Running Wild

The Missing Children

I looked at the photographs of the thirteen children, a group of thoughtful and pleasant adolescents smiling out of their school speech-day portraits and holiday snapshots. All attempts to trace their whereabouts have failed, despite computerized searches of their dental records, blood groups and medical histories. Four of the thirteen were on courses of prescribed drugs (for hay fever, asthma and tinnitus), five were receiving orthodontic treatment and one was under nominal psychiatric care (Jeremy Maxted, seventeen, for bed-wetting). Despite what was clearly overzealous prescription by their physicians, the latter willingly confirmed that the thirteen children were well nourished and enjoyed robust good health.

Extensive scuff marks, bloody handprints and shoe impressions that match the children's known shoe sizes indicate that almost all the children were present at the scenes of their parents' murders. However, no traces of their own blood were found, and the children do not seem to have been harmed.

I closed the files, trying to believe that the children were still alive. Given the task faced by the assassins, and the often complex and ingenious ways in which they had murdered their victims, the fact that they had apparently inflicted no harm on a large group of probably hysterical children suggested that hopes for them, however desperate, might well be justified.