Running Wild, стр. 17

Needless to say, Marion Miller was never to see the film. During the next two weeks, as I waited for the Home Office to reply to my request, she continued to lie in her guarded room at the Children's Hospital on Great Ormond Street. She had made friends with her nurses, murmuring and lisping like the three-year-old version of herself to which she had reverted. I assumed that she had blotted out all memories of the days leading up to the Pangbourne Massacre and the murder of her parents.

Sensibly, I kept my suspicions to myself, and said nothing to the Home Office of my belief that the thirteen children were not the assassins' victims but were themselves the killers. No trace of them had been found, despite a marathon of manhunts organized by the police and national newspapers. No ransom note or list of demands had been sent to the authorities, and the twelve missing children had effectively vanished into another continuum.

Two of them, however, were nearer to hand than anyone had imagined.

Early on the afternoon of November 4 I walked through the lobby of the Children's Hospital with the videocassette in my briefcase. I had not been given permission to show the film to Marion, but while talking to an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard I learned that the child was watching videos of children's programs on the television set in her room.

When I arrived, I found that two uniformed police officers were guarding the private ward on the fourth floor. They examined the video without comment, and my Home Office pass saw me into the child's presence. A young nurse was sitting beside the bed, laying out a jigsaw puzzle on a metal tray.

Marion Miller watched me quietly with a thumb in her mouth. Blond curls hid her small forehead, and her overlarge eyes made her resemble a dreamy infant scarcely off the breast. Could this vulnerable child have murdered her own father and set in train the Pangbourne Massacre? For a moment my faith in my own theory faltered.

"Look, Marion-doctor's brought a film for you."

The nurse put aside the jigsaw puzzle, but Marion had already noticed me. As she turned her head a sharp blue eye surveyed me through the blond fringe, and I could only too well imagine her father's disbelief as this demure parricide dropped the hair dryer into his bath.

Was she aware that I was avoiding her eyes? Busying myself with the television set, I engaged the nurse in small talk, letting her insert the cassette into the video player.

When I switched it on, there was a sudden clamor from the corridor outside the ward. I assumed that the volume control of an extension speaker had been incorrectly set. Then there were the sounds of a violent scuffle, and the ringing clatter of an overturned trolley. The door into the ward burst open. One of the uniformed constables stepped backward into the room, reaching for the revolver in the holster under his tunic.

Through the open door I could see the trolley lying on its side, enamel kidney basins scattered across the floor. A terrified orderly was on her knees against the wall. The second policeman tried to help the woman, disguising his right hand as he drew his revolver.

He was looking up at his assailants, two small figures in white gowns and face masks, their T-shirts incongruously bearing a pop group's logo, whom I took to be a pair of undersized laboratory technicians. However, each held an automatic pistol. Like trained dancers they sidestepped past the debris on the floor. The policeman in the corridor began to raise his revolver, when there were two hard, rapid reports like fuses blowing.

Shot through the chest, the policeman lay at the intruders' feet as they stepped into the ward. Above the masks their eyes glanced at the television set, which was now showing the Pangbourne Village film. I heard the second constable shout a warning, and then a brief volley of shots jarred the windows. The constable stepped forward to the door, one hand raised like a blind man feeling his way, and collapsed onto his knees.

The next few seconds passed in a confusion of sudden violence. The intruders moved to Marion 's bed, weapons raised as if about to kill the child. I stepped forward to protect her, but one of them bent down and lifted Marion from the bed, pressing her face against his shoulder. The other had removed her mask, revealing the white, stony face and aroused eyes of a teenage girl. She moved to the window, and glanced into the street. As she searched the passing traffic I saw a revolver in the right hand of the nurse-in fact, Special Branch officer Doreen Carter. There was a last exchange of gunfire that tore an oblong of jagged glass from the window. Wounded in both arms, Officer Carter dropped her weapon to the floor and crouched against the bed.

As the kidnappers fled with the child, pausing at the door to fire a last shot at myself, I recognized them as Annabel Reade and Mark Sanger of Pangbourne Village.

It was some minutes later, when the ward filled with police, security staff and emergency medical teams, that I switched off the television set. The screen was wet with blood, and I realized that I had been shot in the left hand.