The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “You are a very tolerant man, Sergeant MacCrae,” Whidden said, recovering what he could. “More tolerant, I dare say, than I would be in your place.”

  “Before I leave, sir,” MacCrae said, “I’d like to point out that Dr. Sachs did not know Private Williams and I did, and I still do not believe that he murdered Sarah Coile.”

  “Thank you,” Whidden said. “I have no more questions. I am sure that the jury, like myself, cannot help but admire your loyalty to your men.”

  MacCrae was Dorkin’s last witness of the morning. He felt that he had not done badly. But it was the afternoon that would tell. First there would be Coile. And then if he could not break Coile, enough at least to lodge an irremovable doubt in the minds of his jurors, there would have to be Williams. The day before the trial began he had spent the whole day with him, going over everything that had happened, fishing, probing, trying to find out anything that still remained to be found, trying to be sure that in court there would be no unpleasant surprises.

  When he was away from Williams, Dorkin’s feelings towards him were ones of compassion, but when he was with him, what he often felt was irritation, and he sometimes experienced a curious shock of displacement, as if the person he had committed himself to defend had been supplanted by some shabby imposter. And he would ask himself whether, if he could go back to July, he would do this again. He wasn’t sure. And sometimes he found himself asking what difference Williams made anyway. In a world where millions were being shot, blown up, drowned, tortured, frozen to death, hanged, gutted, what difference would one more make?

  Dorkin walked for a quarter of an hour before going back to the armoury, where he ate a sandwich and washed and changed his shirt and then set off for the jail for a final talk with Williams.

  Everything was more formal now. Dorkin was met by a Mountie and ushered to Williams’s cell. He found him sitting on his bunk, looking very small and frightened. He looked up suddenly at Dorkin as if he were the hangman come to lead him the few steps to the gallows.

  “Dear God,” Dorkin thought, “if there is a God, don’t let him go to pieces yet. Keep him together for another three or four hours.”

  Dorkin stood in the centre of the court, as in an arena, conscious as always of the weight of people above and behind him, and watched Daniel Coile make his way down the aisle. The companions who had been with him every day at the back of the courtroom were still there in their rough mackinaws, but Coile was dressed up in a grey tweed suit that fitted him well enough but still didn’t look as if it belonged on him. He walked with a belligerent, I-don’t-give-a-shit-for-anybody slouch.

  As he sat down in the witness box, he turned on Dorkin a look of sullen hatred. Dorkin noticed that his eyes were small and set too close together, and everything about him suggested something petty and mean, a scavenger rather than a predator.

  “Mr. Coile,” Dorkin said, “I wonder if perhaps we might begin with what you can tell us about Sarah’s movements during the day of July 1. This was a holiday, so I presume she did not go into town to her job at the dairy.”

  “That’s right,” Coile said after a moment’s hesitation, as if searching Dorkin’s question for some clever trap.

  “She was home all day?”

  “No, she wasn’t home all day. She went into town sometime before noon.”

  “To see the parade?”

  “I don’t know what she went in for. I didn’t ask. I didn’t know she was gone until after.”

  “I see. And what time did she come back from town?”

  “End of the afternoon sometime. Four o’clock maybe.”

  Coile slouched in a corner of the witness box partially turned away from Dorkin, answering him across his right shoulder as a man might who had been accosted in the street by someone he didn’t like.

  “And after she came home,” Dorkin said, “what happened then?”

  “We had supper, and I went out to do my chores. Then I come back in.”

  “And did you see Sarah again?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “She was all dressed up to go out.”

  “To the dance?”

  “Yes. But she didn’t say nothin’ about no dance. She said she was goin’ to the movies with Vinny Page.”

  “Why would she do that, do you think?”

  “Because I didn’t want her goin’ to that dance hall.”

  “But her friends all went there. Like Vinny Page. It seems a normal activity for a girl her age.”

  “I didn’t want her goin’ there because I thought she was gonna get herself in trouble,” Coile said. “And she did.”

  “Perhaps,” Dorkin said. “But we don’t know that. Tell me, Mr. Coile, did Sarah have any steady boyfriends that you know of? Anyone she went out with regularly? Anyone who came to the house to pick her up, for example, to take her to a movie or a dance? Anyone like that?”

  “No, not that I know of.”

  “That seems a little strange. From all accounts, she was an attractive girl. It seems odd that she shouldn’t have had someone. Have you any idea why?”

  “No. I wouldn’t know.”

  “You have no idea who it was who got her in trouble?”

  “Sure,” Coile said. “It was him.”

  He pointed at Williams.

  “Why do you say that, Mr. Coile?”

  “It stands to reason.”

  “No, Mr. Coile,” Dorkin said. “I’m afraid it doesn’t stand to reason at all. Whoever was the father of Sarah’s child, it was certainly not Private Williams.You say that you know of no regular boyfriend. I enquired extensively, and I could find nothing about a regular boyfriend. With the exemplary thoroughness which we all saw put in evidence here yesterday, I presume that the RCMP conducted an even more extensive enquiry about this than I did, and they obviously did not come up with the culprit either. It’s all very odd. Somewhere there is a wonderful, invisible man whom it would be very interesting to talk to. You have no idea who it might be?”

  “No,” Coile said. “I still think it was him.”

  “Well, let’s leave that, since you aren’t able to help us, and turn to a different question.”

  Dorkin hesitated. This was the thin ice, and he wasn’t sure how far he would be able to skate out onto it. But he was banking partly on the fact that in so small a place most of the jury would already have heard about Coile and his earlier troubles with little girls and would need nothing more than a reminder to set their minds in motion along lines that might produce the reasonable doubt that in theory at least was all that was needed. He was also hoping that Coile was unsavoury enough that the jury might find him an acceptable alternative to Williams as a sacrificial victim on the altar of their righteous indignation.

  “I would like,” Dorkin said, “to try to get some sense of Sarah’s habit of mind in the weeks or months before her death.”

  In the witness box, Coile twisted, shifting his weight from one buttock to the other. Dorkin saw his eyes flicker toward the back of the court where his friends were sitting.

  “Mr. Coile,” Dorkin said, “I am interested in the way Sarah behaved at home. Did she get on well with you?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “You never had fights?”

  “Nothin’ to speak of.”

  “Mr. Coile, let me remind you that you are under oath and that there are severe penalties for perjury. Did you and Sarah frequently have fights?”

  “Yes.”

  “Almost daily?”

  “I suppose.”

  “What were they about?”

  “Things.”

  “What things, for example?”

  “About her hangin’ around dance halls. Carryin’ on.”

  “Did you ever actually strike your daughter?”

  “Not as I remember.”

  “Mr. Coile, you are under oath.”

  “Maybe once or twice.”

  “I understand that it was a good deal more often
than that. Is that not so?”

  “It could be.”

  “I understand that sometime not long before she was murdered, you hit her so hard that you bruised her cheek. Is that not so?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Did you have a fight with Sarah that night before she went to the dance?”

  “Yes. I told her not to go.”

  “Did you fight about anything else that night? Or earlier that day?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Did you ever fight over the fact that she was pregnant?”

  Coile hesitated. His eyes flicked again to the back of the court, then to the jury, then back to Dorkin.

  “I didn’t know she was pregnant,” Coile said. “She never told me nothin’ about it.”

  “You are under oath.”

  Another hesitation.

  “She never told me nothin’.”

  “You didn’t know any of the circumstances that resulted in her being pregnant?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Mr. Coile,” Dorkin said, “you have a second daughter, Sheila, who is not living with you now but at your sister-in-law’s. Did she leave because of disagreements with you? Let me remind you again that you are under oath.”

  “Yes,” Coile said.

  “Did you attempt to bring her back and did she refuse to come?”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand, Mr. Coile, that some years ago you were the victim of a serious assault. Is that correct?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean that you were beaten up by one of your neighbours.”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand that the reason for this was that the neighbour felt that you had behaved improperly towards his thirteen-year-old daughter. Is that correct?”

  There was the scrape of a chair as Whidden rose, but before he could speak, Dunsdale had spoken for him “Lieutenant Dorkin, I cannot allow such a question. You are dealing in mere hearsay apart from anything else. The jury must ignore all of this.”

  “I apologize again,” Dorkin said. “I would like, if I may, to turn back to the night of the murder.”

  “Very well,” Dunsdale said.

  “Mr. Coile,” Dorkin said, “you live only a short distance from where the body of your daughter was found. I am wondering if perhaps you happened to drive down the Hannigan Road that night and saw anything suspicious. Anything that might have a bearing on the murder. Were you out that night?”

  “Yes,” Coile said. “I was out.”

  “Could I ask you what time?”

  “I didn’t write it down.”

  “Make a guess.”

  “Eight o’clock. Maybe half past eight.”

  “I see. And where did you go?”

  “I went out to a friend’s place to see about some things.”

  “And where did your friend live?”

  “Across the river on the Gulch Road.”

  “You drove past the corner of Broad Street and Hannigan Road to go there?”

  “There ain’t no other way unless you drive all over the county.”

  “Quite so. And when did you come back?”

  “Twelve o’clock or so.”

  “Did you see anything on the way back that might have a bearing on the murder of your daughter?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did you see your daughter when you came back?”

  “No, I never seen her again after she left for the dance until I seen her at the hospital when I went to identify her.”

  “You didn’t happen to pick her up in your truck?”

  “No, I didn’t because I didn’t have no truck. The clutch went bad the middle of that week, and it was settin’ in the yard. I went out there in my friend’s car, and that’s what I come home in, me and him and two other boys.”

  For the first time, Coile looked straight back at Dorkin without looking away. A smirk of triumph. Dorkin had the sense that he had been waiting for these questions.

  “And when did you get your truck fixed, Mr. Coile?” he asked as coolly as he could.

  “The next Wednesday. I couldn’t get no one to do it in town because I owed money. I ordered a clutch and me and two of the boys put it in ourselves.”

  “When you came home with your friends,” Dorkin asked, fighting for some time to think, “did they come into the house with you or did they go straight back across the river?”

  “No, they come in.”

  “And how long did they stay?”

  “A couple of hours. It was Saturday night. There weren’t no hurry.”

  “Your friends, of course, can confirm all this,” Dorkin said.

  “They already have,” Coile said. “The Mounties spent two days questioning everybody but the dogs. Why don’t you ask them?”

  “Could I ask you, Mr. Coile,” Dorkin said, “when these questionings took place?”

  “Last week,” Coile said.

  Dorkin stood. He deliberately kept himself from looking at the jury. And he especially kept himself from looking at Whidden or the Mounties sitting behind him.

  “Thank you, Mr. Coile,” he said.

  “Your witness, Mr. Whidden,” Dunsdale said.

  Whidden rose grandly.

  “I think, your Honour, that this witness has been harassed enough in this courtroom. I have no questions.”

  “Your Honour,” Dorkin heard himself saying, “I would like a recess of perhaps fifteen minutes before calling my next witness.”

  Dunsdale looked down at him, shuffled his papers, looked at his watch, then at Whidden.

  “Mr. Whidden,” he said, “do you have any objection to a brief recess?”

  “No, your Honour,” Whidden said, half rising. “No objection whatever. If Lieutenant Dorkin feels that he needs a recess, then a recess we shall have. With your permission, of course.”

  He had the air, unmistakably, of having won.

  Dunsdale banged his gavel.

  “We will have a recess of a quarter of an hour.”

  There was an explosion of chatter. One way or another, it had been a sensational half-hour. Not looking at anyone, Dorkin walked down the aisle towards the main door. Halfway there, he heard—was probably meant to hear—someone behind him say, “If I was him, I wouldn’t go drivin’ no back roads at night. Nor daytime neither.”

  Dorkin closed the door to his little room and sat down. It was a room for temporary use: a table, three chairs, a coat rack. From one wall, the yellowing photograph of some long-dead judge looked down on him.

  Dorkin had no doubt whatever that Daniel Coile had been molesting his daughters, or trying to, but was it still possible that he had murdered Sarah? He tried to collect his thoughts.

  In the end, what he had said to the Mounties had alarmed them enough that they had conducted the investigation of Daniel Coile that Drost had said they had no right to conduct. In spite of the breakdown of his truck, in spite of the testimony of his cronies, there were no doubt still a dozen complicated ways in which Daniel Coile, alone or in company, could have murdered Sarah. The whole drunken crew of them could have picked her up and gang-raped her, dropped her in the pit, and then gone on to Coile’s place to wind up their evening.

  But could they have conspired to tell a story that would stand up to the sudden descent of the Mounties almost three months later? Probably not. Almost certainly not. And the Mounties were obviously very sure of their ground. However much they may have hung back earlier from turning up evidence inconvenient to their conclusion that Williams was the murderer, once the alarm had been sounded about Coile, Dorkin knew them well enough to know that they would not have buried evidence against him no matter how much they would have liked to.

  Daniel Coile may have screwed Sarah, he may have knocked her up, but it was very unlikely that he had killed her. In the end, this worst thing of all seemed to have happened—that it had no logic, that it made no sense, that her murder had been
as random an act of violence as being trampled by a runaway horse on the street.

  Now there was no alternative. He would have to do what he had dreaded all through the last six weeks. It would have to be Williams. There were things that only he could tell and that Dorkin could not now risk leaving untold, if only for his own peace of mind. But the thought of what some of Williams’s evidence entailed appalled him. Even in murders such as this people sometimes found a certain villainous grandeur (witness Jack the Ripper), but the truths that Williams was going to be made to tell were neither villainous nor grand, merely squalid and ignominious. Perhaps, Dorkin thought, their very squalor might serve to convince, since the jury might feel that someone who was going to lie would choose lies that were less humiliating. Or would they think that this was just what was so clever about the lies?

  There was a tap on the door, and before Dorkin could move to open it, Carvell stepped in.

  “I came to tell you that they’re just about ready to reconvene,” he said.

  Dorkin looked at him with surprise. It was not Carvell’s job to run such errands.

  “I’m sorry about the Coile thing,” he said. “I didn’t know. They didn’t let me in on it either.”

  “Thanks,” Dorkin said. “I set myself up for it. I shouldn’t have lost my temper with Drost.”

  “Still,” Carvell said. “They were doing what you had asked them to do. They should have told you the result.”

  “I guess so,” Dorkin said, “but the damage is done now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Carvell repeated. “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to have to put Williams on the stand,” Dorkin said. “I haven’t any choice.”

  “No,” Carvell said, “I suppose not.”

  With the courtroom as quiet as any room with three hundred people in it could be, Dorkin walked Williams to the witness box. His voice as he was sworn in was barely audible. He looked at the clerk of the court. He looked at Dorkin. Otherwise he sat slumped in his chair looking down at his hands. There is something in almost everyone, thanks to the power of fairy tales, childish and adult, that says that innocence does not look like this, but is clear-eyed, upright, God’s truth shining from the face for all but the wilfully blind to see.