J. Ballard - Running Wild

"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!"

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.

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 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.