Running Wild (5 page)

Then, wholly by chance, in one of the TV documentaries that I liked to despise, I saw a brief film of the child. This rekindled all my interest in the case and settled in my mind, for once and for all, the mystery of who had killed the thirty-two victims of the Pangbourne Massacre.

The Television Film

The TV film, yet another
Newsnight
recapitulation of the tragedy, introduced a short sequence recorded at the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. The police had allowed the cameras into the ward for the first time, as part of their now desperate appeal for witnesses of the child's escape.

Marion lay in her bed, her clenched fists pulling the sheet to her pursed lips. Her head rested to one side, torpid eyes apparently staring at the vase of irises on the nearby table. An elderly woman, the maternal grandmother, dressed in a Persian lamb coat and carrying a patent leather handbag, was guided to the bed by a nursing sister. She smiled hesitantly at her granddaughter, as the sister moved the flowers on which the child had fixed her gaze and urged her to turn her head.

My hall telephone rang while I was watching this affecting scene on the television screen. I paused at the door of the living room, as Marion Miller stared at the imposing figure of her grandmother. In a now famous gesture, endlessly repeated on TV and even mimicked by alternative comedians, the child raised her left hand from the safety of the sheet. She seemed to press a key into a lock and then turn it with a difficult double motion of her small hand—exactly the sequence of wrist movements, according to the experts, that would release a spring-loaded mortise lock. At the same time her right hand rose to her forehead, as if warding off the blow of one of the kidnappers, probably on the other side of the door and between whose legs she had made her brave and miraculous escape.

Confirming this theory, the child's mouth was set in a frightening rictus. She exposed her clenched teeth, parting her lips in an ugly grimace as her incisors gleamed against the camera lights. Although there was no sound track, every one of the millions of viewers must have heard the hiss.

While the telephone continued its weary ringing, I walked to my TV set and turned down the reporter's commentary. I stared at the orphaned child's wounded and desperate eyes, and at her pinched little face under the lovingly brushed blond hair, knowing that I had identified at least one of the Pangbourne murderers.

Return to Pangbourne Village: October 17, 1988

Sergeant Payne was waiting for me at the gatehouse, when I arrived at eleven o'clock the next morning. He gave a patient salute, but showed no emotion on seeing me. Even on the telephone he had been noncommittal, as if unsurprised by my urgent call. The keys to the Millers' house in his hand, he steered me through the onlookers who still gathered at the gate.

Together we strode through the silent estate, past the handsome mansions which I already saw in a very different light. The familiar interior of the Millers' house greeted us, yet every perspective had subtly changed. Payne stood aside, waiting to see which way I would turn.

“The parents' bathroom,” I told him. “That's all we need to see.”

“Very good, Doctor…” Payne spoke encouragingly, an instructor guiding a promising recruit through an obstacle course. But when we reached the bathroom I was at last able to surprise him.

“Let me set the stage, Sergeant.” I pulled open the shower curtain and turned on the bath taps. “We need one or two props…”

Payne stepped back, trying to avoid his multiplying images in the mirror walls. “If you're thinking of taking a bath, Doctor, the heating's been turned off.”

“Don't worry, I won't embarrass you.” When there were two inches of cold water in the tub I turned off the taps, then took Mrs. Miller's hair dryer from its stand above her washbasin. Holding it in my hands, I turned to Payne.

“Now, Sergeant, you saw the television film of Marion Miller, apparently unlocking a door as she made her escape. She was certainly escaping, but not by turning a key…”

For the first time I was ahead of Payne. He watched me cautiously, an unlit cigarette between his lips, as I transferred the hair dryer to my right hand and held the plug in my left.

“So, let's assume that Miller was taking a bath that Saturday morning. At about 8:15 Marion and her brother come into the bathroom. Perhaps they ask a special favor, the answer to which they already know, a last chance for their father to save his life.”

“Doctor…” Payne was shaking his head, clearly disappointed in me. “That's pure speculation.”

“All right, I'm guessing there. But of this bit I'm sure.” I placed the hair dryer on its stand above Miller's washbasin. “Marion picks up the hair dryer and plugs it into the socket. To do this she has to step around the edge of the basin and reach forward with her left hand. Sadly for the father, these childproof sockets aren't quite childproof enough…”

I pushed the plug into the socket, then made the familiar turn, press, turn again motion which the stricken child in the TV film had made so memorable. The hair dryer whirred into life, blowing hot air across my face.

“She's now holding the dryer in her left hand by the pistol grip—it's difficult to hold the thing any other way—and there's a rush of air that blows her fringe into her eyes. She pushes it away with her right hand…” I made the second gesture that we had seen in the film, smoothing down the few hairs that danced across my forehead.

Then I stepped back and tossed the hair dryer into the bath. There was a violent hiss, and a muffled flash that jolted the sides of the bath, lighting up the mirrors around us. Scalded water spat across Payne and myself, spraying fine drops across the ceiling.

Its fuse blown, the hair dryer lay inertly below the seething water. I switched it off at the socket and disconnected the plug. Payne was drying his jacket with one of Mrs. Miller's face towels.

“You heard the hiss, Sergeant—something that poor child will never forget. In fact, it's probably the last thing she remembers.”

“I won't forget it either, Doctor.” Payne gingerly lifted the hair dryer by its cord from the bath. “To be honest, I hadn't worked out the plug business, but I knew she wasn't opening a lock.”

“Of course not. Why should that have traumatized her? Only an overwhelming crisis would have buried itself so deep in her mind, something that involved matters of life and death, or beyond life and death.”

“Like deciding to kill her father?”

“Exactly—though I don't think she did kill him, and she may well know it. She stunned him with the hair dryer, and her brother then killed him with the kitchen knife.”

Payne leaned over the bath taps and released the water from the tub. “So you think they planned it? The brother and sister together?”

“Yes, they planned it, just as all the murders at Pangbourne Village were planned. You know that, Sergeant. In fact, you've known it ever since my first visit here.”

“That leads to another question, Doctor.
The
question—who actually carried out the Pangbourne Massacre?”

“The children, without any doubt. It sounds so outlandish, I'm not even sure if I believe it myself. There's no proof and we may not find any. All the same, I'm certain that the Pangbourne parents, one by one, were killed by their own children.”

We stood in the dripping bathroom, surrounded by the endless images of ourselves, listening as the last trickle of water ran away through the house.

Uneasy with his own reflection, Payne said: “I agree, Doctor, but it's hardest to prove right here, in this bathroom. An eight-year-old girl and her thirteen-year-old brother? You'll have a merry time making that one stick.”

“Perhaps, but I'm sure that Robin and Marion Miller are the key to everything. Remember, they were the youngest of the thirteen children, and they had a particular problem that none of the others faced. Their father was a huge man, well over six feet tall, a former amateur boxer. The boy would never have been able to stab him fatally.”

“And if he'd only wounded Miller he'd have been able to warn the other parents?”

“Very likely—the parents were intelligent enough to realize that something serious was amiss, and rapidly draw the right conclusions.”

“Like lock the nearest doors, don't switch on that appliance, decide
not
to walk in front of the car when the teenage son is staring at you in a funny way over the steering wheel. The whole operation could have unraveled…”

“Within minutes. So young Robin and Marion Miller faced a double challenge. They had to move quickly, and they had to kill their parents themselves.”

“But why, Doctor?” Payne had managed to relight his wet cigarette, and sucked hungrily at the smoke. “One of the older boys, the Ogilvy lad or the psychiatrists' son, could have done it for them.”

“That would have destroyed the whole moral basis of the exercise. The children were making a last stand against their parents. The Pangbourne Massacre was a desperate rebellion, from the children's viewpoint, an act of mass tyrannicide. Each one had to take responsibility for the death of his own parents, whatever the cost.”

“They certainly put a lot of ingenuity into it—all these electrical booby-traps, these strange nooses and harnesses. At first that pointed to a really sick professional killer.”

“I thought so too, Sergeant—but the ingenuity here was born out of necessity. The younger children had never seen a firearm, let alone handled one. The murders had to be carried out in a very short period, perhaps no more than ten minutes, to keep up the psychological momentum. They had to be fast, and they had to be efficient.”

“It's no good a thirteen-year-old boy walking up to his mother in the kitchen and trying to stab her.” Payne shook his head, pondering upon this grim spectacle. “Just think of all that jogging. Those Pangbourne mothers were a collection of fit women, they'd spent a lifetime fighting off young men. Even a fatal stab wound might give them a chance to raise the alarm—especially those alarms that ring inside the head.”

“The loudest kind. Imagine trying to kill someone who loves and cares for you, Sergeant. The murder act has to take place so quickly that you haven't time to think.”

“First time and dead on time. That meant planning, Doctor. It's hard to believe the children could have brought it off themselves.”

“I know. All the same, Sergeant, I'm certain that they acted alone. I think they murdered their own parents at about eight o'clock that Saturday morning, without the help of anyone else. They probably left Pangbourne Village within a few minutes of the murders, perhaps in a rented bus parked around the corner.”

“And now?”

“Who knows? I daresay they're sitting it out in some quiet country farmhouse in a remote corner of Wales or Scotland.”

“They'll be mothering a goat, planting carrots, and lying awake all night as they wait for the dawn chorus. And we'll never hear from them again.”

“Oh, we'll hear from them again, Sergeant. One act of tyrannicide leads to another, especially with this emotional charge behind it. The Pangbourne children are a Baader-Meinhof gang for the day after tomorrow. That's why we've got to make our case against them as strong as we can before we go to the Deputy Commissioner.”

“I won't comment on that, Doctor.” Payne drew the shower curtain, as if concealing a still-visible corpse. “But one last question. I agree the children killed their parents, and that they carefully planned it together. But why? There was no evidence of sexual abuse, no corporal punishment getting out of control. The parents never raised a hand against the children. If there was some kind of tyranny here it must have been one of real hate and cruelty. We haven't found anything remotely like that.”

“And we never will. The Pangbourne children weren't rebelling against hate and cruelty. The absolute opposite, Sergeant. What they were rebelling against was a despotism of kindness. They killed to free themselves from a tyranny of love and care.”

The Pangbourne Massacre: The Evidence

The next three days I spent almost entirely in Sergeant Payne's company, assembling our detailed case against the Pangbourne children, a case that challenged everything held most dear by conventional good sense, but which needed to carry total conviction if it was to overcome the reflex objections of the Yard and the Home Office.

Each morning I drove from London to the Reading police headquarters, and Payne would take me down to the archivist's office in the basement where the classified evidence was stored. Although I was certain of our case, once away from Pangbourne Village I found it difficult to accept the strange logic at work—that the more the children were loved and cherished, the more they were driven into a desperate search for escape.

“Take Marion Miller,” I pointed out, playing devil's advocate against myself. “I'm convinced that she dropped the live hair dryer into her father's bath. All the same, the inference that she set out to kill him deliberately is so bizarre that one has to look at the possibility of other bizarre theories.”

“Such as, sir?” Payne waited patiently by the projector screen with the collection of slides and videos he had assembled.

“Well, perhaps she wanted to dry his hair for him, and dropped the hair dryer into the water by accident. She panicked, and the brother tried to make it look like a suicide attempt. Perhaps it
was
a suicide attempt which the children blundered into…”

“So Miller first electrocuted himself, to shut out the pain, and then stabbed his own chest?”

“Or perhaps the mother stabbed him, and then in remorse killed herself—?” I gave up. “It's implausible, but our theory is even more unbelievable.”

“At least it explains the other murders. Let me show you this tape, Doctor.” Payne switched on the projector. “This comes from the TV monitor in the gatehouse. It contains the final sequences before the system was sabotaged at 8:23 a.m.—the main cable and all the telephone lines were severed with a set of cutters stolen two weeks earlier from a British Telecom van in Reading.”