Austrian society operates on two levels. There is the neat, self-disciplined face of order and bureaucracy, and beneath it a hazy world of who you know, backhanders, compromises, unauthorised decisions and deals that lead to a chronic lack of personal accountability.

When there is a scandal the papers do their bit but there is never that sense of outrage that you see in Britain. More than once an immigrant has died mysteriously in an Austrian police cell; more than once the country has been accused of “systematic corruption”. Rarely does anyone get prosecuted. In Austria, where the surface life is blissfully uncomplicated, very little sticks.

When allegations emerged that an unthinkable crime had been perpetrated – not by one of the immigrants that many hold in such suspicion but by one of their own, a crime that had been unfolding for more than two decades – the reaction of the Austrians was typically defensive. The first thing the Chancellor said publicly about the matter was not “how could this happen?” or “we will get to the bottom of this”. It was: “We won’t allow the whole country to be held hostage by one man. Austria is not the perpetrator. This is an unfathomable criminal case but also an isolated case.”

He was dead wrong on both counts. Not many months earlier Natascha Kampusch had emerged from her own cellar in a suburb of Vienna and, at about the same time, a mother was convicted for having kept her three daughters in filth and darkness for their entire young lives. As to the alleged crime being unfathomable, no crime is unfathomable if you are prepared to examine it. But besides a half-hearted admission from the Justice Minister, Maria Berger, that police and social workers might have been guilty “of a certain gullibility” in their dealings with Josef Fritzl, and one or two vague public ruminations about “society” from an Austrian psychologist, there has been silence on his alleged crimes.

Which is why the Austrians remain so profoundly attached to the idea that Fritzl was a stealthy and extremely cunning criminal. But here is a man who was arrested three times for sex offences and twice for arson, a clumsy and impulsive operator who left many clues. In the last years of his daughter’s incarceration he was taking bags of shopping directly into the cellar – a cellar, it emerges, that was not soundproofed at all.

If there are other horrible crimes being committed in other cellars, who will discover them in this culture of secrecy, of lack of accountability and of astonishing incompetence?

- The Crimes of Josef Fritzl: Uncovering the Truth, by Stefanie Marsh and Bojan Pancevski, will be published by HarperCollins later this year. Available to preorder from amazon.co.uk

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