The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  Bringing Smith along as driver on this expedition was being done merely to give him something to do. Once they had got their shop set up in the armoury, it had taken Dorkin only three or four days to realize that he didn’t particularly need Smith, apart from the fact that having a subordinate around enhanced his image a little in the eyes of the awful Captain Fraser. So Smith did some typing, filed some papers, ran an errand now and then, but mostly sat unobtrusively in his little nook reading the books (surprisingly sophisticated) that he had had the foresight to bring along.

  At the bottom of the slope, the road curved away and emerged abruptly from the forest into open country at the bottom of a shallow little valley with a creek and a covered bridge, and a couple of dozen houses scattered among fields along half a mile of road.

  This was Sherburn Falls, and the creek that ran through it was the same that flowed past the back door of Dan Coile’s place except that here it was smaller, cleaner, more a brook than a creek, and the falls just below the covered bridge was not so much a falls as a rapids—a long slope of smooth rock down which the river flowed in sheets.

  From Louie’s description, Dorkin had imagined somewhere primitive and barbarous, as befitted a place on the far side of so much forest, and it was to give himself the protection of a witness as well as to shore up his crumbling prestige that for the first time he pressed Smith into service as a driver. But what he saw seemed unthreatening. These were not the big, affluent farms of the river valley, but the houses were solid, the fields and fences well tended.

  “The other side of the bridge,” Dorkin said. “Take it slow.”

  He saw no one, but by the time they had crossed the bridge, he felt sure they were being watched. With Louie’s crude map to guide him, he counted off the houses left and right until he found a homemade wooden mailbox with the name JOHN MACMILLAN hand-painted in block capitals.

  The house stood almost up to the road in one corner of a three-acre field, its borders marked by low walls of stone. The main house, cedar-shingled, was square, plain, two-storeyed. Attached to it in a long line were a summer kitchen, a woodshed, and a grey barn. From a small paddock beside the barn two immense workhorses stood with their heads hanging over the fence watching Dorkin’s car as it came into the yard, driving before it a flock of chickens and rousing from its sleep by the back door the farm dog, mongrel and large, who barked dutifully but didn’t look likely to attack.

  At the far end of the garden that ran beside the dooryard, a man who had been digging potatoes stood watching the car also, a big man dressed in work pants and a plaid shirt. He stuck the fork in the ground and made his way unhurriedly towards Dorkin.

  Close up, John MacMillan turned out to be even bigger than he looked at a distance, towering half a head above Dorkin. Dorkin guessed that he would be about forty, with jet-black hair, a jet-black moustache, and soft, remote brown eyes. If he was surprised at Dorkin’s appearance in his dooryard, he didn’t show it.

  Dorkin had come with a carefully prepared plan of inquiry beginning with a variation of the familiar evasions. He had been assigned the duty of representing Private Williams. Part of that duty naturally entailed examining the evidence against Williams, and in doing this he had come to the conclusion that there was a possibility that Private Williams was innocent. He was particularly interested in identifying anyone whom Sarah might have been seeing regularly. Naturally, it was awkward for him to talk to her parents, and he was hoping that he might be able to talk with him and his wife and perhaps Sarah’s sister, who he understood was living with them.

  Watching the strange, soft eyes, Dorkin couldn’t tell whether any of this oily froth was being believed or not. When he had finished, the eyes drifted away, then back.

  “My wife’s inside,” MacMillan said. “She knows more about all this than I do. I think it might be better if you talk with her.”

  “It won’t upset her?”

  “No, I don’t think so. We’ve sort of got used to it.”

  The wife was in the back kitchen. Against one wall there was a black woodstove on which two great pots were steaming. There were preserve bottles everywhere and an overwhelming smell of vinegar.

  Fern MacMillan was standing in the middle of the room awaiting them. She was short and compact with the sharp, clean features of a much younger woman and dark blonde hair tied back in a bun. She gave the impression of being a woman who took a good hard look at the world before she dealt with it, and she gave Dorkin a good hard look now, her head cocked to one side, her lips pursed. MacMillan explained who Dorkin was, and Dorkin went through his act once more.

  “I understand,” Dorkin said, “that all this is very painful to talk about, and you aren’t under any obligation to do it if you’d rather not. But I would be grateful if you would. Nothing you say will be repeated, and there isn’t any question of your having to appear in court or anything like that. I’m merely hoping for information that might give me some guidance.”

  He trailed off, aware that he was beginning to flounder.

  Fern MacMillan glanced at her husband and considered.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go inside where we can all sit down.”

  In the main kitchen there was a long pine table down the middle, and they all sat.

  “So,” she said, “what are you tryin’ to find out exactly?”

  “Well,” Dorkin said, “I’d be interested in anything you might know about any boyfriends Sarah might have had in the last year. Anyone she might have been serious about. Perhaps she might have said something to you.”

  “No,” she said. “We never saw her much in the last couple of years.”

  “She never talked to you about her trouble?”

  “No, she never said nothin’ about that. I only heard about it after the court hearin’. After that it was all over the country. That and a lot of other stuff. Crazy stuff.”

  “What kind of crazy stuff?” Dorkin asked.

  “They were sayin’ that they said in court that that soldier ate off part of her leg.”

  Dorkin recalled Bourget’s macabre joke, but decided to let it pass since the truth was almost as bad.

  “Do you think Sarah might have talked to her mother about her trouble?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t think it,” she said. “You don’t think that soldier was the one who got her in trouble?”

  “No,” Dorkin said. “It’s not possible. He’d never had anything to do with her until a couple of weeks before that night.”

  “You don’t think he murdered her?”

  “No,” Dorkin said. “I don’t.”

  “You think she may have been murdered because she was in trouble?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “I suppose. It wouldn’t be the first time. More than are known about, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  All this was just a diversion. Cautiously, Dorkin began to move towards his real objective.

  “I heard a rumour,” Dorkin said, “nothing very specific, that Sarah might have had some plans for leaving Wakefield. I’ve been wondering if there was someone she might have been planning to go away with—or someone who might have persuaded her that he was going to take her away somewhere.”

  “I don’t know. I never heard nothin’ about that.”

  “I also heard that she wasn’t getting along very well with her father.”

  “Oh? Where did you hear that from?”

  “A couple of the girls who knew her,” Dorkin said. “It was just gossip. The trouble is that I have no way to tell what’s just gossip from what may be the truth.”

  Fern glanced at her husband. He shrugged, and she sat for a moment looking down at the table, her mouth tight.

  “Nobody gets along with Dan Coile,” she said. “Not for very long anyways. Sarah was no exception.”

  “Did she ever say anything to you about it?” Dorkin asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Recently?”

 
“Once last winter. I just happened to meet her in town on Saturday. I told her she could come out here if she wanted. But she had her job at the dairy, and she didn’t want to give it up because then she wouldn’t have no money at all. And there’s not much to do out here. And it’s hard to get to town, especially in the winter.”

  “She did stay out here once a couple of years ago for a few weeks one summer,” MacMillan said. “And once when she was real little, just five years old maybe before she went to school, she lived out here for six months. We never had no children, and Matilda had more than she could really handle. There’s a picture of her here.”

  He took a framed photograph from a collection on a cupboard and handed it to Dorkin. It showed a round-faced child in a neat white dress standing by the porch with a dog whose shoulder was almost level with her own.

  “We would sort of liked to adopt Sarah,” MacMillan said, “since we didn’t have no children, but Dan wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “That bastard!” Fern exploded. “He came out here and got Sarah two years ago before any of this happened—before she started runnin’ round, I mean. I should have had John run him off the place, but he was the father, John said, and he could have set the law on us, so we let her go. She didn’t want to then. If she’d stayed, none of this would have happened. She’d still be alive.”

  “Her sister Sheila,” Dorkin said. “Is she living out here because of trouble at home?”

  Fern pursed her lips and stared furiously at the black cookstove and then out the window. Dorkin looked at MacMillan.

  “Dan wouldn’t leave her alone,” MacMillan said.

  “That bastard!” Fern said again. “I told Matilda not to marry him. He was never any good—prancin’ around and bootleggin’ and thinkin’ that every woman who saw him go by in a car was crazy after him. The only woman fool enough even to look at him, let alone marry him, was Matilda.”

  “She would have been a good girl, Sarah,” MacMillan said, “if she’d had half of a chance. A real happy little girl, she was. Just full of fun. Good looking, too, right from the start.”

  “Who do they think she might have been going to run off with?” Fern said.

  “That’s what I never found out,” Dorkin said. “Maybe no one.”

  “Someone useless the way her mother did,” Fern said. “It’s funny how the same things go on happenin’ in families.”

  “Would her sister Sheila possibly know something about what was happening?” Dorkin asked.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Fern said. “She’s been out here for over a year now, and she ain’t seen Sarah for a long time.”

  “Once when we’d gone into town one time back in the spring,” MacMillan said, “Dan came out here and tried to get her to go back home with him, but she’s of age, and he ain’t got no say over her now, so she told him to get off the place and threatened to shoot him. She ain’t been home since.”

  “She’s workin’ days for a woman over in Leach Settlement who just had a baby,” Fern said. “She don’t like to talk about any of this. She’s got a boyfriend now who’s serious, and she don’t want ever to see Dan or any of them again or have no part of anythin’ to do with them.”

  Dorkin considered and decided not to push it now. Later, he thought, if he really needed to, he could try to talk to the sister.

  “Well,” he said, getting up, “I won’t bother her. I’m sorry about Sarah and about all the trouble you’ve had. And I’m grateful for your help.”

  MacMillan got up too and followed Dorkin out into the yard.

  “You don’t think it was the soldier got Sarah in trouble?” he asked when they were out of earshot of his wife.

  “No,” Dorkin said.

  MacMillan considered.

  “You’re thinking it may have been Dan,” MacMillan said. “I’ve been wondering.”

  “Do you think Dan murdered her?”

  “I don’t know,” Dorkin said, cautious.

  “That would be awful hard on everybody,” MacMillan said.

  “Yes,” Dorkin said.

  He hesitated, afraid of pushing too hard.

  “Have you any idea how far things went with Sheila?” he asked.

  “She never talked to me about it, just Fern, and Fern didn’t say too much. I think he just kept hanging around her and trying to peek at her when she was getting dressed. Or outside. Things like that. And trying to get alone with her when Matilda wasn’t around.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “I don’t know. You may have heard already. He got into trouble once years ago because of a girl twelve or thirteen years old. She lived down the road from his place, and her father beat Dan up.”

  “Was it taken to court?”

  “No, they just let it go at that. I guess they figured it would be too hard on the kid to have it spread around any more than it was already.”

  “Was she pregnant?”

  “No,” MacMillan said. “I don’t think it ever got that far.”

  “I see,” Dorkin said. “Well, that’s interesting to know.”

  “If Dan did do it,” MacMillan said, “how would you ever prove it?”

  “I don’t know,” Dorkin said.

  “I wouldn’t want Fern to have to go into court,” MacMillan said. “Nor Sheila.”

  “I can promise you that that won’t happen,” Dorkin said. “I just wanted some information for guidance.”

  “You’d guessed some of it anyways.”

  “Yes,” Dorkin said. “Some of it.”

  It was dusk by seven-thirty now, and as Dorkin rounded the corner onto Broad Street, he saw that the lights were on in Bartlett’s little bungalow, brighter light at the back where the kitchen was, dimmer, more orange light on the porch where Dorkin guessed that a kerosene lamp must be burning. It was Saturday night, and Bartlett and his old comrades would be starting their weekly get-together. From the tin pipe that served as a chimney, a wisp of smoke ascended to become part of the faint smokiness that tinged the air from the autumn’s first bonfires.

  He parked in Bartlett’s drive and lifted out the case of twelve pints of beer, which he had chilled in the big icebox in the armoury kitchen. Bartlett opened the door and was waiting for him as he mounted the steps with the case under his arm. Behind him, in the warm lamplight, two other men watched.

  “Well, now,” Bartlett said, “what have we got here?”

  “A few bottles of beer,” Dorkin said. “I thought we might have a sip and another talk about some of the things we were talking about earlier. If you wouldn’t mind?”

  “No, I don’t mind. I got a couple of the boys in here, but there ain’t nothin’ I know that they don’t know. Or that anybody else don’t know for that matter. You may be wastin’ your beer.”

  “It won’t matter. You’re welcome all the same. Somewhere or other the world must owe you at least one free case of beer.”

  “Well, as long as you feel that way about it, there ain’t no harm done.”

  “This here’s Lieutenant Dorkin,” he announced when they were inside. “Who you’ve all heard about by now. And this here’s two old pals of mine from a long ways back. This here’s Earl Scourie. And this here’s Herb MacClewan. They’re old soldiers too. And ain’t none of us died yet anyways.”

  They got up from their chairs, awkward in the presence of the officer’s uniform, unsure whether to shake hands or not. Earl was a little man, completely bald, with a wide mouth, so that he looked like the man in the moon in a cartoon. Herb was bigger, tougher, with fading red hair, a red face, and big red hands.

  “Earl,” Bartlett said. “You got two good legs under you. Why don’t you take this beer out to the kitchen and pour us out a little and put the rest to keep cool.”

  Earl went off, and Dorkin sat down on one end of the old couch that Bartlett used as a sofa. They cut some of the edges off the awkwardness with talk of the coming of fall until Earl came back with the beer.

  “Down with the Kaiser,” H
erb said, and they all drank.

  “Were you together in the war?” Dorkin asked.

  “No,” Bartlett said. “Earl here was at Vimy, but we was in different outfits. Herb didn’t come over until after I was on my way home. He got wounded in the leg at Cambrai. Didn’t break nothin’. Earl here never got a scratch.”

  “Got gassed a little once,” Earl said. “That’s all.”

  “So,” Bartlett said, “what’s the news?”

  “No real news,” Dorkin said. “But I’d like to ask you some more about Dan Coile.”

  “Sure,” Bartlett said. “Don’t know whether we’ll be able to answer.”

  “I hear that he had a hankering after little girls,” Dorkin said.

  Bartlett and the others exchanged glances.

  “Yes,” Bartlett said. “Ain’t no secret about that. There was some trouble a few years ago nearly landed him in jail. You heard about that?”

  “Yes,” Dorkin said. “I hear he’s also had trouble with his own girls.”

  More glances.

  “What kind of trouble?” Bartlett asked.

  “I’m not sure. But some of the things I’ve heard make me wonder if things might not have gone on there as well that could have landed him in jail if it got around.”

  Bartlett whistled.

  “Boys,” he said, “you been gettin’ an earful.”

  “He’s a dirty old son of a bitch,” Earl said. “No doubt about that.”

  “One thing I did hear out at the garage one day,” Herb said, “is that the older girl’s got a boyfriend, and he’s supposed to have told Dan that if he ever comes near that girl again, he’s gonna shoot him.”

  “Any idea why?” Dorkin asked.

  “Well,” Herb said, “I heard that Dan figures she should be home helpin’ her mother. But I wonder if there ain’t more to it than that. But I ain’t never heard nothin’.”

  “You’re thinkin’ that Dan maybe knocked that girl up who got murdered,” Bartlett said.

  “I’m wondering if it might not be possible,” Dorkin said.

  “And if he was the one who murdered her?”