Running Wild - Ballard James Graham. Страница 9

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 melee 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 museum-like 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.