The Exception Read online

  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.

  39

  ‘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 t
hat 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?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  Iben knows that Malene won’t believe her and twists one corner of her mouth in a small grimace that only Malene will notice, to let her know that she doesn’t want to talk about it right now. Iben has every intention of telling Malene what happened last night, but now something is holding her back, though she can’t think what.

  Camilla doesn’t say anything and Anne-Lise is keeping to herself in the library.

  ‘Has Anne-Lise been out of the library?’

  Malene looks at her. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘No special reason.’

  Iben sits down and tries to hide her relief – no need to get up again until lunch time. She bends down to take off her right shoe. The lace is already very loose, but it still hurts when she eases the shoe off over the top of her foot. She suppresses the sound she wants to make so that it comes out as a very faint gasp.

  Is this really what it can be like for Malene, day after day?

  She can hear from the tapping rhythm that Malene is writing and then correcting the same word several times. One more mistake. Malene hits the keyboard. It slides sideways and her fingers hit the corner of the large flat surface of the mouse. It must have hurt, because she pulls her hand away at once and rubs it with her other hand. Iben and Malene exchange a smile.

  Next to Iben is a stack of documentation on the Turks’ killing of 300,000 Pontian Greeks between 1914 and 1922. Although Turkey’s extermination of roughly 1.5 million Armenians has eclipsed the mass-murder of the Greeks, the issue of Genocide News on Turkey will be the perfect place to bring attention to the atrocity. Among other eyewitness accounts, Iben will include a description of how Turkish soldiers drove Greek families, women, children and old people away from the coast and into the desert. Once their victims were isolated, the militia left and took all the food and water with them.

  Iben sits in silence, staring at the desk. She should keep working, but she’s having trouble concentrating on the material. She can barely respond when someone talks to her. Instead she reads random back issues of Genocide News. A large greasy stain across the top of a front page catches her eye. The headline says ‘The Psychology of Evil II’. It’s her own article: ‘ … in a war situation, men and women who kill at a sufficiently great distance from the victims are, to the best of his personal knowledge, not traumatised later in life. The closer the soldier gets to the victim, the harder it is to kill.’

  She thinks of how distant she is to Anne-Lise. If Anne-Lise were to have an accident serious enough to disable or even kill her, Iben’s head would tell her it was a tragedy but her heart would secretly be glad to be rid of her. These new thoughts make Iben interpret her writing differently.

  ‘The conclusion must be that simple acts, which in themselves appear to cause only limited damage, can lead to psychological changes that in turn make possible even greater and more destructive acts.’

  Having read Anne-Lise’s journal entries, Iben sees how the following passage also seems to apply: ‘We tend to exaggerate the similarities of those who belong to our group, just as we exaggerate the homogeneity in other groups and the differences among them.’

  By now the nausea from this morning has returned. She stares at the broken spring that dangles from her desk lamp, its sharp little tip and the reflections of the overhead light on the broken metal.

  Her thoughts must have been drifting for quite a while, when she hears Malene and Camilla chatting about Malene’s swimming sessions.

  ‘Of course it isn’t just about keeping your body fit. It does something for your mind and your mood as well.’

  Iben reads on: ‘Cognitive dissonance makes us like those whom we have helped and dislike those we have hurt.’

  She hears Malene’s voice again: ‘If you don’t stay in good shape by doing something active, like you do with your choir, it’s easy to end up just like her in there.’ Malene nods her head in the direction of the library.

  Iben needs to be alone. Just for a few minutes. She quickly bends down to put her shoe back on. Despite her painful foot and upset stomach, she walks towards the toilet. She keeps her face turned away to hide her expression.

  It feels good to hear the small click of the lock. She settles down on the lid, in the tall, narrow stall with its melon-yellow walls and odour of toilet-cleaner. She lifts her sore foot and puts her hand gently but firmly around the taut skin of her swollen ankle.

  The last words of her article are still with her: ‘The more appallingly brutal the acts a perpetrator commits, the more strongly he comes to believe that they are only right and proper.’

  She asks herself if that is what they’ve done to Anne-Lise. Is what she says in her diary true?

  The throbbing pain has spread. It lurks behind Iben’s eyes, in the back of her neck, in the roof of her mouth, in her arms. It melds with images and words of so many genocides that she has pondered over. She can’t help returning to the one question that researchers inevitably ask themselves: If I had been born in Germany before the Second World War, would I have supported the Holocaust? Then she remembers Anne-Lise, who might well find her out if she doesn’t get back to work soon.

  She finds Anne-Lise at Malene’s desk, apparently angry about something. Over the last few weeks, ever since Rasmus died, they have all been kind to Malene – Anne-Lise too. Now that seems to have changed.

  Anne-Lise is speaking too fast and her voice has a metallic ring to it. ‘You were talking about me a moment ago. I heard you say that unless people pull themselves together, they’d end up like me.’ She sounds as if she’s about to have a breakdown.

  ‘Running after two small children keeps you fit. Camilla, you know that, don’t you?’

  Malene is quite calm. ‘Anne-Lise, I didn’t say that about you.’

  ‘I heard you. You said “or you’ll end up like her in there”. And you meant me.’

  ‘Anne-Lise, you misheard me. I never said that.’

  Looking at Anne-Lise, Iben is about to chime in, ‘Malene never said that. I’m positive she didn’t.’ But the words won’t come. Malene, who is so used to Iben backing her up, gives her friend a bemused look: what’s wron
g?

  There’s a short pause. Iben stays silent.

  Malene starts her usual little act that never fails to drive Anne-Lise crazy. ‘If you are hearing people talking about you, then maybe you should see your doctor.’

  As expected, Camilla joins in. ‘A doctor might help you, Anne-Lise. Well, anyway, it’s always worth a try.’

  Malene looks at Iben. Iben feels more and more sick.

  Anne-Lise is shouting now. ‘But you said it! You said it!’

  ‘Anne-Lise, hearing voices is a serious matter. You must look after yourself.’

  ‘I’m not hearing voices! You said that!’

  ‘What’s your doctor like? You’ll need a good one.’

  ‘I know there are a lot of helpful sites on the Internet.’

  Camilla stares at Iben.

  Anne-Lise looks withdrawn. Maybe this is what it takes to make her crawl back into the library and hide.

  Malene still won’t let go. ‘We haven’t even mentioned you in here today. Have we, Iben?’

  Iben can’t speak.

  Malene repeats, more loudly and clearly: ‘Have we, Iben?’

  A quarter of a second passes.

  It is like a test. An evaluation of a human being’s most important qualities.

  Half a second.

  It strikes Iben that her situation only confirms what she wrote in her first article about the psychology of evil. Christopher Browning’s study showed that what drove ordinary Germans to kill Jews was not the threat of punishment, but peer pressure. The men felt they must not let down the comrades with whom they had endured such dreadful hardships.

  Three-quarters of a second.

  The pressure on Iben has other similarities to the forces that drive people to kill, and kill again. One brief moment can have incalculable consequences and determine which side a person takes for the rest of the war.