Running Wild Read Online Free PDF Page B

lengths today! Well done, Jeremy!”
    Ignoring Payne, I pressed on, reciting from memory. “There was a visit by a TV producer planning a film about Pangbourne Village, a repeat of the Panorama program on the Eritrean famine, which a lot of the parents were watching with their children, and the disco in the evening. Nothing out of the ordinary…”
    â€œBut the boy, Roger Sterling, made a real effort to be here. The London Clinic wasn’t keen to let him go.”
    â€œRight—he made up some story about a visiting friend from Canada who didn’t exist. But why? Could the children have been planning a surprise?”
    I was standing with my back to Payne, glancing at the books on the Maxteds’ shelves, and waited for the sergeant to reply. When I turned, a volume of Piaget in my hand, he was smiling primly, like a prudish man forced to enjoy the point of a vulgar joke.
    â€œYes, there’s no doubt in my mind, Doctor. The children were planning a surprise.”
    â€œIt’s possible … and whatever their motive, the killers got wind of this. Correct?”
    â€œI would say so.”
    â€œWhich suggests that they could plan the murders down to the last detail, confident where everyone would be. One thing is plain to me, Sergeant. The killers knew their way around.”
    â€œOh, intimately.” Payne sat back expansively in Dr. Maxted’s leather armchair, as if resting after work well done. “The killers knew everything about the place, every staircase and Jacuzzi and diving board, every alarm switch and electric socket. But then they’d been here for years.”
    â€œYears? But who, Sergeant? The servants?”
    â€œNo, not the servants.”
    â€œThen who else? You sound as if you know.”
    I gestured with the book in my hand, and it fell open awkwardly to reveal a broken spine. I stared down at the pages, many of which had been stabbed with the same doweling tool that had damaged the skirting board in Jeremy Maxted’s bedroom. Someone had gone through the book systematically mutilating its pages. Suddenly I guessed whose fingerprints would be found on the bruised end boards.
    â€œSergeant, are you saying…?”
    â€œWhat do you think, Doctor?”
    â€œI’ve no ideas—but you obviously have.”
    â€œOne or two. I can tell you, they aren’t popular.”
    â€œLet’s have them. I can cope with unpopularity.”
    Payne stood up, composing his reply to me, but then strode to the window. A speeding police car swerved across the road and pulled up at the bottom of the drive, scattering the gravel. A uniformed inspector hurried across the grass. He pushed through the door, a look of triumph on his face.
    â€œSergeant, get back to Reading—you won’t find anything here.” He turned to me. “Doctor Greville, we have the Miller girl! The first of the children has escaped!”
    Marion Miller, the First “Hostage”
    During the next week I remained at my consulting rooms at the Institute of Psychiatry. I saw those patients whom I had briefly neglected, and tried to keep my head down as an immense barrage of publicity greeted the discovery of Marion Miller. This tragically orphaned eight-year-old had been found in the early hours of August 29, hiding in a skip loaded with overnight mail on Platform 7 of Waterloo Railway Station. A ticket inspector coming on duty (Frank Evans, eighteen years’ service with British Rail, already a national hero) had heard what seemed to be a cat hissing among the mailbags in the skip. Trying to rescue the stray, he found the shivering and grimy form of a barely conscious child with matted blond hair, wearing a bedraggled cotton frock and a single shoe.
    The British Rail police were called, but the child, who was seven or eight years old and well nourished, was unable to give her name. Exhausted by her ordeal, she was sunk in a state of speechless