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their pillows. The three housekeepers are shot down as they
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hurry to their cars. The last to die, the tutor Mr. Wentworth, had taken
refuge in the Lymingtons' library, and is shot dead by Arnanda as he corrects
her homework project.
Disappearance of the Children
Having murdered their parents and the other adults who stood in their way, the
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children vanished from the estate. They appear to have left within ten minutes
of the last murder, and no clues have been found to their method of escape.
Many of them were wearing tracksuits, and given the popularity of jogging in
the Pangbourne area no one would have been surprised by a party of jogging
teenagers, while the drying blood would soon have resembled the mud splashes
of an arduous obstacle race.
Apart from the armed abduction of Marion Miller from the Great Ormond Street
Hospital, there have been no sightings of the children. Bearing in mind the
special nature of their crime, I assume that they will emerge again at some
future date, probably in a spectacular attempt to assassinate a leading public
figure. I have been unsuccessful in convincing the authorities of my fears.
The inquest into the parents' deaths returned an open verdict, and to this day
the Home Office believes that the children were abducted by their parents'
murderers.
POSTSCRIPT, DECEMBER 8, 1993
Five years have passed since the Pangbourne Massacre, and the first news has
been heard of the thirteen children. During this time there has been no trace
of the group, and Scotland Yard assumes that they are either dead or in the
custody of a foreign power. The kidnapping of Marion Miller from Great
Ormond Street is seen as part of this conspiracy, and it is assumed that the
young murderers were either drugged or acting under duress.
Sergeant Payne and I are the only ones to remain skeptical. Payne has
continued to send me whatever pieces of information come his way, but the
special investigation of Reading CID has long since been disbanded.
However, he telephoned today to tell me that in the early hours of this
morning an assassination attempt was carried out against a former British
prime minister. All details of the affair have been hushed up, but it seems
that an armored truck was driven at high speed through the gates of the house.
The explosion that followed, on an exclusive estate in Dulwich, southeast
London, has been attributed to a leak in a nearby gas main. The former prime
minister was unharmed, and was photographed handing out cups of tea to the
police and firemen. As before, she continues to enjoy respect, if not
affection, as a leader now sometimes known as the "Mother of Her Nation," or
"Mother England."
These titles, recently coined by a sycophantic newspaper editor nostalgic for
the halcyon days of the l980s, must have been a red rag to the Pangbourne
children. The oldest of them is twenty-two, and most of the others have left
their adolescence behind. Even Marion Miller is now thirteen, and it is
interesting that one of the former prime minister's bodyguards reported that
the assault seemed to be directed by a stern-faced teenager with blond hair
which she brushed compulsively from her forehead.
He speculated that these gestures might have been a set of coded signals.
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Will the children strike again? I take it that all authority and parental
figures are now their special target. So the regime of kindness and care which
was launched with the best of intentions at Pangbourne
Village, and which has prompted countless imitations in the exclusive estates
of southern England, not to mention Western Europe and the United States, has
given birth to its children of revenge, sending them out to challenge the
world that loved them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and was interned by the Japanese
from 1942 to 1945, an experience recorded in _Empire of the Sun_. In a career
spanning over a quarter of a century he has written nineteen books.
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