Christian Jungersen - The Exception

The muscles around his mouth and eyes have tensed up. It’s such a small change, but Anne-Lise cannot bear seeing it.

He puts his hands on her shoulders and speaks slowly. ‘Anne-Lise, I did not do those things. Neither one, nor the other.’

‘No, I see. I believe you. It’s just … you know how you can be.’

‘What if there is some truth in the idea about dissociated identities?’ Anne-Lise and Henrik are brushing their teeth together.

‘I agree that it looks as if it was an inside job. It’s unbelievable, but who else could have done it? Everyone knows Malene’s bag. No one could have thought it was my bag or that it was my tablets they were swapping.’

‘There’s Camilla. She’s the only one who could have sent the emails and exchanged Malene’s tablets.’

‘But that doesn’t fit at all. I didn’t think she was like that.’ Anne-Lise drops the toothpaste tube. A line of white paste ends up on the tiled floor. She picks up the tube. ‘But, it could be why she stayed at home for so long after receiving an email herself. Everything had become too much for her. The story about her ex-partner could just be a cover-up. Oh, I don’t know. It still doesn’t make any sense. She just isn’t like that!’

‘Did Iben say anything about how you find out if someone has a split personality?’

‘Well, sort of. Camilla could be hiding a bitter hatred towards Iben and Malene … That, I would find easy to believe. They don’t behave well towards her, but you don’t notice it so much compared to the way they treat me. There would be times in her life which she can’t or won’t remember. But then, that’s true of most people.’

The top of the toothpaste tube won’t screw back on properly. Anne-Lise stops trying and puts it down.

‘Dissociated personality is a very serious mental illness and Iben says that the patient has usually had a terrible childhood, they’ve been abused, physically or sexually. That’s something they seem to have in common.’

‘OK. What was Camilla’s childhood like?’

Anne-Lise takes her time before replying. ‘I can’t remember if she ever said anything about it. She’s not like Iben or Malene — they won’t stop telling us about that kind of thing.’

‘I thought she talked a lot during your lunch breaks?’

‘Oh, she does. She speaks about her choir and how much she enjoys singing. And going to Norway and Sweden on family camping trips. And how much they save at the Metro Hypermarket …’ When Anne-Lise thinks about it, there hasn’t been one single instance of Camilla saying anything more revealing about her past. ‘Not a word about where or how she grew up. I have simply no idea.’

‘Four women having lunch together every day and you don’t know anything about her childhood? What next? There’s something very odd about that!’

He cackles away at his silly joke, but Anne-Lise can’t be bothered with it.

‘I can’t recall Malene or Iben ever saying anything about having the kind of childhood that would cause them serious mental problems now. But judging by the way they’ve been behaving, they must have had a terrible time.’ Anne-Lise sits down next to Henrik on the edge of the tub. ‘But then, probably no worse than most people.’

When they are finished in the bathroom, Henrik wanders off to his study to enter a few notes on his personal organiser. Anne-Lise looks out of the bedroom window. Apart from a few trees close to the street lamps, the garden is almost invisible in the darkness.

When they are in bed together Henrik continues to speculate: ‘If the others have got it into their heads that you’re the one who sent the emails and interfered with the medicine, then it’s only a matter of time before they make Paul and the board believe it too. You don’t have much time to find proof that Malene mixed up the tablets by mistake. Or that Camilla did it on purpose. If you don’t, you’ll be out on your ear.’

Anne-Lise knows Henrik is right.

Some nights, in the dark quiet of the bedroom, Henrik’s familiar smell wafts across from his side of the bed. Anne-Lise remembers it from way back, when she was at college and they lived together in her small student room. It isn’t a strong scent, but it makes her feel comfortable and safe.

Henrik is thinking aloud. ‘Now, her husband is in the plumbing business, isn’t he? Maybe I should ask him to fix something for us and make him talk while he’s working?’

‘Henrik! That’s out of the question.’

‘OK, OK. We’re brainstorming, aren’t we? What about finding out who their friends are and getting them to talk?’

Neither Henrik nor Anne-Lise can figure out a way to do this. The only hope is that Anne-Lise can persuade Camilla to open up about herself during work.

Anne-Lise is doubtful. ‘She doesn’t speak openly with anyone and tomorrow they’ll be furious with me.’

‘They will. But remember, they’ll be frightened of you as well. If they really believe you have a split personality and that you’re a psychotic basket case, they’ll be at a loss about how to handle you. In situations like that, people cope by sticking to routine. You’ll see. I suspect that a stranger entering the office tomorrow wouldn’t notice a thing out of the ordinary.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

But Anne-Lise still thinks that the so-called plan is absurd. Does Henrik truly believe that with such a terrible atmosphere at DCGI, she can say, out of the blue, ‘Listen, Camilla, we’ve never had a proper heart-to-heart, have we? Why not start today? Tell me a bit more about yourself.’

The following morning Malene phones the office to say that she is still ill and won’t be coming in to work — this is something Anne-Lise has not foreseen.

Paul is out of the office too. He is at a conference in Odense and will be there all day. Anne-Lise is alone with Iben and Camilla, who behave exactly as Henrik predicted. They may well be on edge, but they aren’t letting it show. Nobody can prove anything. Anne-Lise thinks that the Winter Garden is a little quieter than usual, but Malene is away, of course.

Like the other two, Anne-Lise throws herself into her work. Her next task is to extract the best database keywords for a collection of eyewitness accounts from the 1971 genocide in what was then East Pakistan. The killing started up suddenly — and unexpectedly — in the aftermath of Pakistan’s 1970 parliamentary election, which was won by the oppressed Bengali majority. The ruling minority, drawn from the Punjabi and Pathan tribes, rejected the election result and took over after a military coup. The Bengali population protested by staging a non-violent general strike, but the army crushed it. Its orders were to kill, loot and rape. Punjabis and Pathans traditionally believed Bengalis to be an inferior race.

The Pakistani soldiers drove about 40 million of their countrymen into exile, flattened several provincial towns every day, raped some 250,000 women of all ages and killed, in total, about 3 million people.

Anne-Lise has read piles of witness reports from those nine terrible months. At the moment she is reading about a Bengali woman, twenty-five years old, married to an officer and mother of three children. The soldiers took her husband away, despite her pleas. She threw herself on the ground in front of their house, begging for his freedom. They brought him back to her later, disfigured by torture and close to death. Another group of soldiers broke into the family house the following morning and raped the woman in front of her husband and children. They tied the husband down and beat the children when they cried. In the afternoon, the soldiers took her to a cellar, where they locked her in and raped her night after night until she lost consciousness. Three months later she returned home. She was pregnant.