A larger boat this time, bullet-nosed, striped green and orange at the bow. It seemed to lift itself above the fjord as it rounded the headland. Every face in the crowd watched. The boat turned a lazy arc, came to rest by the slipway. From the bow, two armed policemen surveyed the crowd, submachine guns readied. In the stern were two female officers, rifles half-shouldered as they scanned the shoreline.

Two more uniformed officers emerged from the wheelhouse, one tall, one small. Both men were blond, both were unarmed. Something strange in the way they carried themselves; some unnatural swagger. They stood on the deck, looked out at the crowd, expressionless. Narrow white bands cuffed their wrists. Two further female officers appeared close behind them, pistols drawn and pointed at the men.

I turned to Elsa, wanting to know if she felt my confusion, but she simply stood staring. I looked from face to face in the crowd. In every face I saw that same blank incomprehension that I saw in my wife.

Police officers.

I had not thought the perpetrators would be police officers. I thought they would be darker-skinned, that they would be . . . had expected to see the words jihadisme or islamisme in the news feeds, to hear those words whispered knowingly among the other parents, spoken carefully into microphones by the reporters on their live links. Our values. Their values. Allahu akbar.

To be plain: I had not expected these men to be white.

In the bow an officer lowered his submachine gun, dropped a gangplank into place. Metal slid on concrete. The officer beside him stepped ashore, his weapon at the ready. Grit crunched beneath his shoes. Both officers were onshore now, surveying the crowd, weapons readied. They glanced at each other, nodded. One of them turned, nodded toward the escort.

The unarmed men—could they really be police?—began to move toward the gangplank and on to the shore, each followed closely by a pistol-carrying officer who tracked their every move.

The crowd split into two, made room. These men—these suspects—were not just white, they were archetypically, almost comically white. Their hair was bleached, their noses narrow, their eyes blue, their foreheads high. So close they were now. You could almost reach out . . . I caught the eye of the first, the taller of them. The man nodded. I felt myself beginning to nod back.

I checked myself. Because this man . . . because surely no policeman would have done . . . what? What had these men done?

Please, where is my daughter?

None of us spoke. We parted quietly, made room for the police escort and for the two unarmed men who could not—surely they could not?—be policemen themselves. Their collars were undone. Their boots were scuffed and muddied. Badges hung from their shoulders, as if torn by briars.

The shorter man spat something onto the slipway. A gobbet of chewing tobacco, gray-black and shiny.