At all events, the children must have known that they had only a few days to act before they were enrolled into the documentary. Intensely proud of Pangbourne Village, the parents were all present on June 25, presumably to meet the TV team. How the children planned the massacre is not yet known, but it is possible to reconstruct the last hours leading up to the murders, with the help of a few imaginary interpolations.
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.