Running Wild

by J. G. Ballard

  “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…”

  I walked to the projector screen, which showed the cryptic credits of the children’s video, “A Pangbourne Village Production,” superimposed upon an idyllic view of the estate. I was thinking of Marion Miller—if I was right, her escape had been a desperate attempt to return to her childhood world.

  “Tell me, Sergeant, could you get me an edited version of the video?”

  “Without the car crashes and electric chairs? I can arrange one for you, Doctor. Who do you want to show it to?”

  “Marion Miller. It’s just an idea. It might help to remind her of happier times.”

  The Great Ormond Street Kidnapping

  Needless to say, Marion Miller was never to see the film. During the next two weeks, as I waited for the Home Office to reply to my request, she continued to lie in her guarded room at the Children’s Hospital on Great Ormond Street. She had made friends with her nurses, murmuring and lisping like the three-year-old version of herself to which she had reverted. I assumed that she had blotted out all memories of the days leading up to the Pangbourne Massacre and the murder of her parents.

  Sensibly, I kept my suspicions to myself, and said nothing to the Home Office of my belief that the thirteen children were not the assassins’ victims but were themselves the killers. No trace of them had been found, despite a marathon of manhunts organized by the police and national newspapers. No ransom note or list of demands had been sent to the authorities, and the twelve missing children had effectively vanished into another continuum.

  Two of them, however, were nearer to hand than anyone had imagined.

  Early on the afternoon of November 4 I walked through the lobby of the Children’s Hospital with the videocassette in my briefcase. I had not been given permission to show the film to Marion, but while talking to an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard I learned that the child was watching videos of children’s programs on the television set in her room.

  When I arrived, I found that two uniformed police officers were guarding the private ward on the fourth floor. They examined the video without comment, and my Home Office pass saw me into the child’s presence. A young nurse was sitting beside the bed, laying out a jigsaw puzzle on a metal tray.

  Marion Miller watched me quietly with a thumb in her mouth. Blond curls hid her small forehead, and her overlarge eyes made her resemble a dreamy infant scarcely off the breast. Could this vulnerable child have murdered her own father and set in train the Pangbourne Massacre? For a moment my faith in my own theory faltered.

  “Look, Marion—doctor’s brought a film for you.”

  The nurse put aside the jigsaw puzzle, but Marion had already noticed me. As she turned her head a sharp blue eye surveyed me through the blond fringe, and I could only too well imagine her father’s disbelief as this demure parricide dropped the hair dryer into his bath.

  Was she aware that I was avoiding her eyes? Busying myself with the television set, I engaged the nurse in small talk, letting her insert the cassette into the video player.

  When I switched it on, there was a sudden clamor from the corridor outside the ward. I assumed that the volume control of an extension speaker had been incorrectly set. Then there were the sounds of a violent scuffle, and the ringing clatter of an overturned trolley. The door into the ward burst open. One of the uniformed constables stepped backward into the room, reaching for the revolver in the holster under his tunic.

  Through the open door I could see the trolley lying on its side, enamel kidney basins scattered across the floor. A terrified orderly was on her knees against the wall. The second policeman tried to help the woman, disguising his right hand as he drew his revolver.

  He was looking up at his assailants, two small figures in white gowns and face masks, their T-shirts incongruously bearing a pop group’s logo, whom I took to be a pair of undersized laboratory technicians. However, each held an automatic pistol. Like trained dancers they sidestepped past the debris on the floor. The policeman in the corridor began to raise his revolver, when there were two hard, rapid reports like fuses blowing.

  Shot through the chest, the policeman lay at the intruders’ feet as they stepped into the ward. Above the masks their eyes glanced at the television set, which was now showing the Pangbourne Village film. I heard the second constable shout a warning, and then a brief volley of shots jarred the windows. The constable stepped forward to the door, one hand raised like a blind man feeling his way, and collapsed onto his knees.

  The next few seconds passed in a confusion of sudden violence. The intruders moved to Marion’s bed, weapons raised as if about to kill the child. I stepped forward to protect her, but one of them bent down and lifted Marion from the bed, pressing her face against his shoulder. The other had removed her mask, revealing the white, stony face and aroused eyes of a teenage girl. She moved to the window, and glanced into the street. As she searched the passing traffic I saw a revolver in the right hand of the nurse—in fact, Special Branch officer Doreen Carter. There was a last exchange of gunfire that tore an oblong of jagged glass from the window. Wounded in both arms, Officer Carter dropped her weapon to the floor and crouched against the bed.

  As the kidnappers fled with the child, pausing at the door to fire a last shot at myself, I recognized them as Annabel Reade and Mark Sanger of Pangbourne Village.

  It was some minutes later, when the ward filled with police, security staff and emergency medical teams, that I switched off the television set. The screen was wet with blood, and I realized that I had been shot in the left hand.

  The Pangbourne Massacre: The Murderers Identified

  During November, as I convalesced from the wounds to my wrist and palm, I had ample time to replay in my mind that terrifying scene at the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. Discussing the episode with a CID superintendent, we came to the conclusion that the entire assault had taken no more than twenty seconds, from the overturning of the trolley to the kidnappers’ flight with Marion Miller. In this time one uniformed policeman had been killed, a second constable and the woman Special Branch officer seriously wounded. Detective Carter’s intervention almost certainly saved my own life—it seems probable that the kidnappers intended to shoot both of us after disposing of the police guards.

  Their ruthless efficiency confirmed that the kidnapping had been carefully planned. No trace has been found of the gang, and we can only guess whether Marion Miller is still alive. The suggestion that two of the Pangbourne children were responsible met with strong resistance, both at the Home Office and in the national press. Too much emotional capital had been invested in the notion of the thirteen orphaned children.

  However, Annabel Reade and Mark Sanger have been repeatedly identified, not only by Officer Carter and myself, but by the nurses and doctors of the two wards to which these murderous adolescents had been admitted for observation. They had arrived three days before the kidnapping, apparently referred to Great Ormond Street by the casualty department of a north London hospital. This gave them ample time to survey the security and layout of the building, and the exact location of Marion Miller. As children they were never challenged, a problem which would have faced any adult kidnappers.

  Interestingly, they left their fingerprints all over the furniture and utensils in their wards, and this suggests that they are fully prepared to admit their part in the kidnapping and, by implication, in the murder of their own parents. However, I would guess that the children are now far beyond the point where questions of guilt and responsibility have any meaning for them.

  Is Marion Miller still alive? The assumption at the Home Office and Scotland Yard is that she will have been killed before she could reveal the whereabouts of the gang, and that the kidnap was in fact a botched execution. Needless to say, I am confident that Marion is alive, and th
at the nightmare logic of the Pangbourne Massacre demands this. Just as the older children required Marion to play her part willingly in the murder of her parents, so they need her now to believe in the rightness of their cause. Fanaticism of that kind is rooted in total unity. Besides, the older children must realize that within a year or two at the most, when she ceases to be a young child, they will have won Marion forever.

  A Tentative Explanation

  A spate of fresh theories has been offered to account for the murders, many of them variants of earlier theories that the children are the agents of a foreign power or have been brainwashed by advanced hypnotic drugs. There is even the suggestion that the massacre was a misguided rehearsal of the murder of the Kremlin Politburo by their own grandchildren, which would be triggered in the event of a nuclear war.

  The Home Office dismisses all these, and points instead to the Jonestown Massacre. It believes that the children came under the sway of one of the older adolescents, a Manson-type ringleader who exerted a messianic hold over the others, seducing them by the force of his warped personality. The murder of their parents was the initiation rite that led to membership in his deranged cult. The Home Office is confident that, sooner or later, the gang will break cover as they forcibly recruit new members, or as the leader’s megalomania carries him over the brink into delusions of omnipotence.

  I doubt this. There is no sign that any of the older children was a ringleader, or that any kind of coercion was ever employed. Despite the desktop newspapers, cassettes and videos which they circulated, the Pangbourne children tended toward solitary pursuits. Thanks to the television cameras and their crowded recreation schedules, the children were virtually prisoners in their own homes.

  My own view is that far from being an event of huge significance for the children, the murder of their parents was a matter of comparative unimportance. I believe that the actual murders were no more than a final postscript to a process of withdrawal from the external world that had begun many months beforehand, if not years. As with the Hungerford killer, Michael Ryan, or the numerous American examples of crazed gunmen opening fire on passersby, the identity of the victims probably had no special significance for them. More than this, I would argue that for such killings to take place at all, the deaths of their victims must be without any meaning.