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Anders twisted free. ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘You’re talking to the wrong person.’

Kristian had always thought Anders was gay, but it was the first time he had dared bring it up. ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ said a mutual friend who had himself just come out. Kristian’s girlfriend thought the same. ‘Definitely gay,’ had always been her view of Anders. ‘He plainly isn’t interested in women. He just pretends,’ she said.

Anders’s friends also jeered at him for looking like a pansy. Anders and his make-up, Anders and his giggling, Anders and his affected voice. Anders who always had to do a few quick push-ups as a prelude to a night on the town, who never had a girlfriend but talked enthusiastically about prostitutes and the legalisation of brothels.

You could hide behind that sort of blokey façade. There was no threatening proximity, no awkward intimacy.

He called himself metrosexual, a man who loved women but also liked dressing up and wearing make-up.

Now he was denying it outright. Like men, him? It was the last thing he’d ever do, he liked blondes.

‘Anders, you can’t carry on living a lie!’ said Kristian. ‘Things will be better if you tell it like it is.’

They had been standing there for almost an hour. ‘Things will work out if you do,’ promised Kristian, there at the crossroads by the royal park, with people staggering past them on their way to parties, on their way from parties.

Anders curled his mouth into a smile and brushed an invisible speck of dust from his blazer.

That bloody jacket, thought Kristian. It’s ghastly, looks completely ridiculous. He’s got no sense and no style.

They parted in anger.

* * *

Things were less congenial at the office. Mads and Anders did not argue, nor did they really hit it off. And something had happened to Anders. He spent more and more time at his computer screen.

Mads no longer liked his job very much. The work was quite monotonous. Once he had corrected the spelling mistakes made by their co-worker in Indonesia he had to print out the diplomas on thick paper and send them by post to the customers. Sometimes he was sent on little errands such as going to withdraw money at the bank or the post office.

Mads was getting bored, and as the summer approached he handed in his notice.

‘Fine,’ said Anders, his expression not revealing what he might think about being alone in the office again.

Over the summer holidays, Mads had a phone call from Norway’s major broadsheet, Aftenposten. The paper had run a piece on falsified diplomas at Norwegian universities and had now come by more information about dubious practices of that kind. A company in the US had flagged up four websites selling fake diplomas. They had written a letter to the Norwegian authorities and asked them to check up on Breivik’s activities.

Aftenposten was trying to get hold of Anders, but could only find Mads.

‘I don’t understand any of this and I don’t know the websites you mention. I’m not behind any of it,’ the newspaper quotes Mads as saying in September 2005, referring to him merely as an unemployed twenty-five-year-old in whose name the company was registered.

Aftenposten wrote that ‘after wading through lots of print in which the sellers use all the talent at their disposal to disclaim responsibility for any serious use of the documents, we reach the assertion that the certificates and diplomas are intended for “entertainment use”’. The paper did not disclose the identity of Anders Behring Breivik, but stated that the person in question was ‘a named Norwegian from Oslo’.

The Justice Department asked the Director of Public Prosecution to assess the legality of the operations at bestfakediploma.com and superiordiploma.com.

Anders was skating on thin ice.

The week the article was published, Anders completed a three-day shooting course at Oslo Pistol Club.

* * *

The week after the feature in Aftenposten came the day of the general election. Anders was no longer active in the Progress Party after being ignominiously passed over, but he carried on paying his membership fees and he went to cast his vote. The party was still the place in which he felt most at home politically and it had a good election, winning 22 per cent of the vote.

But the Labour Party did better still and entered into negotiations to form a red–green coalition with the Socialist Left and the Centre Party. Together, the three parties formed a government platform that was the most radical in Europe. It signalled that it would put the brakes on all privatisation of state activities. The Socialist Left got the Ministry of Finance. The party stood for everything Anders Behring Breivik was against: stricter regulation of market forces, more control of the economy, bigger fines for financial misdemeanours and higher taxes on share profits.

He made it his principle to pay as little tax as possible. But when he was setting up E-Commerce Group that year, he did have to abide by some laws and regulations. He hired an auditor, which was a requirement when establishing a limited company with shareholders. The income from the diploma production was never reported to the authorities, but he could not conceal profits on selling shares.

He spent the autumn weighing up whether to stop doing the diplomas. It would be embarrassing if his full name came out in the media. Even if it transpired that his operation was not strictly illegal, it was still morally questionable, and he didn’t want to make a living as a forger, he wanted to be a proper businessman. A proper businessman, rolling in money.

But it was hard to give up on shady dealings that generated so many kroner. So the man in Indonesia went on making examination certificates. Anders went on sending them out.

* * *

The snow came drifting down.

Christmas was approaching. Family time. Well, his family was rather meagre. His sister had married in Los Angeles a few years before and he had not seen her since the wedding, when his mother and sister clashed. Wenche complained that she had been instructed by her daughter to say she was a doctor.

So it would be just him and his mother on Christmas Eve as usual, the two of them opening presents and eating a festive meal. This year they would be at the flat in Hoffsveien, to which his mother had moved. But then, just a few days before the holiday, they were invited to Christmas dinner at the home of Wenche’s second cousin, outside Oslo.

Wenche had only met Jan Behring on a few previous occasions, but now his wife had run into Wenche and realised that she and Anders would be celebrating Christmas alone. What a shame! They couldn’t spend Christmas Eve in separate places when they were both so short of close family.

Wenche dressed, did her hair and put on make-up. Anders took trouble over his outfit too.

During the meal Anders noticed a candlestick standing on its own on a shelf in the living room.

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘Greek columns,’ replied Jan Behring, a sparse, self-restrained man. ‘A Doric, an Ionic and a Corinthian column.’

They were the symbols of the order of Freemasons he belonged to – the Pillars.

‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to be a Freemason,’ Anders exclaimed. ‘It’s always been my dream.’ At thirteen he had gone to the Freemasons’ Hall to find out how to become a member. He was told that the lower age limit was twenty-four. Now he was almost twenty-seven.

The Freemasons are the power elite, he told friends who thought it was weird of him to want to mingle with those old stuffed shirts. It was the ideal place to make contacts. You have to join if you want to get anywhere, he would say.