It wasn’t too late yet, the duty editor established. The bulletin was going out in two minutes, but since this was anything but a lead story, they could easily put together a short item from the studio with a picture of the Bishop towards the end of the broadcast. He quickly rattled off a message to the producer.
‘Get something written for Christian right away,’ he ordered the young temp. ‘Just a short piece. And double check with NTB that it’s correct, of course. We can do without announcing someone has died when they haven’t, even on a slow news day.’
‘What’s going on here?’ said Mark Holden, one of NRK’s heavyweights on home affairs. ‘Who’s died?’
He grabbed the piece of paper from the temp, read it in one and a half seconds and shoved it back in the young woman’s hand. She didn’t really have time to realize he’d taken it.
‘Tragic,’ said Mark Holden, without a scrap of empathy. ‘She can’t have been all that old. Sixty? Sixty-two? What did she die of?’
‘It doesn’t say,’ the news editor replied absently. ‘I hadn’t heard she was ill. But right now I need to concentrate on this broadcast. If you could…’
He waved away the much older reporter, his gaze fixed on one of the many monitors in the large room. The brief news headlines were shown, with all the captions as agreed. The presenters were more smartly dressed than usual, in honour of Christmas.
The editor leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk.
‘Are you still here?’ he said to the young woman. ‘The idea is to put out the item today, not next week.’
Only now did he notice that her eyes were about to brim over with tears. Her hand was shaking. She took a quick breath and forced a smile.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it right away.’
‘Did you know her?’ There was still no warmth in Mark Holden’s voice, just a deeply rooted curiosity and almost automatic desire to ask everybody questions about everything.
‘Yes. She and her husband are friends of my parents. But it’s also the fact that she…’
Her voice broke.
‘She’s… she was very popular after all,’ said the news editor gently. He chewed on his pencil and lowered his feet to the floor. ‘Give that to me,’ he said, holding out his hand for the small piece of paper. ‘I’ll write the piece, and you can start putting together an item with archive pictures for the nine o’clock bulletin. A minute, something like that. OK?’
The young woman nodded.
He hesitated, smacked his lips then suddenly continued.
‘Is it absolutely necessary to mention that business with the football match?’ asked Mark Holden. ‘Not entirely appropriate in the circumstances, is it?’
‘I think it is,’ said the editor, sending the text to the producer with one click. ‘It’s fine. But listen…’
Mark Holden was scrabbling around in a huge bowl of sweets.
‘Mmm?’
‘What does a person die of at that age?’
‘You’ve got to be joking. Anything, of course. I haven’t a clue. It’s odd that it doesn’t say anything about it. No “after a long illness” or something like that. A stroke, I suppose. A heart attack. Something.’
‘She was only sixty-two…’
‘So what? People die much younger than that. Personally, I give thanks for every single day on earth. As long as I can have some chocolate now and again.’
Mark Holden couldn’t find anything he liked. Next to the bowl lay three rejected liquorice sweets and two coconut chocolates.
‘You’ve taken all the best ones,’ he mumbled sourly.
The editor didn’t reply. He was deep in thought, and bit on his pencil so hard that it broke. His eyes were fixed on the monitor in front of him, although he didn’t really seem to be following what was going on.
‘Beate!’ he suddenly shouted to the young temp. ‘Beate, come over here!’
She hesitated for a moment, then got up from her desk and did as he said.
‘When you’ve finished your little piece,’ he said, pointing the broken pencil at her, ‘I want you to make a few phone calls, OK? Find out what she died of. I can smell…’
His nose twitched like a rabbit’s.
‘… a story. Maybe.’
‘Phone people after the programme? That late on Christmas Day?’
The editor sighed loudly. ‘Do you want to be a journalist or not? Come on. Get going.’
Beate Krohn’s face was expressionless.
‘You said your parents knew her,’ the editor insisted. ‘So give them a call! Ring whoever you damn well like, but find out what the bishop died of, OK?’
‘OK,’ mumbled the young woman, dreading it already.
Johanne never really dreaded doing anything. It was just so difficult to get going. Since she took her doctorate in criminology in the spring of 2000, she had completed two new projects. After submitting her thesis on ‘Sexualized violence, a comparative study of conditions during childhood and early experience among sexual and financial offenders’ she was awarded a grant which enabled her to write an almost equally comprehensive study of miscarriages of justice in Norway. Ragnhild came along towards the end of this project. She and Adam agreed that Johanne would stay at home with their daughter for two years, but before her maternity leave was over she had made a start on her latest project: a study of underage prostitutes, their background, circumstances and chances of rehabilitation.
Last summer she had been given a piece of work to do for the National Police Directorate.
Ingelin Killengreen herself had contacted Johanne. The Commissioner had obviously been given clear political directives on the issue of putting hate crime on the agenda.
The problem was that this particular type of criminal activity hardly existed at all.
Well, of course it did.
But not when it came to figures. Not statistically speaking. Working in tandem with the Oslo police force, the National Police Directorate had already started mapping all reports made during 2007 where the motive for the crime could be linked to race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. The final report was just around the corner and Johanne had already seen most of the material.
The number of crimes was small, and dwindling.
During 2007 in the whole of Norway 399 cases of hate-motivated crime were registered. Of this number more than 35 per cent were simply the result of an incorrect code being entered in the police register. In other words, just over 250 cases could be classified as hate crime.
For an entire year, in a country with a population of almost five million. Compared with the total number of reported crimes, 256 cases was too small a number to be of any interest.
But it was, at least to politicians. Since just one hate crime was one too many; since the hidden statistics for hate crime must be significant; and since the Red-Green coalition government wanted to enter the election in autumn 2009 with a trump card up its sleeve when it came to minority groups that sounded off whenever a
