Running Wild (4 page)

“I mean that they're so very alike. Not the furniture and fittings, though even they aren't that dissimilar. It's the atmosphere, the sense of very ordered lives being lived here … almost too ordered.”

I strolled around Jeremy's bedroom, noting the desktop computer, the surfboard and swimming trophies, a line of cups that packed the mantelpiece.

“He must have swum miles in that pool downstairs. Jeremy was the bed wetter, if I remember—perhaps the parents didn't appreciate all the effort?”

“Oh, they appreciated it … never stopped, in fact.” Payne pressed the computer keyboard, tapping out a simple code. The screen lit up with a message dated May 17, 1988:

47 lengths today!

There was a pause, and then:

Well done, Jeremy!

I stared at this message from the parents as it glimmered on the screen, a brief show of electronic affection, all that remained of parents and child in this deserted house.

“My God … you mean the parents were wired up to the children's bedrooms? There's something unnerving about that, Sergeant.”

“Isn't there, Doctor? You're sitting here after finishing your homework, and suddenly the computer blips, ‘Well done, Jeremy!'”

“Talk about surveillance of the heart. It's not just those cameras out there. Still, he must have been happy.”

A pair of water skis protruded from a closet. I drew back the door and glanced through the drawers, which were filled with music cassettes, paperbacks and sportswear.

Then, under a pile of diving caps in the bottom drawer, I found a stack of glossy magazines, well-thumbed copies of
Playboy
and
Penthouse.
I showed the top copy to Payne.

“
Playboy,
Sergeant—the first crack in the façade?”

Payne barely glanced at the magazine. “I wouldn't say so, sir.”

“Of course not. What could be more normal for a seventeen-year-old still prone to bed-wetting? The Maxteds were enlightened people.”

Payne nodded sagely. “I'm sure Jeremy knew that too, Doctor. The copies of
Playboy
made good camouflage. If you want to find the real porn have a look underneath.”

I pushed back the diving caps and lifted out the top three magazines. Below them were a dozen copies of various gun and rifle publications,
Guns and Ammo, Commando Small Arms, The Rifleman,
and
Combat Weapons of the Waffen SS.
I flipped through them, noticing that the pages were carefully marked, appreciative comments written in the margins. Mail-order coupons were missing from many of the pages.

“The real porn? I agree.” I pushed the magazines back into the drawer, covering them with the diving caps as if to preserve Jeremy Maxted's secret. “He probably belonged to a local rifle club. But I don't suppose his parents would have approved.”

“You can bet your pension they wouldn't.” Sergeant Payne was smirking to himself. “Handling a firearm? To the people in Pangbourne Village that would be worse than molesting a child.”

“A bit extreme, Sergeant. In a way they could be right. Hold on a second…”

I switched on the cupboard light. Around the skirting board and the interior panels of the door were a series of curious notches, apparently left by a gnawing mammal with powerful incisors.

“Have you seen these marks, Sergeant? It looks as if a small creature was trying to get out. Did the Maxteds keep some kind of exotic pet?”

“Only in a manner of speaking.” Payne ambled to the door and held it open for me as we left the son's room. “Those marks are quite common on the estate.”

“What are they caused by? The forensic people must have some idea.”

“Well … they haven't been able to agree.” We had entered Dr. Edwina's bedroom. Payne pointed to the wooden frame of the headboard, where I saw a similar pattern of fretwork. “You'll find them all over the place, a kind of dry … rot.”

He emphasized the words with cryptic pleasure, then sat on the bare mattress and switched on the bedside TV set.

I said, sharply: “Sergeant, I must be getting on—you'll have to miss the local race meeting.”

“This is their own private program, Doctor. There's no gambling on the Pangbourne channel.” Payne pointed to the screen, which revealed the road outside the window. The camera tracked to and fro, as if searching for a fallen leaf, tirelessly hunting a panorama as silent as a stage set.

I shrugged at the screen. “Security was important here, they were obviously obsessed by it. So the house has an input from the monitors at the gate?”

“Every house in Pangbourne Village.” Payne spoke in a droll but meaningful way. “Upstairs and downstairs. At least we know why there were no infidelities here. But think of the children, Doctor—they were being watched every hour of the day and night. This was a warm, friendly, junior Alcatraz. Swimming at eight, breakfast eight-thirty, archery classes, origami, do this, do that, watch the Horizon repeat on the video together, well done, Jeremy…” Payne blew his coarse cigarette smoke at Dr. Edwina's dressing-table mirror. “The only surprise about these people is that they found time to get themselves murdered!”

“Well, they were murdered. Let's not forget that.” I let Payne's outburst subside. He was still holding something back, and I waited to draw him out. “But they certainly led very busy and well-organized lives. In fact, it's remarkable that the killers found them all in.”

“Perhaps they made an appointment.”

“By staging some pretext? It's hard to visualize what, exactly. Remember, this was a Saturday morning in June. It's quite a coincidence that no one was on holiday. Between them these people owned about fifteen properties, in the South of France…”

“… Cortina, Corsica and Tuscany.”

“All those places you hate, Sergeant. Yet everyone was here, every adult and every child. One of the children—Roger Sterling, the fifteen-year-old—was due to have his wisdom teeth out and was brought home for the weekend from the London Clinic.”

“Brought home?” Payne beckoned me into the ground-floor study as we spoke, still leading me on in all senses. “Or did he volunteer, Doctor?”

“Volunteer? Maybe. But for what? The diaries and appointment books show nothing—there were the usual Saturday activities—gymnasium work, the next round in the bridge contest, swimming…”

“… Forty-seven lengths today! Well done, Jeremy!”

Ignoring Payne, I pressed on, reciting from memory. “There was a visit by a TV producer planning a film about Pangbourne Village, a repeat of the
Panorama
program on the Eritrean famine, which a lot of the parents were watching with their children, and the disco in the evening. Nothing out of the ordinary…”

“But the boy, Roger Sterling, made a real effort to be here. The London Clinic wasn't keen to let him go.”

“Right—he made up some story about a visiting friend from Canada who didn't exist. But why? Could the children have been planning a surprise?”

I was standing with my back to Payne, glancing at the books on the Maxteds' shelves, and waited for the sergeant to reply. When I turned, a volume of Piaget in my hand, he was smiling primly, like a prudish man forced to enjoy the point of a vulgar joke.

“Yes, there's no doubt in my mind, Doctor. The children were planning a surprise.”

“It's possible … and whatever their motive, the killers got wind of this. Correct?”

“I would say so.”

“Which suggests that they could plan the murders down to the last detail, confident where everyone would be. One thing is plain to me, Sergeant. The killers knew their way around.”

“Oh, intimately.” Payne sat back expansively in Dr. Maxted's leather armchair, as if resting after work well done. “The killers knew everything about the place, every staircase and Jacuzzi and diving board, every alarm switch and electric socket. But then they'd been here for years.”

“Years? But who, Sergeant? The servants?”

“No, not the servants.”

“Then who else? You sound as if you know.”

I gestured with the book in my hand, and it fell open awkwardly to reveal a broken spine. I stared down at the pages, many of which had been stabbed with the same doweling tool that had damaged the skirting board in Jeremy Maxted's bedroom. Someone had gone through the book systematically mutilating its pages. Suddenly I guessed whose fingerprints would be found on the bruised end boards.

“Sergeant, are you saying…?”

“What do you think, Doctor?”

“I've no ideas—but you obviously have.”

“One or two. I can tell you, they aren't popular.”

“Let's have them. I can cope with unpopularity.”

Payne stood up, composing his reply to me, but then strode to the window. A speeding police car swerved across the road and pulled up at the bottom of the drive, scattering the gravel. A uniformed inspector hurried across the grass. He pushed through the door, a look of triumph on his face.

“Sergeant, get back to Reading—you won't find anything here.” He turned to me. “Doctor Greville, we have the Miller girl! The first of the children has escaped!”

Marion Miller, the First “Hostage”

During the next week I remained at my consulting rooms at the Institute of Psychiatry. I saw those patients whom I had briefly neglected, and tried to keep my head down as an immense barrage of publicity greeted the discovery of Marion Miller. This tragically orphaned eight-year-old had been found in the early hours of August 29, hiding in a skip loaded with overnight mail on Platform 7 of Waterloo Railway Station. A ticket inspector coming on duty (Frank Evans, eighteen years' service with British Rail, already a national hero) had heard what seemed to be a cat hissing among the mailbags in the skip. Trying to rescue the stray, he found the shivering and grimy form of a barely conscious child with matted blond hair, wearing a bedraggled cotton frock and a single shoe.

The British Rail police were called, but the child, who was seven or eight years old and well nourished, was unable to give her name. Exhausted by her ordeal, she was sunk in a state of speechless immobility, now and then emitting a strange hissing noise, as if she were imitating a pet cat. She was then handed over to officers of the local Metropolitan Police. They assumed that she was either a runaway or had been abandoned by her parents. A close inspection of the girl's clothing revealed a Harrods label in her cotton dress and the monogram of an exclusive Beauchamp Place outfitters in her single brogue.

A more significant finding was the series of stains of organic origin, in the approximate pattern of the girl's left and right hands, on the waist of the dress. An attempt had been made to wash the stains from the fabric, but analysis soon showed them to be blood. The girl herself bore no injuries, and by eight o'clock that morning speedy identification revealed the blood to be that of David Miller, one of the victims of the Pangbourne Village Massacre. Shortly afterward, dental and photographic evidence, and the visual confirmation of both grandmothers, established that the girl was Marion Miller, one of the thirteen abducted children.

During the next few days the discovery of this orphaned child swept all other news from the media, which became a vast pressure cooker of speculation fueled by the uncertainty over the circumstances of the girl's release. Had she escaped, or was she the first of the children to be set free by the kidnappers? All the 1980s love of “hostages” soon transformed the twelve remaining children into pawns in a sinister game played with their lives and hearts by the unknown kidnappers. Several national newspapers established ransom funds, which received millions in public donations.

The child herself was unable to help, lying in her closely guarded ward at the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, and in an irreversible state of catatonic seizure. She was sedated and fed by tube, but on meeting her grandmothers during her brief conscious moments she would merely hiss and make a strange movement of the left hand, as if unlocking a door, while touching her forehead with her right hand, presumably to ward off a blow.

This seemed to confirm that the child had escaped. The skip in which she had been found contained mailbags from the Canterbury area—had a fanatical religious order seized the children, perhaps a group of deranged high churchmen opposed to the liberal archepiscopal establishment? Marion's dress had been washed with a popular brand of detergent retailed for a soft-water area in Wales—Welsh nationalists came under immediate suspicion, and holiday cottages in the principality were sold off by the score. Meanwhile her single brogue contained soil traces from Kensington Gardens, which were ruthlessly scoured as if Peter Pan, now grown into an Ian Brady-like psychopath, had returned from never-never land and beguiled the children into his evil dream.

However, all these speculations soon faded into the air. There was no word from the kidnappers, and Marion Miller remained locked in her deep withdrawal. I requested permission to see the child, and attached a brief report of my visit to Pangbourne, in which I described certain curious features, such as the mutilated copy of Piaget's classic text on the rearing of children. The Home Office turned me down, asking me to discontinue my investigation and hold myself indefinitely in reserve.

Left alone, I was able to think again about my visit to Pangbourne Village and my talk with the cryptic Sergeant Payne, who had now been redeployed to one of the task forces roaming the country. He had seemed to point to the complicity, deliberate or otherwise, of Jeremy Maxted in the abduction of the children and even, perhaps, in the murders themselves. Had Jeremy's secret passion for military weapons led him to purchase a rifle or handgun, which had then provoked the kidnappers into killing the parents?

Meanwhile, the eight-year-old Marion Miller remained the only key to the tragedy, but she showed no signs of recovery. My own interest waned, and I returned to my work with my patients.