Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series Read online

  ‘Thanks anyway, but no thanks.’

  ‘Just as you wish.’

  ‘A lift home would be more than welcome, though.’

  ‘It would be our pleasure,’ said Mr Disvan.

  ‘Absolutely’ I agreed.

  Accordingly, in due course, I conveyed Ellie home. As we approached the infamous gate I turned the radio on loud while Mr Disvan disembarked to clear our path. The sounds of Little Richard pounding his inimitable way through ‘Tutti Fruiti’ percolated from the car into the silent woods, raucously drowning out, I hoped, anything Ellie’s voice might wish to express. Within a brief moment Mr Disvan rejoined us and we were on our way. In deference to the sleep or other activities of the ménage I halted a little way off from the tents and turned the radio right down.

  ‘Here we are, then,’ I said, turning round to speak to Ellie in the back seat. ‘How was that?’

  Her face contained an eloquent answer to my question. She was pointing, plainly horrified, at the radio.

  ‘Can’t you hear it?’ she said. ‘It keeps breaking in to the song!’

  Disvan and I listened intently but could discern nothing other than that which the artist intended.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Ellie cried almost panic-stricken, ‘it says—‘

  And then she fainted.

  * * *

  ‘Feeling better now?’ asked Mr Disvan.

  ‘Yes thank you, very much better,’ Ellie replied.

  ‘How did you explain to Dave and co about us carrying you in?’ I asked.

  ‘That was very simple. I said I was dead drunk. Knowing me as they do, it had the ring of truth. I’d have said anything rather than let it be known that I’d fainted.’

  ‘There’s no shame in it,’ said Mr Disvan. ‘You’d had a bad shock.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it. But even so, fainting just isn’t my image. Where did you say that villa was, Mr Disvan?’

  Ellie obviously wanted the subject of the voice left alone. Disvan obliged by pointing out once again the position of one of the two Roman farms which had constituted, a civilisation ago, the Binscombe of the day, and whose one-time inhabitants presumably rested in the cemetery on the ridge.

  The Friday had dawned promisingly clear and bright and developed into a fine sunny day that a persistent breath of wind saved from becoming too warm. Mr Disvan and I met by arrangement early on, and after breakfast in a café we had driven up to the dig. The ‘Bone Specialist’ from London was already there, supervising Ros and Jayney as they uncovered the barrow burials. Ellie, having set the rest of the diggers to work, was at something of an anticipatory loose end and was thus free to give us a tour round the site.

  Mr Disvan made intelligent and incisive comments about the finds and holes we were shown, and I nodded sagely at what seemed the right moments. It all looked very professional to me, but the repeated sight of pottery and bone fragments and alleged soil features that I found invisible soon began to pall. I was pleased, therefore, when Dave rattled on the hearth’s tin roof to signify it was lunch time, and Ellie suggested we fetch our sandwiches from the site hut and sit lower down on the hillside to eat them.

  Behind us, the motley crew of government-enlisted youths and genteel volunteers sprawled around the hearth area munching their food and listening to Capital Radio on a transistor. Carried away by enthusiasm, the Specialist and Ros and Jayney worked on.

  ‘It was an enclosed courtyard type villa by the middle fourth century,’ continued Mr Disvan, ‘ very much in the continental style, really, which adds to the theory that there were a lot of rich Gallo-Romans coming over to Britannia at that time to escape the social troubles in their province.’

  ‘The Bacaudae you mean?’ said Ellie.

  ‘That’s right. Bands of brigands and revolutionaries and army deserters. Anyway, this villa was unusual in that it later had a defensive wall and rampart built around it.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘How? Well, it was in the 1960 excavation report by the Goldenford Archaeological Society.’

  ‘No it wasn’t. I’ve read it. They were digging in advance of an expansion of the council estate and they didn’t have time to excavate anything other the building itself.’

  ‘Oh well, I must have seen it in the report of Janaway’s dig in 1908.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, I’ve read that as well.’

  ‘How strange,’ said Disvan hurriedly, ‘I could have sworn I read it somewhere. Anyway, getting back to what you told us last week, have you heard anything more of your voice?’

  ‘Not the voice, no. Well, maybe some mumbling on the very edge of my hearing but nothing like... like when I fainted.’

  ‘You don’t want to explain about that by any chance, do you?’ said Mr Disvan.

  ‘No, it’s too personal. However... there is something I can tell you about.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I think the voice or whatever it is has taken shape.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

  ‘It sounds quite an innocent story when I tell it.’

  ‘Go ahead, even so,’ said Disvan.

  ‘It’s just that I was lying awake in my tent a couple of nights ago—I’ve not been sleeping well for obvious reasons—when someone came marching along and stood outside.’

  ‘What’s so strange about that?’ I queried.

  ‘Look at where my tent is.’

  We did as we were asked, and saw that on one side the thick bracken which surrounded the cleared camp site grew chest high.

  ‘And the footsteps came from the side where the bracken is?’ I hazarded.

  ‘You’ve guessed it. No one could walk at a steady normal pace through that. It’d be hard work for a strong man to walk even a few paces, and he wouldn’t be able to stride along like the footsteps I heard.

  ‘No, you’re right,’ said Disvan. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I stayed put, terrified out of my mind, until the sun came up and I heard the footsteps walk away.’

  ‘That was wise, I’m thinking.’

  ‘Did you inspect the bracken in the morning?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes—very cautiously, but I did. There was a line of dead and blackened plants leading back into the woods.’

  ‘Leading where?’

  ‘Nowhere. Dave followed the trail for me, and apparently it just petered out after a hundred feet or so.’

  There was silence for a moment (if one discounts Capital Radio and the sound of eating) while we considered this story. Disvan then turned to speak to Ellie.

  ‘I think you should leave here. Leave now and never come back.’

  Ellie looked out over the panorama of Binscombe and beyond. When she replied she sounded listless and resigned.

  ‘I can’t. You’re probably right, but I just can’t leave now. There’s too much tied up for me in this dig. I’m very scared by what’s going on, but somehow I’m not so scared as perhaps I should be. It’s a strange sensation, but I think I feel less and less threatened by whatever it is.’

  ‘Therein lies the danger,’ said Mr Disvan, ‘because if you don’t—‘

  Jayney came racing along and interrupted what Disvan was about to say.

  ‘Ellie, come and look,’ she said, ‘the burials are really amazing!’

  ‘Marvellous,’ said Ellie, instantly her old self once again. ‘Come on, gents, follow me and see my doctorate come to fruition!’

  Mr Disvan shook his head in dismay, but did as he was told without trying to complete his warning.

  A few minutes brisk walk took us to the top of the ridge and the barrow. Dave, Ros and the Specialist were huddled around a neat rectangular excavation in the barrow’s side and were gesturing excitedly. Our approach was heard and the ‘bone man’, as Ellie had termed him, came to meet us. He was a thick-set young man whose eyes contained an unhappy, dangerous energy, placated, for the moment, by the pleasure of his discovery. An ancient and baggy black woo
lly hat distinguished his pseudo-martial dress from all the other archaeologists I’d so far met.

  ‘It’s a beauty, Ellie,’ he said. ‘Two inhumations, man and a woman, articulation and dentition practically complete in both cases, so we’ll get age and any pathological indicators, no trouble. There’s no sign of a coffin and no trace of soil staining from a shroud that I can detect, but there are grave goods—fantastic stuff too—just right for your purposes.’

  ‘What are they?’ Ellie said.

  ‘Coins over the eyes.’

  ‘Pagan Roman then.’

  ‘Yep. Pretty late, I think, as well.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘And there’s a gold ring. Looks like there might be an inscription on it.’

  ‘Fantastic. Let me have a look.’

  We all gathered round to survey the find as described. Two skeletons lay on the ground, all the soil skilfully cleared away from them, as if they had been beached there during the Great Flood. Their involuntary grin greeted the rays of the sun for the first time in perhaps fifteen hundred years, and its light shone brightly off their skulls and the large golden coins resting neatly in their eye sockets.

  Ellie knelt beside them and with a tweezer device gently picked up the coins one by one.

  ‘A gold solidus of Honorius and... another of the same for this one.’

  ‘That’s the male,’ said the bone man.

  ‘And a... don’t know, and a trimus of Magnus Maximus for this one.’

  ‘The female,’ the woolly-hatted man added unnecessarily.

  ‘About as late as you can get and still be Roman,’ Dave announced.

  ‘And very prosperous people too,’ Jayney said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ellie concurred smiling. ‘Prosperous enough probably to be the top people in an off the track area like this. Anyway, the people who buried them made sure they had enough money to pay the ferryman so they wouldn’t need to come back for more.’

  ‘Note the discrimination against the woman, though,’ said Dave. ‘Lesser value coins for her.’

  ‘It’s noted, Dave,’ Ellie replied. ‘Now, let’s have a look at that ring.’

  She leant over what we now knew to be the male remains and extracted a small, plain looking gold ring which was loosely located on a phalange of what had been a right hand. While brushing it with a whisk, Ellie’s smile broadened even more.

  ‘Yes, there is an inscription, you’re right. Any Latinists here?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Dave, ‘coins and the occasional milestone are about my limit, I’m afraid.’

  I did not feel it necessary to announce my ignorance since it was presumably taken for granted, and a quiet born of frustration came over us.

  ‘Ah well,’ said Ellie, obviously disappointed, ‘It’ll have to wait till we can phone somebody.’

  Mr Disvan, apparently having held his peace while he considered the matter, then spoke.

  ‘That may not be necessary. I have some facility with that language.’

  ‘Great,’ said Ellie straightening up and holding the tweezer-held ring close to Disvan’s face. ‘What, if anything, do you make of it?’

  Mr Disvan screwed up his features and peered at the ring. His head followed the inscription round as he inwardly read it.

  ‘Well,’ he said at length, ‘it’s tiny script, and much abbreviated: but the sense is:

  HELENA: VOX MEA VENIET QUOCUMQUE ES

  which broadly translated means:

  ELLEN: MY VOICE SHALL COME TO YOU WHEREVER’

  ‘Wow,’ said the bone man, ‘that’s pretty weird isn’t it, Ellie? Ellie, what’s the matter?’

  The person in question was now quite oblivious to our presence and was staring from ring to grave and back again as if at approaching nemesis. The archaeologists were puzzled as to what precisely was happening, but could see that somehow Mr Disvan knew more about it than they.

  ‘What’s the problem, Mr Disvan?’ asked Dave.

  Disvan ignored him and instead spoke to Ellie in a tone that was half admonition and half bitter regret.

  ‘I told you to go, didn’t I?’ he said.

  * * *

  That summer saw a run of fine evenings when clouds were nigh absent and the sun warmed and cheered rather than oppressed. One such evening, a few days after our visit to the dig, Ellie came once again to visit us at the Argyll. Mr Disvan seemed to have anticipated her arrival since, contrary to normal practise, he suggested we take our drinks in the garden and join the one or two family groups already there. When Mr Wessner and Mr Patel asked if they might join us he politely declined—sorry, no, he said, we may have a guest and the conversation might be personal-like. Mr Wessner and Mr Patel said they quite understood.

  A few minutes after seating ourselves Ellie arrived. She seemed both pleased and abashed to see us.

  ‘How are you settling in at the Constantine’s?’ Mr Disvan asked when she had fetched a drink and joined us.

  ‘Couldn’t be better. I’m being killed with kindness.’

  ‘Good, I told you you’d be made very welcome.’

  ‘It makes a pleasant change from my normal habitat of tents, squats and grotty B&B places,’ Ellie added. ‘I’m well overdue for a spot of pampering—good food prepared for me, clean sheets and that sort of thing.’

  The explanation for the above conversation lies in the post mortem held on the events of the previous Friday. In the evening Disvan and I, Ellie, the ménage and the bone man had adjourned to the Argyll, nominally to celebrate the day’s find, now safely covered again. By prearrangement, I fielded the archaeologists’ conversation and occupied them with increasingly banal questions while Disvan and Ellie went off in a huddle to discuss matters of more import. The upshot of their sometimes heated debate was a compromise solution in which Ellie refused to abandon the dig but agreed she should minimise the time spent there. To this end, Mr Disvan found her lodgings in the house of Dorothy and Esther Constantine, two spinster sisters of his acquaintance, where she now slept and dined.

  For all the doubtless lavish hospitality being showered upon her by the Constantines, Ellie did not look well. Her eyes were surrounded by dark rings that resembled the effects produced by Ros and Jayney’s cosmetics, and her cheeks were sunken. While nominally at repose, her fingers twitched and fiddled with anything to hand.

  ‘And how is everything else?’ I asked, pretending that her condition was not already sufficient answer to my question.

  Ellie either ignored or did not hear me and, draining her drink, she looked up to stare at Mr Disvan.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘and I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re right.’

  Disvan shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I take no pleasure in your agreement but, at the same time, I’m glad you’ve decided to face facts, however strange they might seem. It’s for the best that you should go but we shall miss you. Shan’t we, Mr Oakley?’

  ‘What? Oh yes, we shall of course. Er... excuse me, but what exactly is going on?’

  Ellie favoured me with the arresting look she had just bestowed on Disvan.

  ‘Its getting worse, as Mr Disvan said it would. The voice is loud and clear now. When I walk to the site in the morning and back again in the evening it calls to me. All the way through the woods it never stops. He—for it is a he, that much is obvious—has become quite eloquent in the last few days.’

  ‘What does he say?’

  Ellie mimicked in a quavering, loud whisper, ‘ “Waiting for you, waiting for you... for so long, for so long” or “Another world here in the woods for us, for us... and it lasts for ever, for ever...” and other such phrases. Sometimes he just laughs and I can hear a woman’s voice screaming or weeping.’

  ‘How can you bear it?’

  ‘Good question. Quite frankly I don’t know, but I do know that I’ve had enough. You see, the worse thing is that while one part of me is frightened and revolted another, less conscious, part is relaxed and passive in an al
most... well, erotic sort of way. You know—that sort of anticipatory tingle you sometimes get just beforehand.’

  ‘Quite,’ replied Mr Disvan abruptly.

  Ellie said nothing more for a little while being obviously deep in thought. We left her to her reflections, thinking this to be the kindest thing to do, although Disvan watched her with great care. At length she lifted her head again and met Mr Disvan’s gaze.

  ‘It’s me, isn’t it,’ she said slowly. ‘It’s me or a one-time me in that grave, isn’t it?’

  ‘It rather looks like that, I’m afraid,’ Disvan answered calmly.

  ‘Somehow I escaped, perhaps a long time ago, and now I’ve come back—or been drawn back, maybe. Remember what it said on that ring!’

  ‘Since Saturday it has rarely been out of my mind, Ellie.’

  The note of alarm in Ellie’s voice heightened as her thoughts raced ahead. ‘And from what I’ve heard—across the gulf of years—I don’t think it was a happy marriage; not happy at all. I think that he flourishes in the cold of the grave and wants me back to be his wife there, to hold me prisoner like he did in life!’

  ‘This could well be so,’ agreed Disvan as if agreeing that the weekend might be warm or Arsenal might win the cup.

  Ellie slammed her glass down on the table, alarming the other occupants of the beer garden.

  ‘Well,’ she shouted in anger, ‘he shan’t have me! I’m going and I’m not coming back. Tomorrow morning I’m going!’

  A sudden burst of wind came from nowhere sending everyone scuttling to secure their drinks and possessions from being blown away. Mr Disvan’s Panama hat went flying and a sun parasol over one table took to the air in unmanned flight. Ellie’s hair was lifted up and alternately played wildly about her face or streamed straight back. She seemed to be concentrating on something other than the uproar around her and, to my surprise, great rolling tears began to slip from her eyes.

  The wind then ceased as abruptly as it started.

  ‘I don’t care what you say,’ Ellie sobbed, ‘I’m still going.’

  * * *

  It had been agreed that Mr Disvan and I would settle up things for Ellie and explain her sudden departure with some plausible lie. I took yet another day off work and as the church clock struck ten (signifying it was circa 9:45) I met Mr Disvan outside the Argyll and drove us both to the excavation site. On our way we were obliged to pull over to allow a police car and an ambulance, both with their sirens and flashing lights on, to speed past us.