Running Wild - Ballard James Graham - Страница 14

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."