The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

say, Why should I have a photograph of her? I noticed. I thought there was a slight undercurrent of wistfulness in his voice, as though he should like to have had one.

“Heinrich-well, he made a mistake about Hannelore,” continued Herr Duster. He paused, and his gnarled fingers rubbed the arm of the chair, making little circles. “He thought she really wanted to leave him. He used to get-very angry with her. He had some idea that Gertrud wasn’t-that she was…” His voice trailed off. He was old, after all, incredibly ancient in my eyes, and I was only a child. He was of a different generation, one that thought unpleasantness was better not discussed in front of children. All the same, I thought I heard him say one single word in a very low voice: Meine. He thought she was mine. I said nothing.

“They say,” went on Herr Duster almost to himself, “that they might have to exhume Hannelore. They think perhaps it wasn’t natural causes.”

I remembered what Frau Kessel had said about the scene she had witnessed between Herr Duster and his brother’s wife. The ranting, the pulling away, Herr Duster trying to kiss Hannelore’s hand. He thought no one would see them, but I did. Had Herr Duster really cornered his unwilling sister-in-law and tried to kiss her? Or had the argument been about something else? About protecting Hannelore from her husband? I don’t know what it was she had… it could have been anything.

“And Gertrud?” I prompted tentatively.

“In the well,” said Herr Duster. He sounded weary, as though he would like to get the story told and over with. “They say it has to be verified, but yes, they think it is her. She was the first one, they think, the oldest…” He looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “How could he do it, that’s what everyone wants to know. How could he do it?”

“His own daughter,” I said, and the idea was horrible, nasty, framed in words I wanted to spit out as soon as possible, like the girl in the story from whose mouth toads dropped every time she spoke. His own daughter.

“Yes, but that was it, you see,” said Herr Duster softly. “He didn’t think she was his own daughter. He thought when she disappeared it would hurt me. He thought he was taking away any chance I had of ever…” He was silent for a few moments, then he went on: “Heinrich was not the man to support a child who was not his own, you know. Not to love a child, even if she called him Papa.”

“That’s horrible,” I exclaimed, and drew Herr Duster’s grave gaze to me.

“He was her father,” he said. His voice was helpless. “She was his daughter-and he killed her.” His eyes seemed to blur and brim over, and at last a single tear ran down one gaunt cheek.

We sat in silence for a while. It was late in the afternoon and the light was fading. It was becoming gloomy in the room, with its small windows. If I did not get up soon and put the lights on, we would be sitting in the dark.

“I don’t see what Katharina Linden had ever done to him,” I said eventually. “Or Julia Mahlberg, or anyone else.”

“They did nothing,” replied Herr Duster sadly.

“Then why-?”

“I think he was trying to get at me,” said Herr Duster. “I think he thought that every time another girl went missing, I would think of Gertrud. He-Heinrich-was very sick, you know. And of course he would have known what everyone was saying, about who was taking these girls.”

I did know what everyone had said, at least everyone as personified by Frau Kessel. Everyone thought Herr Duster had done it. He would have been lynched if a few more levelheaded people hadn’t insisted on letting the law take its course instead-people like my father. And then, when he had been driven out of the town, or even arrested for something he hadn’t done, someone would have searched his house, and there in the cellar they would have found all the evidence they needed. Herr Schiller had only to brick up the tunnel again and no one would have been any the wiser.

I heard later that the tunnel had been there for hundreds of years. Older residents of the town said it was not the only tunnel; the ancient streets were riddled with them, a rotten honeycomb underlying the neat rows of houses. There used to be a synagogue on the Orchheimer Strasse, where now there is nothing but a memorial to the Jewish community who vanished in the war. They think the tunnels enabled the Jews to go about on the Sabbath, when they were forbidden by their faith to go out into the street. How and when Herr Schiller came upon the one under his house, it is now impossible to say.

I was dazed by the enormity of what Herr Schiller had done. People did things I didn’t like, things I hated, every day. If I had heard that Thilo Koch had been trampled by wild horses or had fallen into the big cats’ enclosure at Koln Zoo and been rent limb from limb while screaming for mercy, I would not have been sorry. But I wouldn’t have pushed him in there. “I still don’t understand,” I said. “Why did he do it?”

Herr Duster was silent for so long that I thought perhaps he had not heard the question. Then he uttered just one word in a low voice. Hass. Hate.

Chapter Fifty-six

We stayed in Bad Munstereifel a few weeks more, long enough to see the new year in: the year 2000, although the millennium celebrations mostly passed us by. I did not see Herr Duster again, and I heard later that he had outlived his brother by only a few months. When Boris had told Stefan that Herr Duster was sick, he was right: the old man had cancer, and at the end it carried him off very quickly. I’m thankful for that.

I have often wondered about him and his brother, how the hatred between them could have led to what happened, and why it seemed to accelerate toward the end: four girls taken in one year. I think perhaps Herr Schiller knew that they were both dying, and he was determined to wreak his revenge before it was forever beyond his power to hurt his brother, Johannes.

I wonder if the fact that Herr Duster never reacted infuriated him, and drove him on? Even though Herr Duster was cast as the town villain, he never indulged in any unseemly displays of emotion. Not when the woman he had loved faded away and died. Not when his brother changed his name as a sly means of accusation. Not even on the day when (as later publicized by that inexhaustible supply of local information, Frau Kessel) he opened his front door to find a little packet on the doorstep, a packet containing a child’s hair ribbon. Or the time it was a single glove, a little girl’s glove.

If his brother had hoped to provoke him, he failed, or at any rate he failed to taunt him into any public signs of grief or anger. Herr Duster had simply called the police, as any good citizen might, and had been taken off in a patrol car, stony-faced, seemingly unmoved, to help them with their inquiries. The fact that this had been interpreted by Herr Duster’s neighbors as an arrest for abduction and murder can only have gladdened the icy splinter that was all that was left of Heinrich Schiller’s heart. He would have liked to see his brother, Johannes, torn to pieces by the citizens of Bad Munstereifel, their fists and nails and teeth the instruments of his vengeance. It must have eaten him up inside, the fact that his brother never reacted. That he never succeeded in shocking him.

The police traced the call placed by Boris on the night of our adventure; Stefan’s cousin, in spite of his almost professional burglary skills, had failed to take the simple precaution of calling from a public phone. Or perhaps the Jagermeister was responsible for this oversight. Boris made some attempt to conceal the reasons for his presence in the Orchheimer Strasse that night, but dissembling was not his strong point. He made one unfortunate remark, tried to backtrack, and tripped himself up again.

Eventually the whole story came out. It was Boris who had acquired one of Marion Voss’s shoes, by the simple expedient of paying Thilo Koch to steal one for him from the rack at the Grundschule. It was Boris and his friends who were responsible for burning it, late one night on the Quecken hill, and it was in an attempt to obtain further items belonging to the dead girls that Boris had broken into Herr Duster’s house that night.

Shamefacedly, he was forced to admit that he and his cronies had been attempting a kind of black mass, inspired more by popular television programs than any actual arcane knowledge. Hunched around the stone circle they had built in the ruined castle, they had done a little chanting and drumming, and a lot of smoking (not all of it