The Madness Locker

Book excerpt: On Christmas Day, 1986 a seventy-year-old widow’s body was discovered inside a wheelie bin in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Despite a long and intensive investigation, the police fail to unearth a motive or identify a suspect. Lacking any clues, the police file it as a cold case. Some half a century earlier the Third Reich ramps up its offensive to arrest and deport to the East the Nazi regime’s classification of undesirables. As part of the sweep, a young girl is arrested along with her parents. They are placed in a box car and forced to endure a three-day harrowing train journey. The final stop: Auschwitz. On arrival she is separated from her parents to never see them again and is forced to suffer years of punishing labour, near-starvation and daily horrors. She is freed six years later when the Russian army invades Poland and liberates Auschwitz. Vindicated by her survival she sets out on a journey all the way around the world to Australia, in search of the one person that she blames for her ordeal in Auschwitz. Is that the clue that the police missed in trying to solve the crime?