Running Wild

June 25, 1988-The Reconstruction

_5:56 a.m._ The first sighting of one of the children on the morning of the massacre. A surveillance camera picks up the night security officer Edwards as he walks down The Avenue, on his way to the gatehouse. He has made his final circuit of the estate. At 6:00 he and Officer Baines will hand over to their two replacements on the day shift. As the camera follows Edwards it catches the seventeen-year-old Jasper Ogilvy watching through the transom windown of his bathroom.

Jasper's slim, childlike face is composed, but he has a lot to do. At 6:00 Mark Sanger, who can see the gatehouse from the laundry-room window of the Sanger home, will signal that the guards' change-over has taken place. On Saturday morning the replacement shift is often late, and the men will then make tea together in the gatehouse, subtracting fifteen minutes from the next two crowded hours. During this time Jasper must see that the three children on his roster (Marion and Robin Miller, and Annabel Reade) are awake and ready for action, then slip out and retrieve the shotgun he has buried behind the rose pergola. He must return to his bedroom with the weapon, before joining Mark Sanger in the task of cutting the telephone and TV cables.

_6:02 a.m._ Mark Sanger also has a full two hours. In addition to cutting the cables with Jasper, he has to supervise the three children on his alarm roster (Andrew and Emma Zest, and Roger Sterling). Most difficult of all, he must assemble the lethal bamboo man-trap, still masquerading as a box kite, which hangs from the ceiling of his computer room, and carry it across the open lawn under his parents' bedroom window. Officer Turner is a stickler for security, and Mark knows that he will only gain access to the gatehouse by using a decoy. In this case the decoy is the murder weapon.

Leaning on the pile of linen sheets below the window, Mark impatiently watches the gatehouse. He knows that he is nowhere near so self-controlled as Jasper, or the slightly creepy Roger Sterling, but he is surprised by the sweat pouring from his arms onto the linen sheets (Exhibit 75). Where are the security men?

_6:09 a.m._ Annabel Reade listens to the alarm under her pillow. In the dim light of the bedroom she sees the paging signal blinking softly on the computer screen. Jasper is calling her, tapping out the opening lines of her favorite book, _Animal Farm_. She must remember to erase the signal before they leave. Switching off the alarm, she gets out of bed, unsteady but refreshed, and glad that Jasper insisted they all have a night's sleep. Through the wall she can hear that her sister Gail is awake. She types in the acknowledgment signal, "Snowball," and goes into the bathroom, leaning with her palms (E 98) against the mirror as she is sick into the basin (E 99). There is no time even to wash or brush her teeth. After dressing in her blue tracksuit she begins to unscrew the aluminum baffle of the ventilator shaft above the computer. Already she can see the slide and barrel of the two Remington pistols which she and Gail will use to kill their parents.

_6:15 a.m._ By now all the children have risen, alerted by their own alarms and the paging signals on their computer screens. Graham Lymington has slept fully dressed, and is already waiting by his terminal as the awake signal appears on the screen. Next door, his fourteen-year-old sister, Arnanda, has a shower, using her nightdress to block the drainage grille between her feet (E 63), so that her parents will not hear the pipes drumming.

Only Jeremy Maxted has been unable to sleep-he has spent the night in his bedroom armchair, watching an all-night TV channel with the sound turned down. He disturbs the bed, but its dry and uncreased sheets confirm that it has not been slept in.

Emma Zest has risen at 4:00 a.m., and spends the next two hours sitting in her brother's bedroom, watching him as he sleeps, his crossbow in her arms. One of its steel bolts slips below the cushion (E 29), but there are nine others, more than enough for both their parents and the perimeter security guard Burnett.

Marion Miller is also up and dressed before her brother, and sits on the edge of Robin's bath, eating a chocolate bar as he uncoils the electric cable which she has hidden inside her doll's house and which he will plug into the steel frame of their mother's Exercycle.

Roger Sterling, Graham and Amanda Lymington are in visual contact with Jeremy Maxted across The Avenue, and duck to avoid the security camera on the weather vane as it pans across the houses. Roger is late-in his excitement the previous day he dropped his alarm clock, and he wakes at 6:05 to see the paging signal pulsing fiercely on his computer screen. He breaks a shoelace of his jogging shoes and stumbles noisily across the bedroom, but he knows his parents cannot hear him. In their nearby bedroom they are in a deep, drugged sleep from which they will never wake.

_6:21 a.m._ The security day shift has arrived! Fortunately there is no time for tea. The wait has been exhausting for Mark Sanger-the sheets in the linen room are sodden with his sweat-but the moment Baines and Edwards drive off, taking the two loathsome Dobermans with them, he feels an immense relief. He has always feared the dogs, which are only allowed onto the estate at night (all pets are discouraged at Pangbourne Village; they foul the lawns and are a distracting focus of affection). He watches Turner and Burnett settle into the gatehouse, and then signals to Jasper Ogilvy. The first of the parents will begin to rise between 7:00 and 7:15, and this gives the children barely forty minutes to move around the estate.

_6:23 a.m._ Jasper leaves his bedroom, closing the door behind him. There is no sound from his father's bedroom, but he waits outside his mother's door, listening to her deep, uneven breathing, which occasionally breaks into a snore. She is often awake for a few hours. in the middle of the night, but then sleeps deeply until well after dawn. Jasper walks across the landing and opens the cabinet of the burglar alarm system. He disconnects the electrical circuit that links the windows and doors together during the night. As he eases the toggle his sweaty hands leave ample fingerprints (E 110) on the plastic handle.

Jasper is now free to leave the house. He enters the silent kitchen, unlocks the outer door and lets himself onto the patio behind the garages. Screened by the roof of the swimming pool from his parents' bedrooms, he sets off across the lawn. Behind the rose pergola he retrieves the buried shotgun, which he carries back to the house and hides among the golf clubs in his bedroom closet.

He then returns to the garden. Beyond the tennis courts, the rear gate opens onto the pathway inside the perimeter fence, which Burnett will patrol in twenty minutes. Jasper sets off along the path until he sees the gatehouse on its grassy knoll, separated from the houses by a screen of ornamental trees. Jasper parts the hanging curtain of a weeping willow. Squatting against the tree trunk is Mark Sanger, the bamboo man-trap on the ground beside him.

_6:35 a.m._ Andrew Zest is moving through the trees at the bottom of The Avenue, near the pathway at the northern perimeter of the estate. This is the farthest point from the gatehouse, and the surveillance camera sweeps the lonely pathway for a full hundred yards on either side. Attached to the pylon is a telephone box and a miniaturized relay from the gatehouse of the camera picture.

Behind the pylon is a dense mass of rhododendrons, their dark leaves shutting out all signs of the houses. Graham crouches within the foliage and unpacks the crossbow from his canvas satchel. Using the spanner, he cranks back the powerful bow. His feet slip in the soft earth as he fits a steel bolt into the runnel. He carefully rearranges the foliage, satisfied that he is only six feet from the telephone box.

_6:48 a.m._ Mark and Jasper expose the telephone and TV cables. Over the past week they have excavated a rectangular pit in the damp soil, cut through the tar-paper housing and the yellow plastic tubing that contains the cables. Jasper lowers the steel cutters into the pit. Beside him Mark is setting the springs of the man-trap, bending the bamboo arms that will pinion Officer Turner and allow him to strangle himself.

_7:00 a.m._ The children's preparations are now complete. Graham Lymington has taken the bolt-action target rifle from beneath the floorboards in his bedroom. In the gray light he cuts his right thumb on the loosened nails (E 42). He sits on the bed, cleaning the weapon for the last time, then feeds the soft-nosed cartridges into the magazine.

Annabel and Gail Reade have completed the last exchange of messages on their computer screens. Annabel has loaded her small Remington and left the pistol within reach in the drawer of the bedside table. Gail has placed her weapon between the legs of her teddy bear. Sitting on the beds in their separate bedrooms, the two girls can see Jeremy Maxted at his window across The Avenue, reading an American comic that he has smuggled into the estate.

Composed now, the children wait in their rooms, computer screens glowing and blank, ready for the action to come.

_7:05 a.m._ The first parents begin to wake. Mrs. Sanger lies in bed for a few minutes, making notes for the day into the tape recorder of her bedside clock radio. "The TV people will be here at three. See the garage this morning about the spare car key. Ask Miss Neame to prepare the lobster dressing. Cancel riding lesson, and check with Mark about his weekend program…" (E 142).

_7:12 a.m._ Charles Ogilvy writes down a dream on the bedside telephone pad (E 159). He has dreamed of sailing down the Nile, a journey he and his wife made three years earlier, but in his dream the great temples and pyramids have been replaced by film sets.

_7:29 a.m._ Margot Winterton plays the radio in her bathroom and records an interesting film review on Radio 4's morning magazine program.

_7:45-8:00 a.m._ All the parents are now awake and up, with the exception of the Sterlings, who are still drugged by the powerful sleeping draught which Roger managed to steal during his visit to the London Clinic. The live-in tutors, Mr. Lodge and Mr. Wentworth, and the two au pairs, Krystal and Olga, have also risen. Several of the parents exercise in their bedrooms before bathing, while others don tracksuits and jog around their swimming pools.

_8:05 a.m._ Mrs. West, the first of the domestic staff to arrive, parks her small Honda in the rear drive of the Garfield house. Two more domestic staff appear, Miss Neame and Mrs. Mercier, both intrigued by the expected visit of the TV unit, as their relatives testify. They busy themselves taking the mail and newspapers which they have collected from Officer Turner at the gatehouse. They prepare breakfast and switch on the dishwashers.

_8:10 a.m._ The children wait. Weapons are loaded, and where necessary appliances have been boobytrapped, lethal electric cables plugged into their sockets. Hidden within the willow tree, Mark and Jasper kneel beside the exposed telephone and TV cables, cutters in hand. The children's attention is now on the Miller house.

_8:15 a.m._ At about this time Mrs. Miller, relaxed after ten minutes of t'ai chi, mounts the Exercycle in the family gymnasium. Overhead she can hear her husband running the water for his bath. Her children, as far as she knows, are still in bed, and she is tempted to prepare a little surprise for them. She settles herself on the well-sprung seat of the Exercycle. Its powerful electric motor will rotate the pedals while rocking the seat and handlebars, and she has to take care to stay on. She slips her feet into the pedal straps and sets her hands onto the metal grips with their leather cuffs. Cables run from the motor to the power socket on the wall. There are many electric cables in the gymnasium, to the scales, sunbed and rowing machine, and Mrs. Miller fails to notice the extra cable that runs from the positive terminal of the motor and is clipped to the steel frame of the cycle between her legs.

She reaches down and switches on. Immediately a thirty-two-amp charge surges through her body, galvanizing every muscle and almost throwing her from the machine, but she is held to the bucking seat by her ankle and wrist cuffs. Perhaps in the wall-length mirror she catches a last glimpse of Marion and Robin, watching quietly from the open door as her arms and legs, head and torso gyrate wildly on this last ride.

Three minutes later, the father lies in his bath, listening to the curious slapping sound from the gymnasium (his wife's right leg striking the floor). When his son and daughter enter the bathroom he asks them about the noise, but through the steam he sees his daughter plugging the hair dryer into its socket. She brushes her blond fringe from her eyes and walks up to the bath, looking at him with a strangely fixed smile.

_8:21 a.m._ Annabel Reade sees Marion and her brother waving from the Millers' study. The signal moves swiftly to Mark and Jasper, waiting with their cutters beside the exposed TV and telephone cables. In their bedrooms, the children sit quietly, each with a telephone receiver to the ear. Some ninety seconds later the lines go dead.

_8:23 a.m._ Within the next seven minutes all the remaining adults in Pangbourne Village meet their deaths.

Puzzled by the blank monitor screens in the gatehouse, Officer Turner goes out to inspect the camera mounted on the roof. Mark Sanger is waiting outside the door, with another of the box kites he is always building, but Turner is too busy to speak to him and waves him into the office. When Turner reenters the gatehouse Mark is standing by the lavatory door. Burnett is calling on his radio pager, reporting that the perimeter camera seems to be dead. Turner sits at his desk and looks down at his monitors, vaguely aware that Mark has stepped behind him, still talking about his kite. The boy raises it into the air, demonstrating how he will fly it. There is a sound of string snapping, and suddenly Turner is gripped around the throat and chest by a powerful vise. He has a glimpse of bamboo-green arms, as if he has been seized by a giant praying mantis.

_8:25 a.m._ Dr. Harold and Dr. Edwina Maxted are walking to their car, which is parked in the rear drive behind the garage. They have a busy day ahead of them. Dr. Edwina has a hair appointment in Reading, and Dr. Harold must collect the Super-8 camera with which he will record his conversation with the TV producer. They are pleased that Jeremy has reversed the black Porsche out of the garage for them before returning to his breakfast. Its engine ticks softly in the crisp morning air. Dr. Edwina notices that her son has left a magazine on the gravel by the garage doors. To her surprise it is a lurid American horror comic. She points it out to her husband, and Dr. Harold stands beside her, nodding thoughtfully as she lifts it in her well-manicured fingers. Neither sees their son sitting up in the driver's seat of the Porsche, and they barely hear its engine as it leaps across the gravel toward them.

_8:26 a.m._ Officer Burnett strides along the perimeter path toward the emergency telephone. The pivot of the pylon camera has jammed, and he has called Turner on his radio pager without success. Burnett reaches the telephone beside the rhododendrons. The miniature screen is blank, and all the electrical systems have broken down. He opens the cabinet and is taking out the receiver when the first of the crossbow bolts strikes him in the back.

Julian and Miriam Reade are having breakfast under their Louis XV chandelier. Their daughters, Gail and Annabel, enter the dining room. They are wearing their tracksuits and smile in a conspiratorial way, hands held behind them as if bringing a surprise present for their parents. Annabel stands behind her mother, Gail behind her father, asking them to close their eyes. Sitting there, they are shot in quick succession through the backs of their heads.

_8:27 a.m._ Roger Garfield, the merchant banker, is dressing in his bedroom. He listens to his wife talking in the bathroom, when his son, Alexander, opens the bedroom door. In his right hand is a small-caliber automatic pistol. Alexander raises the weapon, as if showing his father something he has found, and then shoots him through the chest. Mr. Garfield sits down on the bed, barely able to breathe, and presses his hand against the blood leaking through his white linen shirt. He tries to speak to his wife, who is backing through the bathroom door. Her son's second shot misses her, but she falls across the bidet and he shoots her twice in the head as she lies half-stunned against the glass door of the shower stall.

Ignoring his wife and son, Mr. Garfield walks from the bedroom onto the landing, blood running down his trouserless legs. Alexander is a few steps behind him, but Mr. Garfield is thinking only of the Mercedes parked outside the front door. There is just time for Poole to drive him to Reading Hospital. When he opens the door he speaks to the chauffeur, Mr. Poole, who has heard the muffled sounds of the shots and has left his chamois leather and polish on the roof of the Mercedes. Before the chauffeur can go to the car telephone Alexander follows his father into the open sunlight. The chauffeur steps into the flower bed, but Alexander shoots him down among the flame-tipped cannas.

Still ignoring everything except the numbness in his chest, Mr. Garfield climbs through the passenger door of the Mercedes and sits in his rear seat. A disc jockey is talking on the car radio, but the words mean nothing to Mr. Garfield and the sound is soon drowned by the last of the shots which his son fires at him through the passenger window.

_8:28 a.m._ Mark Sanger has returned home from the gatehouse. The razor-sharp wires of the man-trap had cut his left hand as he dropped the spring-loaded frame over Officer Turner, and he pauses by the bottom of the staircase to wrap the wound in his handkerchief. His mother comes out of the library, where she has been standing by the window with Mark's father, puzzled by the distant sounds of the Porsche colliding with the doors of the Maxteds' garage, and by what seem to be muffled gunshots around the estate. They have tried to call both the gatehouse and the Reading police, but the telephone line is dead. Concerned for her son and surprised by his bloodstained tracksuit, Mrs. Sanger fastens her dressing gown and walks up to him, but he ignores her and runs up the stairs to his bedroom. She is halfway up the long flight when he reappears by the balustrade with the pump-action shotgun he had hidden among his golf clubs.

_8:29 a.m._ Also puzzled by the muffled gunfire and the dead telephone lines, the Wintertons open their front door. Jeremy Maxted is standing by their Volvo station wagon, and they assume he has come to clean the car, one of the voluntary good-neighbor tasks which the Pangbourne parents have persuaded their children to carry out. Reassured by Jeremy's quizzical but ready smile, Mrs. Winterton goes to her kitchen to collect a bucket of water and a wash leather. When she returns to the hall she finds her husband lying on the doormat. She can see that he is dead, but she kneels down to loosen his collar. It is only then that she notices Jeremy standing in his bloodstained sneakers in the doorway of the cloakroom.

_8:30 a.m._ By now all the remaining adults in Pangbourne Village are dead. Only Richard and Carole Sterling die in their own bed together, still deep in their drug-induced sleep and unaware that their son Roger is suffocating them with their pillows. The three housekeepers are shot down as they hurry to their cars. The last to die, the tutor Mr. Wentworth, had taken refuge in the Lymingtons' library, and is shot dead by Arnanda as he corrects her homework project.