Christian Jungersen - The Exception

Then, one day, Dragan met another woman. He fell as tempestuously in love with her as he had done with Camilla only six months earlier.

Their affair was finished. Over the following two years, Camilla felt deeply depressed. There was nothing to fill her life, except unbearable visits to see her parents or to Anja and Finn’s place for yet another, altogether too cosy, evening of drinking tea and chatting.

Camilla forced herself to attend choir practice regularly. With the help of her parents and a support group, she forced herself to beat her addiction. Finally, she understood clearly that the shrew who had stolen Dragan away had, in fact, also saved her life.

Camilla and the kids get up at the same time as Finn. He is up early, usually at five-thirty in the morning.

She arrives at the Centre about an hour and a half before the others.

The red light on the answering machine glows in the semi-darkness, but it doesn’t blink. No messages. Malene has forgotten to switch her computer off. Camilla quickly turns on the overhead lights. They flicker a couple of times and then everything looks normal again. She turns her own computer on and goes to make coffee.

The offices are silent, the book-lined walls absorbing the noises from outside. It’s still too early for the morning traffic to have started up. Until recently, early morning was Camilla’s favourite time at work, a quiet moment to herself when she could organise her work. But these last few days have changed everything.

Ever since Iben discovered that Camilla has been involved with a war criminal, she’s excluded her. Camilla knows only too well what that means.

She returns to her seat and finds a stack of documents to enter into a database. Before she left home she took two aspirins, but she still feels rotten — especially her stomach.

This is how the mornings were for her a long time ago. In order for her mother to get to work on time, she would drop Camilla off at school about twenty minutes before the first lesson. For years Camilla would start each day sitting with her knees together on the worn old bench in the school yard, speculating about what would happen that day. How would her classmates punish her today?

Oh dear, maybe she shouldn’t drink coffee on an upset stomach. Anyway, it’s probably ready. She goes to pour herself a cup.

Then the others arrive and the first two hours pass just as she knew they would.

Later that morning she decides to change the humming fluorescent light in Paul’s office. Paul has been complaining about it for ages and fixing it gives Camilla a chance to get out of having to be in the same room as Malene.

In the storage room Camilla takes her time pulling out the ladder and finding a new tube. She hurries through the Winter Garden, closes Paul’s office door behind her and sets to work as slowly as possible. While she’s standing on the top step of the ladder trying to fit the new tube into place, Iben enters briskly and starts speaking without a pause.

‘I’ve been in contact with a Serb journalist, and he told me that a colleague of his was murdered by your old boyfriend about a year ago.’

‘What …?’

‘Dragan pistol-whipped this man to death, Camilla. Someone who had written a critical article about Dragan’s friend Zigic and the Serbian cause. Just as I have.’

‘But …’

Camilla has to get down from the ladder and takes the tube with her.

‘You have to help us. We need more to go on.’

‘But I can’t tell you any more than I already have.’

‘How come I always have the impression you’re lying when it concerns Dragan?’

‘I’m not lying. There just isn’t anything else to say. Look, I feel just like you. I’m scared that he’ll come after us too, but what can I do?’

The muscles around Iben’s jaw are twitching visibly. She stands with her feet planted apart. Brigitte, the vilest of the girls in Camilla’s class, used to stand like that in front of the teacher’s desk. The others would cluster around her. When she found something to throw at Camilla, the others would start throwing things too.

Camilla has to sit down. She sinks onto one of the chairs at Paul’s meeting table and buries her face in her hands, pressing her fingers against her eyes.

Iben’s insistent voice comes at her through the darkness. ‘I’d like to believe you. It’s just that your whole manner won’t let me. You’re such a poor liar, Camilla.’

‘But I’m not lying!’

Camilla can hear her own voice go thin and shrill. Even with her head down and her eyes closed, Camilla can feel Iben silently watching in her warrior’s stance.

Camilla repeats herself. ‘I’m not lying! I’m not lying! I’m not lying!’

She hears Iben turn and walk away.

Camilla knows that she deserves everything she’s getting. They are right to punish her. She has been lying, and it has slowed the search for the man who is threatening to kill Iben. What if Iben is killed, or one of the others, just because Camilla hasn’t told the truth? Camilla is still sitting with her face in her hands when she hears Iben’s voice through the open door.

Iben is telling the others about her discovery. ‘I phoned Ljiljana Peric. That’s the woman who went to the same secondary school as Zigic. Remember I interviewed her for my article about him? Through her I got the name of a Belgrade journalist who knows Dragan but is now too scared to write a word about either him or Zigic. The journalist says that, without any doubt, Dragan is involved in drug trafficking, prostitution, and kidnapping. That can mean only one thing: the mafia.’

Iben raises her voice to make sure that Camilla won’t miss a word. ‘I have written about Dragan’s senior officer during the war. And Dragan was her boyfriend. It’s not necessarily Zigic who killed Rasmus; it could just as well have been Dragan. He could have sent the emails. And broken into the office before we got the CCTV installed.’

Even if Camilla hadn’t already been hypersensitive about bullying, working at DCGI would have been enough. The way they used to treat Anne-Lise was totally uncalled for. Hundreds of times Camilla had wanted to help, but when she tried to be pleasant towards Anne-Lise, Iben and Malene would start harassing her. And, after all, she had to share an office with them, had to be a good team player to make the office run smoothly.

Once she had spoken up and said that they should treat their new colleague with a little more consideration. Malene had replied, ‘But Camilla, don’t you realise it’s different for Iben and me? We’re old friends. Anne-Lise is just someone who works in the same place as us.’

It was as if they had no idea of the harm their behaviour caused, or the effect it might have in the long run. Camilla knew. She had seen enough. Almost every day Anne-Lise retreated to the back of the library, behind the East European collection.

Anne-Lise hadn’t been with them long before Camilla began to feel she could no longer look her in the eye. She decided to mention it to Paul. She remembers well how it went.

‘Paul, I’m not sure that Anne-Lise is settling in. Could you talk to her? Maybe there’s something we could do, something to help her?’

‘Why do you think she isn’t happy?’

‘During the coffee break I thought that she might’ve been crying, because her eyes seemed bloodshot and she was flushed.’

‘Come on, Camilla! Haven’t you noticed that she looks like that all the time? It’s probably something to do with her skin, I suppose.’

He was on his way out. Camilla returned to her work and tried to be light-hearted while Iben and Malene poked fun at everything. But now Iben and Anne-Lise are chatting away in the library, while Malene is struggling to find a way to cope on her own.