Christian Jungersen - The Exception

Is that Rasmus’s voice she hears from the stairs? Who’s he talking to? Isn’t that a woman’s voice? She turns the water off before the basin has filled.

Is it Malene? For a second, Iben felt sure she heard Malene’s voice. What’s going on? What does Malene want?

No more voices. She must have been mistaken. Maybe it wasn’t Malene. And it’s unlikely to have been Rasmus’s new girlfriend. Maybe just a neighbour?

Iben stops and listens. Everything is quiet now. She walks into the short corridor outside the kitchen. In the silence of the stairway she hears Rasmus move with heavy steps. Then, suddenly, there is an echoing crash and a scream.

She runs along the hallway and out onto the empty landing.

‘Rasmus? … Malene? Rasmus?’

Nothing.

The next landing. Nothing.

Another empty flight of stairs and then she sees it.

A large hole has opened up in the wall. At first she can’t make herself go any closer. She stands a few steps above the landing, staring at the emptiness that is as tall as a man. It used to be a mosaic of stained glass.

She inches closer. She can see people moving around in the courtyard below and talking in frightened voices. Somebody screams. Iben doesn’t have the courage to look at what might be down there. Instead she takes another couple of quick steps forwards and discovers at the last moment that the step in front of the broken window is wet. She grabs the handrail with both hands. Her body slips sideways and lands heavily. Trying to get up she puts one hand down on the step, only to find that her palm slides on the slippery surface. She sniffs at her sticky hand. Someone has poured oil on the floor.

Iben manages to get up and manoeuvre around the fluid. She runs down into the street and looks around. Rasmus isn’t there. And Malene isn’t there either.

The door to the courtyard behind the building is locked. Iben fumbles in her pocket to find the keys. It takes so long. At last she gets the door open. She runs through the dark passage.

The yard is divided down the middle by a wire fence and Rasmus is hanging across it, his body bent double. Iben had no idea a human body could break in the middle like that. One of the vertical steel fencing posts protrudes through his back.

Despite all the blood, Iben can see that Rasmus’s face has slammed into the profiled steel. It is crushed. The impact of his body has made the wire fence sag, but its sharp edge has sliced open his abdomen.

Iben backs away, knocking into something on the pavement, and sits back without wanting to. She looks at what she’s sitting on. It’s a piece of Rasmus and Malene’s dining table. It is quite clean and unused, as if the last few days haven’t happened, as if Rasmus and Malene and Iben might still gather around it, in this small yard.

Over by the wall a man is speaking on his mobile. The police will arrive soon. A woman is pushing against a door to the kitchen stairs. She must be trying to keep children away from the yard.

Iben stares at the table fragment. Not long ago it was cluttered with plates, bottles of wine, flowers. She hears the voices round the table. ‘Pass me the rice, would you? Rasmus, I met Ole from Film Studies in the bus. You won’t believe what happened in the Centre today …’

A dark knot in the light wood stares back at her, like an eye.

She tries to get up.

‘I was standing on the staircase and called out to Rasmus that I was on my way down with the posters. It was sheer chance that Rasmus asked me to wait until later. He wanted to take large things like the table down first.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘If someone had been waiting in the stairway to pour oil on the steps, that person would probably have assumed that I would be the first one to come down.’

‘I see. What happened instead?’

Iben breathes in quickly. ‘Look, where did the rail go? There’s usually a handrail across the window. A long strip of brown railing. When was it taken away? It can’t be a coincidence — there’s been several strange things happening over the last few months … anyway, it can’t have been an accident. Someone is after me. Or after Malene. It’s her flat. Someone might have thought she was the one on her way down.’

Iben and a woman police officer are sitting together in one of three police cars lined up in front of the door to Malene’s building. Detectives are cordoning off the stairs and the courtyard and interviewing the neighbours to find out if they saw anything.

‘Very well, Iben. Now, I’d like you to take me through what happened again, step by step.’

Iben describes how she offered to help Rasmus with the table and how, when he said he’d manage on his own, she went to the kitchen to clear away some dirty dishes. Then the next thing she heard was a crash and a scream. She ran downstairs at once, slipped and almost shot out through the broken window herself.

Iben also tells the officer about Anne-Lise and her suspicions that she might have some kind of personality disorder. She mentions Anne-Lise’s trick of hiding blood in her own office and pouring it all over herself, and about her swapping Malene’s medication. She knows that Anne-Lise is capable of doing all sorts of things. She might very well have removed the railing and poured oil on the steps.

Iben gasps for air again. She feels she is presenting essential information. It might just lead to Anne-Lise’s arrest.

The detective, who is listening quietly, breaks her silence. ‘We’re called out to many fatal accidents. We can’t assume that one of the victim’s nearest and dearest is a murderer every time someone falls off scaffolding or hits a high-voltage cable.’

‘No, of course not. But in this case a section of handrail is missing.’

‘Bits and pieces are missing from lots of stairways in the old properties in central Copenhagen. Accident investigation is my job. Sometimes accidents are the outcome of the most terrible coincidences. But, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, an accident is an accident. It’s not like TV …’

‘Of course I know that. It’s just that—’

The detective interrupts her: ‘I understand your problems with the woman at work — I’m sure it makes sharing an office with her very uncomfortable. But, to put it plainly, it’s not relevant to the police investigation.’

‘But someone took the handrail away and poured the oil on the step!’

Iben might as well not have bothered.

‘My colleagues are looking into it right now. Some are upstairs taking photographs. They’ll find whatever was left or poured on the stairs and who could have done it.’

A male police officer knocks on the car window. He has come to tell them that there was no one else on the stairs at the time. No one saw Rasmus fall.

When he has left, the detective turns to Iben. ‘Here’s my card. Contact me if anything new occurs to you.’ Her tone of voice suggests that she doesn’t mean it.

Her name is Dorte Jørgensen. Iben knows that she must make herself sound more logical in order to make Dorte J#248;rgensen take her seriously.

‘I understand that you don’t believe me, but honestly, I’m not normally a nervous person. A couple of months ago, before everything I told you about started to happen, I was as calm as you are now.’

Dorte smiles at Iben, but Iben can see she’s distracted.

Iben’s voice is more forceful. ‘I don’t like the idea of going home on my own. Someone has probably just tried to kill me. What will stop her from trying again? Or trying to kill Malene?’

Dorte doesn’t respond.

‘You must do something about it!’ Iben goes on.

Dorte gets out, walks round the car and opens the door for Iben. She climbs out gingerly. Her coccyx and one of her hands are still sore after her fall.