It was nineteen minutes past eleven. It had taken eight minutes.
The court moved on to Anders Kristiansen. Who was holding a protective arm round Bano when she died.
He was the next red dot on the path.
‘Now we move to the steep slope down to the water. The cliff area. Five died there,’ said Gøran Dyvesveen from Kripos, the day after pointing out Bano, Anders and the others who were killed on the path.
‘All five were transported over to the mainland and were not in their place/site of death when the crime scene investigation started.’
He orientated them on the general map, which was enlarged on the wall-mounted screen. ‘The steep slope lay just to the south of Lover’s Path,’ he said, pointing. ‘This is where we saw the ten lying yesterday. This slope will be the focus of our attention now.’
The picture was taken from the water and illustrated just how steep it was. It was a drop of about thirteen metres. ‘This is not a place where anyone would go down to the water as a matter of course,’ said Dyvesveen. ‘I would say it is so steep that you would not get back up again without assistance.’
A white circle on the picture showed a rock. The forensic technician explained that a boy was found lying there. The pathologist described the injuries. She always gave the victim’s name and age first.
‘Simon was three days short of his nineteenth birthday,’ she said. She indicated on the dummy where the deadly bullet had hit him: entering his back and coming out through his chest. ‘Simon died of the bullet wounds to his chest, which rapidly led to unconsciousness and death.’
Heavy breathing could be heard. Tone and Gunnar were finding it all totally unreal. Simon definitely wasn’t here, in this place.
Public advocate Nadia Hall read the short eulogy. ‘Social commitment and an interest in culture came early for Simon. He was the leader of his local youth council from the age of fifteen. He was the founder member of the AUF branch in Salangen and was due to go straight on from Utøya to a conference in Russia. He had been to Cambodia to make a film about water. His brutal murder before he reached nineteen is felt as a huge tragedy. The loss of Simon will leave many people poorer in the years to come. He leaves behind him a mum, a dad and a younger brother.’
Breivik spent most of the time looking down at his papers during the autopsy reports. He did the same that day.
He said nothing. He had no comment.
Once the court was adjourned for the day, Tone and Gunnar Sæbø went out with Anders Kristiansen’s parents. The two sets of parents had been together for the last couple of days; they had finished in Oslo now and were going home to Troms.
On leaving the courthouse the four of them walked up towards the park round the Royal Palace. At the National Gallery, a policeman was blocking off the street. The parents stopped.
Then they saw it.
A motorcycle came at full speed, then a white van and finally a police car.
‘Cobblestones! Are there any cobblestones here?’ cried Viggo Kristiansen.
But there were no loose cobblestones.
The van sped past. The dads were left standing there.
‘Oh, we would have thrown them hard!’ said Gunnar Sæbø.
The two fathers looked at each other. Staring into the other’s powerlessness.
‘Why did we just sit there?’ Viggo demanded fiercely. ‘There in the courtroom. Why didn’t we do anything? Why didn’t we shout something? Why did we all behave so bloody nicely?’
They had even tried to stifle their sobs, there in the grey-painted room. They had not wanted to be noticed. Did not want to be any trouble.
Gunnar looked at Viggo.
‘We were paralysed,’ he answered. ‘We are paralysed.’
The Will to Live
After a week of autopsy reports and eulogies for those murdered on Utøya, the schedule said: the aggrieved.
After the four-day break for Norwegian National Day, the court participants’ faces looked tanned. The public in the courtroom dressed more lightly in the mid-May heat of Oslo. The bereaved families had gone home to their regions and were now following the trial from district courts all around the country.
There were no more words of remembrance to be read. Time had come for the testimonies of the survivors.
I lost my best friend.
I heard a loud, deep scream.
I’m not sure if I heard shots first, then screams, or screams first and then shots.
He begged: Please, please don’t do it.
I thought it must be my turn next.
I had two rocks in my hands.
I put my tongue between my teeth to stop them making a noise.
The survivors were muted. They were grave. Many of them felt guilty. Survivor’s guilt.
I was swimming just ahead of him. He dropped behind. Then I turned round and he wasn’t there any more.
Or the girl who had removed a bullet from her thigh before she swam for it: I was the delegation leader of my county, and I lost the three youngest.
All the survivors were asked how they were now. There was no room for big words.
It’s going fine. Kind of at half speed.
Or: It’ll be all right.
Or: It varies a lot, up and down, pretty hard going actually.
Some of the young people Breivik had tried to kill asked for him to leave the room while they gave their evidence. But most of them wanted him there. Often, they did not deign to look at him. Whereas he was there in his seat, obliged to listen to them. No one cursed or spoke directly to him. The strongest expressions came from a girl who called him blockhead and idiot.
For many, it was a stage in working through their trauma to see him sitting there. The man who had opened fire on them would not be able to harm anyone again.
One boy had prepared himself for giving evidence more thoroughly than he had ever prepared for anything.
He was summoned to appear as a witness on 22 May.
It was Viljar.
After he started singing on that sixth night, he fell asleep again. He drifted in and out of consciousness, a state that gradually became more of a morphine-induced haze than a coma. He woke and slept, woke and dozed off again. His parents and the doctors still knew nothing about how his brain was faring, how badly damaged it had been by the shot through his eye that had smashed his skull. It was a good sign that he had remembered those lines of the song, said the doctors. But then he said no more after that, just went back to sleep again. The corners of his mouth would occasionally twitch when Martin said something funny, when his mother stroked his cheek and his father gave him a hug, or when Torje told him about the Norway Cup match he had played in. Only Viljar knew what was going on inside his head, and he lacked the strength to tell anyone.
The day he woke up and summoned enough energy to say something, he called out to his mother: ‘Mum, I can’t see at all well. Can you get my glasses for me?’
‘Viljar, you’ve… lost an eye, you were shot in the eye, but the other eye—’
‘It’ll still be better with the glasses,’ he insisted. These were his longest sentences since he was brought from Utøya.
‘They’re on the top shelf on the left just inside the living room in Roger’s flat,’ said Viljar.
And so they were. ‘A really, really good sign,’ the doctors said in relief.