One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway Read Online Free PDF

rare oak trees, streams and little paths.
    She could relax here and they could be happy.
    But her energydrained away. The move from Frogner to neighbouring Skøyen had exhausted her, as had the division of assets that had finally taken place. From now on she was on her own. Many of the flats around hers were still standing empty. Her children were always arguing and fighting. Anders was an angry boy and his punches were hard.
    At the start of the new year in 1983, Wenche contacted the family counsellingservice at the Oslo Health Board and asked for a new respite care placement for her son. Daily demands of a purely practical kind, like dropping him off at the Vigeland Park nursery that was within walking distance from their flat, or fetching him in the afternoons, seemed insurmountable. He might disappear from her on the way: he was often simply running off. The nursery had also expressedconcern about the boy. He found it hard to make friends, he never invented games of his own and he didn’t cry if he hurt himself.
    ‘Clingy and difficult, demands a lot of attention,’ Wenche told the officer dealing with her case at the Oslo Health Board. ‘Aggressive, and nasty with it,’ said the case notes.
    She was very keen to have a diagnosis for Anders. Perhaps there was some kind of medicinehe could take? She told the counsellor she wondered whether Anders might have diabetes, referring to the baby’s bottle of cordial he clung to at home. But he coped without the bottle at nursery, and he had shown no interest in it when he was with his weekend family. It was at home that he needed it. And there was nothing wrong with his blood-sugar levels.
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    Wenche had two faces to showto the world. Mostly she showed the smiling, chattering, carefree one. But sometimes she was distant, and would walk straight past without saying hello, or looked away. If she did say anything it was in a drawling voice, her words almost slurred.
    Neighbours talked about it. She wasn’t drunk, it wasn’t that; could it be drugs?
    The neighbours on Wenche’s staircase soon started to get the feelingthings were not as they should be behind the family’s front door. Anders was rarely at the play area; both children were sort of invisible, silent, scared. The neighbours called him ‘Meccano Boy’ because he was like something made out of a construction set, stiff and angular. But it was his big sister the neighbours were most worried about. She acted like a mother to both Wenche and her littlebrother. She was the one who kept things in order at home, and looked after Anders.
    ‘Wenche doesn’t pick up signals,’ said one neighbour to another. The woman in the flat opposite would wait inside her own front door whenever she heard Wenche on the stairs. ‘You could never get away. She went on and on, talking a load of rubbish and jumping from one subject to another, especially sex – she alwayshad lots to say about sex. She twisted words and phrases and laughed a lot at her own stories,’ she said later. It surprised the neighbours that Wenche had no inhibitions, even when the children were there and listening to her innuendo. It was usually Elisabeth who finally managed to get her mother through the front door by saying something like, ‘We’ll have to go now Mum, or our frozen stuffwill start to melt. We’d better put it in the freezer or it might get spoilt.’
    The rumours were going round. There were lots of male visitors, the neighbours gossiped. It was embarrassing to encounter them on the stairs and avoid their glance or pass them when they rang the doorbell of Wenche’s flat. And Wenche was always out and about, they muttered to each other. Even at night. No one eversaw ‘a babysitter or grandma’ going in. When Wenche once asked a neighbour to come and take a look at something that was not working in the flat, the neighbour was struck by the fact that there was no sign of any children living there; it was as if they did not