Out of the Line of Fire by Mark Henshaw Read Free Book Online

streets of Munich, totally disoriented and in a state of extreme agitation. She was taken to hospital and heavily sedated. In her bag they found a large sum of money.
    Her parents were overjoyed to hear that she had been found. They had begun to think that they would never see their daughter again. In the hospital the doctor who examined her discovered that she had recently given birth. Both her parents and her fiancé were shocked by this news and waited anxiously for the effect of the sedative to wear off. Even as they waited beside her hospital bed she suddenly sat up wide-eyed and cried: ‘My baby, my baby’—and then fell back onto the bed in a state of complete unconsciousness.
    Finally she awoke. At first she thought she was dreaming, but gradually her parents were able to convince her that they were real, that the nightmare she had been living through for the past year was over. As you can imagine it was a tearful reunion. But despite her obvious happiness at having been delivered into the arms of her loving parents she became distraught when she realized her baby was not with her. She clung to her mother’s breast. ‘He took my baby, he took my baby,’ she sobbed.
    Gradually, the full story emerged and much was made of it in the papers at the time. Many of the articles that were written then have been reprinted over the last couple of days. It was like a horrible fairy-tale come true. Some reports remained sceptical about the girl’s story, implying that she had made it up, that, in fact, she had fallen pregnant to another lover and to avoid shaming her parents had run away until the child was born. Then she had either killed or abandoned it. Even some of the police refused to accept her account of what had happened and naturally there was a lengthy investigation into all of the circumstances of her disappearance and the disappearance of her child. Despite rigorous questioning and a number of psychiatric examinations, one of which was conducted by Dr Franz Werthold, Munich’s most eminent psychiatrist at the time, she stuck to her story. What she maintained happened was this:
    She had left the office of the local stationery wholesalers where she worked late because it was the end of the month and there was a backlog of accounts to process. This was not unusual and, moreover, it had not been all that late—it must have been around seven o’clock. What little rush hour traffic there was in the town’s business district had cleared. It had rained earlier in the afternoon but despite this the night was warm and she was happy to be out in the clear evening air. She crossed Marienstrasse and began walking towards the laneway which joined it to Humboldtstrasse. From Humboldtstrasse she would catch the bus home to her parents as she always did. It was Thursday and her fiancé, she knew, would be waiting there for her.
    She turned into the alley-way. It was well lit and she had no need to feel afraid. She recalled how the overhead lights transformed the polished cobblestones ahead of her into shimmering arcs of light, arcs which seemed to flutter like hundreds of tiny radiant wings as she moved towards them. She had the impression that she was floating, rather than walking, over them. Further along the narrow alley-way she noticed a car parked halfway up on the footpath, directly under one of the street lights. She could see the form of a man wearing a hat standing on the footpath examining what looked like a street map spread out on the car’s roof. As she stepped off the footpath to go around the car the man looked up and called her name. His voice sounded warm, familiar. She looked up at him as he stepped out in front of the car, but because of the light overhead and the shadow from the brim of his hat she could not make out his face distinctly. He said her name again in the same friendly tone and stretched out his hand as if to greet her. His gesture had seemed so natural that she had automatically reached out