Christian Jungersen - The Exception

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.