The woman on-screen seemed calmer. She was speaking slowly, but her words were no less chilling. “Our culture is being held down by the ankles and raped, and it is being mongrelized. These are the real crimes being committed daily against the Norwegian people through this mass immigration, and that is what the Andersen brothers are trying—imperfectly and clumsily, I concede—to communicate.”

The presenter on-screen was trying to hold her to account. “But what these men did is not communication. What they did is murder.”

The woman turned contemptuously to the camera. “You see? Instead of reporting the message, you and your media colleagues brand them criminals and murderers and side with the people who would see our heritage disappear.”

I could feel the anger rising in me. “Seriously, though,” I said, “you can’t separate those men’s ‘message’ from the killings. The killings are the message. Can we please watch something else?”

“With pleasure.” Elsa picked up the remote and flicked the channel.

On-screen a ginger-haired man was speaking English, slowly, to a very tall black man. “You are perfectly nice,” he was saying. “And entirely welcome here. But Norwegian research proves your reaction time is likely to be slower than mine. And your IQ significantly lower.”

I said, “I guess I was hoping we could watch something a whole lot less racist.”

“Our TV is racist,” said Elsa. “How did you never notice this?”

“Just weird.” I picked up the remote. “When everything else is so right on.” I flicked through the channels till I found a quiz show. The room filled with the sound of audience laughter.

Elsa watched distractedly for a moment.

“What, love?” I said.

“We need to visit that house church.”

She drove purposefully, hands clamped on the wheel. Franklin sat in his car seat, alert and excited, very far from sleep.

The eastern suburbs looked very much like our western suburb. The same no-nonsense architecture, though the buildings were placed closer and there were fewer trees. There were basketball courts here and a soccer field on green-painted tarmac that was floodlit, though there was light in the sky. There were more dark faces among the players here than in Øvre Øvrebøhaugen. Fewer cars.

As Elsa turned left up a narrow road that wound to the left, the players stopped to watch. The road surface was dusty, the grass at the side spattered with dried mud. We reached the top of the rise. Elsa parked the car, got out. I got out too. In front of us a hole, three stories deep, and behind it a towering wall of rock. Around the edges of the pit stood vast industrial machines: earth movers; cranes; pile drivers.

“And this is definitely the address you came to?” I said.

Angry tears were forming in Elsa’s eyes. “I should have taken a telephone number from someone, or gotten an email or a name . . . I just didn’t think . . .”