The Case Against Owen Williams
Page 8
“But you can definitely state that somewhere near eleven o’clock on the night of July 1, you saw Sarah Coile standing on the corner of Broad Street and Hannigan Road by the old churchyard with a soldier in uniform.”
“Yes, that is so.”
“Thank you,” McKiel said. “I must compliment you on the care which you have taken to be accurate in the evidence you have given.”
Clemens descended, and Thurcott glanced at the pocket watch on the bench in front of him. It was now four o’clock, and the sitting had been going on for two hours without interruption.
“I have only one more witness,” McKiel said. “With your per-mission I would like to recall Corporal Drost of the RCMP.”
“I understand,” McKiel said when Drost had taken his place, “that under your supervision an investigation was conducted of the people known to have been at the dance at The Silver Dollar on the night of July 1. I would be grateful if you would give us the results of that investigation.”
With nothing substantial to base it on, Dorkin had conceived a dislike for Corporal Drost, though he could not help but admire the meticulousness of the investigation that his office had conducted into the movements of everyone who had been at the dance hall or had been seen around it. Of all the men known to be at the dance hall, Drost concluded, only Private Williams remained unaccounted for for any substantial period of time between 10:30 PM and 2 AM.
“But is it not possible,” Thurcott asked, “that there could have been a man or men outside the dance hall whom you did not find out about?”
“Yes,” Drost said. “That is possible, but in view of our detailed enquiries, it seems very unlikely.”
“In the light of Reverend Clemens’s testimony that he saw Sarah Coile on the Hannigan Road with someone whom he took to be a soldier about 11 pm,” Thurcott asked, “did you check the movements of soldiers other than those at the dance? I am thinking of other soldiers in the garrison and soldiers who may have been home on leave.”
“We questioned all the other soldiers at the armoury,” Drost said, “and were satisfied that they were not at the dance hall that night. We have no way of knowing for sure how many other soldiers may have been in the area on leave, but we did make enquiries. We learned of five soldiers who were on leave, and we questioned all of them and found nothing to suggest that they had been anywhere near the dance hall on the night of July 1.”
“I see,” Thurcott said.
McKiel’s summary of the evidence against Private Williams was a model of clarity and brevity. He began with what he took to be the indisputable facts. So far as Sarah Coile was concerned these were that at around 10:30 PM, she left The Silver Dollar in the company of Private Williams and was not seen again by anyone whom the police questioned other than Private Williams until her body was found four days later in the gravel pit off Broad Street, some half a mile or so from the dance hall. She had been dead since the night she disappeared or very shortly after.
So far as Private Williams was concerned the indisputable facts were that he left the dance hall with Sarah Coile at approximately 10:30 PM and was next seen at approximately 11:50 PM, an hour and twenty minutes later, at The Maple Leaf canteen, which is only some fifteen or twenty minutes’ walk away. Evidence by one witness at the canteen suggested that Private Williams had been lying on the ground. When first questioned about his whereabouts that night, Private Williams said that he had left the dance hall with Sarah Coile and had walked her along the track behind the dance hall which became Birch Road until they came to Hannigan Road, where he left her to walk home by herself while he went down the Hannigan Road to the canteen and then back to the armoury. When subsequently confronted with the fact that his description of his movements left nearly an hour unaccounted for, he testified that he had been drinking and must have left the dance hall later than he had thought and that he and Sarah Coile had stopped for a while outside the dance hall to talk before walking out to the Hannigan Road. None of the witnesses who saw Private Williams that night considered him to have drunk excessively.
Reverend Clemens testified that at approximately 11:00 he had seen a girl whom he recognized as Sarah Coile with a soldier, not at the junction of Birch Road and Hannigan Road, where Private Williams asserted on two occasions that he had left Sarah Coile, but some fifty yards further up the Hannigan Road at the junction with Broad Street. Assuming that the girl was Sarah Coile, McKiel asked whether it were really plausible that she had left the dance hall with Private Williams at 10:30 and within half an hour appeared with a different soldier who nevertheless resembled Private Williams in general height and build, while Private Williams vanished into thin air for nearly an hour before re-materializing at The Maple Leaf canteen.
Surely, McKiel said, the truth was more simple, and the truth was that Private Williams left the dance hall with Sarah Coile at 10:30, was seen with her some half an hour later by Reverend Clemens on Broad Street, and then lured or chased her to the nearby gravel pit where he assaulted and brutally murdered her for reasons which he alone knows, perhaps because she had resisted his advances, perhaps because he was the father of her child.
McKiel remained standing briefly, then returned to his place and sat down beside Whidden, who rolled his leonine head to one side and said something into his ear. McKiel pursed his lips and nodded. As he spoke to McKiel, Whidden’s eyes rested on Dorkin, unseeingly, as they might have rested on the tabletop or a section of the wall.
At six-thirty, Thurcott sat on the bench, unhappily, as he had seemed to do all day.
“I must ask you, Private Williams,” he said, “if there is anything you wish to say about the evidence which has been given here today.”
Williams stood up, and, his voice threatening to break, said, “I didn’t do anything to Sarah Coile.”
At the back of the courtroom, someone made a sound more like the growling of a dog than a form of articulate speech.
Thurcott cleared his throat.
“Nevertheless, Private Williams,” he said, “in view of the evidence presented here today, it is my duty to commit you to stand trial in this court in the last week of September for the murder on or about July 1, 1944, of Sarah Coile. In the meantime, you will be confined in the county jail adjacent to this court. I declare this hearing concluded.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
In the uproar that followed, the pushing back of chairs, the scraping of feet, the sudden release of voices that all together sounded somehow inhuman and murderous like the sound of the sea among rocks, Thurcott rose and walked out of the courtroom, very straight and dignified with his papers under his arm. Williams, staring wildly around like someone who has just been violently awakened, was got to his feet by Carvell and guided out his different door.
Whidden placed his hand on McKiel’s shoulder in a gesture of Olympian approval. Dorkin sat looking down at the random notes and doodles he had begun making during the afternoon. He was still contemplating them when Thurcott’s clerk slipped up to his table, with his waiter’s air of trying to seem invisible, and murmured in his ear, “Mr. Thurcott would like a word with you, sir, before you go, if that would be convenient.”
Dorkin packed his papers into his briefcase and followed the clerk out of the courtroom. Thurcott was seated behind the desk in his office, looking very small and worried. He rose, directed Dorkin to an armchair, and sat down again.
“From now on, this case will be no affair of mine,” he said, “but before you left I wanted to ask you to explain to Ken Meade how very unhappy I am about these proceedings. There should have been legal counsel, and if there were difficulties about getting one, the hearing should have been postponed until one was found. Given the evidence that was presented, I had no choice but to send the boy to trial, but there were a great many things that should have been questioned. Perhaps I should have intruded myself into things more than I did, but when you’re on the bench, you really can’t act as a defence counsel as well.”
“Do you think Williams may be innocent?” Dorkin asked.
“I don’t know,” Thurcott said. “I don’t know. The evidence presented today seemed to me far from conclusive. Whidden wouldn’t have agreed to act as prosecutor if he hadn’t felt pretty sure that he would win, but…”
He hesitated for several seconds before he went on.
“But—I probably shouldn’t be saying this, and I would be grateful if you wouldn’t repeat it to Ken—but with Whidden, feeling that he can win and feeling that the accused is guilty are not always the same thing…”
He hesitated again, as if there were more that he wanted to say, and Dorkin sensed the presence of an imperfectly suppressed anger. Then, with an almost imperceptible shake of his head, Thurcott changed the subject.
“Anyway,” he said, “tell Ken about my unease with the hearing. Also, someone should see about getting Williams proper counsel. I understand that his uncle is here today. Perhaps you should talk to him now. Could you do that?”
“I could,” Dorkin said, uneasily. “If I could find him.”
“He’s probably gone back to the jail. He was there earlier in the day. But Sheriff Carvell will know where he is, I expect. You could ask him.”
Dorkin looked at his watch. It was already getting late for driving back to Fredericton. He could leave in the morning. And he would be able to tell Meade more clearly what the situation was.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Dorkin left the courthouse by a side door that led out onto a little walk that ran between the courthouse and the jail. The sidewalk, the far side of the street, the parking lot by the RCMP office, were still crowded with people, hanging around, gawking, drawn by the scent of death. As he walked the few yards to the jail and mounted the steps at the bottom of the squat tower, he was aware of their eyes upon him.
He found Carvell sitting behind his desk and explained his errand.
“Yes,” Carvell said, “the uncle’s here. Also his wife. They’re in with Williams. You can wait and talk to them here if you like.”
Dorkin sat down in one of the armchairs.
“What sort of shape is Williams in?” he asked.
“Not very good,” Carvell said.
“What’s the uncle like?”
Carvell shrugged.
“I don’t think you’re going to find he’s much help. Nor the wife either. She’s the blood relative. A sister of Williams’s father. Their name is Whittaker. Hubert and Alice Whittaker.”
Dorkin had only to look at them to recognize the accuracy of Carvell’s assessment. Hubert was a heavy-set man of fifty or so, with a watch chain across his paunch, a bluff round face, and a walrus moustache. The wife was dark, small, thin-lipped. She seemed burning with rage, her black eyes under her straight, black brows, glittering like anthracite. They were both dressed in black, as if for a funeral.
Dorkin met with them in the room where he had talked to Williams. He sat on one side of the table, they on the other, stiff and hostile.
“Before I go back to Fredericton,” Dorkin said, “I wanted to talk to you about arrangements for defense counsel for your nephew.”
At the word nephew, Mrs. Whittaker glared fiercely at her husband.
“I understand,” Mr. Whittaker said, “that I am not legally responsible to pay for lawyers in this business.”
“No,” Dorkin said. “You have no legal responsibility.”
“I also understand that if I don’t pay for a lawyer, the government will. Is that right?”
“Yes. He can’t be tried without having legal counsel, and if no one else can provide it, the court will.”
“Then why not let them?”
“You can let them. But your nephew would be better represented if he had his own lawyer rather than one appointed by the court.”
“Suppose I did pay for a lawyer,” Whittaker said, “and they decided that Owen didn’t do it after all. Would I get my money back from the government?”
“No,” Dorkin said, “I’m afraid not. That’s between you and your lawyer.”
“Do you call that justice?”
“No, probably it isn’t, but it’s the law. I didn’t make it.”
“The rich made it, Mr. Dorkin. The rich and the lawyers.”
“That may be, Mr. Whittaker, but I can’t help it. All I’m trying to do is find out what needs to be done in relation to your nephew.”
“I already talked to a lawyer, Mr. Dorkin. I had a hard time finding one who would even talk to me. The one who did sent me a bill for twenty dollars for half an hour’s talk. He told me that paying a lawyer for the trial could cost a thousand dollars or more.”
“Possibly,” Dorkin said.
“I don’t have a thousand dollars, Mr. Dorkin, and I have two sons of my own that I have responsibilities to. I’m not going to mortgage my farm to defend a nephew.”
Dorkin thought of observing that he had two farms if you counted the one he had possessed from Williams’s mother for debts, but he let it pass. It wasn’t his business.
“What was he doing at that dance hall anyway with that girl?” Mrs. Whittaker said.
“I don’t know,” Dorkin said. “It was a dance, that’s all.”
“Do you think he killed that girl?” Whittaker asked.
“I don’t know,” Dorkin said. “Possibly not.”
“He says he didn’t,” Whittaker said.
“He never did a day’s real work in his life,” Mrs. Whittaker said. “Emma—his mother—spent every cent she had and a lot she didn’t have putting him through high school so he could get a job in an office where he wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty. And this is what it comes to.”
“The army is a curse,” Whittaker said. “His father was another fool. He couldn’t wait to enlist, and in a year he was back with his lungs burned out so he couldn’t ever really work again.”
“Does Private Williams have any brothers or sisters?” Dorkin asked.
“No,” Mrs. Whittaker said. “There were two boys before him, but they both died of the croup.”
She made it sound as if this too were a well-deserved punishment for something or other. Dorkin looked at them exuding their air of greed and ignorance and decided that he had had enough.
“Thank you,” he said, getting up. “I just wanted to be clear what the situation was.”
The Whittakers looked at each other, too slow and gauche to disguise their relief at getting out of it so easily.
“It will all be looked after then,” Whittaker said.
“Yes,” Dorkin said. “Somehow it will be looked after.You needn’t trouble yourselves.” He saw them out the front door and watched them descend the steps. He felt sure that no one here would be seeing them again.
“A nice couple,” he said to Carvell when he was back inside.
“Salt of the earth,” Carvell said.
“I’d better see Williams for a few minutes,” Dorkin said. “I can talk to him in his cell.”
Carvell led him down the line of cells, and Cronk appeared from wherever he lurked and unlocked the door. Williams was lying on his bunk, curled up facing the wall. He turned over when they came in, and seeing Dorkin, started to stand, but Dorkin gestured him back, and he sat down on the edge of the bunk.
“Before I go back to Fredericton, I wanted to explain to you about what will happen now,” Dorkin said. “I talked to your uncle, and it seems that he doesn’t have the financial resources to pay for a lawyer for you.”
“He always hated me,” Williams said. “He didn’t need our farm. He could have given it to me. I could have farmed. I probably wouldn’t have been conscripted then.”
“I’m sorry,” Dorkin said. “I can’t help that. He can’t be made responsible if he doesn’t want to be. He’s not your guardian or anything like that, and you’re not a minor. When I go back to Fredericton, I’ll report the situation, and either the army or the court will pay for a lawyer for you.”
He looked as if he were going to start to cry.
“Calm down,” Dorkin said. “A preliminary hearing is not a trial. All it means is that there are enough grounds for suspicion to warrant a trial. In a trial, those grounds are going to be questioned by your lawyer, and you can’t be convicted if there’s any doubt whatever about your being guilty. They have to prove you guilty. You don’t have to prove yourself innocent. The odds are all on your side.”
Dorkin became conscious of his own voice, detached from himself, rushing along, filling the stale air with these pious half-truths—if they were even so much as half-truths. Williams was sit-ting looking down at the plank floor between his boots.
When Dorkin left the jail, the crowd was still there, though much thinned. The better dressed had gone home to their suppers, their newspapers, their respectable evening’s rest, leaving behind the un-ashamedly, insatiably curious, those eternal, unoccupied watchers of life’s calamities. Dorkin noticed that there was a surprisingly large number of women among them, mostly in their twenties, the age of women whose husbands would be in the army, fighting the war that Williams was refusing to fight. They all watched him in silence as he descended the steps, and he found himself hating them more than he could find reasons for, and also, to his surprise, fearing them a little.
Back at the armoury, he had hardly been in his room long enough to take off his tunic when there was a tap on the door, and he opened it to Sergeant MacCrae, who had waited for him on what Dorkin felt sure was merely the pretext of asking if he needed anything.
MacCrae was somewhere in his mid-twenties with one of those rectangular, plain, sun-roughened faces that Dorkin thought of as the regulation enlisted man’s face of the Canadian Army. Unlike his flock of Zombies, he had a gs badge on his sleeve. He also had four ribbons on his tunic. Ribbons all looked the same to Dorkin, and as he wondered what they were, MacCrae worked his way towards what he had really come for, which was to get the inside story of what had happened at the hearing. Dorkin gave it to him, or all of it that mattered, because there were also things that he wanted to ask.