Girl in the Cellar by Allan Hall Read Free Book Online

teenage children leading to an escalation in pitch and tone during arguments with their parents. ‘But he would scream back at her, literally scream, that he was fed up being ordered about, thatone day he would be in charge, and she would listen up then,’ added the neighbour. ‘It was always around lunchtime, when the father wasn’t there: I think he was a little bit afraid of the father. And on the couple of occasions I heard them shouting—once when I was walking past to go to the shops—I heard her saying he should take his “wet bed things” to the washing machine before going out.’ The same neighbour went on:
    Karl had set his mind on a son that I think he wanted to take to football, on hikes, to do ‘manly’ things with, but his son was sensitive and shy. There was friction too between Karl and Waltraud. He drank—he always had lots of free samples from his company, I saw him often unloading them from his car—and this was another flashpoint. Waltraud was very abstemious: a glass of hot wine at Christmas. So many of us never see beneath the surface of relationships and lives, like we never saw beneath the surface of his building and the secret underneath. It must be that something in his relationship with his parents made him what he was, mustn’t it?
    A school photograph of Priklopil at 14 shows an earnest-looking boy with dark eyes and thick hair parted on one side. It gives little clue as to what was going on inside his disturbed head. He wore the mask of innocence.
    â€˜I once told him he looked like a girl, he was so angelic-looking,’ said Rosi Doni, a 55-year-old hairdresser who regularly cut his hair at the home he shared with his mother until 15 years ago. ‘He liked it long and wouldnever let me take off that much.’ She recalls Priklopil’s mother complaining that her son was obsessed with technology and that just getting into the family’s house in Strasshof was ‘a real effort’. ‘I remember, after he had grown up and he was living with her alone there, the mother having to yell at me, saying, “Wait while I deactivate the security system so I can open the door.”
    â€˜The house looked very normal, I can’t remember anything peculiar about it, it was nice and tidy. The only thing I was surprised about is that he never spoke about girls, not once. And he was such a handsome man. He also looked a lot younger than he was.’
    Long before Wolfgang the master pupated from Wolfgang the servant, he began learning the skills which would enable him to indulge his fantasy. He started work as an apprentice at Siemens, the German electronics giant, when he was 15, after dropping out of technical school after one year, at a wage of some £25 per week. It was a good job with a solid company, and one which his father urged him to take, although according to some accounts he wanted to stay on at school.
    Contemporaries at Siemens say he completed his apprenticeship with good marks and was subsequently hired by the firm. One of his ex-colleagues from this period described him as ‘not at all ostentatious. He joined in all those normal jokes we did, like hiding untraceable malfunctions in switches, or letting an electrolyte-capacitor “explode” exactly when the instructor passed by. Apart from that we thought he must have derived from a wealthy family, because he always had money.’
    Ernst Winter, a fellow apprentice, remembered Priklopil’s obsession with cars when he was working at Siemens, describing him as a ‘petrol head’ who really only became animated when talking about machines, not his fellows. ‘The other thing that stood out is how much time he took over everything,’ said Winter. ‘He was slow, but thorough. Very thorough.’ Nothing in his demeanour or his manners gave any inkling to the strange obsession that he was carrying around inside him—to kidnap