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.
The Psychiatrists' Home
We crossed the silent avenue, watched by the monitor camera mounted on its ornate stand, and continued on our inspection. Sergeant Payne rattled his keys, like the jailer of a luxury prison for the miscreant super-rich. I felt that he disapproved of the people who had once lived in these houses, resenting them not merely for their wealth but for the humane way they displayed it.
All the same, I was glad of the company of this bored policeman puffing on his sour cigarettes, nodding at my comments without listening. Already I knew that he would not confide in me directly, and I needed to find some way of provoking him.
Fortunately, the Maxteds' house provided the opportunity.
By chance, the Maxteds were the two murder victims whom I had actually met, at a Stockholm conference in 1986. I remembered an elegant and professional couple, almost too self-controlled with their silk suits and hand-tooled personal pagers. Their smooth, downplayed Gestalt and Human Potential jargon reminded me uncannily of the Scientologists, with the same reassuring patter concealing a hard-nosed, evangelical sell.
But their home seemed pleasant enough, furnished in the comfortably oak-paneled way still favored by the more controversial psychiatrists. Avoiding the garage, where the Maxteds had been crushed to death under the wheels of their own Porsche, Payne and I set off on a tour of the groundfloor rooms, through the well-equipped gymnasium to the indoor swimming pool beside the tennis court. The bulletin boards displayed the same obvious pride in their son's academic and sporting achievements that the Millers' had shown, the same friendly homework reminders, the same recommended TV programs and suggestions for further reading.
I noticed in the Maxteds' study that none of my own books had a place on the shelves, an A-Z of once-modish names from Althusser and Barthes to Husserl and Perls. Whether to soften, or emphasize, this rigorously fashionable image, there was a small television set on the desk beside the inkstand, placed there like the ultimate adult toy.
"And this is the son's room?" I asked as we entered the bedroom of the seventeen-year-old Jeremy. "You know, Sergeant, other people's homes always seem a bit strange, but these are rather odd houses."
"No more than some I've seen." Payne ignored my obvious ploy, well aware that I wanted to get him rolling, but he glanced at me with mild curiosity. "In what way, Doctor?"