Girl in the Cellar by Allan Hall Page B

Never!
    Police later had to admit that Frau Sirny had been dropped as a suspect in the case.
    Time passed, the seasons blending into one. Ludwig Koch lost his businesses one by one as he ploughed money and time into trying to find his daughter, prowling the streets late at night, scrutinising the waifs outside the city’s West Station to see if she was among them, looking at the young hookers in the red-light district, asking anyone and everyone to look at the photo of Natascha he carried around with him.
    â€˜Have you seen this little girl?’ he would ask. ‘Have you seen her with anyone?’ But the strays, the junkies, the hookers, the flotsam and jetsam of urban life, answered with mute shakes of the head.
    Frau Sirny, too, coped with her own private hell—first the animosity of her husband, then of people like Anneliese Glaser. Placing faith in clairvoyants gave a little comfort and hope, but only a little. Nothing could make up for the loss of her flesh and blood.
    The agonies were piled on whenever headlines surfaced in another country of a child killer—and the worst pain came in 2004 when 62-year-old Michel Fourniret, the ‘Beast of France’, hit the headlines as the mass murderer of at least nine women and girls. He took some of his victims in a van similar to the one that a witness had told police she had seen someone dragging Natascha into. Frau Sirny said in an anguished interview at the time:
    About three weeks ago, late one evening, when I saw a report about the arrest of this man, and found out that he frequently used a white van when he was looking for victims, I immediately thought about Natascha. And I began to pray: ‘Please not, please not, my kid cannot be one of his victims…’
    I only know: there are so many things that would match up. The thing about the white van is just one of them. But in the meantime I have also found out how this killer approached his victims: that he pretended to be sick and needed help. And Natascha was always helpful: she would only have come near a stranger if she felt that her help was really needed. Then she would have surely approached him. And I don’t want to think any further: the thought that my child became victim of this beast is just awful.
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    Asked in the same interview if she still clung to the hope that Natascha was alive, she said: ‘I will never lose thathope, until I know, one hundred per cent, that Natascha is dead. And in my dreams it happens every now and then, that my little girl suddenly stands at the door and says: “Mommy, now I’m back.” And waking back up is so awful, because I’m back in reality, and there is the terrible uncertainty…’
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    If she could have known how her daughter was conducting herself in those first few hours she would have had nothing but pride in her. Natascha would later say: ‘In principle, I knew within the first couple of hours of my abduction that he was lacking something. That he had a deficit.’
    She would go on to say that he had a ‘labile personality’ in contrast to what she judged a ‘healthy social environment around me—maybe not a particularly happy, but a loving family. Both my parents had assured me that they loved me. He didn’t have that. In a certain way he lacked self-assurance. And something else—security. He didn’t have that.’
    A labile personality. A complex word describing a complex complaint, learned by a little girl who taught herself such things in her cellar world.
    Her freedom was to the psychoanalyst’s profession what war is to armaments industries, with theories about him, her, her family and relationships piling up like wrecks at a stockcar rally. But she was closest of all to Priklopil in a hothouse environment unencumbered by other social contact. Perhaps her take on him is one that has more value than any of those ‘experts’ who would swarm around her