Running Wild by J. G. Ballard Read Free Book Online

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: “I agree, Doctor, but it’s hardest to prove right here, in this bathroom. An eight-year-old girl and her thirteen-year-old brother? You’ll have a merry time making that one stick.”
    â€œPerhaps, but I’m 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€œAnd if he’d only wounded Miller he’d have been able to warn the other parents?”
    â€œVery likely—the parents were intelligent enough to realize that something serious was amiss, and rapidly draw the right conclusions.”
    â€œLike lock the nearest doors, don’t 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 unraveled…”
    â€œWithin 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€œBut why, Doctor?” Payne had managed to relight his wet cigarette, and sucked hungrily at the smoke. “One of the older boys, the Ogilvy lad or the psychiatrists’ son, could have done it for them.”
    â€œThat 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 children’s viewpoint, an act of mass tyrannicide. Each one had to take responsibility for the death of his own parents, whatever the cost.”
    â€œThey certainly put a lot of ingenuity into it—all these electrical booby-traps, these strange nooses and harnesses. At first that pointed to a really sick professional killer.”
    â€œI thought so too, Sergeant—but 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€œIt’s no good a thirteen-year-old boy walking up to his mother in the kitchen and trying to stab her.” Payne shook his head, pondering upon this grim spectacle. “Just think of all that jogging. Those Pangbourne mothers were a collection of fit women, they’d spent a lifetime fighting off young men. Even a fatal stab wound might give them a chance to raise the alarm—especially those alarms that ring inside the head.”
    â€œThe 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 haven’t time to think.”
    â€œFirst time and dead on time. That meant planning, Doctor. It’s hard to believe the children could have brought it off themselves.”
    â€œI know. All the same, Sergeant, I’m certain that they acted alone. I think they murdered their own parents at about eight o’clock 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€œAnd now?”
    â€œWho knows? I daresay they’re sitting it out in some quiet country farmhouse in a remote corner of Wales or Scotland.”
    â€œThey’ll be mothering a goat, planting carrots, and lying awake all night as they wait for the dawn chorus. And we’ll never hear from them again.”
    â€œOh, we’ll hear from them again, Sergeant. One