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

had been nothing. She was overcome with grief and was discovered not long after wandering through the back streets of Munich not far from the main railway station.
    Her story was checked and rechecked. Advertisements were placed in all the regional and national papers pleading for the doctor who delivered the child to come forward. All international departures by train and air were monitored and a description of the man appeared on German television for weeks. All to no avail.
    The emotional stress of her harrowing experience, and the agony of the investigation after it, left her a broken woman. Her once beautiful young face quickly vanished in the years that followed. She was haunted by the memory of her terrible ordeal and by the fact that out of it a child had been born, a child who, at the very moment she had begun to love it, had been cruelly taken from her. Unable to accept her story, her fiancé had broken off their engagement and when, eventually, she had returned to work she had been unable to concentrate and her employer had been forced to let her go. For years she lived with her parents in a state of isolation and severe grief.
    Eventually, however, she was able to find work again and although she never married the wounds began to heal. But her face had changed irrevocably and she no longer took the same care over her appearance as she once did. In 1978 both her parents died and she moved to Frankfurt where she got a job as a ticket clerk with one of the airlines. I think you can guess what happened from here.
    He took a sip of his now cold coffee and looked around. The two women opposite, both of whom had been listening intently to his story, looked quickly away.
    Well?
    Well what?
    You can’t just stop there. What happened?
    Well, apparently she had been sitting at her desk checking through the morning’s ticket sales when he arrived at the next counter. She had heard him say to her colleague: ‘Good morning, my name is Bessermann and I have tickets reserved for my daughter and myself for Buenos Aires’. Even before he had finished his sentence she had recognized his voice. Her hands were trembling as she looked across at the man standing on the other side of the counter. His hair had gone grey and he now wore thick glasses and a short beard. For a moment she thought perhaps her mind was playing tricks on her. She sat there shaking, waiting for him to speak again. Her colleague handed him his two tickets. He thanked her and turned to leave. It was only then that she found herself looking into the face of a young girl who moments before had stood concealed behind him, a girl who was the mirror image of the person she herself had been years before.
    After a number of hurried phone calls between airport security and the Frankfurt and Munich police he and his daughter were detained at the baggage check-point before boarding. Initially he had denied everything, but the police were suspicious enough to be able to compel him to postpone his return flight for a day or two.
    I listened as Wolfi related the sensational events of what he said had become one of Germany’s most notorious trials, how each new piece of evidence had come to light, what a field day the media had had.
    They’re treating it like a real-life fairy-tale. You wouldn’t believe the length that some of these papers will go to to get a story. But being there, actually being there was incredible. And you know, looking at his daughter I can understand in a way why he did it.
    He took out a folded newspaper photograph of a young girl.
    I had to admit she was very striking.
    Who’s to say that the very existence of this young girl doesn’t justify the strange circumstances surrounding her birth. If the same thing happened in some primitive tribe in Africa or Samoa or God’s knows where, no one would think twice about it. But the moral righteousness of some of the things that have been written about the trial has to be seen to be believed. I mean,