I nodded. ‘Thanks. Good to know Franklin’s in safe hands.’
‘Sure.’ Her ponytail swished reassuringly as she carried him from the room.
On the way out I saw Tvist coming towards me, carrying Josi.
‘Hello, Cal Curtis,’ he said evenly.
Josi turned to look at me. I looked at her, smiled. Her face lit up. ‘He’o Ca’ Cu’is.’
‘Good luck today,’ said Tvist.
‘See you there,’ I said, watching after him.
* * *
Scanners at the courthouse. Shoes off. Keys and belt in a plastic tray. Standard precautions – the familiar routines of the modern world.
We walked across the slate floor towards the wooden staircase. Vee hung back.
‘Want us to save you a seat, honey?’
‘I’m good.’
On the floor outside the courtroom a chaos of tape marks and cables and tripods. Men and women in sober suits standing in pools of light, speaking test-words into microphones, joking quietly with the crews behind the cameras.
Elsa held my face in her hands. Around us people flowed towards the court.
‘Handsome fuck,’ she said.
My phone vibrated. I took a step away, pulled the phone from my pocket.
Dan.
I held my phone up to Elsa.
‘I’ll find you a seat with translation,’ she said, serious suddenly. ‘Say hi.’
We looked at each other. ‘Courage,’ she said, very quietly. I nodded. Courage, love.
I raised the phone to my ear. ‘Sorry, Dan.’
‘Three things. One: I’m ringing to wish you guys luck.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Two: I want to let you know I have options.’
‘Options?’
‘If you need to back out.’
‘I do not need to back out.’
‘I want you to promise—’
‘What’s the third thing’
‘The third thing is a piece of advice. Do not engage with these people.’
‘Sure, Dan, whatever you say.’
‘I’m serious, Cal. These are not people you want anywhere near the inside of your head. Do not look them in the eye.’
A wall had been built for the trial, a three-sided glass box ten feet high. They stood there behind their wall, these men who had murdered so many people’s children, so many people’s brothers and sisters, in their nondescript black suits, their hair unbleached now. Mousey.
I saw Tvist take his place in the front row.
You do all this for these men, Tvist: your airport scanners, your glass walls, your special officers with their submachine guns. Yet you couldn’t protect our children.
Tvist turned, as if he sensed my eyes on him. He caught my gaze and smiled. I turned away, surprised at my own anger.
In the back row of the courtroom Vee sat with some girls I didn’t know, holding hands. All adult dresses, minimal make-up. I tried to meet Vee’s eye, to ask her if she was OK, but she was lost in conversation.
Elsa curled her fingers into mine.
The men stared out at us from behind their bulletproof glass. Two officers approached them.
The Andersen brothers held out their hands. The officers removed the cuffs.
There they stood, massaging their wrists, surveying the room. They turned to each other. A look passed between them. Each man folded his right arm across his heart. They turned again to face us, stared out again at the faces in the courtroom. Slowly, in unison, each unfolded his right arm, clenched his fist, fixed his gaze on the press at the back of the courtroom.
A frenzy of cameras.
A salute. A white-power salute. The men exchanged a look, smiled, adjusted their pose. Their fists clenched a little tighter, their right arms extended a little further. Amplifying the signal.
Elsa was gripping my wrist. The sinews in her arms and face were tight.
‘I know,’ I said. Courage, love.
I heard a laugh in the row behind. An actual laugh, ringing bell-clear across the court. I turned to see a girl of Licia’s age, dark-skinned and pretty, sitting amongst friends. The girl covered her mouth as she met my eye, appalled at her own reaction. The men turned towards her, anger in their gaze. They had not expected laughter. The tiny female judge spoke, asking for silence. The girl nodded an apology.
Beside me I felt Elsa turn too. She and the girl exchanged a look. Elsa put a hand over the girl’s and smiled; the girl smiled back, glad of the support.
More cameras were turning. The girl couldn’t be more than sixteen.
I looked towards the men, foolish and ashamed in their black shirts and their bully boots. The girl had punctured their moment, destroyed the drama of their performance, left them standing half-cocked and pathetic.
Laughable.
I put on my headset. I heard the translator’s words in my ears. ‘Defendant Andersen J will stand.’ The judge began to address the first defendant. I could hear her voice through the foam padding of the headphones.
The tall man nodded at his brother, then stood, facing the judge.
The translator continued. ‘Defendant Andersen J, do you understand the charges made against you?’
The man nodded.
‘Respond.’
The man nodded again; he spoke, a single syllable.
The translator’s voice, flattening out the dialogue, rendering both sides. ‘Yes.’ A pause. ‘How do you plead?’
There was another, longer pause. The man looked about him. Checking he has the attention of the court, I thought.
Bastard.
The man began to speak. After a moment the translator picked up his words, without inflection.
‘As a … Knight of the Temple of Solomon … I decline to recognize the authority of this court. I refuse to plead.’
I looked around at the girl behind us. She was not laughing.
I lifted the headphone off my right ear. Absolute silence in the courtroom. Beside me, Elsa was quietly shaking her head. The chief judge sat stock still, staring at the man. The defendant looked around to his brother, nodded, then turned towards the back of the courtroom, stared defiantly out at the survivors, at the families of the dead. No one spoke. There were no camera shutters. I turned to look at my daughter, but Vee would not meet my eye. She was staring back at John Andersen.
The judge leaned across and consulted with her fellow judge, her hand across her microphone. She turned, sat watching the man for a few seconds. She took her hand from her microphone.
‘Defendant Andersen J, a refusal to enter a plea will be recorded as a plea of not guilty.’
‘I understand.’
‘Then your plea will be entered as not guilty.’
‘I do not recognize the authority of this court.’
He looked across at his brother who nodded, then leaned forward and spat a gobbet of chewing tobacco into his water glass.
The judge remained composed, but you could feel her anger. She spoke two words.
‘Noted,’ came the voice in the headphones. ‘Sit.’
Elsa leaned towards me. I raised an ear cup.
‘Look at them with their little uniforms, their little salutes, their little speeches.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘Look at the fact that they rehearsed the whole thing. Like, We are the Knights of the Round Table. That’s funny, isn’t it? It’s like fucking Monty Python.’
From the bench the chief judge was staring at Elsa.
‘Elsa,’ I said. I nodded towards the judge.
‘Yeah,’ she said quietly. ‘OK.’
Now the prosecutor stood looking out across the faces of the public. An accomplished woman, blond-haired, eyes of granite. Elsa and I sat up and faced the front.
The prosecutor spoke slowly, left long pauses between sentences, gave the translator time to catch up. She turned to address the judges. In the headphones the translator was affectless and calm, her words seconds behind the prosecutor’s. ‘In the time between the parkin
g of the van and the explosion, a witness rang the police to say she had seen two men in navy overalls as they walked towards a small white car. Something in the men’s demeanour caught in her mind: their behaviour was hurried, feverish even.
‘The eyewitness gave the police an accurate physical description of the men you see before you: the high foreheads, the wide-set eyes, the West Oslo accents. Both men were blond, she reported, though the eyewitness wondered if the shorter of the men you see before you, Paul Andersen, had dyed his hair; there was something about the eyebrows that did not match. The eyewitness had the presence of mind to note the licence number: XR310701. This was indeed the licence number of the car that the men drove to Garden Island.’
Ahead, Tvist turned to a colleague. None of this was new to him.
I felt a movement beside me. Elsa’s face was clouding with anger. Around us people were exchanging looks, shaking heads. I turned around. Vee’s eyes met mine from the back of the courtroom, full of fury.
The translator’s voice in my ear. ‘In other words, the police had the information needed in order to apprehend the suspects with no loss of life.’
You could hear the translator sipping water while the prosecutor continued to speak. I caught Tvist’s eye and he smiled; a careful smile, studiedly neutral.
‘In fact,’ the translator began again, ‘at one point a police cruiser was directly behind the suspects’ car. We know this from camera footage taken from the police cruiser.’
The anger in the courtroom was intensifying. Elsa was gripping my arm tightly. I could sense the mounting outrage, could feel it rising in me too.
The Post-it note.
The white car.
The police cruiser.
Licia missing, presumed drowned.
The prosecutor finished speaking; she stood looking out across the court; she walked to her desk; she sat down. The translator’s voice continued, catching up with the prosecutor’s words.
‘No one at police headquarters thought to pick up and read the note until 19:57, by which time both suspects had been in police custody for six minutes. And on the island ninety-one people, eighty-seven of them teenagers between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, lay dead.’
I took off my headphones, looked at Elsa.
Elsa leaned in. ‘I’m OK,’ she said.
‘Tvist lied to me,’ I said. ‘About the Post-it note. Or it wasn’t exactly a lie …’
At the back of the courtroom something clattered to the floor. I looked around. Vee was on her feet; she pushed past her friends and out into the aisle. Her eyes met mine. Her face was streaked and blotched.
‘Let’s go,’ I said to Elsa, my voice a low whisper.
‘You stay, Cal,’ said Elsa. She got to her feet.
Vee was at the door of the courtroom.
‘You sure?’ I said.
Elsa leaned in, spoke very quietly. ‘One of us needs to witness this.’
On the rows nearby people were staring at us. A woman, a court official in a dark skirt, was making her way towards Vee. Elsa reached the aisle, headed towards the rear exit, exchanged words with the official. The official opened the door and held it. Elsa put her hand on Vee’s back, guided her through it.
The accused men watched as my wife and daughter walked away down the corridor. John Andersen said something to Paul. Paul smirked.
They had noticed our daughter’s distress. They liked it.
25
At quarter to one I stood on the steps of the courtroom, blinking in the harsh summer light. Before me the temporary studios, each a twelve-foot cube on stilts, walled by translucent white tarpaulin.
‘Perhaps people will listen to you next time.’
It was Bror, smiling his most benevolent smile, his arms thrown wide as if I were his long-lost brother. I hesitated for a moment, uneasy at the intimacy, then stepped forward and felt the warmth of his embrace.
Bror took a half-step back. ‘You tried to break the story about the police delay, no?’
So Bror had known about the Post-it.
‘I had no reason to expect people to listen,’ I said.
‘Next time they will.’
‘I hope so.’
He gestured towards the canvas studios. ‘This is nice.’ The sides of the studios were rolled up. Journalists on high office chairs were joking with colleagues on other continents, checking their hair in the screens of their phones. ‘Practical and elegant and egalitarian,’ Bror was saying. ‘The best of our Scandinavian values. You’re going to make a report?’
‘I’m going to try …’
‘You must not allow these men’s actions to anger you.’
‘You’re asking me to empathize with them?’
‘Of course not. You must ignore their little display and tell your truth.’
I felt a vibration against my thigh, took out my phone, clicked away the call. Bror stood, arms folded across his grey robe, smiling.
‘I guess I should file my piece.’
He reached out, took my hands in his. ‘Expect another of Milla’s little gifts.’
Then he was walking away.
‘So that was you?’ I said.
‘I don’t know.’ He turned, gave a self-conscious shrug. ‘Was it?’
‘Who is the source?’
He smiled, shook his head. ‘A priest has a duty of silence to his flock.’
‘I can respect that.’
‘With that in mind, if ever there were any particularly difficult thought you couldn’t share with Elsa …’
‘We’re getting by,’ I said, because I trusted this man, but only so far.
He smiled. ‘Keep building your case.’ And he was gone.
At just before one I rolled down the sides of a studio at the far end. One hundred and fifteen seconds on the clock.
‘Cal, we’re seeing outrage at the behaviour of the defendants in the Garden Island trial in Oslo, Norway.’
‘Some. When defendants John and Paul Andersen were brought into court, their first move, once the handcuffs were removed, was to make what I can only describe as a white power salute, right arms out, fists clenched. A gesture intended to shock, but which was met with derision. Far more serious were details that emerged about the Oslo police, who failed to act on an eyewitness description of the suspects, along with the licence plate of the vehicle they drove to Garden Island. That number was on a handwritten note that sat on the desk of Police Chief Tvist himself. Yet no one thought to look at the note. Not until after the massacre was over and the men in custody.
‘Meanwhile we await clarification on two major points: the police are stating that the organization to which the men claim to belong, the Tactical Brigades of the Knights Templar, is simply a dog-whistle to other white extremists, and does not exist beyond the imaginations of John and Paul Andersen. Given the demonstrable incompetence of the police, how far can we trust such a claim? And point two: these men tested and perfected a powerful fertilizer bomb. So where is the laboratory where the men produced that bomb? No mention of this rather significant hole in the investigation. You have to ask: are the police even looking?’
I looked up, saw the clock tick down to zero.
‘Thank you, Cal.’ A click on the line and Carly’s voice became distant. ‘A brave man bearing witness at the trial of the presumed murderers of his daughter.’
I stepped out from the white tarpaulin walls of the studio. I joined the queue for the scanners; I put my press accreditation around my neck, took off my belt and my shoes, put my laptop and phone in a grey plastic tray.
Tvist turned in his seat as I entered the courtroom. I smiled and nodded. Tvist smiled carefully in response, but I saw the scowl he tried to suppress. He had heard my radio piece, I guessed.
Elsa’s seat was empty. On it was a small envelope, with Cal Curtis written in fine cursive script. I looked about me. Tvist had turned away, but I felt eyes on me.
I looked up. The judges were entering.
I look
ed down at the envelope in my hands.
I looked up. Paul Andersen now, fitting a lump of chewing tobacco between his upper lip and his gum, all the while trying to lock his eyes on to mine.
I turned to the woman on my left. ‘Excuse me,’ I said as I got up to leave.
The image in the envelope was a simple one. A red rubber dinghy, photographed from above. There were figures in the boat, heavily foreshortened, wearing some kind of uniform. Two had rifles slung across their chests. The rubber of the boat bulged around the figures of each of the men, as if it could not contain them.
A still from a video. I turned the picture over. In the same cursive script a hand had written, ‘The real story’.
26
I sat on the terrace drinking whisky. There was a psychotic intensity to the evening light. The fjord glowed gold and green; there were purples and indigos in the trunks of the trees: a parallel spectrum, some great supernatural darklight.
Did I imagine hearing the front door slide shut? It was quiet, but there was a distinctive click.
I went through to the bathroom. There was Elsa in the shower. She turned off the water, opened the cabinet, her body slick.
‘Strange,’ I said. ‘I thought …’
‘You thought?’
‘… that you’d slipped out.’
‘And yet, here I am.’ Water beading on her breasts, on her belly, making gentle tracks down her thighs. A smile that was more than a smile. ‘Perhaps you want to join me in the shower?’
An invitation that was not an invitation. A challenge, almost, her wolf eyes searching mine.
Water drops marking tracks on her thighs, on her breasts.
‘I love you. It’s just …’
I saw the desire in her eyes, saw it curdling with disappointment. She nodded sadly. ‘It’s just you don’t want me any more.’
‘Vee went out.’
‘Which should give us the perfect opportunity. But I get it.’
‘I’m going to go after her,’ I said.
‘Of course.’
As she turned away, water ran in rivulets down her back.
In trees to the side of the path crows had gathered. They watched silently, eyes flicking white as they caught the lights from the apartment buildings.
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