The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “He didn’t kill her. He didn’t knock her up, either.”

  “Had to be someone with a car, you figure?”

  “Probably.”

  “You think you can get your soldier off?” Bartlett asked.

  “Yes,” Dorkin said.

  “A lot of people gonna be disappointed,” Bartlett said.

  “Yes,” Dorkin said, “I expect there will be.”

  “Anyway. I ain’t been much help to you.”

  “Worth a try. Thanks for your time.”

  “Time I got lots of.”

  He got up and saw Dorkin to the door with his cripple’s gait, the lower right leg swinging forward dead from the knee.

  “If I find out anythin’ might be of any use, I’ll let you know,” Bartlett said. “But I wouldn’t be too hopeful.”

  Dorkin walked to his car. He visited three more houses, ritualistically, hardly listening to the same useless answers he had already gleaned two dozen times, and all the while he was thinking about Vinny Page. One thing he had heard from almost all the girls he had talked to the day before was that if anyone knew something that others did not know about Sarah Coile it would be Vinny Page. She was the prosecution’s witness, but it was not about the testimony she had given in court that he wanted to ask her. He debated it with himself the rest of the afternoon. After supper, he made up his mind. The days were trickling relentlessly away. He no longer had time for the higher refinements of legal ethics.

  Half an hour later, he was sitting facing Vinny Page across the parlour of the Page house. Outside in the hall, just out of sight beyond the doorway, their presence betrayed by the faintest of sounds, her father and mother hovered, listening.

  She had brought an ashtray with her, and she sat smoking and listening with an elaborate show of attention as Dorkin explained that he was not here to discuss the testimony she had given at the preliminary hearing but simply to find out more about the back-ground of Sarah Coile. Everyone he had talked to, he said, had told him that she was Sarah’s closest friend. Everyone had told him that if Sarah had confided in anyone it would be Vinny Page.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. For the last couple of years anyways.”

  “Some of the people I’ve talked to,” Dorkin said, “have told me that over the last few weeks Sarah was talking about leaving Wakefield. Did she talk to you about that too?”

  “Yes. Quite a lot.”

  “One of the girls she worked with at the dairy said that she wasn’t getting along very well with her father. Do you think that was one of the reasons she wanted to leave?”

  “Yes, I guess maybe.”

  “What was the problem between her and her father?”

  “I don’t know. A lot of things, I guess. He didn’t work much, and he used to take a lot of her money.”

  “Did Sarah ever say anything to you about his beating her?”

  Vinny puffed her cigarette.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember when Sarah told you about his beating her?” Dorkin asked.

  “Not too long ago. I think he did it more than once, but that time there was a mark on her face. Maybe that’s why she told me.”

  “Do you think Sarah was talking more about leaving here in the month or two before she was killed than she had before?”

  “Yes. I think she was gettin’ serious about it. One day I said that she would need some money to get started somewhere else, and I asked her did she have any saved up. And she said she’d saved a little, but she knew where she could get some more.”

  “Did she say where?”

  “No. She said it was a secret. She said she might tell me some-time but not now.”

  “You haven’t any idea who she was going to get the money from?”

  “No, I don’t know. I thought maybe she was gonna steal it or somethin’ like that. But she never did things like that before.”

  “You don’t think it might have been from whoever got her in trouble?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know anythin’ about that then.”

  “Did she ever say she might be going away with someone? A man, I mean?”

  “No, she never said nothin’ about that.”

  “Did she have any steady boyfriend that you knew of?”

  “No. She used to see people at the dance, but she never went there with anyone.”

  “And she’d never said anything to you about being in trouble?”

  “No, never. I just heard about it afterwards.”

  “If she were going to confide in anyone, I guess it would have been you. I wonder why she didn’t.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve wondered too.”

  “You’ve no idea who it might have been who got her in trouble?”

  “No.”

  “Not Williams, you think?”

  “I don’t know. It could have been, I suppose.”

  “She never talked about Williams?”

  “No, nothin’ that I remember.”

  “What did you think of Williams?”

  “I didn’t know him except just to see. Sort of shy, I guess.”

  “Why do you think Sarah was dancing with him that night?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe some of them other guys was pesterin’ her, and he was a way of keepin’ clear of them. He was someone she could manage maybe.”

  Dorkin sat and thought. He had come up with nothing that he hadn’t heard from the others. He wondered if Vinny were hiding things from him, but he decided not. Nor the others either. The silence was too complete. No sense of a chink in it anywhere.

  He rose and thanked her for her co-operation.

  “I know it must be a painful thing to have to remember.”

  “Yes,” Vinny said. “She was my best friend.”

  Dorkin had the sense that she would have liked to have managed a tear, but none came.

  Three hours later, after his solitary dinner at the hotel, Dorkin sat at the desk in his office, meditating on the futility of the day’s enquiries. The darkness was beginning to gather, but he didn’t turn on the lamp. What was needful now, he decided, was a long systematic think.

  Begin with the indisputable facts, he told himself. These were few and simple. First, Williams left the dance with Sarah around ten-thirty, they stopped to make unconsummated love for half an hour or so, then walked out to the Hannigan Road. Sarah walked up the road towards home, and Williams walked back to the canteen and then to the armoury. Second, Reverend Clemens testified that he saw someone whom he took to be Sarah with someone whom he took to be a soldier and whom everyone now took to be Williams. It was possible, of course, that Clemens was mistaken and that the girl whom he saw was not Sarah at all. Third, on Wednesday, Sarah was found in the gravel pit, raped, suffocated, and badly beaten, having been dead for about three days—meaning that she might have been killed within an hour of leaving the dance or as late as the next morning. And meaning also that the body might have been conveyed to the gravel pit any time during the next three days.

  The puzzling thing about the first set of facts was what Sarah was doing walking away from the dance with Williams in the first place. Dorkin had found no evidence that Williams had ever had anything to do with Sarah before the dance the previous week and no evidence that he was the father of her child. It was also strange that she should choose him for a little lovemaking when she clearly had other, more attractive choices. He had wondered from time to time whether she had used Williams merely as a blind to cover her leaving the dance so that she could meet someone else, choosing Williams because he would be easy to get rid of, as Vinny Page had suggested. But if that were the case, she would not have stopped to make love with him as she had. Whatever her motives may have been for going off with Williams, it seemed obvious that she had no plans then for meeting someone else. To make way for her real interest, she might have paid Williams off with a kiss or two but not with the heavy petting he had described. Whoever Sarah had met after she had left Willi
ams, it seemed clear that it was a meeting that she at least had not planned.

  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 th
at 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.