One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway

Narcissus on Stage

The cell was in the basement of the Law Courts.

He sat on the bench waiting, with armed men standing guard outside.

They had picked him up from Ila prison early that morning, unlocked his cell door and brought him down to the prison garage. There they had asked him to get into a white van.

To the uninitiated, it looked like an ordinary van, not unlike the one he had hired the previous year and blown up outside the Tower Block in the government quarter.

In the van they fastened him to the seat with handcuffs and restraining belts. It was an armour-plated vehicle. He could not see out. With a number of police officers around him, he sat strapped for the half-hour that it took to reach Oslo. Upon arrival the driver steered the van straight down into the garage beneath the courthouse. From there they led him into the building and along several corridors, then locked him into the waiting cell in the basement, a security cell into which he was not allowed to take anything.

That was where he was sitting now, dressed in a dark suit with a freshly ironed shirt and copper-coloured tie.

His defence team had come down to greet him before they went back up to their room behind the main courtroom on the first floor. Now he was alone. He was waiting for someone to come and fetch him. He was waiting for the curtain to go up.

The media ban had been lifted in the middle of December, so he knew in detail what the courtroom looked like, who the professional judges were, the lay judges, the prosecutors, the public advocates. He had prepared himself well and read everything that he could find on the case. He had taken a particular interest in the debate about whether he was sane and accountable for his actions.

For a long time, he found it entertaining. In fact, at first he did not take it entirely seriously and did not really relate to what the forensic psychiatrists had concluded. He was going to use the trial as a stage on which to perform, come what may. His operation had reached its third phase.

The clock in room 250 showed half past eight. Its face was grey, its hands of pure aluminium. The room was brand-new. But everything in it was muted, minimal, toned down.

The judges sat on a dais that was raised above floor level, though not by much. At their bench, made of knotless maple, were six high-backed black leather chairs. The two appointed judges would sit in the middle. Three lay judges and a reserve would be seated beside them. The appointed and lay judges would all vote on the final verdict.

Behind the chairs were low shelves of light wood that would soon be filled with thick ring binders containing the case documents. The judges would be able to turn round in their seats to find what they needed.

On the grey wall behind the judges hung the Norwegian coat of arms, a golden lion holding an axe on a red background. It was the sole element of colour in the room.

In front of the judges, at floor level, was a smaller desk with four chairs behind it. Places for the forensic psychiatrists. Their seats faced the public, not the defendant. It would be their faces that many would try to read in the coming weeks.

Most other issues were already clear. He had admitted to the actions, albeit not to any guilt, but that was a formality. If he were ruled to be of sound mind, he would get the most severe sentence the law could mete out to him, twenty-one years, with the possibility of extension if he presented a threat to society.

Or would he be held not accountable for his actions and be forced to undergo treatment instead?

Was he mad, or was he a political terrorist?

At an angle to the judges’ bench, at floor level, was the prosecution bench and behind it places for the coordinating public advocates. The defendant was to sit facing the prosecution, between his defence team. Behind them was a bulletproof glass wall, and behind that were some seats for the public. Right behind the back row was the only window in the room, covered with bomb-proof foil. Pale grey blinds with a slight sparkle to them covered the frosted glass. They would remain closed for the duration of the case.

In the centre of the floor, between all the parties, stood a small desk with three sides and a chair. The table section could be raised or lowered. Those giving information or evidence could choose whether to sit or stand.

It was compact, everything felt close. The victims appearing as witnesses would be sitting only a few metres from the perpetrator, in the same seat where he himself would be cross-examined.

The room was divided in half lengthways. A low glass door, kept closed, separated the participants in the trial from the public, who were to sit in long rows running the length of the room. The Law Courts had tried to fit in as many seats as possible and the rows were so tightly packed that one could only edge along them. The sole access to most of the seats was via the central aisle. It would be impossible to leave the room unnoticed except during a break. The first row behind the partition was reserved for the courtroom artists and the commentators from the major media outlets. Less important media groups were in the second row. Then came next of kin, the bereaved, survivors and other people affected, their escorts and the public advocates. The support group for the victims’ families and survivors had been allocated permanent seats, as had the leadership of the AUF. Other seat allocations would rotate throughout the trial. The two back rows were again for accredited press. Here there were electrical sockets and headset plugs for those requiring interpreters. From the interpreting booth, which had an unrestricted view of all the parties, there would be simultaneous translation into English, Kurdish or Georgian, depending on the media’s needs and the nationalities of the victims and their relatives.

The room had never been used before. It did not have a single scratch.

In August the previous year, twenty days after the terrorist attacks, the man in the waiting cell had met the first pair of psychiatrists. There was one woman and one man: cool, buttoned-up Synne Sørheim and heavy, ruddy-cheeked Torgeir Husby.

Both of them had clearly indicated that they were uncomfortable about meeting him. They said they were not in a position, either emotionally or intellectually, to carry out the one-to-one interviews with him which would be the norm. They worried about potential hostage situations, they said, especially in the case of the female expert.

For the first eleven sessions he was in shackles and his left arm was fastened to an abdominal belt. He was placed in a corner with three conference tables between him and the two psychiatrists. There were two prison guards in the room throughout. Interviews twelve and thirteen were conducted in the visiting room. On those occasions he was locked into a cubicle behind a glass wall while the experts, one for each session, sat on the other side of the glass. The guards were then on the outside.

For the first meeting he put on his striped Lacoste jersey in muted, earthy colours, the one he had been wearing on the morning of his operation, when he took the getaway car to Hammersborg torg to park it and then walked through the government quarter under an umbrella in the drizzle.

The psychiatrists shook his hand. Then he was taken to his seat behind the three tables. In his right hand he had a piece of paper, which he put on the table in front of him. The first thing he said was that every forensic psychiatrist in the world probably envied them the task of assessing him.

This produced no particular response, so he went on. He had a list of seven questions, which they had to answer before he would cooperate.

‘Why?’ asked the psychiatrists.

‘Well, I don’t want to contribute to my own character assassination, do I?’

The experts were not prepared to answer any questions. These observations were to be done on their terms. The accused insisted he must know their view of the world before he could take part in the sessions. ‘If either of you is on the ideological left, you’re going to be biased,’ he asserted.

Arguments were tossed back and forth. Breivik said they would no doubt try to gag him. ‘The machinery of power is Marxist-orientated. After the war they sent Quisling’s justice minister to the madhouse.’ Breivik repeated that he had to find out what they stood for before he gave them any answers.

Finally the forensic psychiatrists conceded. They asked him to state his questions. He read from the piece of paper.

‘The first is: What do you think about Knut Hamsun and the resignation of justice minister Sverre Risnæs after the Second World War? The second is: Do you think all national Darwinists are psychopaths?’

The psychiatrists asked him to explain the term ‘national Darwinist’.

‘A Darwinist who’s a pragmatist. With a logical approach to political decisions. There are two approaches to a political problem: men are pragmatic, whereas women use their emotions to solve the problem. Darwinism views human beings from an animal perspective, sees things as if through the eyes of an animal and acts accordingly,’ he said. ‘One example is when America bombed Japan. They employed a pragmatic approach. Better to kill three hundred thousand but save millions. We consider that to be suicidal humanism.’

‘Who are “we”?’

‘We, the Knights Templar.’

The experts asked him to go on with his list of questions.

‘Question number three is whether you think the American military command lacks empathy. Question number four: Explain the essential distinctions between pragmatism and sociopathy.’

‘How do you interpret the word sociopathy?’ asked the psychiatrists.

Breivik smiled. ‘Isn’t it the same as psychopathy, then?’

He said the subsequent questions would be more personal in nature.

‘Question five: Are you nationalists or internationalists? Number six: Do you support multiculturalism? Number seven: Have either of you had any connection with Marxist organisations?’

‘How will you judge whether we are telling the truth, if we answer your questions?’ they asked.

He grinned. ‘I already know. Thousands of hours as a salesman have taught me to predict with seventy per cent accuracy what the person I am talking to is thinking. So I know that neither of you is of Marxist orientation, but you are both politically correct and support multiculturalism. It’s all I can expect.’

‘Do you guess, or do you know what other people are thinking?’

‘I know,’ said Breivik. ‘There’s a big difference.’

He said he had studied a great deal of psychology and was able, for example, to tell the difference between people from the east and the west end of town by their clothes, make-up and watches.

At the end of the session he decided he would accept them. He looked at the experts and smiled.

‘I think I’ve been lucky.’

In the first ‘Status præsens’ that they wrote, Sørheim and Husby drew a number of conclusions. ‘The subject believes he knows what the people he is talking to are thinking. This phenomenon is judged to be founded in psychosis,’ they wrote. ‘He presents himself as unique and the focal point of everything that happens, believing that all psychiatrists in the world envied the experts their task. He compares his situation to the treatment of Nazi traitors after the war. Indicative of grandiose ideas,’ they noted. ‘The subject clearly has no clear perception of his own identity as he shifts between referring to himself in the singular and the plural,’ they concluded. ‘The subject uses words that he stresses he has invented himself, such as “national Darwinist”, “suicidal Marxist” and “suicidal humanism”. This phenomenon is judged to be one of neologism.’ Such ‘new words’ could be part of a psychosis.

At the end of the thirteen sessions, the psychiatrists concluded that Anders Behring Breivik suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. They adopted the view that he was psychotic while carrying out the attacks, and that he was still psychotic when they were making their observations. He was therefore in criminal terms not responsible for his actions and should receive treatment rather than a sentence.

Breivik was permitted to read the report when it was submitted in November 2011. He said he thought they were trying to make a fool of him. They called his compendium ‘banal, infantile and pathetically egocentric’, motivated by his ‘grandiose delusions about his own exceptional importance’. But they also described him as ‘intelligent rather than the opposite’.

He had boasted of having an extremely strong psyche, stronger than that of anyone else he had ever known. Otherwise he would never have been able to carry out his attack on Utøya, he emphasised.

Then he started getting letters from supporters around Europe who felt he would serve their cause badly if he were deemed to be not accountable for his own actions. He suddenly understood what was at stake. He could be declared insane.

Then it would all fold.

The court could rob him of all honour. Judge him to be an idiot.

Just before Christmas he rang Geir Lippestad, who was basing his preparations on the conclusions of the psychiatric report. He asked the lawyer to come and see him right away.

He had sounded worked up on the phone, so on 23 December Lippestad assembled the whole defence team – four people – and went to see him at Ila prison. They listened to him through the glass wall in the visiting room. Anders Behring Breivik asked them to change strategy.

‘I want to be found accountable for my actions,’ he said.

The defendant was supported in this by those with the clearest grounds for hating him. Several next of kin and bereaved family members had been upset to hear that he might escape serving a formal sentence. Mette Yvonne Larsen, one of the coordinators of the public advocates’ group, asked for another set of experts to be appointed so that the court would have two reports to compare. More and more of the public advocates began to press for a new assessment to be carried out.

The prosecution did not want it. They had already started their work based on the first report. Lippestad was against it. Breivik said he’d had enough of shrinks. There was also the risk that a second observation would produce the same result as the first, thought Lippestad, making it even more difficult to advance the case in court that Breivik was of sound mind, as he now wanted to affirm.

‘It has never done a case any harm to shed some extra light on it,’ concluded Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen, the judge appointed by the court to lead these negotiations. She requested that two new forensic psychiatrists be designated.

Norwegian forensic psychiatry circles are small, and many of the higher-profile experts were ruled out because they had already expressed their opinions in the media. But the court found Terje Tørrissen and Agnar Aspaas, who met the criteria of neither being close colleagues, nor having commented publicly on the case.

In addition to his conversations with the experts, Anders Behring Breivik was now to be observed around the clock for four weeks. Early each morning a team of a dozen nurses, psychologists and auxiliary psychiatric nurses were to come and spend the day with him, talk to him, eat with him, play board games with him and then submit written reports, which the new pair of experts would have to take into account.

In mid-February 2012, two months before the trial was to begin, the first session with the new forensic psychiatrists took place. Breivik asked for the interview to be recorded, so Lippestad could listen to it afterwards.

Terje Tørrissen was a short man with a furrowed brow and flyaway hair. He greeted Breivik, who entered the room flanked by two prison officers.

‘I want to inform you that we have not read the previous report,’ said Tørrissen, speaking quietly in his lilting western Norwegian accent.

‘Well I’m extremely impressed that you’ve been able to restrain yourselves,’ smiled Breivik. ‘I didn’t think there was a psychiatrist left in the whole of Norway who hadn’t made some comment, as it’s very tempting in such an important case as this.’

Once Breivik had seen how he was being perceived in the media, he realised he had miscalculated the impact his trappings of chivalry would make. The uniforms, the martyr’s gifts, the awards and decorations, the titles, even his language were ridiculed. He decided to tone down his rhetoric, referring to himself from then on as a foot soldier rather than a messiah.

‘Just to put you fully in the picture,’ he told Tørrissen, ‘I have never behaved threateningly to anyone, apart from a window of three hours on the 22nd. I am polite and pleasant to everybody. The picture the media has constructed of me as a psychotic monster who eats babies for breakfast…’

He laughed. Tørrissen noted that the laugh was self-deprecating, reasonable and appropriate.

‘… is pure rubbish and there’s no need for you to be apprehensive about me. I look forward to our working together.’

Tørrissen asked him about his conduct during the open committal hearing ten days earlier, when Breivik had made a short speech. It provoked laughter from AUF members in the hall when he declared himself a knight of the indigenous Norwegian people. He called the murders defensive attacks, undertaken in self-defence, and demanded his immediate release. The laughter spread as he spoke, and after a minute had passed the judge halted him.

‘If you know me, you’ll realise that was just an act I put on,’ explained Breivik. ‘I am actually talking to a tiny group of people, a few thousand within Europe, though that number can grow. I know very well it’s a description of reality that’s wholly alien to most people. But it’s a show… I play my role. If I say I expect to be awarded the War Cross with Three Swords, I know I’m not going to be, of course. And when I say I expect to be released immediately, I know that isn’t really going to happen either. I’m only following the path I’ve set out all along.’

‘But why not just be yourself?’

‘In a way I am myself, because I represent an entirely different picture of the world, which has been unknown since the Second World War. It exists in Japan and South Korea, but it’s alien to a Marxist society.’

‘What you call a Marxist society is really more of a social democratic society, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t mind calling it a social democratic society. I can tell the two apart. But when I say cultural Marxist, that’s to be provocative. In a way, it’s a domination technique. They use such techniques on the left and they like calling other people obscurantists, so now we’re using those tactics against the left. By the way, are you familiar with the seven questions I asked the previous experts?’

‘No, but you can ask me them now.’

‘When something big like 22 July happens in a country, it’s impossible not to be emotionally affected. The psychiatry profession has no experience of politically motivated aggressors, and that’s a major problem. You don’t know how militant nationalists think, or how militant Islamists think, or for that matter how militant Marxists think. It’s a separate world that I think very few psychiatrists have any knowledge of. You weren’t taught about it at college, and I don’t know if there’s any additional professional training available either. Maybe you can tell me about that.’

Tørrissen could not. He replied that his mandate was to find out whether the subject was ill; that is to say, whether he was suffering from a severe mental illness or not.

Psychiatry’s great weakness was that it had no response to religion or ideology, argued Breivik. ‘If it had been up to your profession, all priests would no doubt have been shut up in lunatic asylums because they had had a calling from God!’ he laughed, and described at some length how Islamists prayed five times a day to become fearless warriors, and how they got to have sex with seventy-two virgins in Paradise if they were killed. For his part, he had used Bushido meditation. He said that this involved manipulating your own mind to suppress fear, but also other feelings. ‘That’s the reason I seem de-emotionalised. I couldn’t have survived otherwise.’

Nor should the psychiatrists underestimate the importance of what he had learnt from al-Qaida, he said. Islamic militants were his source of inspiration. He was like them. A politically motivated aggressor.

In contrast to the first two psychiatrists, Terje Tørrissen and Agnar Aspaas studied the language and opinions of websites on which Breivik had been active, such as Gates of Vienna and document.no.

‘You can’t isolate the ideological, even if you decide to leave it out of a report,’ Breivik had stressed.

Just a couple of days before the trial, the new report was presented. This pair of psychiatrists concluded that Breivik suffered from dissocial personality disorder with narcissistic traits. He had a ‘grandiose perception of his own importance’ and saw himself as ‘unique’. He had a vast appetite for ‘praise, success and power’ and was totally lacking in ‘emotional empathy, remorse or affective expression’ vis-à-vis those touched by the acts he had committed.

In legal terms, a narcissistic personality disorder means that a person is criminally responsible, because the disorder is not considered to be based in psychosis. Tørrissen and Aspaas concluded that Breivik was not psychotic either at the time of the acts of which he was accused, nor during the observation. He could therefore be held criminally liable.

These two reports were then pitched against each other as the case opened on the morning of Monday 16 April 2012.

For weeks the rain had deluged bare trees. Dirty grey snow had melted and run along the streets, leaving in its wake the detritus of winter, grass covered by the previous year’s rotting leaves, and a season’s dog mess. The city had still not had its spring cleaning.

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.

Having people uncover the cracks in him.

Tørrissen once asked him about vulnerability. ‘Do you have a vulnerable side?’ the psychiatrist had asked. ‘Not being loved,’ Breivik answered. ‘That must be every person’s greatest fear, not being loved.’

Now he hoped for one thing. That his mother would not appear in the witness box. She had been called to give evidence, but she had asked to be excused. She was his Achilles heel, he had told the psychiatrists. She was the only one who could disconcert him now, bring the whole thing down. That was why he had not agreed to any prison visits from her before the trial. Up to now, everything had gone as he wanted it. The eyes of the whole world were on him.

The public prosecutors and public advocates returned to their places after the handshakes. He sat down.

He sits down.

It was nine o’clock.

The judges come in.

The court rose; the two public prosecutors, the defence lawyers, the public advocates, the public, the press, everybody rose, except for one: the defendant.

He remains in his seat. He smiles.

That is to say, he tried to conceal a smile. He sat with his legs planted wide apart. Everyone could see that he was not in shackles beneath the desk. He shifted round in the comfortable chair, which had a good, broad back. He looked round, settled himself into the chair. His eyes scanned the rows of seats. Suddenly his lips curved into yet another smile. He had seen someone he knew. Kristian, his former friend and partner, was in the front row. What was he doing here?

Well, the tabloid Verdens Gang had invited him to use one of their places so he could tell their readers afterwards what it was like to see his former friend again. Both of them averted their eyes.

‘The court is in session!’

There was a quick rap of the gavel on the bench. The head judge, Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen, made an authoritative figure. She was an experienced judge, around fifty years of age. She had short, greying hair, clear blue eyes and a thin mouth. At the neck of her robe was a hint of a lace blouse.

The accused wanted to set the agenda from the start, and spoke immediately.

‘I do not recognise the Norwegian court or law because your mandate has come from parties that support multiculturalism.’

He cleared his throat. The judge looked straight at him and was about to say something when he continued.

‘I am also aware that you are a friend of Gro Harlem Brundtland’s sister.’

His voice was high-pitched.

The judge asked if that meant he wished to raise a concrete objection to her participation in the proceedings. The defence team shook their heads. Not as far as they knew.

No, he did not want that. He simply wanted to make a point.

Wenche Arntzen set out the procedural rules for the trial. She was rapid and concise. There was no time to lose here. She asked the accused to stand and confirm his full name and date of birth.

‘Anders Behring Breivik, born 13th of February, 1979.’

He appeared meek now, and spoke in little more than a mumble.

When the judge came to his profession, she said, ‘Well, you are not working.’

Breivik protested.

‘I am a writer and I work from prison,’ he said.

He was instructed to sit down.

Then the charges were to be read out by the female half of the prosecution duo, the blonde and elegant Inga Bejer Engh.

‘Please go ahead,’ said Arntzen.

Bejer Engh got to her feet. She appeared calm. In a clear voice she began to read out the charges: that he stood accused under the terrorism paragraph, §147a of the Norwegian Penal Code.

The Oslo public prosecution hereby judges that Anders Behring Breivik, in accordance with §39 or the Penal Code… should be transferred for mandatory psychiatric health care… for committing while in a psychotic state an act otherwise punishable by law.

In other words, the prosecution agreed with the first psychiatric report, which took the view that Breivik was sick and could be treated.

The charges continued. An act of terrorism, read Bejer Engh. An explosion. Loss of human life. Premeditated killings. Under severely aggravated circumstances.

The bomb detonated at 15.25:22 with violent explosive force and resulting pressure wave, intentionally putting a large number of people in the buildings of the government quarter or at street level in direct mortal danger, and caused massive material destruction… in the explosion he killed the following eight people…

The prosecutor read rhythmically, even expressively. All the syllables were to be enunciated, all the names were to be heard. There were no hesitations; she had practised these names. These names meant something. These people had lived. They were the most important people in this court case. They were the ones it was all about.

He was at the entrance to the Tower Block, near the van, and died instantly of massive injuries caused by the pressure wave and the impact of splinters/objects.

She was at the entrance to the Tower Block, near the van, and died instantly of massive injuries caused by the pressure wave and the impact of splinters/objects.

There was only a pronoun to distinguish between the accounts of the two lawyers’ fates. They were there, precisely there, in the worst place imaginable, when the bomb exploded. They were born in 1979 and 1977.

The public prosecutor took a sip of water. The glass beside her was continually emptied and refilled. Apart from a stifled sob after some of the names, the room was silent. Nobody cried openly. The bereaved put their hands over their mouths so as not to make a noise. They lowered their heads so as not to be seen.

The public prosecutor came to Utøya.

He was in front of the café building.

He was at the campsite.

He was in the small hall.

She was in the main hall.

She was on Lovers’ Path.

He was in the wood east of the schoolhouse.

She was at Stoltenberget.

She was at Bolsjevika.

He was at the pumping station.

She was on the shoreline at the southern tip.

He was found at a depth of six metres.

He ran away and fell down a cliff.

All sixty-nine killed on Utøya were part of the charge.

In addition to the killings enumerated above, he attempted to kill a number of other people but was not successful in his intentions, said the prosecutor.

A reporter from a Swedish news agency murmured, almost to himself, on hearing for the first time where the bullets had entered: The back of the head, they were shot in the back of the head. The elderly man wrote it down in his report. At intervals of just a few seconds he sent new lines to his desk in Stockholm, where they corrected his typos, edited the text if it was too explicit, and swiftly sent it out to subscribers, TV stations and local papers all over Sweden. The man added a phrase after his first, They were shot in the back of the head. He tapped at his keys and sent some words of explanation to the subscribers – as they fled. They were shot in the back of the head, as they fled.

The accused did not look at Bejer Engh while she was reading; he kept his eyes down. But his defence lawyers had their eyes on her, listening. There was nothing else to prepare for that day. Now it was just their names and ages that were to sink in. Born in 1995, in 1993, in 1994, in 1993, in 1994, in 1993, 1996, 1992, 1997, 1996…

Breivik had his head down. Sometimes he moved his lips, sucked them, fiddled with his pen, a special pen, soft, so he could not injure anyone with it; himself, for example.

Bejer Engh had moved on from the dead to the living.

It brought no relief. Amputations. Projectiles in the body. Injuries to internal organs. Damage to the optic nerve. Extensive tissue damage. Cerebral haemorrhage. Open fractured skull. Removal of the colon. Removal of a kidney. Projectile fragments in the chest wall. Skin transplant. Fractured eye socket. Permanent nerve damage. Shrapnel embedded in the face. Stomach, liver, left lung and heart damaged. Removal of fragments from the face. Arm amputated at the elbow. Amputation of arm and leg on the same side.

These were war injuries.

The events on Utøya generated a huge amount of fear in sections of the Norwegian population. The accused has committed extremely serious crimes on a scale not previously experienced in our country in modern times.

Bejer Engh had almost reached the end.

Breivik opted to continue looking down. He was later to call this considerate. He didn’t want to make this a worse day for the bereaved than it already was.

At half past ten, the prosecutor finished and the accused was allowed to speak. He stood up and said: ‘I admit the actions but I do not admit guilt, and I plead the principle of necessity.’

The court adjourned.

After the break, a thin-haired man took the stand. His movements were free and easy, he seemed self-assured. This was the other prosecutor, thirty-eight-year-old Svein Holden. He was to make the opening statement about the defendant’s life, and his crimes.

While the accused had sat expressionless throughout the account of his killing of seventy-seven people, he now appeared to relax. He looked round the room while the public prosecutor was going through his life.

Months of police interrogations had produced several thousand closely written pages. What was true, what was untrue, what was significant, what was unimportant, ascertaining all this was the prosecution’s task. Much of what Breivik had said had been followed up and checked, and the police had not found him to be telling overt lies.

But there were questions he answered evasively, such as those about the group to which he claimed to belong. The prosecution had concluded that the network Breivik maintained was set up in London in 2002, the Knights Templar, in which he said he was a commander, did not exist.

This was sheer fabrication.

Or was it fantasy? Delusion?

The question was, did Breivik believe it to exist?

Again, was this a madman or a political terrorist?

This was to be the central question throughout the ten weeks of the trial.

Holden argued for the former. He was of the opinion that a marked shift took place in Breivik’s life in 2006. Breivik stopped paying his subscription to the Progress Party, he closed down the company selling fake diplomas, he lost a lot of money on shares and he moved back home to his mother. He started playing computer games at all hours.

On a big screen behind the public advocates, a picture came up of Breivik’s room. This was how he had left it on 22 July, and how the police had found and sealed it later that day.

There was an open can of Red Bull on the desk. A safe on the floor. A printer. Post-it notes everywhere. Graffiti on the walls. An unmade bed.

The picture had been taken on a sunny day. Streaks of light found their way through the closed blind.

When he moved in here his life was unravelling, was the impression Holden gave. Was this when his delusions started to develop? At this time, Breivik was playing hardcore in World of Warcraft as Justiciar Andersnordic.

‘Is it a violent game?’ the judge interrupted.

‘It depends how one defines violence,’ replied Holden, and promised to come back to the question a little later.

It was after a year or two of gaming that he started to write his compendium, claimed Holden, that is to say, he authored little of it himself, but borrowed freely from what was available on blogs out there. Holden spoke at some length about the three books in the compendium, saying that he wanted to concentrate on the third, where Breivik himself was more present in what was written. This was the declaration of war, in which the reader is exhorted to join a civil war, and where notes on preparations and the instructions for making the bomb are included, Holden told the courtroom.

The relatives sat in silence, heads bowed, listening. The journalists tried to catch every word, some of them tweeting constantly. The moment Holden’s words were out of his mouth, they were on the internet.

A heavily made-up CNN reporter in the first row sat listening with her headset carefully placed over her hair. A sultry, masculine musk spread from the back rows. It was the al-Jazeera reporter, who had just come back in after a live broadcast. Yes, the world was watching today.

Some of the AUF leadership were more engrossed in their mobile phones than in what the public prosecutor was saying. It was as if they did not really want to hear this, all this about the perpetrator and his life. For them, he did not exist as a person, insane or not, even with him sitting in front of them. It had been so abrupt, so acutely painful. Now they wanted to move on. They wanted to get away. Away from him. Nor did the AUF have any official attitude on the question of his soundness of mind; it was nothing to do with them, the constitutional state would have to deal with that. The crucial thing was that he must never come out. Messages were sent and received on their phones, all set to silent.

Holden started to speak about acquisitions. Weapons, equipment, chemicals for the bomb, fertiliser, uniform. The police had dressed a mannequin in the outfit the defendant had been wearing on 22 July, including the spurred boots caked in mud.

Breivik smiled when he saw a picture of the badge he had attached to the sleeve of his uniform. Multiculti Traitor Hunting Permit, it said. Valid for category A B C only.

Holden showed pictures of Vålstua farm on a bright summer’s day; he showed pictures of the Electrolux blenders, the Chinese bags. The police had established that the bomb had been made exactly as Breivik described in the manifesto. They had carried out a test detonation of the same type of bomb, and Holden again showed pictures.

Breivik followed all this attentively. He was at a seminar about himself.

‘He also made a film,’ said Holden. ‘The accused uploaded a movie trailer from the Window Movie Maker programme.’ The film comprised ninety-nine images cut together.

Sacred tones filled room 250. An iconic black and white photograph appeared on the screen; the Red Army soldier planting the Soviet flag on the Reichstag in 1945. The birth of cultural Marxism, according to the film. Image after image showed post-war Europe being taken over by Marxists. The church-style music was interspersed with electronica. Then the soundtrack changed. The quarter-tones of Arabic music streamed from the courtroom loudspeakers and a man’s voice sang a lament, amanamananah. There were pictures of veiled women, pregnant with grenades rather than babies; there were pictures of hordes of refugees on their way to Europe. Then came hope for change, marked by large, single-word captions: strength, honour, sacrifice and martyrdom. Medieval motifs and Knights Templar were accompanied by music from the computer game Age of Conan. The finale, entitled ‘New Beginning’, depicted the ideal society. The film concluded with a single sentence: Islam will again be banished from Europe.

Breivik’s eyes had narrowed and were filled with tears. His mouth was drawn upwards towards his nose. His face flushed and he wept without shame, staring at the images as they faded out.

Until then, no one had seen him shed a single tear. Now he cried openly.

‘Are you all right?’ asked the female lawyer seated on his left, according to the lip-readers hired by Verdens Gang.

‘Yes, fine,’ replied Breivik. ‘I just wasn’t prepared for that.’

For the screening of his film. His. Film.

The court took a break.

In the hall outside, the journalists tried to find an explanation for his tears.

‘He feels great, tender, warm love for himself. When he sees his own product he is terribly moved. That is how I interpret it,’ said a psychologist to the media.

The tracks from Age of Conan were sung in old Norwegian by the singer Helene Bøksle. ‘Picture it… you hear this song as you battle to wipe out one flank of the enemy…’ he had written in Book 3. ‘That angelic voice singing to you from heaven… that voice is all you can hear as everything light turns dark and you enter the kingdom of heaven… that must really be the most fantastic way to die a glorious martyr’s death.’

For a moment, he had been a knight again.

It was half past one when the prosecutor showed a picture of the island, 500 metres long and 350 metres wide, given to the AUF as a gift in 1950.

Breivik stifled a yawn.

Holden related the course of events from the time Breivik was transported over to the island on MS Thorbjørn. When the prosecutor reached what happened at the café building, he said he was going to play one of the emergency calls that was made from there.

Every time Breivik’s lips curled into a smile, he doggedly attempted to moderate it. This time he hid the muscle movement by sucking his lower lip.

A dialling tone resounded from the loudspeaker system, into the room and into seventeen district courts.

A receiver was lifted, and a cool voice said, ‘Police emergency line.’

‘Hi, there’s shooting on Utøya in Buskerud in the Tyrifjord,’ said a girl in a broad accent. Her breathing was louder than her words. When she called she had just seen her boyfriend shot and killed. It was 17.26 and Breivik had been on the island for ten minutes. He had just entered the café building. The girl, whose name was Renate Tårnes, was hiding in a toilet.

The policeman asked if there were any more shots. Renate gasped for breath before she answered.

‘Yes, it’s going on the whole time. There’s total panic. He’s in here.’

The girl had lowered her voice to a whisper. She did not say anything more, just held up her phone so the operator could hear what she was hearing.

There was a sudden scream on the recording. Another. Several more. The courtroom was stock-still. Not a single movement. Not even the tapping of keys. You were there, outside it, yes, safe on a seat in the room, and yet you were there, caught up in the massacre. You heard the sound of Breivik’s weapons. Initially, the shots were sporadic. They rang out singly, then a number in swift succession. Then more and more.

The recording lasted for three minutes. Holden played it all.

Three minutes. Fifty shots. Thirteen killed.

Many in the courtroom were crying.

Breivik looked down at a fingernail.

Before he glanced back up.

The Monologue

Day two. It was the day he had been preparing for.

Later, many others would set their mark on the case: the prosecution, the witnesses, experts, the defence. But today, the floor was his alone.

He walked slowly to the witness box. In his hands he had a pile of papers. He laid them on the table in front of him and adjusted his cufflinks.

‘You must restrict yourself to the truth in matters pertinent to your case,’ the judge said severely.

‘Dear judge Arntzen, I request that I be allowed to set out the framework of my defence, and I hope you will not interrupt me; I have a list of points—’

‘You must lower the microphone a little for the transmission to the other courts to work properly.’

He was ready. This was the book launch.

‘I stand here today as a representative of the Norwegian and European resistance movement. I speak on behalf of Norwegians who do not want our rights as an indigenous population to be taken away from us. The media and the prosecutors maintain that I carried out the attacks because I am a pathetic, malicious loser, that I have no integrity, am a notorious liar with no morals, am mentally ill and should therefore be forgotten by other cultural conservatives in Europe. They say I have dropped out of working life, that I am narcissistic, antisocial, am prey to bacteria phobia, have had an incestuous relationship with my mother; that I suffer from deprivation of a father, am a child murderer, a baby murderer, despite the fact that I killed no one under fourteen. That I am cowardly, homosexual, paedophile, necrophiliac, Zionist, racist, a psychopath and a Nazi. All these claims have been made. That I am mentally and physically retarded with an IQ of around eighty.’

He read rapidly. He had a great deal to get through. The meaning of the words was more important than how they were read. ‘I am not surprised by these characterisations. I expected it. I knew the cultural elite would ridicule me. But this is bordering on farce.’

He glanced up and then looked down at his papers again.

‘The answer is simple. I have carried out the most sophisticated and spectacular attack in Europe since the Second World War. I and my nationalist brothers and sisters represent all that they fear. They want to scare others off doing the same thing.’

The judges were watching him closely, listening attentively. How was he when let off the leash? Did he ramble? Was he consistent? This was the first time they had heard him speaking freely. How would he fill the half-hour allocated to him?

Norway and Europe were suffocated by total conformity, he told them. And what they knew as democracy was in reality a cultural Marxist dictatorship. This was familiar ground now.

‘Nationalists and cultural conservatives were broken-backed after the fall of the Axis powers. Europe never had a McCarthy, so the Marxists infiltrated schools and the media. This also brought us feminism, gender quotas, the sexual revolution, a transformed church, deconstruction of social norms and a socialist, egalitarian ideal of society. Norway is suffering from cultural self-contempt as a result of multicultural ideology.’

The defendant proposed that there be a referendum asking the following question: Do you consider it undemocratic that the Norwegian people have never been asked about Norway becoming a multiethnic state? Do you consider it undemocratic that Norway takes in so many Africans and Asians that Norwegians risk becoming a minority in their own capital?

‘Nationalist and culturally conservative parties are boycotted by the media. Our opinions are seen as inferior, we are second-class citizens and this is not a proper democracy! Look at the Swedish party Sverigedemokraterna and what is happening to them. In Norway, the media have conducted a systematic smear campaign against the Progress Party for twenty years and will go on doing so. Seventy per cent of British people see immigration as a major problem and think Great Britain has become a dysfunctional country. Seventy per cent are dissatisfied with multiculturalism.’

‘Are you reading from your manifesto now?’ asked the judge.

‘No,’ replied Breivik, and went on: ‘How many people feel the same in Norway, do you think? More and more cultural conservatives are realising that the democratic struggle achieves nothing. Then it is just a short step to taking up arms. When peaceful revolution is made impossible, then violent revolution is the only option.’

He read in a monotone, without any sense of involvement. If he was animated inside, it did not show on the surface. It was like his time in the Progress Party. Even when he was on the podium, he had failed to inspire, failed to generate any enthusiastic applause.There was a bitter tone to his voice.

‘People who call me wicked have misunderstood the difference between brutal and wicked. Brutality is not necessarily wicked. Brutality can have good intentions.’

People in the rows of seats sighed and shrugged. Some AUF members had started whispering together.

‘If we can force them to change direction by executing seventy people, then that is a contribution to preventing the loss of our ethnic group, our Christianity, our culture. It will also help to prevent a civil war that could result in the death of hundreds of thousands of Norwegians. It is better to commit minor barbarity than major barbarity.’

He took a breath and embarked on a discourse about what he termed the Balkanisation of Norway and the witch hunt against cultural conservatives.

‘Are the AUF and the Labour Party doing this because they are wicked, or because they are naive? And if they are only naive – shall we forgive them or punish them? The answer is that most AUF members have been indoctrinated and brainwashed. By their parents. By the school curriculum. By adults in the Labour Party. Still these were not innocent civilian children, but political activists. Many were in leadership positions. The AUF is very much like the Hitlerjugend. Utøya was a political indoctrination camp. It was—’

‘I must ask you to moderate your words out of consideration for the survivors and the bereaved,’ Arntzen said sharply.

‘The certainty of my imprisonment does not frighten me. I was born in a prison, I have lived my whole life in a prison in which there is no freedom of expression, where opposition is not allowed and I am expected to applaud the destruction of my people. This prison is called Norway. It doesn’t matter whether I am incarcerated in Skøyen or in Ila. It is just as pressing wherever you live, because in the end the whole country will be deconstructed into the multicultural hell we call Oslo.’

‘Are you near the end, Breivik?’ asked the judge. He had exceeded his limit of half an hour.

‘I am on page six of thirteen.’

‘You must start finishing off now,’ said Arntzen.

‘My whole defence hinges on being able to read the whole thing.’ He took a sip of water and went on reading in a monotone. ‘According to the Central Office of Statistics, immigrants will be in the majority in Oslo by 2040. And that does not take into account third-generation immigrants, adopted children, people who have no documents or who are here illegally. Forty-seven per cent of those born in the hospitals of Oslo are not ethnic Norwegians. The same is true of the majority of children starting school.’

The three male forensic psychiatrists sat looking at Breivik, while Synne Sørheim made copious notes on her laptop.

‘European leftists assert that Muslims are peaceful and against violence. This is lies and propaganda.’

‘Breivik, I must ask you to wind up,’ Arntzen said urgently.

‘It is not possible to abbreviate the framework of my defence,’ he replied, adding, ‘If I’m not allowed to set out the framework, there’s no point my saying anything at all.’

The judge was determined to keep a tight rein from the start. She could not ease off on day two.

‘There is a consensus between European elites and Muslims to implement the multicultural project in order to deconstruct Norwegian and European culture and thereby turn everything on its head. Good becomes evil and evil becomes good. In Oslo, aggressive cultures like Islam will increasingly predominate, spreading like cancer. Is this so hard to understand? Our ethnic group is the most precious and the most vulnerable, our Christianity and our freedom. Ultimately we will be left sitting there with our sushi and flatscreen TVs, but we will have lost the most precious—’

‘Breivik!’ said the judge. She pronounced his name abruptly, almost without vowels so it sounded like ‘Brvk!’

‘I have five pages left.’

‘This goes far beyond what was requested yesterday,’ said Arntzen, addressing Lippestad.

‘I understand the court, but request that he be allowed to go on,’ said Lippestad, but he also asked Breivik to cut down his text. He stressed that a limit of five days was set for his defence.

‘This was originally twenty pages but I managed to compress it into thirteen. There’s a lot of talk about these five days I’ve got. I never asked for five days, I only asked for an hour! That’s this hour I’ve got now. It’s critically important for me to explain all this,’ exclaimed Breivik.

‘Go on!’ said Arntzen.

‘Thank you!’ said Breivik.

‘Then we come to another European problem. Demands such as sharia law. Norway spends its oil money on social security benefits for immigrants. Saudi Arabia has spent one hundred billion dollars on Islamic centres in Europe and financed fifteen hundred mosques and two thousand schools…’

Public advocate Mette Yvonne Larsen, responsible for liaison between the courtroom in Oslo and the district courts, broke in and said that victims and relatives of victims in the regional courtrooms had taken offence at the fact that Breivik was allowed to go on for so long.

‘You have heard how the bereaved relatives are reacting. Will you show consideration for that?’ asked the judge.

‘I will,’ replied the accused.

‘Is it relevant to you?’

‘It is relevant to show consideration.’

‘In that case I ask you to do so and to conclude as quickly as possible.’

‘I have three pages left,’ said Breivik. ‘If I’m not allowed to read to the end, I shall not account for myself to the court at all!’

Then prosecutor Svein Holden spoke. ‘We consider it important that Breivik be allowed to continue.’

He went on.

‘Oslo is a city in ruins. I grew up in the West End, but I see that the city authorities are buying apartments, public property, for Muslims, who create ghettos. Many Muslims despise Norwegian culture, feminism, the sexual revolution, decadence. It starts with demands for special dispensations and ends with demands for self-rule. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse are heroes acclaimed by the indigenous people of the United States – they fought against General Custer. Were they wicked or heroic? American history books describe them as heroes, not terrorists. Meanwhile, nationalists are called terrorists. Isn’t that hypocritical and highly racist?’

The judge regarded him intently.

‘Norwegians are the indigenous people of Norway! Norway supports those who champion the indigenous peoples of Bolivia and Tibet, but not of our own country. We refuse to accept being colonised. I understand that my info is difficult to understand, because the propaganda tells you the opposite. But soon everybody will realise. Mark Twain said that in a time of change, a patriot is seen as a failure. Once he has been proved right, everyone wants to be with him, because then it costs nothing to be a patriot. This trial is about finding out the truth. The documentation and examples I have presented here are true. So how can what I have done be illegal?’

The psychiatrist Synne Sørheim was chewing gum as she typed her notes. The three men sharing the table with her all had their chins propped on folded hands, observing what happened in front of them.

Arntzen’s fellow judges were leaning back, slightly sunken into the chairs with the tall black backs. Their eyes were fixed on the accused, while their faces were calm, revealing nothing. The corners of their mouths slowly sank into a resting position as Breivik’s speech dragged on.

The accused drank from a glass of water.

‘Have you finished, Breivik?’ asked Arntzen.

‘I’ve got one page to go.’

He set down the glass.

‘Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron have admitted that multiculturalism has failed in Europe. It doesn’t work. In Norway, the opposite is happening: we’re going in for more mass immigration from Asia and Africa.’

He looked down at his papers and hesitated for a couple of seconds, then exclaimed, ‘Well I’m censoring myself now, right, just so that’s clear!

‘We are the first drops of water heralding the coming storm! The purifying storm. Rivers of blood will run through the cities of Europe. My brothers and sisters will win. How can I be so sure? People are living with blinkers of prosperity. They are going to lose everything, their daily lives will be full of suffering and they will lose their identities, so now it is important for more patriots to shoulder responsibility, as I have done. Europe needs more heroes!’

His presentation had been polished in advance and his arguments built logically on each other, within his own universe, and he could not resist, as in the manifesto, repeating the best.

‘Thomas Jefferson said the following: The tree of freedom must be watered from time to time. With the blood of patriots and tyrants…’

He cleared his throat.

‘I’m almost at the end. The political elite in our country are so brazen that they expect us to applaud this deconstruction. And those who do not applaud are branded as evil racists and Nazis. This is the real madness – they are the ones who should be the subjects of psychiatric evaluation and be branded as sick, not me. It isn’t rational to flood the country with Africans and Asians to the point where our own culture is lost. This is the real madness. This is the real evil.’

He drew breath.

‘I acted on the principle of necessity on behalf of my people, my religion, my city and my country. I therefore demand to be acquitted of these charges. Those were the thirteen pages I had prepared.’

‘What is your own relationship with Christianity?’ asked the public advocate Siv Hallgren the following day. The lawyer, who had herself been a teenage mother, represented several of the bereaved relatives.

‘Well, I’m a militant Christian and not particularly religious. But I’m a bit religious. We want a Christian cultural heritage, Christian religious instruction in schools and a Christian framework for Europe.’

‘But what about you personally? Do you profess the Christian faith? Do you believe in the resurrection?’

‘I’m a Christian, I believe in God. I’m a bit religious, but not that religious.’

‘Have you read the Bible?’

‘Of course. I used to, back when we were taught about Christianity in school. Before it was abolished by the Labour Party.’

Hallgren asked him to define Norwegian culture. The one he had killed for, in order to preserve it.

‘You could… yes, you could say that the very heart of Norwegian culture is the Norwegian ethnic group.’

He hesitated for a moment, reflected and found the answer: ‘Everything that’s in Norway, from door handles to designs to beer labels to habits. It’s all culture. Phrases, ways of addressing people. Absolutely everything is culture.’

Said Breivik.

The Heart of the Matter

At the centre of the court case there was a beating heart.

The dead.

The murders had almost been pushed into the background by the discussions of the perpetrator’s psyche and ideas in the run-up to the trial. But it was the murders he was to be punished for, not the ideas.

Svein Holden and Inga Bejer Engh had been given responsibility for planning the trial the previous autumn. They were both young parents with a couple of children each and lived ordinary, privileged Norwegian lives. Holden went straight from leading a press conference about the first psychiatric report to the hospital for the birth of his second child.

The two public prosecutors spent a lot of time talking to the bereaved relatives and survivors as they planned the proceedings, fetched their children from nursery, prepared the trial, changed nappies, read interview transcripts, sang lullabies. Their meetings with other mothers and fathers only a few years older than them had a profound effect. Some were angry, others were weighed down by sorrow. Something was broken in all of them. The public prosecutors encountered both aggression and the story of my son. My daughter. Our child.

It was important both to retain the emotions and to keep them out of it. This was how the public prosecutors were reasoning as they asked themselves how best to set the parameters for the trial.

Svein Holden made a list:

Good contact with those affected.

Good procedures for the police.

Good overview of the trial.

Treat it like any other criminal case.

But it was not like any other criminal case. The scale was so large. Seventy-seven murders.

The Director of Public Prosecution had insisted that every single murder must be investigated. Time and place were to be established, when and how. Those who had lost their loved ones needed as much detail as possible; it was said to help in the healing process.

The police had learned from the response to the bombings in Madrid and London. In those trials, the cause and time of death were not established for each person, their individual fates were not treated as separate events by the court. They were simply referred to as victims of a terrorist attack.

The investigations must also be as thorough as possible so that they would stand up to potential conspiracy theories that might emerge in years to come.

Many wanted to make their mark on the trial. A campaign had started, pressing for all those who had been on Utøya and all those who had been in the government quarter to be named as victims in the charges. They had all been subjected to attempted murder, after all. In a standard trial, attempted murder would always be part of the charge.

The general rule was that if you were named in the charge, you also had to be called as a witness. It would exceed all time scales.

So where would they draw the line?

The two prosecutors were sitting in the office of the Director of Public Prosecution, counting. How many people were hit by projectiles in the government quarter? How many were hit by bullets on Utøya?

They ascertained the numbers and used that as the basis of who would be named in the charge. Those physically hit by metal or lead. In the government quarter there were nine, in addition to the eight who were killed. On Utøya there were thirty-three, on top of the sixty-nine killed.

The Director of Public Prosecutions made a few calculations; the timescale of the trial had already been established. It was to last ten weeks. Yes, it would work. They could all be called in as witnesses. There would be just enough time for that within the period they had at their disposal.

But how many had suffered direct harm in the terrorist attack?

With regard to the government quarter, they decided to write that ‘an additional two hundred people were physically injured by the explosion’. That included cuts, fractures and hearing damage. As for Utøya, they wanted to focus on the trauma suffered by many of the youngsters as a result of seeing people they knew murdered, of losing their friends.

No one was to be forgotten, even if they were not named.

In a standard murder trial, pictures of the dead person are shown on a screen in the courtroom. These are both general shots showing where the victim was found and close-ups documenting the cause of death.

Svein Holden took the view that the same should happen in the 22 July case. ‘That’s what you do in a criminal case,’ said Holden. ‘You show pictures. Business as usual.’ The pathologists agreed.

Bejer Engh was more sceptical. She was afraid it would be too violent. Again the public prosecutors sought the advice of the support group. The bereaved did not want any pictures at all. It would be too awful. In the government quarter some of the bodies were so badly damaged that only a few body parts remained. On Utøya, skulls were shattered, the victims smeared with blood and brains. The first set of pictures had been taken by the crime technicians on the path, in the woods, by the water’s edge or on the floor in the café. Later, when the dead underwent autopsies, they were photographed once more, their bodies cleaned of blood so that the gunshot wounds were more evident. These were the two sets of pictures usually shown to a court.

The views of the next of kin persuaded Holden. The public prosecutors decided they would put the photographic evidence in folders, which would only be given to members of the court.

Inger Bejer Engh wondered how she would cope with the pictures herself. Should she just take a quick glance when she had to? Or should she keep looking at them until she grew immune?

All the bodies of those shot and killed on Utøya had been X-rayed. A three-dimensional picture was generated of each one. These pictures revealed where every bullet fragment had expanded in the tissue. One could detect the bullet in a heart, splinters scattered through a brain, metal that had sliced carotid arteries or entered spines. One could track the path of every bullet, to find out which of them was the lethal one.

The medical experts were preoccupied with showing the injuries as clearly as possible and wanted to display the three-dimensional images of the victims in court.

‘We can’t show their bodies on a screen!’ objected Bejer Engh.

Everything that was shown in room 250 would be broadcast to other courtrooms and there was no guarantee there would not be someone there with an iPhone, taking pictures.

‘What shall we do then, use drawings?’ asked Holden.

In conversations with the pathologists, Holden came up with the idea of a dummy they could point to. They would need a gender-neutral dummy and a pointer.

All right. They would order a dummy.

But where was it to be positioned? On the floor? On a stand of some kind? On a turntable? The dummy had to represent seventy-seven different people. It was important that it be handled in a dignified way.

And what should the dummy look like? What colour would its skin be?

It could not be white. How would the parents of the non-white victims react?

Nor could it be black; that would create the wrong impression too.

They reached a decision.

The dummy would be grey.

It was 8 May. The time was eleven a.m. The tables in the cafeteria, a short distance from room 250, were emptying because all who had been sitting there were heading back to the courtroom. In the recess the cafeteria had been taken over by a loud group of people. They sat a little closer to each other than the canteen users normally did, laughed rather more often and made more noise. They all had the same shade of hair, of skin, darker than most of those in the foyer area, and there were several generations of them together. They had ordered coffee and drunk water. They were family. They were going in for Bano.

They were Kurds, from Norway, Sweden and Iraq. Few of Bano’s closest relations had been able to get visas for her funeral; their applications could not be processed in time. Bano was buried the day after she was identified. She was the first Muslim ever to be laid to rest on Nesodden. A female priest officiated in the church and an imam spoke at the burial.

The court case had been planned long in advance. Now her family were here for her.

Since the start of May, the court had been going through twelve autopsy reports a day. In addition to the submission of evidence about the injuries, every victim was remembered with a picture and a text chosen by the bereaved. It gave this first week in May a sense of ceremony. On this particular day, the court had reached Utøya victim number 31.

Places had been reserved for the relatives. An interpreter sat ready in the booth. Bayan tightly held the hand of Mustafa, who was sitting beside her.

The judge asked Gøran Dyvesveen, the forensic technician from Kripos, to speak slowly and clearly so the interpreter would not miss anything. He promised to do so. It was eleven minutes past eleven.

‘Bano Rashid was on Lovers’ Path. She died of gunshot wounds to the head,’ said Dyvesveen. Three of the judges swung round to the shelves behind them to find the file with the picture of Bano. They could see her in several pictures in the file, lying on her side on the undulating path. They could see the general view of the murder victims lying close, close together, almost on top of each other. In one of the pictures, the ten were covered by woollen blankets. It made them look like a big lump on the path. It seemed they had come together for protection, there in their final moments.

Bano’s uncle, Bayan’s brother, was sitting on his sister’s other side and had also gripped hold of her hand. Soon the whole row was holding hands. Sitting in front of the adults were Lara and Ali, among their cousins. They too were squeezing each other’s hands.

On the wall of the courtroom was a screen, on which a picture of the path was shown – the scene of the killings, but without the victims. A red dot indicated where Bano had been found.

‘The dot shows where her head was,’ said the forensic technician.

Then his medical colleague Åshild Vege went over to the dummy, which was covered in a velvety kind of material. Grey velvet.

Vege went through the injuries inflicted on Bano. ‘Bano died of gunshot wounds to the head. These caused instantaneous loss of consciousness and swift death.’

The same information was displayed on the screen on the wall. The eighteen-year-old’s name and where the bullets had hit her.

Holden was a stickler for aesthetic impression in the courtroom. He wanted all the posters, all the graphs, everything that the forensic technicians, the expert witnesses and the pathologists brought with them to be linguistically correct and to be proofread one last time before they were shown. Holden insisted that everything be in the same black type in a font offering as little distraction as possible: Times New Roman.

Everything in court was to look neat and tidy.

The caption describing Bano’s gunshot wounds was replaced by two pictures of her. Her parents had found it hard to decide which picture to send to the court when they were asked, so they sent two. One showed a smiling Bano in her bunad from Trysil. The other showed a smiling Bano in traditional Kurdish costume.

‘Bano was born in the realm of A Thousand and One Nights,’ began her public advocate. ‘When Bano was seven, she fled the war in Iraq with her family. Everyone who knew her was sure she was really going to make something of her life…’

The lawyer’s voice shook. Mette Yvonnne Larsen knew Bano well, had known her for many years, because her daughter was Bano’s classmate and one of her closest friends. She read a short statement about the things that had engaged and enthused Bano and said she had been posthumously elected to the local council in Nesodden.

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.

Viljar was able to retell the tall stories Martin had recounted on that sixth night, the night the doctors said he came closest to death, when he grew colder and colder. Every heartbeat had been an exertion. His continuing pulse a succession of gifts. Viljar had been somewhere in among it all, the whole time; he remembered the cold and how much he had shivered. He recalled the hugs and the tears, and that he had wanted to respond, wanted to smile, wanted to open his eyes and laugh, but his body would not obey. It was too exhausted. And he had been so cold.

And then, when he woke up properly, he realised before they said it. So he said it himself.

‘I know Anders would have been here now, and Simon, if…’

Viljar looked at Martin.

‘They would at least have sent some kind of message, if they…’

Martin nodded. The tears flowed.

‘… had been… They’re dead, aren’t they?’

Viljar had missed Anders’s and Simon’s funerals. They were held the week Viljar turned eighteen. Jens Stoltenberg attended Simon’s funeral. At Anders’s funeral, Lars Bremnes performed his song ‘If I Could Write in the Heavens’.

Viljar stayed down in Oslo for a series of operations. It was only in October, three months after he had been shot, that they let him travel back to Svalbard.

He slept a lot. It was a real effort to regain his strength. He was a skinny teenager to start with, and had now lost twenty kilos. A red scar ran from the top of his head and down one side. His eye socket had been rebuilt. He had been fitted with a glass eye and a prosthetic hand.

Life was anguish and loss. Fear of death could paralyse him without warning. Often he felt like half a person. Not because of what had happened to him, but because he had lost his best friends. So many unlived dreams!

Over the winter he got the letter summoning him to give evidence at the trial.

He lay awake at night thinking about what he ought to say to make it right. He tested out phrases on his classmates the next day.

‘You can shoot me as many times as you like! But you didn’t get anywhere!’ he tried. ‘I’m damn well going to show this ABB that I can pull through all right!’

One evening Johannes Buø’s family came round to see the Hanssens. Johannes, the fourteen-year-old judo enthusiast and Metallica fan, Torje’s best friend, was killed in the woods by the schoolhouse. Johannes had lived on the island for the past few years with his parents and brother Elias, three years his junior. His father was the director of arts and culture on Svalbard.When Johannes’s autopsy report was presented to the court at the beginning of May, the family went to Oslo to be there. Their places were behind the glass partition, so they found themselves staring at the back of the perpetrator’s head. Elias suddenly moved from his seat to sit on his own at the far end of the front row. When the court rose for a break the freckled little boy with corkscrew curls got to his feet and went right up to the glass wall in the corner. There he stood waiting. He had noticed that when Breivik left his place among the defence lawyers and made his way out, he had to look in that direction. He would have to walk straight towards Elias. They would be separated only by the glass. Then, as Breivik approached, the little brother was going to fix him with the foulest look he could muster. And so he did.

In the Hanssens’ living room, the Buø family did a sketch map of the courtroom for Viljar. ‘He’ll be sitting there,’ they indicated. ‘With his defence team. And you’ll sit here.’

They drew a square in the middle of the room. The witness box. They put in the judges, the prosecution and the public.

‘He’ll be sitting two metres away from you, can you handle that?’

‘The closer the better,’ said Viljar.

He would have to rehearse what he was going to say if he wanted to get through this. He had to leave his feelings out of it or he would not be able to pull it off. That was why he was practising, so he did not find himself faced with anything that would throw him, anything he could not to tackle, anything that might make him break down. He would not afford ABB that satisfaction.

He was trembling as the plane landed in Oslo. But he was ready now. He must not let them down – this was for Anders, this was for Simon, it was for what they had believed in. As so often before, he wondered what they would have said now. What advice they would have given him. Anders on the content, Simon on the style. Once when he had got stuck, he started dialling Anders’s number when he— Fuck! Anders is dead!

He had to do this alone. And he had to pull it off.

On 22 May, Viljar dressed in a black shirt and black trousers as befitted the gravity of the occasion. Over the shirt he wore a jacket in a dark blue. Around his right wrist he had a thin leather strap. He had stylish glasses with black frames. Nothing was left to chance when Viljar Robert Hanssen went to Oslo to give evidence.

He walked down the central aisle to the witness box with light steps. Breivik looked at him, as he always did when someone came in. Viljar caught his eye with a searing look, held it, focused, still held it.

‘Hah,’ thought Viljar. ‘Empty. Just like Johannes’s little brother said: “You won’t find anything in his eyes.”’

A gentle voice addressed him from the left. It was Inga Bejer Engh.

‘Can you start by telling us what happened to you on Utøya?’

Yes, he could.

‘I was at the campsite. My little brother was asleep in the tent. I went to the meeting in the main building to find out what had happened in Oslo. I remember talking to Simon Sæbø. I remember he said if this is something political, we aren’t safe here either.’

He said they had gathered up everyone from Troms. Then they heard bangs. So they started running.

‘We ran across Lovers’ Path. My little brother and I made our way down a sort of slope, cliff-edge thing. The bangs were getting nearer, and in the end they were really, really close.’

The prosecution asked to see a map of the steep slope. Viljar did his best to point. ‘Whether I was hit when I was jumping – here – or when I landed, I don’t know, but I ended up down there and my brother was close by.’

At times while Viljar was giving evidence Breivik whispered little comments to one of the trainee lawyers in his defence team.

‘Then I heard this crazy whistling sound in my right ear and I found myself by the edge of the water. I tried to get up several times, I was a bit sort of Bambi on the ice, you know, and I called out to my brother. But then I decided the best thing was just to lie down in the foetal position somewhere. I curled myself round a rock on the shoreline and stayed there. I was conscious the whole time. It was very strange being shot, it didn’t hurt – it was just unpleasant. A new kind of pain. I lay there and started trying to get my bearings. I looked at my fingers and saw they were only hanging on by scraps of skin. I realised I couldn’t see out of one eye and that something must be wrong there. I started running my hand over my head and eventually I came across something soft and then I touched my brain; I was feeling my own brain. It was a weird so I took my hand away pretty quick. I remember Simon Sæbø was lying there, but I didn’t know then that he was dead. I remember I talked to him, said it would be all right and we’d get through it together.’

‘Did you know him well?’

‘Very well.’

‘And you only found out later that he was dead?’

‘Yes. I think I just didn’t want to take it in… at the time. I remember it vividly, lying there, that… well, I’ve seen lots of bad American films about how important it is to keep breathing and stay awake. So I tried to go on talking, came out with lots of strange stuff. In the end I think I was burbling on about pirates or something.’

‘Did anyone talk to you?’

‘They shushed me. He must have come back again, I think, without me realising. So then they shushed me, like, “Please shut up!”’

‘Your brother, what happened to him?’

‘I lost track of him. The last thing I saw was him moving away from me. Like I was trying to get him to. I didn’t see him again after that, and that was the worst bit for me. I tried to distract myself by thinking about things I enjoyed in everyday life. I thought about going back home to Svalbard, and driving the snowmobile and girls and other things that are really great. I thought about all sorts of things except where my little brother was. For me, dying wasn’t an option and that was smart. Well, in a way I didn’t realise how badly injured I was. I remember I started to feel freezing and get spasms. I was shaking like mad. I remember, though I don’t know how long it lasted, that I passed out. I don’t know when that happened but I think it must have been a little while before they came for us.’

From that point, Viljar could not remember anything until he was taken aboard a boat. ‘The waves were knocking my back quite hard. There was a man beside me, asking, “What’s your name? Where do you live?” to keep me awake. I remember asking if they’d seen a small, red-haired boy. And he said no.’

‘Where did the bullets hit you?’

‘I was hit in the thigh, just a slight graze. And then there’s my fingers here, you can’t miss that, I was shot in the hand, and then it was my shoulder, all this up here was pulverised. Then I was shot in the forearm, this little scar, and then I was shot in the head. If that makes five, then that’s it.’

‘And the shot in the head, how has it affected you since?’

‘I lost this eye, but that’s useful: it means I don’t have to look over there.’

Viljar nodded towards the defendant, who was sitting to his right. It took a second or two, as if Breivik needed a little time to appreciate what the boy in the witness box had said before starting to smile. The whole room smiled.

‘But as for my brain and that…’ Viljar went on, ‘I’ve still got my wits about me.’

There were chuckles in the courtroom. A few people laughed out loud. A sense of release. Breivik was still smiling.

‘So we hear,’ said Beijer Engh. ‘And are things going to continue that way?’

Viljar had decided in advance what he was willing to share and what he was not. ‘Reasonably terribly, decently badly,’ he replied when asked how he was getting on at school. He could talk about phantom limb pain, operations on his head, the eye he could take in and out like a marble. But he wanted to keep what went on inside his mind to himself. The hell – he would not share that with ABB and the rest of Norway. He replied briefly to the prosecutor’s questions about how things were for him now.

‘Quite a challenge, all the anxiety and nerves,’ he said. ‘I only feel safe in a moving car. Anxiety and paranoia. I still seem to find things difficult. Not on Svalbard and maybe not in Tromsø, but I find it unpleasant being in Oslo. Being here now.’

He paused. ‘I had to cancel my place at an AUF event because I got too scared to go. It’s hard. Life has really changed,’ he said, and told the court about everything he had had to relearn: holding a pen, tying his shoelaces. He who had been so active, played football, drove snowmobiles, went skiing, loved everything that was fast and exciting, now he could do none of that. He still had fragments of the bullet inside his head. They were too close to vital nerves to be removed. If these bits moved even a millimetre, it could be lethal. He had to avoid any risk of a blow to his head. For the rest of his life.

‘I can’t just wax my skis and set off any more…’ he said, and paused before he went on. ‘We’re all dependent on having self-confidence and feeling at ease. It does something to you when your whole face has changed and…’

At that, Breivik looked down.

Viljar had no more to say.

He had shared enough.

‘I think you’ve finished, then,’ said judge Arntzen.

‘Fabulous,’ said Viljar.

He stood up, spun on his heel and went. Out.

It was almost summer.

He had his life in front of him. He could walk, sit and stand. He had his wits about him. And many people to live for.

Psycho Seminar

‘It’s insulting!’ cried Breivik. ‘It’s offensive!’

‘Breivik, you get your chance to speak later!’

‘It’s ludicrous that I’m not allowed to comment here. This is being broadcast. It’s insulting!’ Breivik was bright red in the face.

‘NRK must stop the broadcast!’ ordered judge Wenche Arntzen.

The transmission faded out, away from Breivik’s indignant face, to a picture of the main doors of the Law Courts, while the drama played out in courtroom 250.

The clash was about Breivik’s life. For Breivik, it was about the right to a private life. For the court, it was about making the correct diagnosis.

Breivik had constructed his life story as a shining suit of armour. In the lustreless courtroom, within those matte grey walls, a pack of professionals had descended to try with a variety of tools to push, worm and force their way inside his defences.

It was Friday 8 June. The day before, the court had not sat.

Wenche Arntzen had been at her father’s funeral. Supreme Court counsel Andreas Artzen had died two weeks earlier. The funeral was arranged for the first day the court was not in session.

The two professional judges in the 22 July trial came from the legal aristocracy. Wenche Arntzen’s grandfather, Sven Arntzen, was Director General of Public Prosecution in 1945, and it was he who prepared the charges against Vidkun Quisling. John Lyng, grandfather of Arntzen’s fellow judge Arne Lyng, was the public prosecutor in the legal purge of collaborators in 1945 and prosecutor in the case against the Nazi Henry Rinnan who, like Quisling, was condemned to death.

Lyng and Arntzen had with them the three lay judges, who had been selected at random from a list at the courthouse. A young, pregnant teacher of Colombian descent, a retired family counsellor in her seventies and a middle-aged consultant in the Department of Education. On the first day the court sat, there had been another lay person on the bench, but it emerged in the evening that just after the massacre he had posted on Facebook that ‘The death penalty is the only just outcome of this case!!!!!!!!!!!’ He was obliged to stand down, and the elderly family counsellor who was the reserve moved up to take his place.

These five judges were now observing Breivik’s outburst.

He had sat there so quietly for eight weeks. Now he was completely freaking out.

The week before he had been quite satisfied. The defence had called witnesses who stressed that Breivik was not alone in his thinking. Historians, philosophers and researchers in the fields of religion, terrorism and right-wing extremism took the witness stand and set out where Breivik stood in an extremist, but not unknown, ideological landscape. Representatives of Stop the Islamisation of Norway and the Norwegian Defence League were also invited to present their political views.

The court heard from a variety of standpoints about a world in which Breivik’s ideas were familiar. His thoughts were not bizarre distortions, but were in fact shared by many.

The defence had also wanted to call Breivik’s ideological lodestar Fjordman, whose actual name turned out to be Peder Are Nestvold Jensen. Forced out from behind his Fjordman shield, a rather short man in his mid-thirties, with a rounded face and dark curls, appeared. He worked as a night watchman at a nursing home in Oslo and was an anti-jihadist blogger in his spare time. He refused to accept any responsibility for having inspired Breivik.

Breivik had made Jensen’s ideas his own. The difference was that Breivik put this thinking into action.

Jensen did not want to give evidence and moved abroad, where the Norwegian police had no legal authority to compel him to come to court.

One other individual who did not attend was Wenche Behring Breivik. She had spent part of the autumn as an in-patient at a psychiatric clinic. When she asked to be excused taking the witness stand, the District Court gave its consent. She was considered ‘unable’ to appear as a witness.

Ulrik Fredrik Malt, professor of psychiatry, was an elderly gentleman who gave the impression of being used to holding forth. He was the first of a dozen experts who were to brief the court on psychiatric matters, to help it reach the correct verdict. Healthy or sick. Accountable or not. Sentence or treatment.

The grey-haired man took his place in the witness box and regarded the various parties. He spent the first hour on an introduction to the correct use of the handbooks on which the court would rely, before going on to the particular instance sitting a few metres away from him. ‘The Commander. The messiah aspect,’ he said. ‘Life and death. I’m thinking of the executions. There’s clearly something tending in the direction of notions of grandeur, but are they delusions of grandeur?’

No. Breivik had given in too easily. In the case of delusions, one became aggressive when ousted from one’s elevated role. One was prepared to fight tooth and nail for the throne, whereas Breivik had simply toned down the significance of the Knights Templar and dropped the uniform as soon as someone told him it looked ridiculous.

Malt went on through the diagnosis chart.

‘Let us look at dissocial personality disorder – cold indifference to the feelings of others. Marked, persistently irresponsible attitude to social norms and duties. Lack of ability to sustain lasting relationships. Low tolerance of frustration, low threshold for aggressive outbursts, including use of violence. Lack of ability to experience guilt or learn from punishment. Marked tendency to generate feelings of guilt in others or to rationalise conduct that has brought the patient into conflict with society.’

Many in the room had now mentally ticked off all the criteria. But – the criteria had to have been in place before 22 July if they were to count. ‘I have not seen it said in any of the witness statements made by his friends that he was an ice-cold bastard. He did a little tagging, but so do a lot of people. He had some dubious accounts abroad, but those of us familiar with Oslo West circles know a fair amount of it goes on there. If that is a criterion, the number of people with the disorder will have to be adjusted radically upwards. Low threshold for outbursts of rage. No indication of that before 22 July. Lack of ability to experience guilt and learn from experience or punishment. It is possible there was a problem there.’

But it was not enough for Malt to be willing to make that his diagnosis. What about dissocial personality disorder with narcissistic traits, the diagnosis made by Tørrissen and Aspaas? ‘If one looks at what he writes in the manifesto compiled in his bedroom, fantasies about power and money and ideal love are present. That he is unique and admires himself, yes, both of those. Unique rights, yes, we can say he feels he has those, because he definitely does not relate to the law. Lack of empathy, that certainly fits. It would be entirely natural to make a diagnosis of dissocial personality disorder with narcissistic traits. So far, so good, you may think. But it is not good. We now come to the question that we have to ask ourselves as a society, as human beings and as psychologists. What is it that these questions actually give us the answer to?’

An enormous question mark filled the whole screen on the wall.

Judge Arntzen interrupted to ask if it was time for a short break.

‘That would be a pity,’ exclaimed Malt. ‘But we can leave that question mark there, because now we’re coming to the really exciting part.’

Breivik was furious. ‘He’s got to stop!’ he told Lippestad in the recess.

What enraged Breivik was that the testimony was being beamed directly to the TV viewers. Unlike the autopsy reports and witness statements from Utøya, this was going out live. And it was about his mind. People could switch on their sets, sit on their sofas and laugh at him. Yes, he would be allowed to defend himself at the end of each day. But whereas the psychiatrists’ evidence would be broadcast, his responses would not. His comments would be filtered through cultural Marxist journalists and would never get out to people directly.

After the short break, Lippestad asked to speak and demanded that the witness be dismissed, because he had crossed the legal boundaries of personal privacy.

‘The diagnoses he is presenting are, in parts, highly stigmatising.’

Malt was in the witness box, raring to continue. The whole thing degenerated into heated exchanges. The court retired to deliberate and reach a conclusion.

There was lively debate among those left sitting in the courtroom to await the outcome. Some of the public abandoned their seats in favour of the outdoor cafés around the Law Courts. The psychiatry seminar spilled out into the streets.

The trial had undergone a pronounced change of mood. While even the most seasoned crime reporters had been chastened as the courtroom mourned during the autopsy reports and the brutal witness accounts, the intellectual game of diagnosis loosened their tongues.

The same lively discussions were in full swing round canteen tables at work, between mouthfuls at top Oslo restaurants, among friends and colleagues, between couples. People on the bus started arguing about whether Breivik could be held accountable for his actions. Dinner-party guests were engrossed in the topic from their aperitifs through to the brandy and beyond. The case had turned the whole nation into amateur psychologists.

So many people in Norway had been affected by his actions, he had forced his way into their thoughts, and now they were wondering:

‘What was wrong with Breivik?’

Their answers had a tendency to divide along party lines. People on the left were overrepresented among those who saw him as a right-wing extremist terrorist. He had tapped into contemporary trends, and these ideologies and ideologues had to be crushed by debate. In other words, he was of sound mind. The further to the right you looked, the more likely you were to find people who thought him insane. That he could not be taken seriously and was an irrelevance.

Insanity was also the view of those he most admired. The work of a madman. ‘Is he crazy? Yes that’s probably exactly what he is. Nuts. Clinically insane,’ Fjordman wrote in a blog post. His conclusion was shared by several international anti-jihadists. Before 22 July, they had shared the same critique of Islam, the same world view. It had been so fine and pure. Now Breivik had sullied it with blood.

Breivik was overruled. Malt was permitted to go on. The enormous question mark came up on the screen again.

‘It is one thing to set off a bomb. It is quite another to go ashore on an island and shoot young people and talk about it as if he had been picking cherries. Is there an illness that could account for what I would choose to call mechanical killing? And there is also a change in sexual behaviour, we know that.’

‘Chairman. It’s ridiculous for me not to be allowed to object here. This is being broadcast. It’s offensive!’ Breivik interrupted.

Arntzen asked him to be quiet.

‘But my comments aren’t being broadcast!’

‘No, they are not.’

Malt had reached his conclusion.

‘Autism, or Asperger’s syndrome. Struggles to understand social signals. Has problems getting to grips with what others think and feel. What most people do to cope with this is to acquire expertise in social interaction. They become extremely polite, extremely proper and try to learn the rules of the game as best they can. But the point is that for them, empathy remains theoretical. They are incapable of sharing someone else’s suffering. They can have friends. They can run businesses. It works fine, but when you want to have a close relationship with someone… And the two of you are meant to share feelings… They can’t do it. And thus we come to the most important thing of all, and also the most painful…’

He paused for breath. ‘The first time I saw Breivik enter this courtroom – and as psychiatrists we attach great weight to the first two or three milliseconds – it is important to note. I did not see a monster, I saw a deeply lonely man… Deeply lonely… Then quick as a flash he was inside his shell, making himself hard… But… At his core there is just a deeply lonely man. We have with us here not only a right-wing extremist bastard, but also a fellow human being who, regardless of what he has done to the rest of us, is suffering. We must try to put ourselves inside his brain, make his world comprehensible. His personality and extreme right-wing ideology are combined in an effort to get out of his own prison. He ends up ruining not only his own life but that of many others. We have with us here a fellow human being who will be left not only in his own prison but also in an actual prison. It is important for us to appreciate that this is something much more than a pure right-wing extremist. This is a tragedy for Norway and for us. I think it is also a tragedy for Breivik.’

The dissection was over. The cameras were turned off. It was Breivik’s turn to speak.

‘I would like to congratulate Malt for such an accomplished character assassination. Initially I was quite offended, but I gradually came to see it as quite comical.’

He had jotted various points on a sheet of paper. ‘I never deviated from normal behaviour as a child,’ he said. ‘As for the assertion about loneliness: I have never been lonely. Not capable of friendship, that has in fact been disputed by my… er, that is, the people I was friends with before. Periods of depression: I have never been depressed. The claim that I have the right to decide who is to live and die: Che Guevara and Castro killed people in Cuba because people who call for revolution inevitably open up the possibility of people getting killed. It is claimed that I have never been in a long-term relationship. I have had two relationships of about six months’ duration since 2002. When you are working twelve to fourteen hours a day you have no time for a relationship. But I have been on dates during that period and I have had no problem making contact with women. The impression has been given that I hate women, but I love women. I hate feminism. Once I decided to carry out an armed operation I did not feel I would be justified in establishing a family, with a wife and children. Narcissism: as described here, half of Oslo West would fall into that category. It seems an idiotic diagnosis. Malt has been called in by the public advocates and it’s important to be clear about their agenda of making me appear as crazy as possible, but not so much so that I am declared unaccountable for my actions. The judge in this case should dismiss all the psychiatric witnesses. This case is about political extremism and not psychiatry. Thank you.’

The next day, seven new witnesses were called, all of them psychiatrists and psychologists. The day after that, five more. Some had met him, others had not. Diagnoses flew this way and that.

Young psychologist Eirik Johannessen was among those who had spent most time with Breivik. He was employed by Ila prison and had held extensive conversations with the defendant about his ideology and his grand fantasies. As the trial proceeded, he was still having sessions with him, and had found no sign of psychosis. Breivik’s ideas were an expression of extreme right-wing views, and the way in which he presented them could be accounted for by his inflated self-image, Johannessen concluded. He underlined that a succession of people had been observing Breivik weekly for ten months without detecting any psychotic traits.

The team at Ila ended up with a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, just as Tørrissen and Aspaas had. Whereas Husby and Sørheim saw Breivik’s references to his role in the Knights Templar as a sign of psychosis, Johannessen had a simpler interpretation: he is lying.

It was just something Breivik had made up. Something he well knew to be non-existent.

‘Why do you think he tells these lies?’ queried Inga Bejer Engh.

‘He wants to recruit people to a network, but that’s not easy if he’s on his own. And then it helps to generate fear, and he wants his opponents to live in fear.’

‘He lies in order to make us more frightened?’ the prosecutor went on.

‘And to make himself appear a more exciting person. Rather than a failure.’

When the word failure came up, Breivik produced a slip of paper and wrote something on it. He sat there uneasily, swinging his chair on to its back legs.

Johannessen cited a former friend of Breivik’s who had told the court that Breivik always had great ambitions.

‘Not achieving them, being a failure, was so hard to bear that it helped to push him towards extremism. His ideology became important to him as a way of saving himself.’

Johannessen saw Breivik’s childhood and adolescence as a history of rejection. And when he decided to dedicate himself entirely to his ideology he found himself rejected even there, as in the case of his attempt to make contact with Fjordman.

Breivik took lots of notes as this witness was speaking. Every time the young psychologist intimated that he had lied or exaggerated his own importance, he lurched forward and made a note. Lippestad, sitting beside him, remained calm and chewed the arm of his glasses.

Johannessen drew attention to Breivik’s ability to see himself from the outside, something a psychotic individual would not be able to do. ‘At the end of a day in court, he might say, “Today I came across as a bit less accountable,” and then we would see this same conclusion borne out by the commentators on TV in the evening.’

Johannessen left the witness box. Breivik had his chance to speak. He was incensed; he raised his head.

‘It’s completely wrong that Fjordman rejected me,’ snarled Breivik. He had only contacted Fjordman to get his email address, and he had been given it.

‘I have never been rejected by anyone in my whole life,’ he concluded.

Finally, the two pairs of psychiatrists were invited to present their observations. The first duo had not changed so much as a comma of their original report. Nothing they had observed in court had changed their conclusion. Nor had they wished to receive the round-the-clock observations from the team that had followed Breivik for four weeks, which were ready just before the start of the trial. Sørheim and Husby had completed their report in November 2011, and they were standing by what they had written. Breivik was not accountable for his actions.

During the examination of the psychiatrists, judge Wenche Arntzen wondered how the two of them had reached their conclusion about all Breivik’s delusions.

‘His ideas about who should live and who should die, did you term them a delusion because they are so immoral?’

‘Now I’m confused,’ replied Synne Sørheim.

‘Acts of terrorism can be ideologically justified, isn’t that something a person can feel themselves called to, however absurd that may be?’ asked Arntzen.

‘I think we take a simpler starting point than the judge is able to do. Our approach is that he sat there alone in deadly earnest and devoted years to finding out who would have to die.’

In the psychiatry they represented, there was no category for moral deliberation.

The other pair of psychiatrists admitted they had been in doubt. All those days in court in which Breivik had not shown the slightest emotion had made Terje Tørrissen uncertain and he had asked to talk to him again. He went down to the basement and met him in the waiting cell. There he found him to be the same man he had got to know in the course of the observations, friendly, polite and adequate. In order to get through the trial he was playing a role, Tørrissen judged. In the supplementary statement that Aspaas and Tørrissen delivered during the trial, they described Breivik as a special case. His dulled state was a challenge to ‘the prevailing classification systems and models of understanding, particularly in the matter of drawing the line between lack of reality and political fanaticism’. Under examination by Inga Bejer Engh, the pair withdrew their diagnosis of dissocial personality disorder. All that remained were the narcissistic traits. They were thus left with the conclusion that he was accountable for his actions.

Once all the evidence had been heard, the prosecution had to reach a conclusion. Was he accountable for his actions or not? They were not sure he was not accountable, but they had serious doubts. It is an important principle of the rule of law that doubt should not be discounted. This had to apply, regardless of the crime. That was how they argued.

The prosecution’s conclusion: not accountable for his actions.

On the final day of the trial, the aggrieved parties were to make impact statements, as is standard procedure in Norwegian courts. An employee in the government quarter grieved for lost colleagues; three mothers remembered their children and talked about how losing them had affected their whole family. The General Secretary of the AUF spoke about the loss to the political organisation; and finally, a girl who had lost her sister was to end the session.

The seventeen-year-old had been called by her public advocate the previous evening and asked if she could make the closing statement of the trial.

I can’t do it, Lara thought.

She said, ‘Yes, I can.’

On the busy morning ferry into the city, the ferry that Bano had loved, she sat looking out over the fjord, wondering what she was going to say.

How could she explain what losing Bano meant?

She was going to meet four friends at Check Mate, the café by the courthouse. The waiter lent her an order pad and a pen. She started writing, and then read it out. Her friends listened and made criticisms and suggestions. More of this, less of that. Only the best was good enough here. ‘You’ve got to include where you all come from!’ they said. ‘Who you are, who Bano was!’

She wanted to opt out. She couldn’t go through with it. She was freezing in her white crocheted top and her jeans felt too tight. But it was time to go. Her feet carried her past the security check, in through the heavy doors, up the winding staircase and into room 250.

Now she was on her way up the central aisle. Now she was going to face her sister’s murderer.

She took her place in the witness box, afraid her voice would give way. Then she noticed a pair of eyes on her. The pregnant Colombian lay judge with the long dark curls was looking at her. She has kind eyes, thought Lara, and put down her piece of paper. She would say the most important things about Bano. What she had in her heart.

‘Bano and I fled from Iraq in 1999. We fled from the civil war and Saddam Hussein. I had a real struggle with all the trauma and it took me a long time to feel safe here. I had nightmares that the police would come and get us. Bano helped me. There’s two years between us, but we shared all our secrets. I remember her saying, “Even if you happen to lose friends, you’ll never lose me.”’

Her voice held. ‘I had no idea then that she would be the one I lost first of all.’

Lara spoke of how she had done nothing but sleep in the time after Utøya. ‘I dreamt that I was dead and she was the one alive. I mixed up what was real and what wasn’t, and when I woke up I thought real life was the nightmare. It took me several months to understand what was what. It’s made me feel guilty seeing how sad people are. It should have been me who died, then not so many people would have been sad.’

She managed to be entirely honest.

‘When everyone was grieving, I just felt I was in the way. It wrecked my self-confidence. I was born as a little sister. I’ve never lived a life just as a big sister.’

There were ripples of movement along the rows of seats. It was the last day. It was over. But not for Lara.

‘I had to learn to do things myself. I had to learn to start trusting other people. It’s been a difficult time and I don’t want to live like this. He didn’t only take away my security, he took away the safest person in my life. The sorrow is as great as ever, the sense of loss is even greater, but there’s something new.’

She paused.

‘Hope. It wasn’t there before. Bano didn’t die for nothing. She died for a multicultural Norway. There’s a huge empty hole and I’m heartbroken that she won’t be at my wedding or see my children. But I’m proud of her, and I know she wants me to be happy.’

That was the way she ended. Bano was with her.

She turned towards her parents as she left the witness box. Their eyes were moist. Her father raised his hand and gave a little wave. So did her mother.

Lara felt warm all over. Their looks said: We are proud of you. We are so glad you are alive.

The Verdict

On 24 August 2012 the verdict was to be pronounced. The courtroom filled once more with the world press, who had lost interest after the first couple of weeks. There was pressure on seats again.

The accused was in place, his right-wing extremist salute was back, the prosecution came, the public advocates, the defence, the audience.

The judges entered and everyone stood up.

Wenche Arntzen remained standing to read the decision.

‘Anders Behring Breivik, born 13 February 1979, is convicted of breaching §147a of the legal code, clause one letters a and b… to detention in custody…’

A smile spread across Breivik’s face. Accountable for his actions!

He received the maximum penalty the law allowed: twenty-one years. But detention in custody meant that, as long as he represented a threat to society, the sentence could be extended by five years, another five years, another five years – until death claimed him.