The night-time frosts kept seeds and buds slumbering and daytime temperatures that crept a few degrees above zero were not enough to wake them. But in the course of the night, the cloud cover had broken. This Monday morning there were glimpses of colours that people had not seen for a long time. Wasn’t that a little bud on the branch of the cherry tree? And that tulip on its way out of its sheath of leaves, would it be pink or yellow?
It was worse in nice weather, Gerd Kristiansen said. The grief was hardest to bear in the sunshine because Anders, her Anders, had so loved the sun.
Those who were to attend the first day of the trial had risen at dawn. Hours of queuing were anticipated to get through the security checks. Some white marquees with plastic windows, the sort you have at summer parties in case it rains, had been erected in front of the entrance to house mobile scanners.
There was barely an empty spot in front of the Law Courts; every square metre had been taken over by crush barriers or the press. Vans with antennae on their roofs were transmitting live pictures worldwide. The TV faces had momentous expressions.
The rays of the early morning sun created haloes round the journalists in the security queue; they glinted on the crush barriers and dazzled the police officers holding weapons loaded with live ammunition by the solid front door.
Beyond the first few metres of daylight, the building darkened. The staircase to the first floor wound its way round a glass lift. Black ropes divided the Law Courts into zones. The colour of your admission card indicated which zones you were allowed to be in. The blue ones were for those affected by the case: survivors, next of kin, the bereaved and public advocates. The black were the parties in the case; the green were healthcare workers. The press had red cards. All had to wear their laminated cards round their necks for the duration of the case. The lanyards were black, apart from for those with red cards. They also had red lanyards which they were to keep visible, so they could easily be spotted if they strayed into the wrong place. On the cards were your name, your photo, your status and a bar code so the scanner would detect it if you tried to enter a restricted zone.
The whole first floor was set aside for the case. There were two large rooms with work stations for the press, one of them with simultaneous interpretation and an editing room for TV transmissions. There were waiting rooms for witnesses, rest areas and a big room where next of kin, the bereaved and the survivors would be left undisturbed. In the depths of the building was room 250, guarded by another team of police officers. Only a small band of people entered there.
The silver-grey hands were both pointing to the number nine.
The seats had filled up. Necks with black lanyards and necks with red lanyards created a striped effect in the rows. There were roughly equal numbers of each, about a hundred red, about a hundred black.
On the public side of the partition, selected photographers were standing ready to capture the entrance of the parties. The photographers were allowed to take pictures until the court was in session.
There were a number of wall-mounted cameras in the room; their lenses covered most angles. In the editing room, a TV producer from the Norwegian Broadcasting Company was seated in front of a bank of screens. She cut continuously and expertly from one shot to another: ‘Camera 1, there, Camera 2, hold, over to Camera 6.’ The pictures went direct to the live TV broadcast and to courtrooms all over the country.
Seventeen district courts were showing what the public in the courtroom could see. The regional courts had set up big screens and loudspeakers for the transmissions from Oslo.
In Nord-Troms District Court sat Tone and Gunnar Sæbø. Gerd and Viggo Kristiansen were there too. Now they would see him, hear him speak. The one who had taken their boys from them.
The Rashid family had fled the whole thing. For weeks the papers had been full of details of the coming trial. Mustafa, Bayan, Lara and Ali had just wanted to get away, so they were on a trip to Spain. They could not bring themselves to give the perpetrator the attention that following the trial would accord him.
The prosecution found their places. Then the public advocates, the defence. Police guards were already in position.
He is in the building, wrote a journalist from a news agency. The words flew out across the world: Er ist in dem Gebäude. Il est dans le bâtiment.
It was ten to nine.
The door of the waiting cell was opened. He stood up from the bench and was put in handcuffs. Court guards in pale blue shirts took him out and along the hallway.
The lift doors opened and he stepped inside with two guards. The lift was cramped. The three men were pressed close against each other.
The doors opened onto a white corridor. They stepped out, rounded a corner and turned into another corridor. The last stretch had been redecorated at the same time as room 250. The windows along the corridor were frosted. Their bolted frames were painted an industrial grey. The daylight barely penetrated from outside.
There was a court guard in front, then him, then another guard behind. He filled his lungs with air. He straightened up, pulled back his shoulders. The door to room 250 was opened. He went in.
Nobody there. He had entered a little corridor running along the side of the courtroom, a space where no one could see him. He followed the blue shirt barely ten more steps – then the hail of flashes, a cascade of clicking cameras. He is in the room, tapped the news reporters. Shining lenses were directed only at him.
They zoomed in on a pale face. He was less toned than before, a little jowlier.
He was unable to resist a smile. The moment he had been waiting for, preparing for, dreaming of. Now it was here. He pursed his lips to control the smile, nodded to his defence team and took his seat between them as he stole a glance at the audience. His eyes darted round the room; after all, this was not for him to look at them, but for them to look at him. Still, he just had to see, see them all, all those people looking at him.
His hands were cuffed in front of him and connected to a wide belt fastened round his hips. A broad-shouldered detention guard fumbled with a key to unlock the handcuffs. The accused gave an almost apologetic look to the audience as the man struggled to remove the cuffs. Once they were off, dangling from the hip belt, he clamped his right fist to his chest, thrust his arm out straight and then raised it in a salute. Long enough for the photographers to immortalise the moment, he held the clenched fist at head height. A gasp ran through the courtroom. It was five to nine.
He raises his arm in a right-wing extremist salute, wrote the news agencies. He pours himself a glass of water. Drinks. Looks at a pile of papers he has in front of him. Messages flashed out second by second from the journalists in the room.
The public prosecutors go over and shake hands with him!
Foreign journalists were bewildered to see this cordiality. Were they really shaking his hand?
The public advocates and the victims’ defence lawyers shake his hand too!
In some countries they would have put him in a cage. They would have taken his suit and white shirt and cropped his hair. His gleaming silk tie would have been out of the question.
In a cage or not, there were many in the room who would willingly have seen him humiliated. And humiliation was what he himself feared most of all. Being reviled was nothing in comparison to being humiliated.