Closure (audio story)

Closure was a 1999 story in the Bernice Summerfield series, released as part of the Buried Treasures subscriber-only anthology. These two stories were the first original Bernice Summerfield stories recorded by Big Finish Productions.

Publisher's summary
Professor Bernice Summerfield: 26th century archaeology professor, and tutor at St Oscar's University on the planet Dellah. Prone to getting involved in adventures, scrapes and general derring-do armed only with her wits, cunning and a flask of brandy! Aged about 35ish, but frequently says she's younger. Odd that...

The Time-Rings: Given to Benny and her ex-husband Jason as wedding rings, they are two extraordinarily powerful devices which, used together, can take them anywhere in time and space. Bernice has now found a reason to use them once again...

Plot
Using her and Jason's Time Rings, Benny travels back in time fifty years to meet Isabella Hescarty and her son, Ulrich, at her villa in Bresh. She explains to Isabella that she and a team from St Oscar's University landed in Crago on Panos following a war and travelled to the villa, finding a mass grave in the garden. Inside the villa, they found six teenage comfort women, who refused to give details of the officers who raped them, and two surviving victims of genetic experiments.

Isabella refuses to believe that anybody would do these things, but Benny orders her to continue to listen and tells her that the prosecutor of this future war is Ulrich Hescarty, who tore apart two reconciling peoples because of his own feelings. Benny saw those that Ulrich had tortured for their supposed treason, including a woman who had her eye gouged out, a cousin of Ulrich's who was regularly burnt with an electric iron and a man who was hung from a wall and would never stand upright again. By accident, Ulrich was found dead in the woods, shot three times in the back, and his body was frozen to prove that he was dead.

For the sake of her son and to keep him from dying like his father, Isabella promises to raise him right and to kill him if he ever shows any signs of becoming the person that Benny has described, although she accuses Benny of terrorising her. Benny shoots and injures Marcellos Karista, a lost Ashkazi who attempts to attack the villa and kill everyone inside after learning of his lover's death. She reveals that Kallista was supposed to kill Isabella today but that she has decided to save her rather than kill Ulrich, hoping that this will change the future. Before leaving, she gives Isabella her gun and gives her the choice of whether to kill her or Karista or call an ambulance.

Cast

 * Bernice Summerfield - Lisa Bowerman
 * Isabella - Sarah Mowat

Worldbuilding

 * Isabella does not know who Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald are.
 * Isabella's people are at war with the Ashkazi.
 * Isabella shot her husband in the back in a hunting accident, but her family and friends made it so that he appeared to have been killed on the eastern front.
 * Benny's first dance with a boy was at Spacefleet Academy to a song by Modern Romance. The next day, somebody tripped and shot him.
 * Isabella offers Benny tea.
 * Magda was a comfort woman.
 * Benny mentions Hitler and Pinochet.

Continuity
to be added