The Kastners seemed respectable.
He was a lorry driver, and hadn’t given up work on becoming unexpectedly rich. She was a modest housewife, completely devoted to her family and her children. In addition, both were fervent in their religious faith.
But you never could tell.
Vogel pretended to be satisfied. ‘It seems to me we’ve covered everything we can, for the time being.’ He got up from his armchair, immediately imitated by Borghi, who had remained silent throughout. ‘Thank you for the coffee. And for this,’ he added, waving Anna Lou’s diary. ‘I’m sure it’ll be of great help to us.’
The Kastners walked the two policemen to the door. Vogel glanced again at the children playing imperturbably by the Christmas tree. God alone knew what would remain of all this in their adult memories, he thought. Maybe they were young enough to escape the horror. But the package waiting for Anna Lou, its red ribbon still uncut, told him that there would always be something to remind them of the tragedy that had struck their family. Because there was nothing worse than a gift that doesn’t reach the person it is intended for. The happiness it contains slowly decays, poisoning everything around it.
At that moment, Vogel realised that the silence between them had lasted too long, so he turned to Borghi. ‘Could you wait for me in the car, please?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Borghi said deferentially.
Alone now with the Kastners, Vogel spoke in a new, thoughtful tone, as if he had taken ‘the situation’ to heart. ‘I want to be frank with you,’ he said. ‘The media have got wind of the story, they’ll soon be arriving in their droves … Sometimes, reporters are better than the police at digging up news, and what ends up on television isn’t always relevant to the case. Not knowing where to look, they’ll look at you. So if you have anything to say, anything … now’s the time to say it.’
A silence followed, a silence Vogel drew out longer than necessary. It was like sealing a pact. His advice had contained a warning: I know you have secrets, everybody has them. But now your secrets belong to me.
‘Good,’ he said at last, breaking the silence to release them from further embarrassment. ‘I see you’ve had flyers printed with a photograph of your daughter. That was a good idea, but it’s not enough. So far, it’s been the local media who’ve dealt with the matter, but now we’ll need to do more. For example, it’d be helpful to make a public appeal. How do you feel about that?’
Husband and wife looked at each other questioningly. Then Anna Lou’s mother took a step forward, slipped off the bead bracelet her daughter had made for her, took Vogel’s left hand and put the bracelet around his wrist, as if in a solemn investiture. ‘We’ll do everything that’s necessary to help you, Agent Vogel. But you’ll bring her home, won’t you?’
As he waited in the car, Borghi was busy speaking into his mobile phone. ‘I don’t know how much longer he’ll be, he asked to do it,’ he was explaining to one of the officers who had been waiting for more than an hour for the scheduled briefing to start. ‘I have family, too. Calm them down and assure them that nobody will miss their Christmas dinner.’ Actually, he wasn’t sure he should be making a promise like that, because he didn’t know what Vogel had in mind. He knew only what he needed to know, and this morning all he knew was that he had to be Vogel’s driver.
The previous evening, his immediate superior had told him he would have to go to Avechot in the morning to help Special Agent Vogel in investigating the disappearance of a minor. Then he had handed him the meagre file on the case and had concluded with some unusual instructions. He was to be at the roadside restaurant on the outskirts of the village at eight thirty on the dot, wearing a dark suit with a shirt and tie.
Obviously, Borghi had heard plenty of rumours about Vogel and his eccentricities. He and his cases were often featured on television, and he had been a guest on a number of crime-related programmes. He was in great demand for newspaper and TV interviews. He was at his ease in front of the cameras, always able to talk off the cuff, confident of success.
Then there were the stories that were told in the police, which described him as a meticulous character, a control freak, concerned only with looking good on screen and making sure that attention was focused on him, never on anyone around him.
Recently, though, things hadn’t gone so well for Special Agent Vogel. One case in particular had called his methods into question. That had pleased some in the police, but it still seemed to Borghi, naïvely perhaps, that there was a lot to learn from an officer like Vogel. After all, he himself was just at the beginning of his career, and this experience certainly wouldn’t do him any harm.
Except that Vogel had always dealt with unusual crimes, especially gruesome murders that had a strong emotional impact. And it was said that he always chose his cases carefully.
Which was why Borghi was now wondering what Vogel had seen that was so extraordinary in the disappearance of a young girl.
Even though he found the fears of Anna Lou’s parents understandable, and suspected that something horrible might have happened to her, he couldn’t see it as a media sensation. And usually those were the only kinds of cases that interested Vogel.
‘We’ll be there shortly,’ he assured the officer at the other end, just to finish the call. As he did so, he spotted a black van parked at the end of the street.
In it were two men, observing the Kastner house without exchanging a word.
Borghi would have liked to get out of the car and check who the men were, but just then he saw Vogel come out of the house and walk along the drive in his direction. After a moment, though, Vogel slowed down and did something that made no sense.
He started clapping.
Softly at first, then increasingly loudly. As he did so, he looked around. The sound echoed, and faces started to appear at the windows of the neighbouring houses. An elderly woman, a married couple with their children, a fat man, a housewife with curlers in her hair. Gradually, others joined them. They all watched the scene uncomprehendingly.
Vogel stopped clapping.
He looked around one last time, still watched by the neighbours, then resumed walking as if nothing had happened and got in the car. Borghi would have liked to ask him the reasons for this strange behaviour, but once again it was Vogel who spoke first. ‘What did you notice in that house today, Officer Borghi?’
The young man didn’t need to think about it. ‘The husband and the wife held hands the whole time, they seemed very united, yet she was the one who did all the talking.’
Vogel nodded, looking through the windscreen. ‘The man’s dying to tell us something.’
Borghi made no comment. He started the car, forgetting all about the clapping and the black van.
The village police station was too small and cramped for what Vogel had in mind, and he had asked for a place more suited to the investigation. So the school gym had been placed at his disposal as an operations room.
The mats and the gym equipment had been piled up along one of the walls. A big basket of volleyballs stood forgotten in a corner. Some desks had been brought in from the classrooms, and a few folding garden chairs had also been procured. There were two laptops and a desktop computer provided by the library, but only one telephone connected to an outside line. A blackboard had been placed under one of the baskets on the basketball area, and on it someone had written in chalk: Case findings. Underneath were stuck the only elements gathered so far: the photograph of Anna Lou that featured on the flyers printed by the family and a map of the valley.