Ballard, J G - Running Wild

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RUNNING WILD

by J.G. Ballard

Flyleaf:

"Where to start? So much has been written about the Pangbourne massacre, as it is now known in

the popular press throughout the world, that I find it difficult to see this tragic event with a clear eye."

Shortly after eight on the morning of June 25, 1988, the thirty-two adult members of an exclusive

residential community in West London are brutally murdered, and their children abducted without so

much as a trace. Through the forensic diary of Dr. Richard Greville, Deputy Psychiatric Advisor to the

London Metropolitan Police, the brutal details of the massacre that has baffled the entire police

department unfold. "There seems scarcely room for even a single fresh hypothesis," writes Greville, but

he has a few ideas of his own, and pursues them with determination despite repeated discouragement

from his superiors.

In this powerful and compelling novel of suspense, J. G. Ballard, acclaimed author of _Empire of

the Sun_ and _The Day of Creation_, has spun a tale, at once thrilling and disturbing, which challenges

our most cherished assumptions about the relationship between parents and their children.

Originally published in Britain by Hutchinson, an imprint of Century Hutchins on Ltd

First American edition, 1989

Printed in the United States of America. Designed by Chip Kidd and Barbara de Wilde

FROM THE FORENSIC DIARIES OF DR. RICHARD

GREVILLE, DEPUTY PSYCHIATRIC ADVISER,

METROPOLITAN POLICE

August 28, 1988.

Where to start? So much has been written about the Pangbourne Massacre, as it is now known in

the popular press throughout the world, that I find it difficult to see this tragic event with a clear eye. In

the past two months there have been so many television programs about the thirty-two murdered

residents of this exclusive estate to the west of London, and so much speculation about the abduction of

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their thirteen children, that there scarcely seems room for even a single fresh hypothesis.

However, as the Permanent Secretary impressed upon me at the Home Office this morning,

virtually nothing is known about the motives and identity of the assassins.

"I say 'assassins,' Doctor Greville, but there may have been only one of them. I'm told that some

sort of martial arts fanatic could have got away with it." Sitting beneath the portrait of his more

illustrious predecessor, he gestured gloomily. "And as for the whereabouts of the orphaned children--

they've vanished through some window in time and space. Not a ransom demand, or even a simple threat

to kill them . . ."

He sounded almost aggrieved, and I commented: "All the same, I think we should assume that

they're still alive."

"Should we? To be honest, Doctor, I'd rather you didn't assume anything. That's why I've asked you

here."

He stared at me without hope, already regretting the decision. As we both well knew, the fact that I

had been called in by the Home Office, after my unpopular minority report on the Hungerford killings,

was less a compliment to me than a comment on the failure of the police, the CID and the intelligence

services to come up with even a solitary clue to the sources of this horrific crime.

As baffled as the Permanent Secretary, I could only think of asking his permission to visit the

murder site at Pangbourne Village. The luxury housing estate was still sealed off from the press and

public, but had been tramped over by an army of heavy-footed investigators. I waited as he scribbled my

_laissez-passer_, my arms burdened by two Home Office briefcases loaded with their probably useless

files. Then I remembered the comfortable seats of the viewing theater in the Whitehall basement, and as

an afterthought asked if I could see the police video recorded at Pangbourne within a few hours of the

crime.

"The police video? All right, but it's pretty grim stuff. Though after Hungerford, I daresay you have

the stomach for this sort of thing, Doctor . . ."

Irritated by his tone, I almost declined. The senior people at both the Home Office and Scotland

Yard regarded me as a dangerous maverick, overly prone to lateral thinking and liable to come up with

one embarrassing discovery after another. Later, looking back as I revise these diaries for publication, I

realize that it was there, in the deserted viewing theater, that I was given my first glimpse into the real

causes of the Pangbourne Massacre. If I failed to recognize what I saw, and if over the course of my

investigation I seem unduly slow to identify the culprits, I can only plead that what now appears self-

evident scarcely seemed so at the time. My failure to recognize the obvious, in common with almost

everyone else concerned, is a measure of the true mystery of the Pangbourne Massacre.

The Police Video

Like millions of other television viewers, I had already seen selected extracts from the film in

numerous documentaries about the massacre, and I hardly expected any sudden revelation. But as I

relaxed in the viewing theater, I soon realized what a remarkable film this was, and how well it

conveyed the curious atmosphere of Pangbourne Village--in its elegant and civilized way a scene-of-the-

crime waiting for its murder.

The twenty-eight-minute film was taken by officers of Reading CID soon after eleven o'clock on

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the morning of June 25, 1988, some three hours after the murders. Thankfully, there is no sound track,

and one is glad that none is necessary, unlike the TV programs with their hectoring commentaries full of

lurid speculation. This minimalist style of camera work exactly suits the subject matter, the shadowless

summer sunlight and the almost blank façades of the expensive houses--everything is strangely

blanched, drained of all emotion, and one seems to be visiting a set of laboratories in a hightech science

park where no human operatives are employed.

The film opens by the gatehouse that controlled access to the ten mansions, the recreation club and

gymnasium which made up the estate. The medallion of the private security firm is visible beside the

visitors' microphone, but there is no sign of the uniformed security guard who usually sat at the window.

The camera turns to show the delivery van of the local wine merchants which the police have

parked among the ornamental trees on the grass verge. The driver, a pallid young man in his early

twenties, is staring in a despondent way at the deep ruts left in the finely trimmed grass, as if the costs of

restoring this once-immaculate surface will have to be met from his wages. It was he who gave the

alarm, after discovering the first of the bodies as he delivered a case of white burgundy to the Garfield

house (No. 3, The Avenue).

The camera fixes on him, and like a badly trained actor he steps forward to the gatehouse, a tic

jumping across his sallow cheek. He points to the door, and a uniformed constable opens the armored

glass panel to reveal the interior of the office.

A security guard is lying on the floor below the row of television monitors, their screens a blizzard

of snow. Someone has cut the cable running from the surveillance cameras mounted all over the estate,

but clearly Officer Turner had no time to reach for the telephone whose scissored cord hangs from the

desk above his head. Arms pinioned, he lies within a bizarre contraption of rope and bamboo sticks, his

neck gripped by a pair of spring-loaded steel calipers, as if in his bored moments he had been

constructing a box kite for one of the pampered children of the estate and had been trapped inside it.

In fact, as I can see from the livid contusions on his throat, he has strangled himself after

blundering into this lethal cat's cradle which his murderer dropped over his shoulders, its double nooses

tightening around his neck as he struggled to free his arms and legs.

The camera leaves the gatehouse and sets off along The Avenue, the tree-lined central drive of the

estate. The handsome mansions sit above their ample front lawns, separated from each other by screens

of ornamental shrubs and dry-stone walls. The light is flat but remarkably even, a consequence of the

generous zoning densities (approx. two acres per house) and the absence of those cheap silver firs which

cast their bleak shadows across the mock-Tudor façades of so many executive estates in the Thames

Valley.

As well, though, there is an antiseptic quality about Pangbourne Village, as if these company

directors, financiers and television tycoons have succeeded in ridding their private Parnassus of every

strain of dirt and untidiness. Here, even the drifting leaves look as if they have too much freedom.

Thirteen children once lived in these houses, but it is hard to visualize them at play.

For once, unhappily, the pale green slopes of Parnassus are marked with a darker dye. The police

camera turns to examine the Garfield family's Mercedes in the driveway of No. 3. Roger Garfield, a

merchant banker in his mid-fifties, sits in the rear seat, head leaning against the off-side stereo speaker

as if to catch some fleeting grace note. He is a large-chested man with a well-lunched midriff and strong

legs that have spent agonizing hours on an exercise cycle. He has been shot twice through the chest with

a small-caliber handgun. Almost as surprising, he is wearing no trousers, and bloodstained footprints

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emerging from the house indicate that he was shot while dressing after his morning shower. He

somehow managed to walk downstairs and take refuge in his car. Perhaps his clouding mind still

assumed that he would be driven to his office in the City of London.

But the Mercedes was going nowhere. Garfield's chauffeur had been shot dead a few moments after

his employer. A white-haired man in a black uniform, Mr. Poole lies face down in the bed of orange-

tipped cannas beside the front door, cap still held in his right hand.

The camera pauses over him and then enters the house, following the bloody footprints through the

open door. Garfield and his wife had made numerous trips to Hong Kong, and the rooms are filled with

pieces of chinoiserie--large porcelain vases stand on the blackwood furniture, and there are pairs of

Ming horses and jade figurines. Surprisingly, none have been disturbed, suggesting that the murderers

had approached their victims without surprise. The housekeeper, Mrs. West, lies shot below the marble

mantelpiece in the drawing room, interrupted while doing her dusting. In an upstairs bathroom the

camera finds Mrs. Garfield, a handsome woman in her late forties, slumped against the glass door of the

shower stall, her yellow toothbrush still in her hand.

All trace of the Garfields' sixteen-year-old son, Alexander, had vanished. His bedroom, study and

bathroom were undisturbed. Only in his mother's blood flowing across the bathroom tiles could be seen

the smeared prints of Alexander's rubber-cleated shoes, left behind as he was seized and swept away by

his abductors.

The police video continues on its grim and matter-of-fact way. The camera leaves Garfield seated

in his Mercedes and gazes across the tranquil lawns at the next macabre tableau. As the two constables

outside the Reade house (No. 1, The Avenue) step back from the colonnaded porch, the camera reveals

the lavish interior of the property tycoon's home, so filled with French furniture and objets d'art that it

resembles one of the larger rooms at the Wallace Collection. Yet not a glass cabinet has been rifled, not

a Sevres plate shattered, not an ormolu clock toppled from its pedestal.

Indeed, Mr. and Mrs. Reade sit at their breakfast table in the dining room, lying back in their chairs

at opposite ends of the lacquered oblong as if momentarily overwhelmed by the calm and richness of the

life they have arranged for themselves. Both have been efficiently shot by assailants who have crept so

close to them that the cutlery beside their napkins is undisturbed. Only the place settings of the Reades'

daughters, Annabel and Gail, have been scattered to the floor as these orphaned children made a

desperate attempt to resist their kidnappers.

The camera resumes its melancholy tour. By the time it reaches the third house, the Gropius-

inspired home of a distinguished concert pianist, the sequence of entrances, deaths and exits begins to

resemble a nightmare exhibition that will never end. House by house, the assassins had moved swiftly

through the estate on that quiet June morning, killing the owners, their chauffeurs and servants, before

abducting the thirteen children. Husbands and wives were shot down across their still-warm beds,

stabbed in their shower stalls, electrocuted in their baths or crushed against their garage doors by their

own cars. In a period generally agreed to be no more than twenty minutes, some thirty-two people were

savagely but efficiently done to death.

However, as the film ended, with a visit to the perimeter guard post where the second security

officer had been killed by a single bolt from a crossbow, I was struck by the way in which Pangbourne

Village remained aloof from this day of death. The owners of these elegant houses had been dispatched

with the least damage to the fabric of their homes, as if the façades of professional and upper-middle-

class life were their most solid and lasting substance.

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Ballard, J G - Running Wild

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