One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (53 page)

Håvard had been given a sleeping pill before take-off, and he fell asleep. Tone and Gunnar sat clasping hands.

Simon had been shot, they realised that. He would have called otherwise. He must be on an operating table somewhere. That was why he could not call.

Before leaving Salangen they had sent pictures of him to the emergency ward at Ullevål, where the most critically injured had been flown. The hospital had asked if there was any distinguishing feature they could look for.

‘Distinguishing feature? Tone! Does Simon have any distinguishing features?’

Tears ran down Tone’s cheeks. ‘Distinguishing features?’

She wanted to answer that they should
look for a beautiful boy. The most beautiful of all.

Then she remembered the mole on his chest.

Once they had registered at Sundvolden, Tone gave her DNA; a cotton-bud swab in her mouth, that was it. The parents were asked again about Simon’s distinguishing features: had he any scars, piercings, tattoos, distinctive clothing or hair? They had to fill in a yellow form called an
ante mortem
, to
make it easier for the police to find Simon. This was something everybody had to do, the two of them agreed. The form was to help to identify Simon if they found him alive, but terribly injured.

Back at reception, they once again looked very thoroughly through all the lists of survivors that were up on the walls.

‘I
must
find Geir Kåre. I’m sure he knows something. Do you want to come with me?’

No, Tone did not want to. She wanted to sit at a table in a corner and wait for him. She could not bring herself to talk to someone who knew.

*   *   *

Gunnar found Geir Kåre.

Geir Kåre took him in his arms. Held him.

Until then, Gunnar had clung to a tiny hope.

But Geir Kåre had seen everything.

Gunnar wandered in a daze across the terrace of café tables and parasols. He crossed the road
and went down to the water. There he had to stop.

He couldn’t get any air. It all went black. There was no air reaching his lungs. He stood there fighting uncontrollably for breath. His chest constricted.

His thoughts choked him, stabbed him and sank. Certainty took hold. His loss was so vivid to him, and memories flooded in. And everything that would not become memories.

There on the shore,
Gunnar wept.

It came home to him now.

It was so final. We won’t see Simon again.

Then he went up to Tone.

And told her.

A priest came over to them and sat down by Håvard, who had been going about like a sleepwalker ever since he locked himself into his room the previous evening. He sat there stiffly, shut away inside himself.

‘Do you want to tell me about your brother?’ asked the priest.

Håvard nodded.

There were skilled people going among them: priests, psychologists and people from the Red Cross. The King and Queen were there, the Crown Prince and Crown Princess. They were discreet, circumspect, warm. Besides Stoltenberg, a number of his ministers were also circulating. Anniken Huitfeldt, the Minister of Culture, came over to their table.

‘Who are you here for?’ she asked.

‘Simon Sæbø,’ said Gunnar, his voice giving way.

‘Oh, the one who saved so many!’ the Minister exclaimed.

‘What’s that?’ Gunnar gave her a quizzical look.

‘Yes, he was the one who helped people down from the path and gave away his own place!’ said the minister.

What? Had he sacrificed his own life?

Gunnar was bewildered. What was she saying?

A boy who could have been alive, but wasn’t. Is
that what she was saying?

Had he chosen others’ lives over his own?

More people came up and told him the same thing, or variations on it.

That Simon had saved lots of people at the cliff’s edge.

A new sadness stampeded over them.

An unspeakable sadness.

He could have been alive! It was his own fault!

*   *   *

In Ullevål hospital, Viljar Hanssen was fighting for his life, while Gunnar
Linaker, the goalkeeper of the Troms football team, had given up. That is, his body had given up. The king of keepers was still breathing when the police lifted him from the ground at the campsite, where he had been shot in the act of shouting ‘Run!’ to the rest of the Troms camp. He was still breathing when they took him down to a boat. On the way over the strait, his breathing stopped, but the rescue
team got it going again. In the helicopter, they connected him to a respirator.

He was on the machine when his parents arrived from the airport. The doctor explained that if they took him off it, he would not live. The first shot had hit him in the back and gone on up the back of his neck and head, where it had expanded. The second had gone straight into the back of his head. He was knocked out
by the first shot, the doctor said, but it had not penetrated the cerebellum, so he had carried on breathing. But now, there was no longer any blood supply to the brain.

‘It’s so unfair! It’s so unfair!’ cried his sister Hanne in the sterile hospital room. She had first recognised her brother by the tattoo on his leg when they were carrying him off the island, covered by a blanket.

His family
all sat round him, saying goodbye. They had been asked to make some difficult decisions. It was left up to them to decide on the moment of his death.

That afternoon, his life-support machine was turned off.

But just before that, his heart was removed and would be transplanted into someone else’s body.

The three said a prayer.

Their grief was vast and black. But they were grateful that they
had been able to say their farewells to Gunnar while he was still warm.

And that his heart would still beat.

*   *   *

In another wing, Viljar lay in a coma.

His mother had spent the whole night ringing round to hospitals all over Norway. She had rung places as far north as Trondheim. But nobody could give her the assurance she sought, that her son was with them and alive.

At Sundvollen,
the others from the cliff had told them what they knew. They had seen Viljar shot in the head, straight in the eye, seen blood pour out and splinters of skull go flying. We’ve lost Viljar, his parents thought, but they didn’t say it out loud. They had Torje to think of.

At about two in the morning, Christin got through to one of the emergency numbers, and described Viljar’s injuries.

‘Your son
is still on the island,’ said the man at the other end.

‘On the island?’

‘Yes, they haven’t brought the dead back over yet. I’m very sorry for your loss.’

Christin kept this to herself. It wasn’t true until she had seen him herself. Some hours later, around seven, her phone rang. A voice asked a question.

‘Has your son any distinguishing marks?’

‘A scar. On his neck. A burn. From when he
was little.’

‘In that case he has been identified at Ullevål.’

‘Identified?’

‘That’s all I can say.’

‘Please tell me what you mean!’

‘He’s here. He’s alive at the moment.’

They were asked to come right away. ‘We can’t say what the situation will be by the time you get here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t say any more. We want you here when we tell you more.’

They raced to the car. Torje
was exhausted, and fell asleep on the back seat. His parents focused on the road. There’s a sign here. There’s a bend here. There’s a junction here. They wound the windows up and down. Up and down. Up. And down. In an attempt to make themselves breathe.

They pulled up at the entrance to Ullevål hospital and ran in. They were taken to see Viljar in intensive care.

It was unreal. That was their
child lying there. Their firstborn. The big brother. He lay deep within a white wrapping, with wires and tubes running into it. The information the hospital gave them was unambiguous: he is alive now, but you must be ready for anything.

The hours went by. In the afternoon the family was updated on the seventeen-year-old’s condition.

‘In all likelihood, he will survive the day.’

But the doctors
could not say if Viljar would ever wake up.

And if he did, what sort of Viljar would he be?

*   *   *

On Utøya, the forensics teams had started their work. Recording and securing evidence. Everything was noted down on a pink form entitled
post mortem
.

One of the forensic technicians was Danijela Andersen, Håvard Gåsbakk’s partner. She had not kept the news turned on because of their two little
children at home, so knew nothing until Håvard called her that evening. She had never heard him sound so upset. ‘It’s insane! Sick. There are lots of them dead. They’re children!’

Now she was taking over. Three teams divided the dead between them, working in pairs. Danijela and her colleague were to start with the ten who had been taken by boat to the mainland the evening before and were now
laid out in the civil defence force’s tent. Kripos had issued the teams with a hundred boxes of labels, number tags, plastic strips, tape, blood-sampling kits, black tarpaulins and body bags. The white body bags had zip fasteners and two carrying handles.

The weather had improved. It had brightened up and also turned warmer. They had to work quickly.

‘Have you seen a dead body before?’ the experienced
Kripos colleague asked her before they started.

She nodded.

They removed the first white wool blanket.

A young boy. They photographed him and recorded his details on the pink form. Where the bullets had gone in and out, what injuries they had caused, abrasions, wounds. They laid him in body bag number 1.

Then a couple of boys in their underpants, who were given the numbers 2 and 3. Others
were in sturdy wellingtons, waterproof jackets, woollen jerseys.

As she worked, Danijela always took care to remember that this was a human being who had been alive. She did up the girls’ blouses if they had come open, pulled down a top if it had ridden up. From the moment she pulled aside the wool blanket to the moment she put them in the body bag, they were in her care. When she had finished,
she stroked each one gently on the cheek. Finally, if necessary, she closed their eyes.

Halfway along the row she came to a boy with a lot of clothes on. Jeans, trainers, a windproof jacket, a jersey and a red and blue striped T-shirt. Or rather, no, it was white and blue striped, but now so soaked in blood that all the white parts had turned red.

Danijela rubbed a little of the dried blood
off his face. He must have been a good-looking boy, she thought.

As he lay there on his back, his hands stuck up in the air. They were rather bent, and the same was true of his legs. He had stiffened in that position, draped over the rock.

She recorded everything. Filled in the form for the deceased. She patted his cheek. Closed his eyes. And took one last look at his handsome face before she
pulled the zipper shut.

*   *   *

The interrogation room was on the sixth floor of the police headquarters. There was an experienced female interviewer waiting, while a team of detectives sat behind a glass wall. From there they could see and hear everything that went on in the room, while those in the interview room could only see themselves in the mirror glass.

Anders Behring Breivik had
been locked in a cell at police headquarters at 04.49 that morning. Just before, he was asked whether he wanted a specific defence lawyer to act for him.

Breivik wanted Geir Lippestad. He was the lawyer from whom he had rented an office when he was running his firm, E-Commerce Group, with Kristian. They had shared a fridge and lunch room with the lawyer, who at that time was defending the neo-Nazi
accused of murdering fifteen-year-old Benjamin Hermansen. Little had been heard of the lawyer since then.

Lippestad was still asleep when they rang.

‘We have arrested an individual by the name of Anders Behring Breivik for the acts of terrorism. He wants you as his defence counsel.’

The name meant nothing to Lippestad. He was urged to think quickly about it, as the perpetrator had said there
were three more terrorist cells and several more bombs in the city. The police wanted to interrogate the accused as soon as possible, but he refused to be interviewed without a defence lawyer.

By half past eight Lippestad was at the police headquarters. He shook hands with Breivik, and after a short conversation they entered the interrogation room together.

‘So you’re the one with the unfortunate
task and honour of interviewing the biggest monster in Norwegian history since Quisling?’ was Breivik’s opening remark to his female interviewer.

The charge was read out to him. He was asked for his reaction to it. He said it was deficient, and he found it remarkable that it said nothing about his production of biological weapons and his intentions for their use.

He was informed that eight had
been officially recorded dead in the government quarter and more than eighty on Utøya.

‘Lots of them must have swum for it, then,’ he said. And smiled.

In the time since the interview on Utøya he had finalised his list of demands. ‘We are willing to grant an amnesty to all category A and B traitors if they dissolve Parliament and transfer authority to a conservative board of guardians, with
me or other national leaders at its head,’ he said. Once the demands on his first list were met, he would identify the remaining cells and thus save three hundred lives.

On his more limited list of demands he wanted the right to wear his Knights Templar uniform at his trial, which must be open and freely accessible to the media. He also had some demands regarding the conditions in which he would
serve his sentence. ‘You can’t put Crusaders and Muslims together.’ In the United States, prisoners were segregated to avoid conflicts, he said.

He was informed that a computer was on order for him. His demand to wear uniform for the committal proceedings and his trial was under consideration. They were also working on the matter of a printer; it was possible he would be able to connect to a
machine elsewhere in the building.