Girl in the Cellar by Allan Hall

for not having tried harder when he split with her mother to gain custody of Natascha. Like her mother, he was reduced to scouring the streets of the ancient capital in a desperate search for her.
    Frau Sirny said, ‘In the first few weeks I trawled the streets of Vienna looking for her. I would sit in parks allday in the hope that she would turn up. Then I started to travel to other Austrian towns and cities and hang out in places where there were lots of children, especially kids who had run away from home or were skipping school, but there was no sign of her.’
    When the police told her there was little else they could do and were scaling down the investigation into Natascha’s disappearance, Brigitta Sirny sought help from psychics.
    â€˜I didn’t know what else to do, and so I went to a clairvoyant to ask if she could help me. She told me that Natascha was alive. She said that she was being held north of Vienna in a cellar in a house, but the police refused to act on the information, saying the psychic was probably just a hoax.’
    Also painful, even in the aftermath of reunion, was the knowledge that she had driven to Strasshof one day for work and had actually travelled right past the house. ‘I can’t believe I even drove past it one day when I had a presentation in Strasshof,’ she said, her head bowed, her eyes filling up with tears.
    Even as the days, months and years passed, she said it never got any easier for her:
    What really got on my nerves was everyone giving me bits of advice, especially when they said things like ‘Life goes on’. For me it was like being in a time warp. Life around me went on, but in my head it stopped on the day Natascha vanished.
    At times I even wished they would find Natascha’s body. At least then I could have strived towards somekind of closure and had a grave where I could mourn my beautiful daughter. But instead I continued as if she would walk through the door at any minute. I saved any letters she got and kept her things as she had left them. In my bathroom I made room for her Barbie shampoo and her Pocahontas soap. One day I discovered that Natascha’s clothes had been eaten by moths and I almost collapsed with sadness.
    At Natascha’s school her loss hit hard and deep. Many schoolfriends recalled the fateful day she vanished from their lives. Michael Ulm, who was in the same class as Natascha—4C—fell ill with worry because she had gone. ‘She was my friend,’ he said. ‘I want the person who took her away to bring her back.’ Schoolchildren pleaded with teachers to be allowed to form search parties to scour the streets and wasteland nearby, but the idea was soon scotched for fear of more unsupervised children going missing.
    Mothers who took their children to school were the lucky ones: most parents were too busy working to ferry their offspring to the gates and to pick them up again. Gabriele Boehm, 38, who started escorting her son to school after Natascha vanished, said: ‘Most mothers work around here. You can only hope every day that things will turn out OK, but there are no guarantees—we know that now, don’t we?’
    Liane Pichler, 45, was upset that the authorities hadn’t seen fit to inform the mothers that another school in the area had posted a warning about a sex criminal theybelieved was stalking children in the area. Whether or not the suspect was Wolfgang Priklopil will now never be known.
    Newspapers at the time printed the messages of hope and love that they hoped would touch a nerve in a stony-hearted man:
    YVONNE: Hopefully, you will come back to us soon.
    KATHARINA: I was her best friend and she told me everything.
    JENNIFER: She told me that there was lots and lots of rowing in the house and that she was often sucked into them. She didn’t like that.
    MARCEL: She was inventive, funny, strong, quiet—sometimes—and cheeky. And she could sometimes