Prologue

..............Yet again she was on the move, for yet again another schoolday. Already everything and everyone was moving about. The hard, cold wind, some leftover snowdust and all the people on and in their bicycles, scooters, busses, lorries and cars. Above it all more snow-filled clouds are gliding though a greyish morning sky. Also the news is new, again. Another story has filled the heads of the adults. As if it was important. A so-called ‘incendiary letter’ had been published in one of the morning papers. If you thought about it, this was kind of strange! A letter set on fire was no longer a letter, because it turned into ashes!? But they seemed to be talking about nothing else, first during breakfast, and now, in the car. She listened but only with one ear. She was thinking about the coming school day, wondering what they all were going to do later on. Her last lesson would be swimming, which she enjoyed, after that they would be free! Pretty soon she would ready for her second swimming certificate! As if she was born in the water, according to Dad: he thought she swam like a dolphin. On the schoolyard there would be a rustle of talk about the newest Harry Potter film. Out on DVD, now, so everyone wanted to get a copy of it! Be that as it may, most of all she wanted to discuss certain things with Lisette. Secretly, of course!

This private meeting had been planned for the third member of the threesome. Only four more days to Elsie’s birthday! Coming Sunday their friend would be the last to turn nine, and pretty soon the two of them had to decide what to do and buy for her upcoming celebration. First of all they would get a few of the newest Potter presents, Lisette being quite obsessed with that bespectacled Harry...But her share would have to come out of Dad’s wallet...All the new games, gadgets, posters, let alone a party with dressed up Harry Potter-people performing; all of them were very expensive. The Pokémon coins and cards had been affordable, at least if you kept your urge for collecting under control. She knew a few kids how had stolen money for it…No, her allowance would never stretch far enough. She must remember to ask dad for money tonight...

‘Darling, a lot has changed in this tiny yet megalomaniac country. But that is something we all know! Especially the last three, four years…But this cryptic missive still comes as a surprise!’ her Dad continues there squabble. Being fund of surprises she pities herself not being able to understand what he was talking about. But her eyes understood what she saw: her daddy always looked great! The parting of his hair, for example, made a funny little shelter above his dark brown eyes. That always came in handy when it rained, he used to say. Like this his eyes never got wet. Looking through the rear-view mirror she could perfectly peek at him…

Then she peered back at the traffic, at all the twinkling lights. The lights became a single red-and-white sparkling strand. It was beautiful, especially with your eyes half-closed: as if the two colours got mixed up and were jumping up and down in front of you! Everyone else was on the move, but they all seemed to have gathered right on this motorway! All the red lights went towards the city where Dad and Mum worked and where she went to school. The white ones drove towards the city where her only grandfather and one of her grandmothers, Mum’s elder mother and father lived. What an amazing amount of cars, she thought while secretly sucking her thumb on the back seat. Her parents warned her often enough: yes, yes, she knew she was too old to suck her thumb...It was usually a lot easier when the two of them didn’t completely agree. That always left some room for manoeuvring…Very well, they might think so, but she didn’t! A frown appeared and then she sucked even more eagerly. It always calmed her down. She was still so tired. The three of them had to get up even earlier than usual because Dad had to be in town. As long as they did not complain about her sucking her thumb she would go on with it. Humph!

‘Everyone is but a consumer!’ her Mom re-enters the conversation, ‘Consuming news is like eating all the wrong kinds of fat. This avalanche of non-stop crimes and madness is totally indigestible. And it keeps going on and on, until our souls are clotted up completely. After that a mere dotter operation doesn’t help mutch. Only transplantation will do. But the key question here is, darling, how to transplant a soul? Where to find empty and spotless souls? So yes, I believe the writer of the incendiary-letter is crazy, but I do understand where he is coming from.’

Her mother was as attractive as daddy. What a classy women! Lipstick on her friendly lips, mascara on her eyelids, a wardrobe full of beautiful clothes and that long, very long blond hair in one beautiful braid. A real lady, as if she had stepped out of one of those glossy magazines lying on the reading table at home. Alas, she could talk as strangely as dad. In the mirror the girl watches his mouth move, filling the car with words of which she doesn’t grasp the meaning: ‘Well, this self-appointed ‘one alone’ has clearly gone astray. Way beyond the outer rim of our galaxy! As far as I am concerned this guy is as straightforward a psychopath as they get. But he did find a nice way to get his rotten, broken or clotted soul into that stupid rag of yours. Quite prominently, I might add!’ Wow, as if most of it had been fluent French, Arabic or Chinese…

Almost immediately mother had her answer ready: ‘And why has this newspaper turned into my rag, all of a sudden?! Correct me when I am wrong but you wanted to get this so called paper home delivered as well! For all the inserts about cars, the economy and sssportsss…’ The very last word sounded more like the hissing of a snake. Oops, the sound of their voices had clearly changed. Not for the better, no no, this didn’t sound right.

Mom was a psychologist or something like that, her Dad an engineer whatever that may mean. There were abbreviations to go with these titles. Often she could read additional letters after their names on the mail: mom B Sc and Dad B Sc… Mom fixed people, made them strong and happy again, just by listening and talking. Dad wrote stuff for in those teeny tiny chips. Not the crispy ones you loved to eat but totally different ones. These were meant for in the computer, the TV, the car, and such. Double Dutch, what they did for a living and what they were talking about. If only she could understand why they were so mean to each other…Most of their words sounded like some of that Harry Potter stuff. But she had learned to understand this Pottery language. All that was exciting, adventurous and very, very funny. Big books chockfull of magic tricks, witchcraft and a whole lot more. Take that crazy ballgame Quidditch, for example: much more fun and ever more difficult than that stupid soccer games Dad watched far too often on the Telly. But no, all this was totally strange, so she just stopped listening. Her head slipped sideways and her sleepy eyes shut themselves down.

It would be her very last day. After today this girl couldn’t play and laugh with her friends no more. Never again get her pretty face painted. Never again stuff pancakes dripping with maple syrup into her mouth. After today no more pony riding, no more practising for the second swimming certificate, no more hoping for her first little brother or sister. An abrupt end would come to skating, playing ping-pong, running. No more hugs from her Mom and Dad. Hell, when you are dead how to enjoy your granddad’s old-fashioned candy! And hell, when you are dead how to do dance to the newest songs of your favourite singers Madonna, Britney and Jennifer!

An abrupt end of being together with her two best friends, with her class mates, teachers, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces or neighbours was in the making. After that horror she was about to experience she never again would taste her favourite’s apple pie and cheese fondue. Never again she would see fireworks, go out skating, go abroad on summer holidays, stroke the fat cat or cuddle her soft toys. All of this and a lot more would come to an end in a few long, very long hours. The rest of her life would stop, stop forever. She never ever could reach the age of ten, let alone twenty, thirty-five, seventy. For all eternity she would be nine years old.

Her parents couldn’t come to a rescue. She had been kidnapped, driven about and everything now felt as if she had vanished from the earth. If she didn’t even know her whereabouts how should there parents have come to that rescue!? Totally bewildered and disorientated their daughter would gaze into the distorted, panting face just above hers. Artificial lamps shone everywhere, as even so many suns. What was happening here…was this for real…or was she only dreaming the most awful nightmare she had ever had…And Dad, wouldn’t he be angry because all her brand-new clothes got ripped? That he mockingly nicknamed her tomboy didn’t mean he liked torn pieces of clothing. A careless fall out off the school bus, then? Or a slippery glide gone wrong with her bicycle? Wham, a drop out of the tree hut? Caught yet again in some barbed wire? And the two or three pills he had forced into her mouth, what were they mend for...

‘Mummy!’ she somehow managed to cry out. ‘Mumm…!’ but then he shut her up. Why did her private parts hurt so much? She had seen his Willie, but it seemed incredibly long and big. It was much longer and bigger than the one of her Dad. She had seen it often enough when growing up, together in the hot tub with or without Mom. Like a hanging sausage. And the one of her neighbourhood friend Charlie, whilst playing doctor: no more than a miniature sausage. Was that almost purple, monstrous thing really inside her now!? She knew that was how babies were made, but she didn’t want to have babies yet. She would love to have a few with Charlie when she was a grownup too, but certainly not, not now and never with this creep. What she was feeling now was more pain than all the other earlier pains times three hundred. More pain than the falling-off-the-bicycle, stinging-nettle, barbed-wire and the dentist-and-doctor-needle pains and this man slapping her face put together. All that didn’t really hurt, she knew now. She cried for a bit longer, a few high shrill but already receding cries.

Measured in real-time it was but a short period. But real-time doesn’t add up, now, does it! The girl’s experience was far beyond methods of counting and thus measuring minutes and hours. That is because in hell every second stands for an eternity of pain, grief and misery. So if Heaven exists, which Goddamn should exist for her anguish alone, well, that is were she is, now…The hellish times for her dear parents would last mutch longer and would disrupt everything they thought they knew for fact. Everything would become a continuous road to hell and back, once they received the message of doom. All their combined knowledge and experience, which supposed to buffer any given situation, had no value whatsoever. That ghastly afternoon their entire universe would turn into quicksand. Instantly. There was nothing to hold on to. Comfort had become an empty, an almost non-existing word. Short fragments of sleep wouldn’t bring peace or rest. Nightmares filled these short periods of sedated sleep, only to be replaced with the shock of reality afterwards. Both of them were not able to work; colleagues, friends and family, although in shock too, were trying there utmost to help.

The police had told them their little girl could be a victim of an indecent assault. And there it was: the most dreaded words for all parents. A fatal car accident, even by a drunk, was preferred over knowing your child is being held by a paedophile, possibly... So the agonising waiting hours turned into days, and these days into weeks. There hopelessness went deeper and deeper still, as if this quagmire was bottomless. The girl wasn’t to be found until an already retired police-dog had dug her up in the Amsterdam Forest. Off course some cynics said: what all the active policemen couldn’t achieve some old retired police-dog did...Forensic scientists were able to retrieve enough evidence to reconstruct, within reasonable time margins, what had happened on and just after that damned wintry Wednesday.

And so the poor dead girl became yet another article in the newspapers, another newsflash on television. After that people concluded: poor girl, poor parents. But, this world awash with news, she was a news item like all the others: the very next day and all the coming days after that were going to be flooded with other, newer news...After the two officers from the Amsterdam-Amstelland police department revisited their home her mother really went mad. It took just one glance at the two cops to know their own and only girl was dead, gone, forever. The sullen faces of both police-officers signalled resignation, resignation but no dismay. But eventually finding whoever did wouldn’t get their girl back. The bereaved mother pulled out her hair, started shouting and screaming which finally was followed by an apathetic lethargy. Her father would take his time, stubborn as ever. He threatened, raved and swore; after that he started drinking heavily. Yet again there was offered victim assistance...But sometimes a lifebuoy is but that, a lifebuoy. You could only save your body, your skin and bones with it. What they really needed was a couple of brand-new souls, as she had suggested some three weeks ago when they still formed a happy family of three. Transplantation of clean and empty souls was the only option. To do that was as impossible as turning back time was, and they both knew that. Oh, irony of fate: just that was argued based on the incendiary letter about victimized cases like their now dead girl on the day she went missing.

Mother would slit both wrists, not even two months later. She would do so as it should be done, by cutting the radial arteries lengthwise. Just like her patients in the psychiatric ward, when they got their chance. Mom had learnt a little too much from them. The trick was to get as much of the artery damaged as possible. Laying in the warm bath she first took 25 sleeping pills. Only after feeling somewhat groggy she started cutting. And through some more tears she stared at the wet picture. Oh, how beautiful and lovely she looked, Madeleine…Then her pain miraculously dissolves into the pinkish bath…Daddy, stubborn as ever, would drive his car against a huge sycamore tree whilst drunk, some eighteen months later. He hadn’t put his safety belt on, off course...And together with a large stack of colour photographs of his former family he tried escaping through the windshield. All the exploding airbags weren’t able to withhold him. The Volvo’s speedometer was slammed stuck at 187 kilometres per hour. The Hensen family was dead. It had taken precisely three violent dramatic events to kill them all.