging. Something deep inside me must have been destroyed when I punish myself instead of them. As I did that time when I had what Henrik calls my ‘breakdown’. I would do anything, give anything – except my family – if I could be sure that I don’t completely fall apart before we merge with Human Rights …

  There seem to be more papers like this one, but time is running out. Iben stuffs the CDs and the piece of paper inside the waistband of her trousers. Craning to see if there is anyone on the stairs, she suppresses an almost irresistible urge to run up them.

  Nobody is at the top of the stairs. Henrik’s snoring has stopped. All is still. Once inside the study, with the chair jammed once again under the door’s handle, Iben sighs with relief. Soon she’ll be outside. She puts the lamp back under the plastic bag and takes a good look around to make sure that she hasn’t left the slightest hint that would give her away. Everything looks fine.

  Just as she starts to remove the chair, the handle jerks up a little. Someone on the other side has also blocked the door.

  The handle doesn’t move.

  Iben runs towards the window.

  A man’s voice roars: ‘Now! Now!’ His voice sounds as desperate as Iben feels. He shouts even louder: ‘Take it away now. Then RUN so he can’t hurt you!’

  Over by the window Iben realises that the ladder is already gone.

  Just below the window a heavily built man and his large black dog stand guard. The man is calmly talking on his mobile and is close enough for Iben to hear.

  ‘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 o
n.’

  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.