dripping bathroom, surrounded by the endless images of ourselves, listening as the last trickle of water ran away through the house.
Uneasy with his own reflection, Payne said: âI agree, Doctor, but itâs hardest to prove right here, in this bathroom. An eight-year-old girl and her thirteen-year-old brother? Youâll have a merry time making that one stick.â
âPerhaps, but Iâm sure that Robin and Marion Miller are the key to everything. Remember, they were the youngest of the thirteen children, and they had a particular problem that none of the others faced. Their father was a huge man, well over six feet tall, a former amateur boxer. The boy would never have been able to stab him fatally.â
âAnd if heâd only wounded Miller heâd have been able to warn the other parents?â
âVery likelyâthe parents were intelligent enough to realize that something serious was amiss, and rapidly draw the right conclusions.â
âLike lock the nearest doors, donât switch on that appliance, decide not to walk in front of the car when the teenage son is staring at you in a funny way over the steering wheel. The whole operation could have unraveledâ¦â
âWithin minutes. So young Robin and Marion Miller faced a double challenge. They had to move quickly, and they had to kill their parents themselves.â
âBut why, Doctor?â Payne had managed to relight his wet cigarette, and sucked hungrily at the smoke. âOne of the older boys, the Ogilvy lad or the psychiatristsâ son, could have done it for them.â
âThat would have destroyed the whole moral basis of the exercise. The children were making a last stand against their parents. The Pangbourne Massacre was a desperate rebellion, from the childrenâs viewpoint, an act of mass tyrannicide. Each one had to take responsibility for the death of his own parents, whatever the cost.â
âThey certainly put a lot of ingenuity into itâall these electrical booby-traps, these strange nooses and harnesses. At first that pointed to a really sick professional killer.â
âI thought so too, Sergeantâbut the ingenuity here was born out of necessity. The younger children had never seen a firearm, let alone handled one. The murders had to be carried out in a very short period, perhaps no more than ten minutes, to keep up the psychological momentum. They had to be fast, and they had to be efficient.â
âItâs no good a thirteen-year-old boy walking up to his mother in the kitchen and trying to stab her.â Payne shook his head, pondering upon this grim spectacle. âJust think of all that jogging. Those Pangbourne mothers were a collection of fit women, theyâd spent a lifetime fighting off young men. Even a fatal stab wound might give them a chance to raise the alarmâespecially those alarms that ring inside the head.â
âThe loudest kind. Imagine trying to kill someone who loves and cares for you, Sergeant. The murder act has to take place so quickly that you havenât time to think.â
âFirst time and dead on time. That meant planning, Doctor. Itâs hard to believe the children could have brought it off themselves.â
âI know. All the same, Sergeant, Iâm certain that they acted alone. I think they murdered their own parents at about eight oâclock that Saturday morning, without the help of anyone else. They probably left Pangbourne Village within a few minutes of the murders, perhaps in a rented bus parked around the corner.â
âAnd now?â
âWho knows? I daresay theyâre sitting it out in some quiet country farmhouse in a remote corner of Wales or Scotland.â
âTheyâll be mothering a goat, planting carrots, and lying awake all night as they wait for the dawn chorus. And weâll never hear from them again.â
âOh, weâll hear from them again, Sergeant. One