"Then all the screens went blank, and the killing machine rolled into action." I walked over to the projector, fascinated by the flower-shaped prints of the child's hands. "So that's where she wiped her fingers-I can see her doing it as her brother finishes off the father in the bath. But what about the people at the Yard? How do they explain this?"
"They don't try. They say the boy and girl had been locked into the study and were signaling for help."
"For heaven's sake, she was smiling-an icy smile, I admit, but a smile."
"Enough to freeze the lips off the Mona Lisa," Payne commented. "A tough little lady. If she was strong enough to start everything off, why did she want to escape?"
"Because she was so young. Everyone else had reached puberty, they were choking on the nonstop diet of love and understanding being forced down their throats at Pangbourne Village. This was an idea of childhood invented by adults. The children were desperate for the roughage of real emotions, for parents who now and then disapproved of them, became annoyed and impatient, or even failed to understand them. They needed parents who weren't interested in everything they did, who weren't afraid to be irritated or bored by them, and didn't try to rule every minute of their lives with the wisdom of Solomon."
"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 tableau-like 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.