Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series Page 13

  ‘Another family dispute in the estate, I expect,’ said Disvan. ‘Either that or the council trying to evict someone—probably the Abbott tribe again.’

  For once, however, one of Disvan’s predictions, although based on his seemingly omniscient knowledge of Binscombe, proved to be incorrect. As we made our way up the track to the ridge, there was every sign that someone had immediately preceded us—in large vehicles, such as a police car or an ambulance. This proved to be the case, and when we came upon the site through the already opened five-bar gate, it was to see said vehicles, their beacons still in operation, parked as close to the barrow as safety would permit.

  Abandoning the car, we made haste to join the small crowd that was milling around the ambulance. I saw the ménage, two policemen and some MSC lads removing a large wooden structure that had inexplicably come to be on the side of the barrow. The ‘bone man’, as we knew him, was also there directing other people who were in the burial trench itself.

  As we drew near and made our way through the mob, the ambulance men finished loading an occupied stretcher into their vehicle and then drove off back down the hill at reckless speed.

  Having disposed of the strange wooden object, the senior of the two policemen was having strong words or, more accurately, a strong monologue with Dave, who was weeping bitterly and ignoring his questioner completely. Ros and Jayney, one either side of him like book ends, were attempting to comfort the distraught archaeologist.

  The policeman gesticulated wildly once more and then gave up in frustration. Following the direction of his arm I saw that the site hut had somehow been beheaded and that the puzzling wooden structure now lying by the side of the barrow was the hut’s one-time roof. A horrible suspicion began to form in my mind.

  Our approach was now audible even over the general furore, and the peeved look on the policemen’s faces eased as they turned to inspect the new arrivals.

  ‘Ah, Mr Disvan,’ said one, ‘good morning to you.’

  ‘Morning, Alan. Morning, Desmond. What’s going on?’

  ‘Difficult to say. I can’t get no sense out of these weirdoes. An accident caused by appalling safety standards, that much is plain, though.’

  ‘Who’s been hurt?’ Disvan asked.

  ‘Young girl. The one you’ve been taking a drink or two with lately.’

  ‘How badly?’

  ‘Bad as you can get. Her head’s split. She’ll be DOA.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Dead on arrival.’

  ‘I see. Thank you, Alan. Look, perhaps I can assist you here; I’m acquainted with these people.’

  ‘By all means, Mr Disvan, carry on.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Mr Disvan crossed over to Dave and placed his hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Hello, Dave’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry about what happened. Do you think you could tell me about it?’

  Dave regained control of his emotions and answered in a level voice.

  ‘Yeah, I’m all right now. It was when we were taking photographs of the burials. Someone opened the site hut door, there was a sudden almighty blast of wind and the roof blew off. I just don’t understand that because I put it together myself—it should have been as firm as a rock...’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t, was it,’ said a policeman, ‘and furthermore...’

  Mr Disvan waved him to silence. ‘Carry on, Dave’ he said gently.

  ‘Well, it flew over here and we didn’t see it coming because we had our backs to it and... it hit Ellie on the head—she was crouching over the burials you see—and there must have been some nails protruding from the roof because... Anyway, it hit her first and the rest of us were able to duck or roll underneath its path. Ellie got carried forward and pushed onto the graves and buried underneath the damn thing. We lifted it off but... there was nothing we could do to help her.’

  ‘What was she doing here?’ I asked.

  The archaeologists looked at me in surprise.

  ‘Why shouldn’t she be here?’ said the bone man. ‘She came here every day, as you well know.’

  ‘Of course. It’s just that we were under the impression that… she’d been called away. We’d come up here to explain that to you.’

  ‘Really?’ the bone man continued. ‘She didn’t mention it to me when I came down from London and called at her lodgings this morning.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’ asked Mr Disvan.

  ‘To pick up the coins and the ring which Ellie had in her safe keeping so we could do some extra pictures. The first lot didn’t come out for some reason. There were some very odd effects of the light in them.’

  ‘I warrant that this lot will be the same,’ Disvan commented quietly.

  The bone man looked at him sceptically.

  ‘Don’t see why—conditions were perfect. Anyhow, we had to have some decent pics before the burials were taken up, because without them Ellie’s report would have been a bit of a laughing stock. And, for the pictures, I required the grave goods and Ellie to supervise. Actually, now you come to mention it, maybe Ellie was a bit reluctant to come up here with me. I put that down to the incident at the faculty Christmas party when I was a bit tipsy, but in view of what you say perhaps she did have an appointment elsewhere. That was Ellie all over—never able to delegate or back out of anything. It was one of her strengths.’

  ‘There is also a strength in knowing when to back down,’ said Mr Disvan solemnly.

  ‘Don’t understand what you mean, old boy,’ said the bone man.

  The policemen, local men both, winced at such unwarranted familiarity with Disvan.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you do,’ Mr Disvan agreed.

  ‘Anyhow,’ the specialist continued unabashed, ‘it’s all very, very sad...’

  Mr Disvan and I nodded prematurely before hearing the bone man out.

  ‘... the female burial is completely smashed,’ he continued, ‘and the male’s is so messed up that it’s not worth removing now. Worst of all, the ring seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.’

  * * *

  ‘Come, come,’ said the coroner, ‘there must be someone to take responsibility for this poor girl’s remains.’

  A policeman, unknown to me, rose and addressed the court.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘Parents divorced fifteen years ago, present whereabouts of father unknown, mother now remarried and resident in New Zealand, no other family known. The mother was notified and she has written to the Court, sir and she says...’

  He took up an air mail letter and read stentoriously:

  ‘ “Please make such arrangements as you see fit for burial or cremation and after deduction of due expenses thereof please forward any remaining funds to…” And she appends her address, sir.’

  ‘I see, I see,’ the coroner said frostily. ‘So much for ties of blood. Right then, we’d better do as bidden and act as we see fit. Is there a representative of the girl’s university here?’

  The junior lecturer who’d given evidence earlier rose and, obviously embarrassed, said that he had no authority... would need to refer... and so on.

  Clearly pained by this travesty, Mr Disvan stood up.

  ‘I will undertake to arrange for the deceased’s funeral if the court so pleases.’

  ‘I see, well, we’re obliged to you, Mr...’

  ‘Disvan.’

  ‘And what was your connection to the deceased, Mr Disvan?’

  ‘Friend and advisor.’

  ‘Is there anyone in court who can vouch for this?’

  Rising as one, as they did in all other things, Dave, Ros and Jayney said that Mr Disvan had spoken the truth.

  ‘Ah, thank you’ said the Coroner regarding them with neutral curiosity.

  ‘I can further attest to Mr Disvan’s statement,’ said the policeman known to me as Alan, who had also given evidence earlier.

  ‘Good. Very well, let it be so recorded. Mr Disvan, kindly see the usher after this hearing in or
der that the formalities can be observed and the relevant papers signed. This court will rise.’

  The usher, when we duly came to meet him, wrongly thought us to be a sympathetic audience for a well polished sermon on the rootless, existential nature of modern youth with particular reference to the case just heard. ‘Take my daughter,’ he said, ‘please!’ He concluded his case by saying, ‘A clever girl her age ought to have a husband who’d take care of her remains.’

  Mr Disvan smiled and said, ‘Well, it’s funny you should say that because...’ before I bustled him away.

  * * *

  Aside from the Reverend Jagger and the corpse, Mr Disvan and I were the only people present at the cremation. The ménage promised to attend but failed to do so, presumably being archaeologically occupied elsewhere now that the Binscombe dig was finished. Similarly, the rumoured representative from the university was conspicuous by his or her absence. After a few short words on the brevity and uncertainty of life by the rector, and a taped hymn, Ellie’s remains trundled off into the depths of the crematorium and, in their present form, out of the world.

  We returned a while later and collected the ashes in the plastic urn provided.

  ‘What now?’ I asked.

  ‘To the ridge, of course,’ Mr Disvan replied as if stating the blindingly obvious.

  ‘Do you intend, God forbid, what I think you intend?’

  ‘That rather depends on what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I’m thinking that you propose to bury Ellie’s ashes next to the male burial in the barrow.’

  ‘Then you think right.’

  ‘You can’t!’

  ‘On the contrary, I must. Such an ending is obviously ordained.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘No, not nonsense. Consider, Mr Oakley, the fact that Ellie’s accident spoilt the human remains to such an extent that the archaeologists left them in place. Further consider the fact that the ring was never found. Everything that has been permitted to happen points to one conclusion, and we would be incorrect to act against it. No, Mr Oakley, there are times when one must move with the tide of events.’

  ‘Even if the tide is wrong?’

  ‘It’s not given to us to see the outcome of all things. Considerations of ultimate right and wrong can stretch beyond the perspective of a single human lifetime. It’s a matter of trust, you see.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.’

  ‘But for heaven’s sake, Mr Disvan, it’s not what Ellie would have wanted, is it?.’

  ‘Can you be so sure about that? Despite all that she said to us that final time in the Argyll, she still went to the ridge the very next morning of her own free will.’

  ‘To supervise pictures so her report could be completed.’

  ‘Maybe—superficially, perhaps, but I can’t believe she’d forgotten the risk so quickly. Remember that she spoke to us of her growing feeling of belonging up there. I think she realised that if it was not her that was rejoined it would be some descendent of hers. If not in this life, then in some other.’

  ‘Is that what you thought, that there was no escape for her?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’

  ‘It’s hardly good news to rush to impart to someone. I thought she might escape the call for the duration of her lifetime, so I kept my ideas to myself. Clearly however, Ellie came to the same conclusion of her own accord—perhaps thinking it through that night after she left us. I think that at the last moment, leaning over the double burial with the ring in her hand, she accepted what was to come and the hut roof plighted their troth for a second time—with her permission.’

  I thought about this for some while, and cursed the world. Then we set off in my car, taking Ellie on her final journey, to reunite the long parted couple.

  THE WILL TO LIVE

  My first meeting with Terence the solicitor was in the course of one of his apparently regular, if infrequent, evening visitations to the Argyll. It was, by the merest of coincidences, the anniversary of Mr Bolding’s disappearance and, spotting the memorial drink standing on the bar, Terence seized the opportunity to outrage local sensibilities by striding up to it and taking a sip.

  ‘Bolding doesn’t need it any more, does he?’ he roared in a hoarse, dusty voice. ‘Not as much as me, anyway, haw, haw, haw.’

  His ostentatious arrival by Rolls Royce, much heralded by the trumpeting of its horn and concert pitch quadraphonic sound, and his brash eruption into the Argyll, had already done little to endear him to the clientele. The sacrilegious treatment of Bolding’s drink and general behaviour thereafter completed the process of alienation.

  Turning his back on the bar and placing his elbows upon it, Terence slowly surveyed the assembled company.

  ‘Well, yokels,’ he said with a joyless smirk, ‘how is everything in your little world?’

  Terence the solicitor was an extremely tall, extremely thin and extremely cadaverous man of perhaps forty years of age. The effect of his fine, well cut suit was offset by the pale angularity of his features and a certain unhealthy tautness to his skin. He put me in mind of a stringy, plucked bird clad in human clothes, or perhaps one of the featherless and blind chicks that you find fallen out of nests. Yet, despite these unfortunate likenesses, he seemed strangely familiar to me, although I could not at present place the association.

  His companion, a hard eyed, beautiful woman of uncertain years, tittered at his remark and, by way of an obvious effort of will, snuggled up affectionately to him. In definite contrast to the other ladies present, she wore circulation-threatening leather trousers and a shimmering, scarlet blouse. Looking closely at this exotic creature and arriving eventually at her face, I noticed a curious tiredness there. Simultaneously, Terence looked down proprietarily at her and said in what I took to be a mock comforting tone, ‘Yes, darling, it is a bit of a dump, but we needn’t stay long.’

  ‘If you don’t like it, you know what you can bloody well do, don’t you,’ said the landlord, advancing along the length of the bar like a galley at ram speed.

  Terence the solicitor turned to face him smiling sweetly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

  The landlord stopped dead in his tracks, all his former confidence and certainty fled.

  ‘Well... I won’t have you running this place down in front of me like that. It’s my home and my livelihood.’

  ‘Of course it is, my dear man,’ Terence replied, ‘and I wouldn’t dream of deprecating it—that means running it down, by the way. We think the Argyll is terribly quaint, don’t we, Cheryl—just like Binscombe as a whole.’

  Cheryl, as we now knew her to be, giggled again.

  ‘Okay, then,’ said Terence, licking his lips, ‘what shall we have to drink?’

  He leant over the bar to study the serried rows of bottles there, and Lenin the dog, who had been sleeping soundly on the floor up to this point, caught sight of him for the first time. The Alsatian let out a terrible yelp and, after running to the cellar door, pawed at it in an expression of desire to escape. The noisy canine protest did not cease until Lottie answered his pleas and set him free from our company.

  ‘That dog’s dangerous,’ said Terence angrily. ‘It’s hysterical.’

  ‘No, he’s not,’ the landlord replied; ‘he’s just particular about the company he keeps.’

  We all smiled at this rejoinder, and probably sensing this, even if he did not see it, Terence decided to ignore the matter and to press on to regain lost ground.

  ‘I don’t suppose you do cocktails, do you?’

  ‘You suppose right,’ said the landlord.

  This response surprised me for, it seeming appropriate given the heat of the evening, I had ordered and was currently consuming a Moscow Mule prepared by the landlord not ten minutes before.

  ‘No?’ Terence continued. ‘On reflection I wonder why I bothered to ask—cocktails are perhaps a trifle sophi
sticated. Very well, we’ll have a large dry martini each. With ice and lemon.’

  ‘And a cherry on a stick, if you so wish,’ said the landlord.

  ‘Yes, we do so wish, thank you so much.’

  At this point, Mr Patel obviously felt that our natural hospitality had been imposed upon enough. Given that his daily employment was immigration control at Heathrow, it may be that experience had made him less inclined to suffer taunts than most, but even so, popular opinion in the Argyll was clearly with him.

  ‘If you hold this place in such evident contempt, why do you burden us with your presence?’ he said loudly.

  Terence faced his accuser and delayed his reply for a second or two just to silently express disdain for question and questioner. He took a sip at his drink before speaking.

  ‘Well, little man,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I have no ready answer for you. The closest approximation to the truth is that my visits constitute some modern form of noblesse oblige. It’s a version of that particular sentiment adapted to the present meritocratic times, whereby those successful in life return to their humble roots to inspire the less fortunate to greater efforts by their example. I should also say that my motives for returning are slightly selfish, again in accord with modern times, in that a certain piquancy is added to my sense of achievement by observing those left behind in the game of life. Alternatively, it could all be some obscurely motivated masochistic exercise in which...’

  ‘Enough,’ said Mr Disvan, very quietly. Terence’s deluge of wordy sarcasm straightaway ceased.

  ‘Your presence we tolerate out of charity,’ Disvan continued, ‘but the ill feeling you generate is unacceptable. If you don’t amend your manners, you’ll have to go.’