The Case Against Owen Williams (14 page)

Somewhere, from some corner in the depths of the mind, un-invited and unwelcome, there floated up Marley's dreadful cry in Dickens's
A Christmas Carol
: “Mankind was my business.”

Shit, he thought again.

He could imagine even more clearly than he had before the kind of defence lawyer the system would be likely to provide Williams. He could, even when he thought about it, bring up particular names and faces—weakly ambitious, incompetent little men for whom the merest nod of approval from the great H. P. Whidden would matter more than their obligations to any client, let alone someone like Williams.

He went back and forth over it all night, sleeping, then waking up to it again, then going back to a sleep troubled by obsessive anxiety dreams from which he now retained only vague memories of flight and imprisonment and humiliation.

The upshot of the night's excursions into these labyrinths was that he was back again at this ugly little jail.

There were steps along the corridor, and then Williams was standing in the doorway with Carvell towering behind him. He hadn't shaved, nor even combed his hair. He saluted his perfunctory salute. He seemed sullen and suspicious.

“Sit down, Private Williams,” Dorkin said when the door had closed. “I'd like to have a talk with you before I go back to Fredericton.”

For a moment, Williams remained by the door, then he slouched over and sat down, and Dorkin sat down opposite him.

“When I go back to Fredericton,” Dorkin said, “I'm going to try to get the army to provide a lawyer for you, and it will make it a lot easier if I can give them a clear idea of what actually happened the night of the dance.”

Williams sat, looking down into his lap, and said nothing.

“Look,” Dorkin said, “I can't make you talk to me if you don't want to, but I'm trying to help you.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” Williams said, “but I don't know that. I don't know what side you're on. You told me to say nothing in court, and it didn't do me any good. How can I tell who you are?”

“I'm a lawyer. I spend my time trying to keep soldiers out of jail when they knock out store windows and get in fights with civilians. I was sent here by headquarters in Fredericton to give you what advice I could and to see what was happening and report back. When I told you to say nothing in court, I was telling you what any lawyer would have told you. If you had started talking, you would only have got yourself in more trouble. Without any defence lawyer to protect you, McKiel would have taken you to pieces. I'm on your side, or I'm trying to be.”

Dorkin had begun to raise his voice angrily. Williams blinked.

“What is it you want to know about, sir?” he asked.

“I want to find out what actually happened the night of July 1,” Dorkin said. “The Mounties think that you lied to them.”

“No, sir, I didn't,” Williams said. “I was mixed up about the time I left the dance hall. I wasn't paying any attention to the time.”

“Okay,” Dorkin said. “Tell me what happened. You went to the dance with some of the other soldiers from the armoury, and you met Sarah Coile there. How did that happen? Did you know her before?”

“I saw her around, and I'd danced with her once before, that's all.”

“You weren't the one who knocked her up?”

“No, sir, I didn't.”

“Okay, so what happened the night of the dance?”

“I danced with her a couple of times, and we went out and had a drink. Then we went back in for a while and danced some more. Then there was an intermission, and we went outside again. She smoked a cigarette, and we had another drink. I heard the music starting up again inside, but she said she didn't want to go back in because she wasn't feeling good. She said she must have drunk too much and that she wanted to go home and would I walk her partway. She said she knew a shortcut through the woods, so we walked along a sort of trail from back of the dance hall out to the Hannigan Road, and I left her there, and she walked up the Hannigan Road, and I walked the other way. That was the last time I saw her.”

“Then on Tuesday, Corporal Drost came to question you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you told him the story you just told me?”

“Yes, sir. But not exactly. There were a lot of little things I didn't tell him. I didn't think they made any difference.”

“Did Corporal Drost caution you that what you were saying might be used as evidence against you?”

“No, sir.”

There wouldn't be any reason to at that point, Dorkin reflected. Still, it might be something for a defence to keep in mind since they were using what Williams had said as evidence.

“Okay,” Dorkin said. “What did you tell me just now that you didn't tell Drost the first time he questioned you?”

“I don't remember exactly. I didn't say anything about stopping outside for a drink.”

“And what did you tell them the second time? The same story you told Drost before?”

“Yes, sir. Just about.”

“And they got you to sign a paper with all that on it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you ever tell them the other things that you've just told me?”

“Not all of them, sir. I'm not sure. They confused me. They never gave me time to think.”

“What did they say?”

“They said that I lied to them. They said if I left the dance the time I said, I would have been at the canteen a lot earlier and that I must have stopped somewhere along the way.”

“When did they tell you that they had found Sarah Coile? Right at the start?”

“No, sir. Not until later. I didn't understand what it was all about at first.”

“So what did you say when they accused you of lying?”

“I told them I hadn't paid much attention to when I left the dance. I knew it wasn't anywhere near the time I had to be back at the armoury, so I wasn't paying any attention. It must have been later than I thought. Maybe eleven-thirty. Or later.”

“Did you tell them about going outside for a drink?”

“No, sir, I don't think so.”

“Why not?”

“I didn't think. They never gave me time to think and get things straight before they asked me another question. If I didn't answer a question right off, they would ask a different question, and then come back to the first one later on.”

“Okay. So you had your drink, and you heard the music start up after the intermission and you left to walk to the Hannigan Road. That would still only make it a quarter or twenty after eleven. It still took you a long time to get from the dance hall to the canteen.”

“I wasn't walking very fast when I was with her. We just sort of strolled and talked.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Nothing much.”

“What?”

“Well, I guess I told her about the army, and she told me about where she worked. Just stuff like that.”

Dorkin put his hands behind his head and leaned back and looked at Williams. The unshaven black beard made it look as if the lower half of his face had been dirtied with coal dust like the face of a miner, and it struck Dorkin that there was indeed some-thing subterranean about Williams. He was in there somewhere, but a long way down, a long way behind the eyes he was looking out through.

He met Dorkin's eyes for only a second, a look furtive and questioning, and then he looked down at his hands with their bitten fingernails resting on the edge of the table. Dorkin let the silence spin itself out. Inside the jail it was stuffy in spite of the rain, but the windows were closed, no doubt nailed and unopenable.

“Private Williams,” Dorkin said finally, “I don't believe that you murdered Sarah Coile, but I also don't believe the story you've just told me.”

Williams blinked, looked past Dorkin at the window, then down again at his bitten fingernails.

“No one saw either you or Sarah Coile in the dance hall or outside after the intermission started,” Dorkin said. “I think that you left the dance hall when you said you did the first time the Mounties questioned you, and that means that no matter how slowly you walked, there is at least half an hour that isn't accounted for.”

Williams sat, and Dorkin waited.

“What do you want me to say?” Williams asked.

“I'm not here to teach you to say anything. I'm trying to find out what the hell happened that night, so that I can do something about finding someone to save your life.”

There was another long silence. Williams squirmed in his chair like a delinquent schoolboy.

“Tell me,” Dorkin asked, “did you stop somewhere in the woods with Sarah Coile?”

Williams glanced up at him, then down again.

“Did you?” Dorkin asked again. “I've got to know what happened.”

“Yes,” Williams said.

“All right. Now tell me what happened.”

“Well, we went out. We were just going to have a drink from my bottle when some of the local guys who hang around out there started shouting stuff at us and making dirty talk, so we went around the corner as if we were going back inside. Then we went off along that trail back of the dance hall and found a place, a sort of little clearing.”

“Did she seem to know where she was going?”

“Yes, sir. She said she knew the way because it was a shortcut back to her place.”

“Okay. So then?”

“Well, we stood there and had a drink.”

“Did she seem to be drunk?”

“I don't know, sir. A little maybe.”

“So what did you do after you had your drink?”

Williams hesitated, at the edge evidently of some kind of brink. Through all this, he had never once looked at Dorkin directly.

“God damn it, Williams,” Dorkin said. “It's important that I know. What did you do?”

“We kissed some.”

“What else? Were you standing up or did you lie down?”

“After a while, we laid down.”

“And? What did you do? How far did you go?”

Under the prison pallor, Williams was blushing now, and the hands moved nervously on the table, apart, then back together.

“Look, god damn it,” Dorkin said, “you're not the first person in the world to pet with a girl in the bushes. What happened?”

“She let me touch her tits. Just through her dress. And her leg.”

Dorkin waited out yet another silence.

“Then she wouldn't let me do it anymore. She said that we should get up. She said it was time for her to go home. She said that she must have drunk too much because she wasn't feeling very well.”

“And then?”

“We walked out to the road, and she went off towards home.”

“You didn't walk up the road with her to the corner by the churchyard?”

“No, sir.”

“You didn't see her meet anyone up the road?”

“No, sir. But I didn't look. I just walked the other way down the road.”

Dorkin studied him, wondering. There was an habitual unease, a kind of perpetual shiftiness about Williams that made it seem even when he was answering the simplest question as if he were hiding something. As if he were an actor performing a role that he was not yet entirely comfortable with.

“When you were with Sarah in the woods,” Dorkin asked, “were you aware of anyone else around? Did you think you were being followed or watched?”

“Well, sir, there were a lot of people around out there, drinking and stuff.”

“But did you think that anyone was actually following you? Did you have the sense that Sarah might be aware of someone around whom she knew?”

“I don't know. When we were lying down, she seemed to hear something that made her listen, but there were people all over out there.”

“Did you ever get the feeling that she might actually be waiting for someone else?”

“No, sir. I never thought of that. But I suppose she might.”

“Who do you think murdered her?”

“I don't know, sir. There were guys all over out there.”

“But she didn't want you to walk her home?”

“No, sir.”

“So you left her there, and you went off to the canteen. That all happened the way you've said it did?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you didn't hear anything about her until Corporal Drost came to talk to you on Tuesday about her being missing?”

“No, sir, I never heard anything.”

Dorkin sat. He hadn't run out of questions, but he felt that he had run out of capacity to make sense of the answers.

“What's going to happen to me?” Williams said.

“I don't know. I'll see what I can do about arranging a defence when I get back to Fredericton.”

“But I didn't do anything to that girl. All I did was leave the dance with her.”

“Not quite,” Dorkin said. “You also lied about it afterwards to the Mounties.”

An hour later, Dorkin was sitting beside his driver, cramped into the passenger seat of the Jeep with the top up and the flimsy doors closed as best they could be and the rain drumming heavily on the canvas overhead. The road wound uphill and downhill, and they kept catching up with lumbering farm trucks, which they often had to follow for miles, and what with the road and the rain and the scuffed, inadequate windshield wipers on the Jeep, it took them nearly two hours to get back to Fredericton.