Christian Jungersen - The Exception

The boy speaks again. ‘Why can’t I go over there? Is he going to come out?’

‘I just want you to stay here by me. I know, let’s go into your room.’

‘No-oo … Mummy, I don’t want to.’

‘Yes! Come on.’

Iben pulls her sweater off and rummages in the pockets of her jacket for the hood and scarf. She ties the scarf over her face and pulls the hood well down over her forehead, trying to make sure that not a single strand of her blonde hair is showing. After buttoning her jacket, she ties the sweater round the bottom of it. The effect she wants is slim hips and a bulky upper body in the hope that she might be mistaken for a man.

She jumps up on the desk and stands in front of the open window. What chance does she have? Everything is so high in this old villa. Even though she’s just on the first floor, the ground seems very far down.

The man shouts at her again. ‘Jumping? Don’t do it. You’ll break your legs.’ He pulls quickly at the dog’s lead. ‘And if you don’t, Skipper here will get you anyway!’

The police might be just a minute away, but Iben crawls back into the room. There’s a mess of electrical cords under the desk. She pulls two extension leads out of the mains socket and ties them together. The result is a kind of rope, at least six metres long.

Anne-Lise is apparently still hovering in the hallway, but her voice is at a safe distance from the door. ‘What if there are two of them?’

‘There aren’t. I spotted this one downstairs.’

Anne-Lise sounds quite different from when she’s in the office. ‘What do you think? Will he jump?’

‘I don’t think so. Besides, Lars is there with his dog.’

Iben opens the upper part of the window and climbs back up onto the sill. Now she grasps the crosspiece between the upper and lower windows and stands with her entire body on the outside of the house. Stretching, she can just grab hold of the gutter that runs along the roof.

The man named Lars calls out: ‘Hey! Stop!’ He speaks into his mobile. ‘The man is trying to get onto the roof. I bet he’s high on something. It’s a little guy. I don’t like this, it looks bad.’

He calls out: ‘Get back inside! Prison is better than what you’re trying.’

Iben manages to place one foot on the upper edge of the open window and heaves herself up. She tests the gutter. It seems solid. She moves one more step along and then tries to propel herself farther onto the roof, but a dangling edge of her sweater gets caught. She hangs on to an attic window sill while she tries to free herself.

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.

‘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.