Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series

by John Whitbourn

  Although temporarily subdued, Terence the solicitor was still full of aggressive spirit.

  ‘Go, eh?’ he said. ‘And who’ll make me?’

  ‘I will, if necessary,’ replied Mr Disvan, with a confidence their disparate sizes did not justify.

  ‘And with Lenin snapping at your heels—if I can get him out of the cellar,’ added the landlord.

  Terence’s response was pugnacious in content, but nevertheless his tone showed that he had backed down from immediate confrontation.

  ‘You people amaze me,’ he said. ‘You have no idea, no idea at all of a greater world outside this village, do you? Do you realise that with my influence and friends I could... I could have the Argyll’s licence revoked, or even have a road driven through it. Hell’s teeth, if I put my mind to it I could probably get the Ministry of Defence to put in a request to have this whole area as a training ground for the next hundred years! And yet you threaten me?’

  ‘We’ve made no threats, Terence,’ said Mr Disvan, ‘and no doubt you could do all you say. However, have you considered what we could do with what we know about you?’

  Once again Terence suddenly fell silent as the grave, restraining expression of his obvious exasperation to a mere angry glare.

  ‘Ah, I can see that you have given it consideration,’ said Mr Disvan. ‘Very wise in your circumstances I must say. Doctor Bani-Sadr, would you care to examine our friend, please?’

  ‘Gladly’ said the Doctor. He advanced on Terence and sought his arm.

  Terence spiritedly withheld it until Disvan fixed him with a look and somehow brought about compliance. Bani-Sadr held the tall man’s wrist and took his pulse.

  ‘Just as before,’ the Doctor said, ‘nothing at all, not a peep.’

  Terence wrenched his arm free, quite beside himself with an anger that he did not dare, for some reason, to release.

  ‘You’re a quack,’ he said to Bani-Sadr who received the insult with unruffled calm. ‘You don’t know the first thing about medicine. You ought to be struck off—in fact I’ll...’

  Mr Disvan directed a finger at him in warning.

  ‘I’ll... take my drink outside into the garden,’ Terence ended weakly.

  Dragging the bemused Cheryl with him, he strode off towards the door. His mind was presumably working furiously all the way there for, on the point of leaving, he came to an abrupt halt and turned to address us again. Cheryl, in tow, bumped into him and spilt half her drink.

  ‘If I ever hear reports of loose talk about me emanating from you lot, you’ll see that I wasn’t joking about the M.O.D. training ground. Also my lawyers are pretty hot on unsubstantiated libels about me and...’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ replied Disvan, calmly. ‘Go and have your drink and simmer down, there’s a good chap.’

  Terence clearly considered replying to this but decided not to. With a very graceful and eloquent gesture, he snapped his fingers at us and carried on out of the bar.

  After such an atypical scene, the silence left behind was oppressive and conversation slow in restarting. Nobody however seemed very surprised by what had happened, and my curiosity was aroused by this.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked Mr Disvan.

  Terence Leander,’ he replied, ‘or Terence the solicitor as he was always known around here—that being the most important feature of his personality.’

  ‘A local man?’

  ‘Very much so. His family’s name crops up in the old time church registers and militia lists with monotonous regularity. Terence, however, has severed himself from his roots to all intents and purposes. Once he qualified, he headed straight for the bright lights and the money of the metropolis.’

  ‘Not to mention the shady deals of the metropolis,’ said Mr Wessner.

  ‘Ah, well, that’s supposition,n’ said Mr Disvan.

  ‘That’s not what the fraud squad said,’ Wessner persisted.

  ‘He was acquitted.’

  ‘On a technicality.’

  Disvan shrugged his shoulders, conceding the point.

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘Terence comes back from time to time, either on business or to flaunt his financial success.’

  ‘Or to gloat,’ said Doctor Bani-Sadr.

  ‘Or as the doctor says. I must admit that his visits are hardly something I look forward to.’

  ‘His old mother has barred him from her house,’ added Lottie in support of the evidence so far.

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘What’s the matter with him, then?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s dead,’ answered Disvan.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘He’s dead. You know—deceased.’

  ‘But how... I mean—he’s just...’

  ‘Bought a drink and talked to us? Yes, I know, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he’s certainly dead.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Doctor Bani-Sadr. ‘There’s no pulse, no heart beat, no respiratory function, no electrical activity in the brain, no anything.’

  ‘But how does he...’

  ‘That’s an interesting question that has exercised my mind for some time now,’ said the doctor. ‘I thought about doing a paper on the case for The Lancet but then it occurred to me that it wouldn’t exactly help my career, saying that dead men walked the face of the earth when the dead man in question won’t come in and own up to it. Accordingly I’ve just left it as a mystery.’

  ‘My guess is that it’s willpower,’ said Mr Disvan.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Bani-Sadr, ‘that could be so; the prolongation of pseudo-life by sheer willpower. Mind you, that’s perilously close to accepting the notion of a soul or non-physically-based awareness and other such nonsense.’

  ‘Your atheistic faith is touching, doctor,’ said Disvan, ‘but...’

  ‘Just a minute,’ I said, interrupting the theological debate that would doubtless have ensued. ‘I just can’t believe we’re having this conversation. Did you really say that man was dead?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Doctor Bani-Sadr, ‘quite dead. I was there when he went.’

  ‘You were?’

  ‘Yes indeed. I was his doctor from the first time he complained of chest pains and his heart condition was diagnosed. I was called when he had his second heart attack and died.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Much the same as usual in these cases, except that he was more talkative than most. I’d done all I could but he was obviously on the way out, and I didn’t think he’d make it to the hospital. All the way there in the ambulance he was giving quite a speech, considering his condition, about how unfair it was that his career should be cut short. Mind you, he’d been like that all the time I’d been attending him, right from the first test, but on his death bed—or death stretcher to be more accurate—he was really... indignant. Yes, that’s the right word. Indignant.’

  ‘Terence was always like that,’ said Mr Disvan. ‘Even as a little boy he’d made up his mind what he was going to do with his life, and when—and woe betide anybody or anything in the way. Some people even said that he had a timetable of achievements written out.’

  ‘It was true, he had. His mother told me,’ said Lottie, who was listening in on our conversation.

  ‘I can well believe it,’ said Disvan. ‘Full of determination was our Terence. He never played games when he was a boy—which I thought strange at the time—and he never missed a day off school, passed all his exams, won prizes, and got his legal qualifications in record time. Life held great things in store for him.Which, I suppose, is why he wouldn’t leave it when a dodgy heart disrupted his timetable.’

  ‘That could be so,’ said Doctor Bani-Sadr. ‘He’d just become a solicitor when the heart valve defect was detected and things were starting to move for him. Also, that company of his was taking off after the Board of Trade decided not to press charges.’

  ‘Wasn’t that the napalm for South Africa incident?’ asked Mr Disvan.

  ‘Yes, I think s
o. He managed to seduce the civil servant who was investigating—or was that the investigation before? I forget now, but no matter. Anyway, all in all, in Terence’s terms he had a lot to live for.’

  I couldn’t get enough of this. I was getting straight answers for once. ‘And so?’

  ‘So, a few minutes after I pronounced him dead in the ambulance and covered his face, the corpse sat up and said “NO!” in a very loud voice. Fair frightened the life out of his mother and the ambulance men, I can tell you—and me too now I come to think of it. Of course, I dashed over to see to him, and that’s when I found there were no vital signs. He’d just decided not to accept death.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘In such situations there’s not much you can do. He was beyond needing my services, as you can imagine. By the time we’d got to the hospital and got the ambulance man down to a manageable level of hysteria—one of those university drop-out types—Terence was up and about, and he asked me if I’d see his mother home for him. I said okay, and then he just strode off into the night without another word. The next time I heard of him was about six months later in the context of a News of the World article about an executives’ escort agency he was allegedly running. Of course, that was a long time ago, when he was making his first hundred thousand pounds and things sometimes were a bit... tacky, to say the least. That’s all behind him now and he’s the epitome of respectability—on the surface, and for a few layers below as well.’

  The doctor sipped his barley wine ruminatively for a moment before returning to the subject to add a coda of his personal views.

  ‘You should understand, Mr Oakley, that I mean no general criticism of someone not tolerating their death. No, not at all. It’s just a pity that it’s Terence the solicitor of all people who should be the one to manage it.’

  ‘I can’t agree with you there,’ said Mr Disvan. ‘All stories must have an end if they’re to have a meaning.’

  ‘Nonsense. For example, as far as we’re concerned the universe doesn’t end but even so, it does have a meaning.’

  ‘Really, doctor?’ said Disvan. ‘How interesting. What is the meaning of the universe then?’

  ‘It’s—‘

  The doctor’s statement, upon which we were all hanging, was cut short by the opening of the bar door and Terence the solicitor’s re-entry. He seemed to have composed himself from his points defeat in the earlier verbal tussle and was smiling, if very insincerely, upon the assembled company.

  ‘Two more martinis, if you’d be so kind,’ he said.

  The landlord looked at him suspiciously, seeking some hidden barb in this request but finding none.

  ‘Okay,’ he said at length, and set about the drinks’ preparation.

  ‘So kind.’

  Suddenly looking round, Terence caught my intent gaze upon him before I could avert it. Looking at me coldly, he called across the bar, ‘I don’t recognise you. What’s your name?’

  ‘Mr Oakley,’ I replied, trying to appear undaunted and to forget just who or what was speaking to me.

  ‘Newcomer?’

  ‘Comparatively.’

  ‘An old Binscombe family, though,’ Mr Disvan interjected.

  ‘Educated too,’ said Terence.

  ‘More or less,’ I countered.

  ‘I see. Well, Mr... Oakley, a word of warning to you. Don’t believe every tale you’re told around here. To these people the concepts of the seventeenth century would represent a mighty leap forward.’

  A sense of loyalty whose existence was hitherto unknown to me was affronted by this remark.

  ‘Is that so?’ I said. ‘In that case, I wonder if you’d permit me a favour, Mr Leander?’

  ‘What is it?’ Terence asked cautiously.

  ‘I’d like to test your pulse and listen to your heartbeat.’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘Why not?’

  Terence sighed and said to no one in particular, ‘On reflection I think the seventeenth century was a little too generous. Perhaps I should have said the eleventh century.’

  ‘Perhaps you should go back to the grave where you belong,’ said Mr Patel.

  By now Terence the solicitor was halfway to the door, drinks in hand. At this last remark he stopped and laughed loudly.

  ‘Grave? Grave?’ he scoffed. Why should I go to the grave? Next month I’m launching a new international company with projected turnover of five hundred thousand within a year. All in all, I’m worth fifty mil on paper. I employ over two thousand people in three different countries, and within a few years my parent company will go public. I have five houses, take fifteen weeks holiday and a new eighteen-year-old mistress every year—and you tell me to go the grave? You think of your lifestyle compared to mine and then tell me who’s dead, eh?’

  This might have been a telling point had the landlord not intervened.

  ‘Don’t sit out in the garden too long,’ he said, ‘it’s getting chilly and you might catch your death.’

  Amidst general merriment Terence the solicitor glared at him.

  ‘You’ll laugh on the other side of your face when the road widening plans are published!’ he said and then stomped off.

  ‘Well, there you have it,’ said Mr Disvan when he had gone. ‘Rich, successful, dead, and a bit of a charmer.’

  ‘How come he’s so successful?’ I asked. ‘Any solicitor can be prosperous but making millions is another matter.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Disvan replied. ‘Well, in a funny way, you see, Terence’s death was the making of him. Since he didn’t need sleep any more after dying, he was able to devote twenty-four hours a day attention to his business interests. A profile I read in the Financial Times called him “the human dynamo”, although whether he’s a human any more is a moot point. Consequently, with that sort of industry and concentration, and Terence’s particular blend of energy and unscrupulousness, all his ventures flourish.’

  ‘Unless the law intervenes,’ said Mr Wessner.

  ‘Which it does less and less often as he gets richer and has less need for the more desperate sort of project. He’s also acquired relationships of mutual interest with people “in high places” as they’re called, and he and success now walk side by side.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Doctor Bani-Sadr, ‘it may be he doesn’t sleep because if he did, if his attention slipped for one second, his disbelief in his own death would be suspended.’

  ‘And then he’d really die,’ I said.

  ‘Possibly. Or perhaps decomposition might set in,’ the doctor agreed.

  I went over to the window and looked out into the garden where Terence the solicitor, arm around his shrinking girlfriend, gazed lizard-like, unblinkingly at the other patrons around him. It was possibly an effect of my overworked imagination, but it did seem as if the sunlight around him was dimmer than elsewhere and that, in his immediate vicinity, laughter and good cheer ceased.

  ‘Is his threat about the motorway and the MOD and so on, serious?’ I asked.

  ‘In what way?’ said Mr Disvan.

  ‘I mean, could he do it?’

  ‘I dare say, if he pulled out all the stops and called in all his favours. He won’t do it however, because, firstly we don’t justify that sort of supreme effort, and secondly because he knows that a single word from us could ruin him.’

  ‘Is he really that powerful?’

  ‘Certainly. In a perverse sort of way we’re almost proud of him, despite his unfortunate manner, seeing as he’s Binscombe’s most famous son. There’s been talk in some of the papers that he might be a minister if he keeps on the way he’s going. It was with that in mind that we tried to sell his secret to the Russian embassy—for the church roof restoration fund, you understand. Sadly, they wouldn’t believe us.’

  ‘Minister?’ I said incredulously.

  ‘Yes. Probably defence, given his links with the armaments industry, or maybe even Prime Minister. If he doesn’t set the missiles flying while he’s in office, he
could end up in the Lords. Imagine that: Lord Binscombe!’

  Quite suddenly the alien-ness created by the story I had just heard dissipated. That name and face was indeed familiar to me. I turned to look at Mr Disvan, and he could hardly have failed to detect the surprise and horror on my face.

  ‘Do you mean that he’s..?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t I mention that?’ said Disvan. ‘I assumed you’d know. Yes, Terence Leander is your local MP.’

  HERE IS MY RESIGNATION

  Binscombe Station was too pleasant and restful a place from which to commence yet another day’s hard labour. The commuters who waited there every morning, at least those who could still appreciate such things, were lulled into pleasant thoughts by the leafy surroundings and abundance of green all about. They temporarily forgot the painful wrench of rising too early and the spoilt pleasures of a hurried breakfast amidst the splendours of birdsong and the sunlight filtering through the foliage. Therefore, when their train arrived, it always came as an unwelcome intrusion of the mundane, workaday world into the beauty that was spread out by nature for all, if they would only accept it. The consequent hostile glares that greeted the train driver as he passed by the serried ranks on the platform had been a byword and cause for puzzlement among generations of railwaymen.

  Constructed as a late Victorian afterthought in a time when there was no lack of cash and confidence, Binscombe Station had escaped later modification by management or German bombs and therefore remained much as its original designer intended. The building itself was of local Bargate stone, which gave it a warm, welcoming aspect and, in line with the thinking of the age of their construction, the doors, windows and guttering had been used to ornament and beautify as well as merely serve their basic purpose. Gracious features such as a ladies’ waiting room and colourful flowerbeds were still maintained by the staff who, being largely local men, were rarely rude or offhand to travellers. All of which is to say that the station had clearly survived past its time.

  It was set in a deep cutting through a chalk outcrop and could barely be seen from the main road which ran nearby. Similarly, trains came upon it almost by surprise as they rounded a tight curve, traversed a short tunnel and found themselves, without much warning, at a station on the outskirts of a village. To the stranger and the uninitiated, this phenomenon was the cause of many a rushed disembarkation and a small mountain of forgotten luggage over the years.