Running Wild (6 page)

The video revealed a general view of The Avenue on the fateful morning, the lawns and pathways deserted, the residents in bed, at breakfast, or taking their fateful baths. “It's now about 8:22, according to the time coding on the tape. David Turner, the security guard in the gatehouse, was probably strangled within thirty seconds of the tape ending. The audiocassette in his breast-pocket radio records the unanswered query of Burnett, the other guard on duty, who was calling from the perimeter security post about the camera failure. Something like thirty seconds later
he
was killed by a crossbow bolt.”

“And these two deaths started off the whole Pangbourne Massacre?”

“That's what everyone upstairs assumes, all the senior CID people and the Yard. According to them, this was the signal to the other members of the gang waiting to attack.”

“It seems likely—someone had to fire the starting pistol.”

“Sure. But let's run the tape back a little, Doctor…”

The pictures moved in reverse, showing the familiar perspectives of the estate, except for a solitary pigeon that flew tail-first down The Avenue, as if withdrawing tactfully from the tragic scene. At Pangbourne Village, I reflected, time could run backward or forward. The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity they existed in a civilized and eventless world. In a sense, the children had rewound the clocks of real life.

“This is the Miller house.” Payne pointed to the graceful modern façade. “It's now about 8:19, and the Millers are ready for another rich and successful day to wrap itself around them.”

I ignored this and watched the screen. The surveillance camera, as if bored with nothing to do, began to scan the house in close-up. The superb lenses, representing the most advanced optical technology, showed every detail with unnerving clarity. The camera panned along the plate-glass windows of the lounge and dining room. The undisturbed furniture could be clearly seen, even a clock registering 8:20 on a mantelpiece.

“Nothing untoward there,” I commented. “No assassins waiting for a signal…”

“Hold on, Doctor—you'll see the assassins in a moment.”

The camera passed the study windows. The darker background of bookshelves concealed the interior, but somewhere in the confused play of light and shadow I saw the image of a child.

“Wait, Sergeant! Hold it there.”

“You saw it, Doctor? Good…” Payne froze the frame and enlarged the image. Marion Miller was standing on a chair by the window, her knees against the sill. Her untidy blond fringe partly covered her eyes, but on her lips was a small tight smile, unmistakable in its fierce knowingness. Her gaze was fixed on one of the houses across The Avenue.

Behind the girl was her brother Robin, his face dappled by the reflected foliage. His eyes also watched the house opposite. Between the two children was the desktop screen of the security monitor.

“It's the same picture that you and I are watching,” I pointed out to Payne. “Perhaps they've seen something, Sergeant, and they're trying to warn everyone…?”

“No, they're just waiting for the screen to go blank. It's this little pair who fire your starting pistol.” Payne ran the film in slow motion. Marion's brother had come to the window beside her. Boy and girl clasped hands and raised them over their heads in a gesture reminiscent of a black power salute.

“Look closely at this, Doctor…” As the smiling girl lifted her arm she pressed against the window, and her dress flared across the glass. Imprinted on the waist were two floral patterns like stylized tulips.

“Handprints, Doctor. They were still there when she was found at Waterloo Station, in the same blood group as her father's.”

I stared at the five-fingered patterns. “Fair enough, Sergeant. So at this point Miller and his wife were already dead. Robin and Marion were first off the mark, and then came downstairs to signal to the others. Everything depended on whether these two were up to it.”

“It's easy to follow their line of sight. They were looking across The Avenue at the upstairs window of Annabel Reade's bedroom. She must have passed on the message to whoever cut the TV and telephone cables.”

“Then all the screens went blank, and the killing machine rolled into action.” I walked over to the projector, fascinated by the flower-shaped prints of the child's hands. “So that's where she wiped her fingers—I can see her doing it as her brother finishes off the father in the bath. But what about the people at the Yard? How do they explain this?”

“They don't try. They say the boy and girl had been locked into the study and were signaling for help.”

“For heaven's sake, she was smiling—an icy smile, I admit, but a smile.”

“Enough to freeze the lips off the Mona Lisa,” Payne commented. “A tough little lady. If she was strong enough to start everything off, why did she want to escape?”

“Because she was so young. Everyone else had reached puberty, they were choking on the nonstop diet of love and understanding being forced down their throats at Pangbourne Village. This was an idea of childhood invented by adults. The children were desperate for the roughage of real emotions, for parents who now and then disapproved of them, became annoyed and impatient, or even failed to understand them. They needed parents who weren't interested in everything they did, who weren't afraid to be irritated or bored by them, and didn't try to rule every minute of their lives with the wisdom of Solomon.”

“And Marion Miller?”

“She was only eight—at that age you enjoy being cocooned in total affection, with someone telling you what to do every moment of the day.” I tapped the softly glowing image of the smiling girl. “She fired the starting pistol, but she wasn't the ringleader, and perhaps she began to remember the happy paradise she had left behind at Pangbourne. Let's go through the other material, Sergeant—older and far more dangerous heads planned the Pangbourne Massacre.”

The Pangbourne Children

During the next hours, Sergeant Payne, using film, slides and videos, took me through the evidence assembled by the police investigation into the characters and history of the Pangbourne children. Together it formed the portrait of a group of likable and talented youngsters, successful at school and with a wide range of outdoor interests that included swimming and hang gliding, scuba diving and parachute jumping. As I looked at the photographs of these fresh-faced teenagers, snapped by their friends as they posed in their flying overalls and wet suits, I could not help thinking that all these activities involved the element of escape, as if the children were unconsciously equipping themselves with the means to break free from their lives.

Surprisingly, however, their interest in these outdoor sports had begun to lapse during the previous year, as the children moved the focus of their activities to their own homes. This was clear from their diaries and videos, and from the private newspaper, oddly named
The Pangbourne Pang
(circulation, thirteen copies), published from his desktop printer by the fifteen-year-old Roger Sterling. A darker and more closed world soon emerged.

By the winter of 1987 the children had abandoned their hang gliding and scuba diving, and were spending nearly all their time in their own rooms. So gradual was this process that it was scarcely noticed by the domestic staff, though in their testimony two of the maids commented on the increasing difficulty of cleaning the children's quarters.

Miss Rogers:
He was building a strange kite that completely filled his whole bedroom. Once I tried to pick it up and it just snapped shut around me. Mark had to cut me loose—he was very sorry, and Mr. Sanger asked him very nicely to apologize.

Mrs. Stacey:
Graham was always playing with his computer, adding up all these numbers. Finally I had to ask Mrs. Lymington to put my times on the bulletin board.

This loss of interest in outdoor activities inevitably led to the withering-away of their friendships with children from the nearby estates. Fewer school friends visited them, and those who did commented on the clannish atmosphere.

William Knox,
14, school friend of Roger Sterling: They were busy with their own thing. It used to be fun there, and then it wasn't fun anymore.

Philip Bax,
15, son of a Reading doctor: It wasn't really spooky, but they seemed to have gone away. They used all these codes talking to each other.

This retreat within the perimeter of Pangbourne Village appears to have been unplanned, but the secret hobbies of the children might well have given the parents pause. The milder of these, like the rifle magazines concealed in Jeremy Maxted's closet, lay well within the bounds of ordinary adolescent behavior. Almost all the children kept diaries, either written in longhand or typed into their word processors, and most were either shredded or erased in the days before the massacre.

However, two of the girls, Gail and Annabel Reade, kept elaborate secret journals which were discovered in the panels behind their dressing-table mirrors. These throw no direct light on the Pangbourne murders, but describe a richly imagined alternative to life in the estate that at the same time seems an implicit comment upon it.

The journals cover the lives of a number of genteel Victorian families living in Pangbourne in the late nineteenth century, a caring and affectionate upper-middle-class community described in a formal prose reminiscent of Jane Austen but with a startling frankness about their sexual activities. Together they convey the impression of
Pride and Prejudice
with its missing pornographic passages restored. Two of the charming and well-bred daughters establish themselves as prostitutes and serve the desires of the other members of their families of whatever sex and age. Yet it is clearly not the pornographic details that appeal most strongly to Gail and Annabel—these are sketched in perfunctorily—but rather the powerful emotions which their sexual passion elicits. What comes through most vividly is the sense that through these sexual activities the overcivilized inhabitants of Pangbourne can make their escape into a more brutal and more real world of the senses.

Many of the other hobbies of the Pangbourne children show the same obsession with the theme of escape. Andrew Zest, an enthusiastic radio ham, had rigged a powerful radio antenna on the roof of his house and was trying to communicate with intelligent life in a neighboring galaxy. This complex array of wires was only discovered when it interfered with the estate's TV security system.

The same reductive strain was apparent in
The Pangbourne Pang,
desktop-printed by Roger Sterling and distributed between March and June 1988 to its thirteen readers. In a lively tabloid visual style, it specialized only in boring news. “Egg boils in three minutes” and “Staircase leads to second floor” are two of its banner headlines.

Graham Lymington, meanwhile, programmed his computer to calculate pi to a million places, and papered the walls of his bedroom with the printouts. Gently dissuaded from this by his parents, he then put out
Radio Free Pangbourne,
an audiocassette program, six issues of which were distributed to the other children in November and December 1987. This was a sequence of random sounds, mostly his own breathing, interspersed with long patches of silence.

The key to all these was the curious home video, filmed by Amanda Lymington and Jasper Ogilvy, which at first sight appeared to be a matter-of-fact documentary of daily life at Pangbourne Village. Some seventeen minutes long, it was made with the happy cooperation of the parents, and adopts the style of a real-estate developer's promotional video. With its glossy color and tableaulike settings, it depicts the parents sitting in their drawing rooms, having dinner, parking their cars. The commentary is warm and affectionate, and the film is a lighthearted parody, before the event, of the BBC-TV documentary that was to be made about Pangbourne Village in the late summer of 1988. There is a certain gentle leg-pulling at the parents' expense—the camera lingers on Mrs. Sterling as she mistimes a swallow dive, and on Mr. Garfield as he drops his cocktail shaker.

Extracts of the film were shown to the parents and often screened for the benefit of visitors. However, the final version that secretly circulated among the children was very different. This carried the identical jovial sound track, but Jasper and Amanda had added some twenty-five seconds of footage, culled from TV news documentaries, of car crashes, electric chairs and concentration-camp mass graves. Scattered at random among the scenes of their parents, this atrocity footage transformed the film into a work of eerie and threatening prophecy.

Almost all copies of the videotape were destroyed at some time before June 25, but a single cassette was found in the Maxteds' bedroom safe. One wonders what these fashionable psychiatrists made of it. Seeing the film, I had the strong sense, not for the first time, of young minds willing themselves into madness as a way of finding freedom.

“It's a remarkable piece of work, Sergeant,” I said to Payne as the film ended. “I can't help feeling that it links everything else together.”

“Could the Ogilvy boy have been the ringleader? He was the oldest of them.”

“Possibly—something acted as the trigger and persuaded the children to plan the murders.”

“The film, Doctor. It's practically a detailed blueprint for the killings—shootings, car crashes, electrocutions…” Payne grimaced, almost gagging on his own cigarette smoke. “It's as if the film came first for them.”

“By the time they made this, everything was turning into a film. The BBC producer was due to visit the estate on the afternoon of June 25. Perhaps the planned documentary was the last straw—the children knew they'd have to play their parts for the cameras, doing all the interviews, acting out their ‘happiness' under the eyes of their doting parents. The prospect of all that phoniness could have driven them over the edge…”