Papa?”
My father looked up from his habitual refuge behind the outspread pages of the Stadtanzeiger.
“Yes, Pia?”
“When you were at school here, did you know anyone called Bianca Schmitz?”
“No, I don’t think so.” My father glanced back at the page he had been reading, clearly eager to get back to some exciting account of local news.
“Well, did you know someone called Caroline Hack?”
Reluctantly, my father lowered the paper. “I don’t think so, Pia.”
“Are you sure, Papa?”
“Pia, I am trying to read the newspaper. What’s so important about Caroline… what did you say her name was?”
“Caroline Hack. Papa, Frau Kessel says she-”
“Frau Kessel?” My father sighed. He was about to say something along the lines of what my mother had said about not listening to Frau Kessel’s stories. Then light dawned. “She was the girl who ran away.”
“She ran away? Frau Kessel said she disappeared.”
“Well, she did, I suppose. She just took herself off without a warning. But how did you come to be discussing it with Frau Kessel?”
“She asked me to carry her shopping for her,” I said truthfully.
“She did? Unverschämt,” grunted my father.
At another time I might have been tempted into a digression at this point, agreeing how disgraceful it was that Frau Kessel had made me carry all her things home, hamming it up a bit: my back had never stopped aching since, you wouldn’t believe how many things she made me carry… however, for the time being the question of Caroline Hack was still more interesting than the possibility of dropping Frau Kessel in it.
“She says Caroline Hack just vanished, like-like Katharina Linden did.”
“Hmph.” My father straightened in his armchair, and looked at me rather severely. “Pia, I am not happy about this. Frau Kessel has no business frightening children with such stories.”
“I wasn’t frightened, I-”
“If she asks you to carry her shopping again, you tell her your papa told you to come straight home, verstanden?”
“OK… but Papa?”
“Yes, Pia?” My father sounded a little weary.
“Can you just tell me about Caroline Hack-please? I’m not frightened,” I added hastily. “I’m just… interested.”
“Ach, Pia! There really is nothing to tell. She was at the Grundschule at the same time as I was, but I really didn’t know her; she was in the fourth grade and I was in the second or third, I don’t remember which. She just didn’t come into school one morning, and eventually it got around that she had run away. She didn’t get on with her mother, I think.”
“Her stepmother, Frau Kessel said.”
“Frau Kessel said! Frau Kessel should mind her own business. Pia, I mean it quite seriously, I do not want you listening to such tales.”
“Yes, Papa.” Even I could see that any further questions were going to rouse my father’s ire; reluctantly, I retired from the field.
The following morning I cornered Stefan at the break. We loitered in a corner of the playground, away from the jungle gym where the first-graders were flinging themselves around like monkeys, and a safe distance from the corner where Thilo Koch and some other fourth-grade boys were standing in a huddle.
“What’s up?” said Stefan.
“It’s not just Katharina Linden and Marion Voss,” I told him without preamble. “Other girls have disappeared.”
Stefan glanced about him, as though he might notice who had vanished from among our number.
“Who?”
“Not now,” I said. “It was years ago, when my papa was at school.” Stefan’s shoulders relaxed when I said this: years ago, when my papa was at school-that was a time so remote as to be meaningless.
“Really?” he said, without excitement.
“Yes, really. There was a girl called Bianca Schmitz, that was before Papa was at school, I think, but there was another one called Caroline Hack, who was here at the same time as he was.”
“And what happened to them?”
“They just vanished. Frau Kessel told me.”
“Frau Kessel told you? Pia, you can’t believe a word that old Hexe says.” Stefan sounded quite irritated; no doubt the Breuer family had suffered from Frau Kessel’s hyperactive tongue in the past.
“No, really. It’s not just her-my papa knows about it too. He says she just didn’t turn up for school one morning, and everyone thought she had run away.”
“Why would she do that?”
“She didn’t like her stepmother.”
“Well, maybe she did run away.”
“Frau Kessel doesn’t think so. She thinks someone took her.”
“Someone?”
“Well…” I lowered my voice, glancing around me. “Frau Kessel thinks Herr Düster did it.”
“Old Düster?” Now Stefan’s interest was piqued.
“Yes. She says he took Gertrud out for a walk the day she disappeared-”
“Hang on, hang on…!” Stefan looked bewildered. “Who’s Gertrud?”
“Herr Schiller’s daughter,” I said impatiently. “The one who also disappeared. Herr Düster took her for a walk in the Eschweiler Tal and she never came back.”
“Well, if it was so obvious, why didn’t anyone do anything?”
“Frau Kessel says Herr Schiller stood up for him.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know.” I thought about it. “Frau Kessel says he took Gertrud to get at Herr Schiller, because he wanted to marry Herr Schiller’s wife, before she got married to Herr Schiller, I mean.”
“So why did he take the other ones?”
“Maybe it was like a man-eating tiger,” I suggested. “Once he tasted blood, he had to do it again.”
“Or a vampire,” said Stefan. “You know, like Dracula. I saw a film about him once. He could turn himself into a bat, and fly into people’s bedrooms through the window.”
“I don’t think Herr Düster turns into a bat,” I protested. “And anyway, none of the kids has disappeared from their bedroom.”
“Maybe he turns into a wolf.”
“And nobody notices a wolf in the middle of the street?” I asked sarcastically.
“Or a cat. A big black cat with glowing eyes.”
“Like Pluto, you mean?” I suggested.
Stefan gasped. “Of course.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, really.” Stefan looked at me, his face alight with the advent of a new idea. “Listen, has anyone ever seen Herr Düster and Pluto at the same time?”
“How should I know?”
“I bet they haven’t.” Stefan considered. “You remember that time we were at Herr Schiller’s, and Pluto got in, and Herr Schiller just went mad? Like the cat was a devil or something.”
I thought back; Stefan was perfectly right. A sliver of cold slid through me.
“That’s crazy,” I said, shaking my head. Pluto was just a cat. A very large, very mean-tempered cat, but just a cat all the same. He had made Herr Schiller jump, that was all…
The bell rang for the end of break and as we went inside I dismissed the idea from my mind altogether; it is only in retrospect that I believe that was the point when the germ of an idea began to sprout, the idea of somehow getting into Herr Düster’s house and searching for the lost girls, searching for the truth.