The Case Against Owen Williams (30 page)

“Do you recall at what point that warning was given?”

“Not exactly. It was quite a long interrogation.”

“You make it clear in your testimony that Private Williams was confronted with his earlier statement to Corporal Drost.”

“Yes.”

“Even though that statement had been made without any warning that it might be used against him.”

“At the time, there was no reason for a warning.”

“But you were nevertheless now using it against him,” Dorkin said.

“It was the investigation of a very serious criminal offence. If we took some liberties in order to get at the truth, we considered them justified.”

“Did you suggest to Private Williams that if he now altered his original informal statement, he would be guilty of perjury?”

“I don't recall anyone saying that.”

“I suggest to you that Private Williams was subjected to an ex-tended grilling until late at night by a team of five
RCMP
officers without the benefit of any legal advice, that he was confused and unnerved, and that he was bullied into repeating a statement which he had made earlier when he had not been given any legal warnings and when he did not understand that anything criminal was at issue.”

“That is a distortion of what took place,” Grant said.

“As I understand it, you are suggesting that Private Williams deliberately lied in his initial statement in order to cover a criminal act?”

“Yes.”

“But, Sergeant Grant,” Dorkin said, “it wasn't a very clever lie since it could so easily be checked and disproven, as indeed it was. On the other hand, if Private Williams had told you that he and Sarah Coile had stopped somewhere along the way to the Hannigan Road, as we shall see that they did, the time which you so alertly discovered had not been accounted for would have been taken care of. If he had really murdered Sarah Coile, do you not think that is what he, or anyone with a grain of sense, would have done?”

“Not necessarily,” Grant said. “Criminals often panic and say things to incriminate themselves.”

“But we have just heard Corporal Drost testify quite emphatic-ally that Private Williams was not panic-stricken when he made that statement and that there was nothing in his behaviour to suggest that he had done anything wrong. I suggest to you, Sergeant Grant, that the only reason Private Williams is in this courtroom now is that when first asked about Sarah Coile he was too embarrassed to admit that he had stopped in the woods with her after they left the dance.”

Grant was followed by the manager of The Silver Dollar, who testified that the time of the intermission at the dance was ap-proximately ten-thirty, by Mrs. Clark of The Maple Leaf canteen who testified that Williams arrived at the canteen at ten to twelve, and by Maclean, who told about the grass and dirt on Williams's uniform.

Maclean had never got in touch with Dorkin, and after his interview with Meade, Dorkin had made no attempt to get in touch with him. When he was seated, he glanced at Dorkin and almost imperceptibly shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, what can a man do? Dorkin felt sure that after their talk someone had given him a hard time.

The final witness of the afternoon was the pathologist, Dr. Pierre Bourget, impeccably dressed now that it was autumn in a darker suit than he had worn in July. Like Drost and Grant, he repeated his earlier testimony virtually without alteration.

“I would like the jury to be absolutely clear about one point,” McKiel said. “It is your testimony that Sarah Coile had lost virtually no blood, that there were no signs that she had struggled, and that her assailant could therefore have emerged from the en-counter without any incriminating signs either on his person or on his clothes. In other words, the fact that your laboratory found no incriminating evidence on Private Williams's clothing does not preclude the possibility of his having murdered Sarah Coile.”

“That is correct,” Bourget said.

“And the traces of semen on Private Williams's trousers. Would these not be consistent with an act of intercourse that took place while Private Williams was still clothed—as would almost certainly be the case if he had assaulted Sarah Coile?”

“That is also correct,” Bourget said.

“Thank you,” McKiel said.

“Do you think,” Dorkin asked when Bourget had been turned over to him, “that the absence of incriminating evidence on Private Williams's clothing would be consistent with his having assaulted Sarah Coile in almost total darkness in the bottom of a gravel pit?”

“If he had knocked her unconscious at the very beginning, yes,” Bourget said.

“You have given evidence that the body of Sarah Coile showed no signs of having been dragged,” Dorkin said. “I wonder if you have any reflections on why Private Williams and Sarah Coile should have walked past numerous places where they could have had privacy and some degree of comfort in order to go to a gravel pit?”

“People sometimes have extraordinary tastes,” Bourget said and drew a ripple of laughter.

“Would you consider it possible that the body of Sarah Coile might have been brought to the gravel pit by car, perhaps sometime that night, perhaps as much as two nights later?”

“That is certainly possible. Many things are possible. It might, for example, have been thrown over the back of a horse or lowered gently from a balloon.”

This time the laughter was louder, more general. Dorkin waited it out.

“Quite so,” he said. “But Private Williams doesn't own a horse or a balloon any more than he owns a motor car, and since Sarah Coile by your evidence weighed one hundred and fifty pounds to Private Williams's one hundred and forty, it seems unlikely that he carried her there bodily.”

Behind him, Dorkin heard the scrape of a chair.

“Your Honour,” McKiel said, “my learned friend is conducting a line of questioning with this witness which is quite out of order. Dr. Bourget is a pathologist, not a policeman.”

“Quite right, Mr. McKiel,” Dunsdale said.

“I apologize,” Dorkin said. “But I am trying to make it clear that it is a great deal more likely that Sarah Coile, alive or dead, was driven to the gravel pit in a car rather than chased or even walked there. One final point. The traces of semen on Private Williams's trousers. In the preliminary hearing, I believe you made it clear that it was impossible to know how long they had been there. I believe you also suggested that there were ways they could have come there other than by an assault on Sarah Coile?”

“I don't recall.”

“What you suggested, Dr. Bourget,” Dorkin said, “is that young men without access to female companionship sometimes make their own satisfactions and that such furtive activities could easily account for the traces of semen on Private Williams's trousers. Would you not still agree that that could be so?”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“Thank you. In other words, there was absolutely nothing in your examination of Private Williams's clothes to connect him definitively to the murder of Sarah Coile?”

“I suppose not, but nothing in the world is definitive, Lieutenant Dorkin.”

“No doubt,” Dorkin said. “But if we are going to convict someone of murder, we would like to have something a little more definitive than anything arising from your testimony.”

The afternoon was fading, the sun now shining almost level through the tall windows into the faces of the public in the gallery. Dunsdale consulted his watch, consulted Whidden, then declared the court adjourned until nine o'clock the following morning.

Except for the judge's chambers and the jury room, all the other rooms in the courthouse, including the small, bare office that Dorkin had been assigned, were at the front of the building and could only be reached by leaving through the same door as the public. Dorkin collected his papers slowly to give the crowd outside time to disperse before he and Smith made their way out, but the crowd was not in a dispersing mood, and he found the lobby and the corridors still filled with people.

As he made his way through them, Dorkin became aware of Daniel Coile and his cronies standing together by the front door, watching him silently. He met one pair of eyes, not those of Coile but of a younger man, hulking, stooped, wearing a coarse mackinaw jacket, fixing him with a look of cringing hatred, a look which if it were to seek its fulfilment would seek it silently, anonymously, from ambush, as he or someone like him had done with Louie Rosen.

Dorkin ate his supper alone in the mess at the armoury after the others had finished, picking without much appetite at some kind of fish covered with some kind of white sauce accompanied by the usual overcooked vegetables.

There was a strange quiet in the armoury. Captain Fraser had decreed that for the duration of the trial everyone except Sergeant MacCrae should be confined to barracks when they were not out on essential duties. The effect was to make the armoury seem a little like a prison.

As he ate, Dorkin read the newspaper. The front page was full of news of Arnhem. The British were reporting that General Horrocks's Second Army had reached the Meuse and was proceeding against Arnhem. The Germans were announcing that they were mopping up the remnants of the British paratroopers. Dorkin was inclined to believe the Germans, and it seemed obvious that, as with Dieppe, the British were preparing to present a calamity as a victory in disguise.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

Next morning, the stage having been prepared for him, Whidden took over, rising and advancing grandly to the centre of the court-room like a great actor. One might almost, Dorkin thought, have expected a round of applause.

His first move was to recall Corporal Drost. Unlike the other witnesses, the Mounties sat near the front of the court, and this afternoon, not only Drost but Hooper was there. While Drost was being sworn in, Hooper took the map of the Hannigan Road area from the stand where it was displayed and replaced it with a sheet of bristol board covered with rows of numbers.

Once again, as at the preliminary hearing, Drost described the meticulous interviews to establish the whereabouts of everyone who had been at or near the dance hall the night of the murder, but this time there was an additional twist. When all of this testimony had been collected, it was transferred to the chart that was now before the court. In this chart, everyone who was at the dance was identified by a number. After each number, there followed the identification numbers of the people who had accounted for that person's movements in the period after the intermission when Sarah Coile had left the dance hall.

Standing in front of the chart, with a pointer like a school teacher, Drost showed that if the list were examined it was clear that there was no small group of people accounting for each other. Dorkin saw that the Mounties had examined the depositions exactly as he had done, and like him they had found no other potential murderer lurking among those whom they knew to be at the dance hall that night. But unlike him, they were not disposed to move outside that circle of suspects, and Dorkin saw that what they and Whidden were engaged in was the fabrication of an artificial world, like that of an Agatha Christie novel, with a carefully circumscribed locale and a carefully defined roster of suspects, so that conclusions could be removed from the untidy realm of the merely possible and rendered undeniable.

“Of all the people known to be at the dance that night,” Whidden said, “I take it that there was only one whose movements were not accounted for by anyone during the critical period, and that person was Private Williams, who was seen to have left the dance hall with Sarah Coile?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I should explain also,” Drost added, “that we asked everyone at the dance if they had seen anyone who was totally strange to them in the area and in particular if they had seen any such person with Sarah Coile. In all cases, the answer was that they had not.”

“In summary,” Whidden said, “this exhaustive investigation produced only one possible suspect, and that was Private Williams.”