Running Wild (3 page)

(7) The Parents as Killers
Could one or more parents have killed the others, and then committed suicide? Possible motives include sexual jealousy, professional rivalry or individual psychopathy. Could the appalled children, in a state of shock that has still not lifted, have then fled the estate, taking refuge in a remote property owned by one of the families? Curiously, for all their participation in group activities at the recreation club, the parents themselves did not mix socially, never invited each other into their homes, and seem to have known one another only as casual acquaintances. All the domestic staff agree that in the three years of the estate's existence there was not a single example of marital infidelity between fellow residents, a remarkable tribute to the concepts of social engineering built into the estate's design.

(8) The Domestic Staff
Could disaffected members of the domestic staff—the chauffeurs, housekeepers, cooks and tutors—have turned against their employers? All the servants on leave (one, an elderly gardener, died of a heart attack on hearing of the massacre) were repeatedly interrogated, and far from showing resentment they all seem to have sincerely admired their employers, and were clearly happy to work for them.

(9) Bizarre Theories
There remain a few outlandish possibilities.
    (a) A unit of Soviet Spetnaz commandos, targeted on the residential quarters of the NATO headquarters staff at Northwood, received an incorrect war alert order and were parachuted by error into the Pangbourne estate during the night of June 24. They slaughtered the adult residents, assuming they were senior military personnel, then realized their error and abducted the children.
    (b) An experimental nerve-gas projectile fell from an RAF or USAF military aircraft into the Pangbourne area and deranged a group of nearby residents, who committed the murders. They then destroyed all traces of the children before suffering retroactive amnesia that erased any memory of the crime. Unaware of the murders they carried out, they have now returned to ordinary domestic life.
    (c) The murdered residents and their children were, unknown to themselves, deep-cover agents of a foreign power. Their mission accomplished, the parents were “instructed” to murder each other, and the children disappeared into the cellars of the foreign embassy before being spirited abroad.
    (d) The parents were murdered by visitors from outer space seeking young human specimens.
    (e) The parents were murdered by their own children.
    Looking through this list, it struck me that all were as fanciful as each other. Some uniquely strange event had taken place at Pangbourne Village, and to find its source I needed to visit the estate myself.

A Visit to Pangbourne: August 29, 1988

Needless to say, the visit proved more difficult to accomplish than I imagined. Two months may have elapsed since the murders, but popular interest in the tragedy seems even greater now than it was in the days immediately after June 25, fanned by the popular press and by a series of sensational TV documentaries. Last night the BBC's
Panorama
program even speculated that a group of long-term unemployed from the north of England had come down to the leafy Thames Valley in search of jobs, and had been provoked by the ostentatious display of privilege and prosperity into a spasm of murderous rage.

Farfetched, perhaps, but seeing the large crowd around the entrance to Pangbourne Village I felt that the theory was almost plausible. The murders have attracted an army of sightseers, most content merely to gaze at the houses from the surrounding lanes or any convenient high ground. Scores of people, many equipped with binoculars and cine-cameras, are trudging across the front lawns of the estates, much to the annoyance of the residents. I even saw one man, with a tripod and telescopic lens, clambering onto a garage roof and being pelted with gravel by the outraged chatelaine, a ferocious blonde in her dressing gown.

The police try to disperse the public—all this must be a field day for burglars out on reconnaissance—but most of their manpower is needed to protect Pangbourne Village. A crowd of some two hundred sightseers was packed into the tree-lined avenue leading to the estate, and there were people actually perched among the branches of the poplars, some with sheets around them, while others shouted abuse at the police below.

As I edged my car through this mêlée an overexcited young constable pounded on the roof and almost broke the windscreen with his fist. Despite my written authorization from the Chief Superintendent at Reading he was extremely reluctant to let me through.

I was rescued by a Sergeant Payne of Reading CID, a polite but rather taciturn character who is stationed permanently at the estate, and I suspect is working off some minor penance. He is well informed about the case, in an offhand and sardonic way, but most of his energies are devoted to controlling the spectators. When I parked my car by the gatehouse I noticed that the police were making full use of the closed-circuit TV system, whose severed cables they had replaced. A shirtsleeved officer scanned the monitors, sitting at the chair where his predecessor, the murdered security guard David Turner, was strangled in a strange cat's cradle of wire and bamboo (a device used by the Viet Cong to trap and kill American soldiers, so Sergeant Payne informed me).

Seeing the lawns, drives and front porches on the screens, I queasily remembered the police video I had watched in the Home Office theater. As I stepped out along the well-bred gravel of The Avenue into the silent estate, surrounded by the impassive mansions, I half-expected to come across the Mercedes with a trouserless Roger Garfield in its backseat. Fortunately, the forensic teams have long since removed all evidence, and virtually erased every grim trace of the murders. The broken windowpanes have been replaced, bloodstains chemically lifted, bullet holes plugged and replastered. Even the lawns have been cut, on the instructions of the firms of solicitors representing the next of kin.

Walking around the estate, a bored Sergeant Payne twenty paces behind me, I found it easy to imagine that I was one of the prospective buyers visiting Pangbourne Village soon after its completion. The noise of the distant crowd was lost behind the high screens of rhododendrons, and the fine houses gave off the unmistakable scent of oversleek contentment that comes from the combination of money and taste.

Selecting it at random, I walked up the drive to the Millers' house, No. 4, The Avenue. David Miller, a stockbroker, had been killed in his bath, his wife Elizabeth electrocuted on her booby-trapped exercise cycle. Their daughter, Marion, aged eight, and their son, Robin, aged thirteen, were the youngest of the Pangbourne children. While Sergeant Payne searched through his keys, I noticed the remote-control camera mounted on an art nouveau lamp standard in the center of The Avenue. It turned toward us, the officer in the gatehouse keeping an eye on our comings and goings, and then swung away to scan the silent pathways between the houses.

I pointed to the camera. “I must get one of those for my cottage at Pagham. They're useful things to have around.”

“Not useful enough.” Payne pushed the door open for me, unimpressed by the cameras. “As it happens…”

“Of course, Sergeant. I only meant that they help to keep out intruders. Though constantly living under those lenses must have been a little unnerving. The security is cleverly done, but the estate does seem designed like a fortress.”

“Or a prison…” Payne lit a cigarette and deliberately exhaled a coarse blue smoke at the white-on-white interior of the Millers' home. Its deep-pile white carpets, chromium and leather furniture seemed to aggravate him in some way. “The dogs and cameras keep people out, but they also keep them in, Doctor.”

“A pretty comfortable prison, all the same,” I rejoined. His tone irritated me, like the ash he scattered on the carpet. “Who on earth would want to escape? There's space for the imagination to breathe here, Sergeant. Young imaginations—I'm thinking of those children.”

And trying not to think of the Millers' two children, I began a brief tour of the house. As I gazed at the pleasantly furnished bedrooms, the boy's with his bathroom and personal computer room en suite, I visualized the civilized and contented lives that the stockbroker and his family had led. There was nothing museumlike about this home—the skirting boards in the boy's bedroom were scored by the heel marks of a healthy teenager. Sections of the striped wallpaper were pockmarked with old sticky tape from which a gallery of posters had hung. A wide range of interests was on display—there were a chessboard, shelves of intelligent paperbacks, the computer room and its video library of classic films like
Citizen Kane
and
Battleship Potemkin.

“A bright lad,” I commented as we looked back from the doorway. “This was a happy child.”

“Happy? It was practically compulsory.” Payne smiled through a set of tobacco-stained teeth. “With all this gear, anything else would have been a crime.”

“Perhaps, but it's not that lavish, Sergeant. It's just that there are no rubbishy toys here. Tennis racquets, skis, home computer projects—it's all very sensible.”

“Oh, it's sensible.” Payne steered me down the corridor to the parents' bedroom. “That's one thing you can say about Pangbourne Village. It's all very sensible … and very, very civilized.”

At the time I thought this an odd choice of words, with the peculiar emphasis that Payne gave to them. We were staring at the Millers' bathtub, where a man had been put to death before his own children, first stunned by the hair dryer thrown into the water and then stabbed with a kitchen knife. I tried not to visualize the seething explosion of bloody water. This civilized mansion was a modern House of Atreus. I remembered the photograph of the Millers in the dossier, which showed a thoughtful, friendly man and his cheerful, good-looking wife. In the downstairs gymnasium where she died on the booby-trapped Exercycle there had been a wall diary marking out the various activities shared with the children—the school reading assignments to be talked over, the hour set aside after dinner to discuss television programs of mutual interest, the social events at the sports club in which the parents were taking part, the next round of the Pangbourne Village fathers-and-daughters, mothers-and-sons junior bridge tournament. Scarcely a minute of the children's lives had not been intelligently planned.

Without thinking, I reached out and held the electric plug of a hair dryer that hung beside the washstand (its double, the actual murder weapon, had been removed). The floor-to-ceiling mirrors that lined the walls multiplied the images of myself and Sergeant Payne. He watched me in his broody way, like a teacher patiently waiting for a dull pupil to catch up with him.

I realized that he wanted me to imitate the assassin's actions. Refusing to let him outstare me, I pressed the plug into the childproof socket. The spring-loaded pins required a double flick of the wrist, forcing me to lean across the washstand. I switched on the hair dryer, feeling the rush of warm air across my face and forehead, ruffling my hair. I listened to its whir, and watched the smoke from Payne's cigarette swirl and dance around us, as the water vapor must have swirled and danced on a June morning two months earlier. The mirrors had been spattered with blood, and whoever had put Miller out of his misery had seen endless reflections of himself receding to infinity down aisles speckled with red confetti, a true blood wedding.

“Satisfied, Sergeant?” Annoyed with myself, I switched off the dryer and led the way from the house.

The Psychiatrists' Home

We crossed the silent avenue, watched by the monitor camera mounted on its ornate stand, and continued on our inspection. Sergeant Payne rattled his keys, like the jailer of a luxury prison for the miscreant superrich. I felt that he disapproved of the people who had once lived in these houses, resenting them not merely for their wealth but for the humane way they displayed it.

All the same, I was glad of the company of this bored policeman puffing on his sour cigarettes, nodding at my comments without listening. Already I knew that he would not confide in me directly, and I needed to find some way of provoking him.

Fortunately, the Maxteds' house provided the opportunity.

By chance, the Maxteds were the two murder victims whom I had actually met, at a Stockholm conference in 1986. I remembered an elegant and professional couple, almost too self-controlled with their silk suits and hand-tooled personal pagers. Their smooth, downplayed Gestalt and Human Potential jargon reminded me uncannily of the Scientologists, with the same reassuring patter concealing a hard-nosed, evangelical sell.

But their home seemed pleasant enough, furnished in the comfortably oak-paneled way still favored by the more controversial psychiatrists. Avoiding the garage, where the Maxteds had been crushed to death under the wheels of their own Porsche, Payne and I set off on a tour of the ground-floor rooms, through the well-equipped gymnasium to the indoor swimming pool beside the tennis court. The bulletin boards displayed the same obvious pride in their son's academic and sporting achievements that the Millers' had shown, the same friendly homework reminders, the same recommended TV programs and suggestions for further reading.

I noticed in the Maxteds' study that none of my own books had a place on the shelves, an A-Z of once-modish names from Althusser and Barthes to Husserl and Perls. Whether to soften, or emphasize, this rigorously fashionable image, there was a small television set on the desk beside the inkstand, placed there like the ultimate adult toy.

“And this is the son's room?” I asked as we entered the bedroom of the seventeen-year-old Jeremy. “You know, Sergeant, other people's homes always seem a bit strange, but these are rather odd houses.”

“No more than some I've seen.” Payne ignored my obvious ploy, well aware that I wanted to get him rolling, but he glanced at me with mild curiosity. “In what way, Doctor?”