Free Fear Not by Anne Holt Page B

just to look at the young man: this rootless, homeless Kurdish boy without any parents, with his silver tooth and smooth cheeks. Regardless of how many times she came across these children – and God knows it happened all too often – she just couldn’t distance herself. Sometimes in the evenings, when she looked in on her own two sons who had now decided they were too old for goodnight kisses, but who still couldn’t get to sleep until she had tucked them in, she experienced something that resembled guilt.
    Perhaps even shame.
    The sound of a car horn shattered the silence, making her heart miss a beat. She opened the window and looked down at the turning area in front of the entrance and the main desk.
    ‘Mum! Mum, will you be much longer?’
    Her youngest son was hanging out of the car window, yelling. Silje immediately felt cross. Quickly she placed Hawre Ghani’s file on top of her in tray, pulled off the Post-it note with Harald Bull’s number and tucked it in her pocket.
    As she locked the door behind her and ran towards the foyer in the hope of reaching the car in time to stop her son sounding the horn again, she had completely forgotten why she had gone to the office early on the afternoon of Christmas Day on the way to dinner with her in-laws.
    The skis.
    They were still behind the door of her office. By the time she eventually remembered them, it was too late.
    *
     
    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 withtears. 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.
    ‘The Bishop of Bjørgvin, Eva Karin Lysgaard, passed away