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  It pleased him that no two rooms in the cellar were alike in either shape or purpose. In the small room in the southeastern corner designated as his workshop, for example, he had installed a shelf unit on which he had arranged most of his electrical tools—drills, saws, a sander—along with the odds and ends, such as tubing, electrical wire, spare plugs, and sockets, that are the builder’s stock in trade. He had lugged most of the construction materials down from the garage and sorted them into compartments: Planks of oak and pine stood stacked neatly against the wall in the room he had earmarked for storing wood; sacks of cement and sand for mixing concrete were piled up in the storerooms; and odd items such as spare window frames and sinks, a box full of ceramic wall tiles that he had snapped up at half price—things that he had picked up cheap but for which he had not yet conceived a purpose—were given space in the room allocated to “spare parts.” Dimly lit and dank though the cellar was—damp-proofing it completely had proved impossible; it had no ventilation, so, especially in winter, the walls farthest from the boiler room were often slimy with condensation—it was a well-ordered, functional place.

  Indeed Josef had been so convinced that the cellar was now complete that in the summer of 1983 he had arranged for the council to visit in due course and rubber-stamp it, a legally required procedure to ensure that any alterations made to a building conformed to the original plans. And on November 14, 1983, a man with a clipboard arrived at 40 Ybbsstrasse to make the official inspection. Josef was proud to be able to tell him, as they wandered from one dimly lit room to the next, discussing the expert job he had made of rendering the walls, or the fuel efficiency of the log-burning stove, that what the man was looking at was all Josef Fritzl’s own handiwork. “Five years it took for me to do this,” he said. The inspector went back to his office to write up his report and approved the cellar the same day.

  But, proud as he was of his achievement, Josef couldn’t help but feel that something was missing. Like the house that he had spent the past few years endlessly tearing apart and putting back together again, the cellar failed to live up to his expectations—it seemed to lack some indefinable thing. That uncomfortable feeling had first crept over him in the autumn of 1983, between the time he had asked the council to inspect the cellar and the day the official with the clipboard had appeared at his door. The cellar, it had dawned on him, was not complete at all. It needed to be bigger. His instinct told him that he would have to build two more rooms that would extend from his workshop in an upside-down P-shape, underneath the courtyard, in the direction of the old house.

  Had Josef been given to contemplation, he might have wondered what the extra two rooms would be for. Or why he had felt the need, at around the same time, to reinforce the courtyard with two layers of concrete. But his instinct would tell him only that seven rooms were now insufficient for his needs and further excavation was now essential. And if Josef had been predisposed to self-analysis, he might have noticed that whatever was happening to his perception of the cellar had started to occur around the time that Elisabeth had run away. Because it had been after she had disappeared—or, more precisely, once he had picked her up from the police cell in Vienna and driven her back to the safety of their home—that he had first fallen into the habit of spending long periods of time underground: accustoming himself to the cellar’s smells and atmosphere, to the point where it became by far his favourite area of the house.

  But Josef Fritzl was not a man who thought very much about the significance of what he did. And had he been asked—as indeed he was, twenty-four years later in a prison cell in St. Pölten—he probably would have said that more than once in his life, he had found himself in a situation that had seemed to have come about “spontaneously,” entirely independently of his own will. For there had been times when he had found himself doing something or other—loitering about on a bicycle in the streets of Linz, say—without knowing why. And although it was inconvenient that Josef would now have to start work on the cellar again just when it appeared to be finished, he had set about making the necessary arrangements. A week before the official from Amstetten Council had come to inspect the cellar on November 14, Josef Fritzl had sent further drawings to the housing department, seeking permission to excavate two additional rooms.

  The council approved this second application on November 11, 1983, but because nobody there ever heard another word about it, it was assumed that Fritzl had abandoned the project. And when, five years later, a member of the council’s planning team finally called him to find out what had ever become of those two rooms, Fritzl would tell him that he had given up on the project because it had proved too complicated. Quite the opposite was true. He hadn’t given up on the project at all, only decided it now needed to be carried out in secrecy. And he spent the following nine months—from November 1983 to August 1984—deeply involved in burrowing out and furnishing these two extra chambers. Because he trusted his instincts, he continued to carry out what he now knew to be a vitally significant work without asking himself why and without breathing a word of it to anyone.

  Elisabeth had always been a keen letter writer. And although it had been a long day at the Rosenberg restaurant, where still, after almost two years, she reluctantly worked as a waitress, she now felt the urge to commit her thoughts to paper. She had arrived back home in Ybbsstrasse after her shift some time in the early evening, far too exhausted to do much else but go straight to her room, flop into bed, and flick on the television. Somehow she had ended up watching the late film: Duel, Steven Spielberg’s first feature, the story of a man who is stalked by an apparently driverless truck. It was not usually her sort of thing, but she had surprised herself by enjoying it so much that she had watched it to the end. For several days she had been turning over thoughts of Ernst, a friend from whom she had unexpectedly received a letter. And now she chose from a selection a pen filled with pink ink and a sheet of plain paper.

  Dear Ernst, she wrote in a compressed, girlish hand.First I want to thank you for your nice letter. I was so happy to receive it. I hope you’ll forgive me for not having written back straight away, but I’m having a very stressful time.

  Her sentences in letters were always brief and to the point, not the sprawling constructions typical of many German speakers.

  In his letter to Elisabeth, Ernst had complained about the poor marks he had received in his exams—three Ds—but Elisabeth now consoled him with the news that she had fared considerably worse: five Ds. What was more, her finals were coming up in June. She had always been a mediocre student, very dreamy and prone to illness, but the latest exam results had tipped her over into a period of more than usually profound anxiety. Theoretically she would complete her two-year course in tourism and gastronomy once she had passed those exams in the summer. After which she planned to move out of her home. The prospect of another five Ds was the only thing in her way.

  She went on to confide to Ernst that she intended to leave her waitressing job at the Rosenberg and move into her sister Rosemarie’s apartment in Linz from where she promised to send him her new address.

  Then it was Bye. Speak soon. She signed her name with a large, swirling “S,” for “Sissi,” and added, Write back to me soon and don’t worry yourself to death!

  The letter was dated May 9, 1984: three weeks after Elisabeth’s eighteenth birthday. By September she hoped to be living with her sister in their very own apartment.

  Just more than two years had passed since she had run away to Vienna. And although that drive back in her father’s car remained frozen in her memory as one of her worst-ever moments—the sight of his corrupt, lopsided face staring at her in the rearview mirror; even in a car he was a peeper—life for Elisabeth had not necessarily deteriorated. True, there had been an exceptionally bad patch in the Fritzl household after her forced return: her mother looking doleful, not daring to say much; her father trying to play the big man by slapping his daughter under a ridiculous curfew. That had cost her some friends.
But Josef hadn’t been able to get around the fact that she worked for a living. And work and curfews were incompatible. Working meant getting out of the house. And getting out of the house meant that she had gradually—not that it had been easy—won back a degree of independence.

  And one of the good things that had come out of the trip to Vienna was that he wasn’t touching her anymore. He would stare at her and follow her around in his creepy way, and he was still opening all of her mail and probably not passing half of it on to her. But he hadn’t touched her. It was obvious why not. He wouldn’t come near her because he was frightened that she was going to tell someone. He had always been adamant that nobody would believe her against him anyway. But when she’d run away he had been taken aback. He hadn’t known what else she was capable of. And, for her, just the fact that he was keeping his distance had suddenly made life so much more bearable.

  She was still fragile. She was very thin. One of her colleagues at the Rosenberg had taken her aside one day and asked her if she was self-harming, and she had told him that she had fallen off a motorbike. But she was feeling more confident now. And although her father still tried to control her, and standing up to him always required tremendous reserves of courage, she was steadier now and more confident. Day by day she grew more assertive, until she got to the point where she could almost ignore him. She wasn’t afraid to talk back to him. He’d tell her that she was going out too much or that she was going off the rails. And she’d tell him, “I don’t give a stuff.” When he was away on his business trips, she started having friends over to number 40 for the first time.

  Besides, she saw less of him now that he was fanatically busy on one of his building projects. Doing whatever he was doing under the house. She didn’t care what. As long as he was out of her way she was happy.

  Value-for-money was his middle name, and Josef had built the cellar with materials he had bought at a special rate from his former employer Zehetner. And whenever old Frau Zehetner or one of the odd-job men who helped her husband run the business asked Josef what he was planning to do with all this concrete, he would tell them that he was building a nuclear bunker. And in Austria during the Cold War, with Czechoslovakia to the north, Hungary to the east, and Yugoslavia to the south, this seemed like a fairly reasonable, even astute, undertaking.

  Everybody was building them. Austrians had reason to be anxious, after all. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; the crash of a U.S. Air Force B-52 jet carrying four hydrogen bombs into the frozen ocean off Greenland in 1967; the stockpiling of nuclear weapons next door in divided Germany; not to mention the ever-present risk that tensions between NATO and the communist members of the Warsaw Pact would erupt at any moment into some sort of catastrophic end-of the-world scenario—all of this had convinced neutral Austria, geographically unlucky to be in the thick of it all, that when it came to it (and most Austrians spoke of when, not if), the country would find itself at the center of the nuclear crossfire between East and West. In 1969 an editorial in the Amstettner Anzeiger had starkly pointed out that “the prospects for a nuclear war are becoming more and more terrible and the chances of survival smaller and smaller.” And the following year the Austrian government had passed a law that obliged its citizens to equip any newly built house with a nuclear shelter, a law that would remain in force until 1997. Meanwhile anybody who wanted to convert their cellar into a bunker was entitled to state subsidies.

  In the early 1980s the fear was still very real. So, although Frau Zehetner remained instinctively suspicious of Josef Fritzl, she saw nothing out of the ordinary about his intention to build a bunker. She suspected that many of the firm’s clients were doing the same. Indeed, the only thing that had surprised her at all was his willingness to discuss it so openly; a bunker was something that most Austrians chose to build in utmost secrecy, so much so that even the government was never able to determine with any real accuracy how many of these radiation-proof hideouts existed across the land. Somewhere around 2.7 million, it was estimated, of which at least half were thought to be privately owned. This tendency to furtiveness where bunker building was concerned had its roots in two causes. First, there was something vaguely unseemly about admitting to your neighbours that you were frightened—or paranoid—enough about the future to want to carry out such major alterations to your home. And second, if nuclear war did break out, anyone in possession of a bunker wanted to be able to retreat to safety discreetly, without any last-minute moral dilemmas as to whom to take in, whom to leave out.

  Every few days or so Josef would stride into Zehetner. “How’s the bunker going?” Frau Zehetner would ask, not entirely without irony—she had never liked him, nor forgotten his rape conviction. “Fine, it’s fine,” he would reply with a wink, then disappear with another sack of cement. He did not tell her that “the bunker,” as he was fond of calling it, did not refer to the original seven rooms of the cellar, but to the two extra rooms that he was now excavating in secret. Nor did he correct her assumption that the cataclysmic event toward which he was moving in his mind was based on some private conviction that Amstetten might one day become the casualty of a nuclear attack.

  Now the two extra rooms began to take shape. To get to the first room, which was long and thin—a corridor, really—Josef had punched a hole in the wall behind the shelf unit in his workshop and enlarged it so that it was big enough for him to crawl through. Then there was the corridor through which he could access the second room, which measured eighteen metres square. The farthest wall of this second room backed onto the foundations of the old house.

  Within the foundations of the old house he now excavated another two rooms which were, however, not connected to the P-shaped rooms but were accessible through the boiler room. Two rooms: He tiled them and filled them with the excess rubble and building materials and would leave them as they were for almost a decade.

  A second letter to Ernst, a longer and more revealing one: Elisabeth sent it two and a half weeks after the first. This time she chose a blue fountain pen and baby-blue stationery, her hand sloping with the effort of writing neatly for the first paragraph, then reverting to the squashed, rounded style of her previous letter.

  The date was May 29, a day of brilliant sunshine that had burst forth unexpectedly after forty-eight hours of heavy rain. But Elisabeth had been unable to enjoy it; she was cooped up in Ybbsstrasse, off work, brought down once again with the unpredictable bouts of illness that had dogged her adolescence. I only sometimes have pains, and occasionally I also still feel sick, she explained to Ernst. And, a few sentences later, I’m sorry about my handwriting) as well as being ill. I’m also completely stressed. My nerves have never been the best.

  In a roundabout, oblique way it might have been an appeal for help, but Ernst would never detect it.

  She had not been idle during her illness. In fact, she had come to an important decision. After a disagreement with her supervisor at the Rosenberg, a man she dismissed to Ernst as “dim-witted,” she had decided to find another job in Traun, a small town in Upper Austria some thirty-five miles west of Amstetten. With this in mind she had spent many hours combing the newspapers and sending off applications. There had been an opening in a restaurant for kitchen help. She had even written to a dentist who required an assistant. On Monday, she told Ernst, she would travel to Traun for interviews. And, for the second time that month, she promised to send him her new address, just as soon as she had moved.

  There were other things that concerned her besides her job. Her boyfriend, Andreas, for example, whom she now mentioned to Ernst for the first time.

  I’ve been together with him since we started the course. Only it’s difficult at the moment because he is from Lindabrunn. That‘s, of course, quite far away and it makes me quite sad.

  In his last letter, among tales of late-night parties and heavy drinking, Ernst had been bold enough to ask Elisabeth to send him a passport photograph of herself. She had searched around for something suitable and settl
ed on a recent Polaroid. The picture shows Elisabeth beside one of her father’s more frivolous additions to the house: an enormous, prefabricated swimming pool. Made of blue plastic, it takes up most of the roof terrace that Josef had recently built on the roof of the apartment block and squats there entirely out of place in its surroundings, looking more like an enormous vat—the kind one might expect to find in a factory for processing liquids—than a pool. Like many things about the house, this pool and another one in the garden were practical, cheaply made, and strikingly ugly.

  In the picture she sent Ernst, an aluminum ladder is draped over the outside rim of the pool and Elisabeth is seated on one of its rungs, wearing jeans and a blue tartan cotton blouse cut off at the shoulders. Her hair has not kept its blond colour but has turned light brown, and on a recent trip to the hairdresser’s she had insisted on having it chopped into short, feathery layers, the style of the day. And, although her posture is slightly hunched, she is smiling; her heart-shaped face has lost the prim seriousness of her early youth. It is an image of a blissful early-summer evening, marred only slightly by the evidence of her father’s never-ending construction work. Behind Elisabeth one of the gentle hills of the Mostviertel, densely covered with trees, is just about visible above the high wooden fence of the terrace. And strewn across the decking are assorted unidentifiable objects, trussed up in several layers of unraveling plastic sheeting—stored here temporarily on the terrace until they were taken down to the cellar.