Running Wild

The Television Film

The TV film, yet another _Newsnight_ recapitulation of the tragedy, introduced a short sequence recorded at the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. The police had allowed the cameras into the ward for the first time, as part of their now desperate appeal for witnesses of the child's escape.

Marion lay in her bed, her clenched fists pulling the sheet to her pursed lips. Her head rested to one side, torpid eyes apparently staring at the vase of irises on the nearby table. An elderly woman, the maternal grandmother, dressed in a Persian lamb coat and carrying a patent leather handbag, was guided to the bed by a nursing sister. She smiled hesitantly at her granddaughter, as the sister moved the flowers on which the child had fixed her gaze and urged her to turn her head.

My hall telephone rang while I was watching this affecting scene on the television screen. I paused at the door of the living room, as Marion Miller stared at the imposing figure of her grandmother. In a now famous gesture, endlessly repeated on TV and even mimicked by alternative comedians, the child raised her left hand from the safety of the sheet. She seemed to press a key into a lock and then turn it with a difficult double motion of her small hand-exactly the sequence of wrist movements, according to the experts, that would release a spring-loaded mortise lock. At the same time her right hand rose to her forehead, as if warding off the blow of one of the kidnappers, probably on the other side of the door and between whose legs she had made her brave and miraculous escape.

Confirming this theory, the child's mouth was set in a frightening rictus. She exposed her clenched teeth, parting her lips in an ugly grimace as her incisors gleamed against the camera lights. Although there was no sound track, every one of the millions of viewers must have heard the hiss.

While the telephone continued its weary ringing, I walked to my TV set and turned down the reporter's commentary. I stared at the orphaned child's wounded and desperate eyes, and at her pinched little face under the lovingly brushed blond hair, knowing that I had identified at least one of the Pangbourne murderers.