Girl in the Cellar by Allan Hall Page A

But she kept shouting at her daughter, insulting her and all. I felt very embarrassed and told her to calm down.
    Frau Sirny than told Natascha to go upstairs to their flat, change her bed sheets and go to sleep. Natascha was wetting her bed, and the mother was telling everyone about that. She reproached her because of it in front of me, and I could see that the girl was very ashamed of it.
    After Natascha went home, Frau Sirny stayed with me and had more drinks and went on about how Natascha was becoming more and more cheeky with every new trip to Hungary. But that was not true, she was not cheeky at all, and she also loved the trips to Hungary—she would always return happy and positive from there.
    Anyway, it was such a shame that the evening had to end like that. Natascha had been very happy, and she’d told me that her mother had cleared out the baby room in the flat and she believed she was finally going to get around to getting her a writing table, which was something that seemed very important to her.
    Natascha was, indeed, just hours away from getting such a table—but it was in a hermetically sealed room in Wolfgang Priklopil’s strange home, not her own.
    She went to bed sullen, feeling unloved and put-upon. And the combination of a bad night’s sleep and the dreary prospect of an early start at school for a test in the extra German class she’d been attending, meant she was late in getting up. Some 20 days later, in virtually the only interview she has ever given about the family life surrounding Natascha, Frau Sirny admitted to the Viennese paper Kronen Zeitung that there were words the next day about her tardiness. It got more heated, in the way these things do, and her mother lashed out, giving her a firm slap around the face. But as soon as it was delivered, it was regretted. Frau Sirny told the paper: ‘On the morning she disappeared, she stayedin bed for 45 minutes before getting up. She is generally bad at getting up. Then she could not find her glasses. And then she was cheeky. So I gave her a smack in the mouth. But I don’t persecute myself because of it. One must set limits with children. But yes, she was obviously emotionally hurt.’
    Natascha dressed in silence, stopping only at the door of the flat as her mother turned to give her a hug, saying, ‘You must never set off for school upset or angry with me, because we may never see each other again.’
    One lost childhood later Natascha would reveal in her TV interview: ‘Yup, the second of March 1998. A bad day. On the evening before, I had a fight with my mother because my father brought me home too late and didn’t accompany me to the apartment door. “God knows what could have happened to you,” she said to me, “someone could have grabbed you”—and then the next day, while in her care, that really happened. “Never leave the house after an argument without saying goodbye,” my mother always used to say.
    â€˜Exactly. And I thought, “I don’t agree with my mother right now,” and to spite her I slammed the door. Because nothing was going to happen to me anyway. That’s pretty heavy when you are kidnapped just half an hour later and you are cowering in the back of a van.’
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    Less than a mile away, Priklopil the predator waited. He parked his van in the Melangasse near to her schoolgates. White van man, inconspicuous as ever throughout an unremarkable life, waiting for the moment that he had prepared for over the years. The collector, come to collect that which he knew would fulfil him the way no jigsaw puzzle or electronic circuit breaker ever had. He sat, silent and alone in his van, tuned into the local Vienna news radio which, 24 hours later, would be featuring as its lead item the news of a missing girl. The windows of the van were misted from his breath on the inside; the windscreen was running with rivulets of melting ice and snow on the