The Case Against Owen Williams (21 page)

Assuming that Clemens had indeed seen what he said he had seen, almost immediately after leaving Williams on the Hannigan Road, Sarah had met someone who seemed on the basis of a quick look in the dark much like Williams in general appearance. And then? And then things started once more not to make sense. If Sarah had gone voluntarily to make love with this new partner, why had they not simply gone into the churchyard where they would have had privacy enough? Why go on to the gravel pit, whether down through the bushes or around by the road? And if Sarah had been running from whoever it was, the last place she would run to would be down into the darkness and seclusion of the gravel pit instead of along Broad Street where there were houses and lights. On any assumption, it seemed inconceivable that Sarah had voluntarily gone down into the gravel pit. Either she had been murdered in the churchyard and her body carried down through the bushes into the gravel pit—something that would have required a man a good deal bigger and stronger than Williams—or she had been murdered somewhere else altogether and her body brought back, presumably by car.

There was something else that seemed likely too, and that was that whoever Sarah had met, it had been someone whom she knew. The rage of violence against her dead body that Bourget had described was not likely the rage of some stranger. It was the rage of someone in whom she had bred somehow—by infidelity, by demands for marriage or for money, by threats of exposure—an insane, ungovernable hatred. Someone had lurked somewhere outside the dance hall, awaiting his opportunity. Their meeting on his side would have been no accident, however unexpected it may have been on hers.

But suppose Clemens had been mistaken and the girl he had seen was not Sarah at all. That could have happened easily enough in the circumstances. Dorkin had had enough experience with eye-witnesses to know how fallible they were, how little they often really saw, how easy it was for them, while quite unconscious of any act of fabrication, to create in their own minds a coherent, meaningful picture that had only the most tenuous connection with the half-apprehended events that had actually taken place. Like nature, the mind abhors a vacuum, and what it does not see or does not remember, it invents. So Clemens sees a man and a woman and later decides that it was Sarah whom he saw. Sarah and a man who comes to look more and more like Williams. And at a time too that gets moved closer and closer to the time Sarah and Williams would have been there.

And if Clemens were mistaken in his identification of Sarah, a whole new range of possibilities opened up. She could have gone on her own to some house on Hannigan Road or Broad Street or somewhere even further away. She could have been picked up by someone in a car as she walked up Hannigan Road. She might have gone home and been murdered there by the irascible Daniel Coile in one of his fits of drink.

There was also the possibility, of course, that Clemens was lying. Having decided that Williams was guilty, he could be doing what police themselves sometimes did. He could be fabricating testimony to ensure that a murderer did not go free for lack of evidence. Dorkin looked at the date of Clemens's deposition. It was Friday, July 7, two days after Sarah had been found—more than enough time for him to have heard from the rumour mill everything he needed to know to fabricate the scrappy details he had provided. But whatever the truth might be about Clemens, several things now seemed clear. Like the facts he had started with, they were simple. Sarah had left Williams, and somewhere, probably by chance on her part, had met, not some random stranger, but someone whom she knew—presumably, if reality were indeed behaving itself, whoever it was who had fathered her child. She had had sexual relations with that person, whether willingly or under compulsion, and she had then been savagely murdered sometime between midnight on July 1 and the next morning, and sometime between then and Wednesday her body had been taken to the gravel pit.

There was still one thing that stubbornly baffled Dorkin. Why had Sarah gone off and engaged in the abortive lovemaking with Williams? When he was in high school, Dorkin had had a physics teacher who had been in love with science and who had said something that Dorkin had always remembered. In any search for the truth, it is the circumstance that does not seem to fit that points the way. Dorkin thought about that now, and he thought about Sarah's choice of Williams. And abruptly, out of the darkness and the silence, he had an inkling of what it might mean.

CHAPTER
NINE

At nine o'clock the next morning, Dorkin was standing at the window of the visiting room at the jail. He listened to the jingling of Henry Cronk's ring of keys and the opening of Williams's cell door, and he turned as Cronk shuffled Williams in. They saluted perfunctorily, a ritual that Dorkin had decided was best kept up, and Williams sat down. He looked pale and tired, and he seemed still to be losing weight.

Dorkin tried to lay down some smoke by making small talk, but he could see that Williams wasn't fooled. He obviously sensed at once that something was up, and he was wary, watchful, withdrawn somewhere deep inside himself in that unsettling way he had, unsettling especially since every once in a while it made Dorkin wonder if perhaps, just perhaps after all, there really might be a murderer hiding away in there.

“I've been thinking again about what happened that night between you and Sarah,” he said, “and I want to make sure I've got it straight so we don't find ourselves getting caught out in court.”

“I told you,” Williams said.

“I know,” Dorkin said, manoeuvring behind the smoke, “but there are still things that puzzle me, especially about Sarah. You said that she might have been a little drunk but not very. She wasn't staggering or anything?”

“No.”

“Did she seem nervous at all?”

“Nervous?”

“Yes. As if she might be afraid of someone. Or trying to get away from someone.”

“No, I didn't notice.”

“I'm puzzled,” Dorkin said, “about why she would lead you on the way she did and then stop it. Do you think she might have heard something?”

“I don't know,” Williams said. “Maybe. She might have.”

“But you're not sure?”

“No.”

“There's something about it,” Dorkin said, “that just doesn't seem to hang together. I can't help feeling that there's something in the situation that we've missed—something that might make sense of it.”

He paused. Williams met his eyes briefly then looked away, and Dorkin let the silence stretch out, letting him sweat. He shifted uneasily in his chair, still avoiding Dorkin's eyes. I'm going to get the truth out of you this morning, you shifty little bastard, if I have to break both your arms, Dorkin said to himself.

“Let's go through it again slowly,” he said at last, “and see if we can turn up whatever it is we've missed. You left the dance hall at intermission. You had a drink outside and necked a little, and she suggested that you go somewhere more private. This was her idea, you said?”

“Yes.”

“But you were willing, so you went along a track to the Birch Road, but there were people around, so you went along to another place that she seemed to know about. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“Then you lay down?”

“Yes,” Williams said.

His face was flushed now.

“So she let you touch her breasts and her leg, and then she wouldn't let you go any further. Why do you think that was? Did she hear somebody, do you think? Or did she suddenly change her mind? When she told you to stop, what exactly did she say? What were the words she used?”

“She said she didn't want to go all the way.”

“Were those her exact words? ‘I don't want to go all the way'?”

“Maybe not exactly. Something like that?”

“I see. So what did she do exactly?”

“She got up, and I walked with her to the road and left her there, the way I said.”

“You told me before that she said that she wasn't feeling well,” Dorkin said.

“Yes,” Williams said.

“That was probably why she wanted to stop and go home?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“It just came over her all of a sudden?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

Dorkin let another silence hang. He got up and looked out the window at the swatch of scarlet maple leaves on the tree outside and at the hollyhocks along the side of the house next door with their little drums of seed, their last brilliant trumpets of the season, their traffic of bees shopping for winter. Or was it spring? The war might be over by then. He came back and sat down across from Williams and looked at him.

“Private Williams,” he said. “You're lying to me. You've been lying to me every time we've talked, and I'd like you to start telling me the truth.”

Williams stared at him, and the blood that had flamed his face drained away.

“I'm trying to save your god-damned life,” Dorkin said, his voice rising, “and you're playing some kind of stupid game with me. I've had enough of it. I'm not sure what the truth is, but I'll know it when I hear it because you're too god-damned stupid to make up a lie that will go on looking like the truth. And if you try, I'm getting out of this, and you can find yourself another lawyer.”

Williams looked so frightened that Dorkin was stricken again by the thought that the truth might turn out to be that he was indeed the murderer.

“I've told you everything that matters,” Williams said.

“What the hell do you know about what matters? You tell me the truth, and let me decide what matters. Let's take it again for one last time. You walked along the Birch Road and found somewhere more private. Is that true so far?”

“Yes.”

“So then what happened? What did you do? What did she say? Don't fart around with me. There are things one doesn't forget, and this is one of them. Tell me what happened.”

William hesitated, not looking at Dorkin. A minute passed, then another, as he evidently fought out some excruciating battle within himself. When he finally began, Dorkin was aware of his own heart drumming heavily.

“It was sort of a little clearing we went to,” Williams said, “and there was a place in one corner where there was some tall grass. She got me to take my tunic off, and she sat on that so she wouldn't get stains on her dress, and I just sat on the grass. After a while we stretched out.”

“Did you talk? What did she say?”

“She said she liked me, and she asked me if I liked her. I said that I did.”

“And did you?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Why? Why did you like her?”

“I don't know. She was sort of fun to be with.”

“Okay,” Dorkin said, “so what else did you talk about?”

“I remember she asked me what I was going to do after I got out of the army, and I said that I would probably go back to Fredericton and get another job like the one I had. And she said she'd never been as far as Fredericton. And she said she'd like to go away and live somewhere bigger. She said she didn't like Wakefield.”

“Anything else?”

“Not that I remember.”

“So then?”

“She kissed me.”

“And?”

“She let me touch her, like I told you before. Then she asked me if I wanted her to take her pants off, and I said yes.”

“And she did?'

“Yes.”

Williams shifted in his chair and looked out the window.

“Tell me the rest,” Dorkin said. “I'm sorry, but I've got to know everything that happened.”

“Well, you know…”

“You touched her.”

“Yes. After a few minutes, she asked me if I wanted to go all the way. And I said yes. I'd bought that tin of Sheiks from one of the other guys. We'd got a lot of lectures about vd and about getting girls pregnant, and I wanted to be careful. But when she saw what I was doing, she said she didn't like those things. And I said I didn't want to get her into any trouble. And she said that couldn't happen because it was the wrong time of the month. She said girls can only get pregnant at certain times in the month between their periods and that this was a safe time. I was scared of vd as well, but I didn't want to say that, so I just said I still wanted to be sure nothing happened. We argued for a little while, and then she said all right, I could go ahead and use it. But I think she was sort of mad at me. I had one of the Sheiks in my billfold, and I got it out, but it was dark, and I couldn't see very well, and I had trouble getting it on.”

He stopped, blushing furiously, still not looking at Dorkin.

“So?” Dorkin said.

There was a long pause.

“Tell me,” Dorkin said. “I've got to know.”

“Well, before I could get it on, it happened. You know?”

“Yes,” Dorkin said. “Don't worry about it. You're not the first.”

Jesus Christ! he thought, relaxing for the first time since Williams began. All of this had come about because of nothing more than that.

“So then?” he asked.

“She didn't realize what had happened at first, and I had to tell her. Then she did get mad. She got up and put her pants on and left.”

“She put her pants back on?” Dorkin said. “You're sure?”

“Yes.”

“You didn't walk her out to the road?”

“No.”

“Did you see which way she went?”

“Yes, she went out towards the Hannigan Road. When I got my tunic back on, I went the same way.”

“How long did that take?”

“I don't know. A minute or two. I didn't realize she was leaving. I thought she might just have gone a little ways.”

“So when you got out to the Hannigan Road, did you see her again?”

“No.”

“Have you any idea where she went?”

“I don't know. She could have been walking up the Hannigan Road. It was dark, and I couldn't see very far.”