The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “No,” Clemens said. “I didn’t see anybody.”

  “All dark?”

  “Yes,” Clemens said.

  When they were back in Carvell’s office, Carvell had phoned Constable Hooper, and the three of them were now sitting around Carvell’s desk.

  “But the fact is that he lied,” Dorkin said.

  “Yes, he lied,” Carvell said. “But it may not mean what you’re trying to make it mean. Even if he were just roaming around in the woods looking at the girls, he wouldn’t want to admit it. And for all we know, he may have been screwing one of those girls who pick up their pin money out there—in which case he certainly wouldn’t be disposed to admit it.”

  “And he may only have been out there spying on the dance hall the way he told Salcher,” Hooper said, “and didn’t want to admit to that either.”

  “I don’t think so,” Dorkin said. “Something happened that night that scared him enough that he took away his outfit and never used it again.”

  “But even if he didn’t commit the murder,” Carvell said, “all the activity out there afterwards would have been enough to scare him off.”

  It was now nearly three o’clock in the afternoon, and for over two hours they had been hammering it back and forth.

  “He could have been lying about the cars, too,” Carvell said. “He had the wind up by that time. He didn’t know what we were getting at, and he may have decided to say that there weren’t any cars. Then if he had to, he could always pretend to remember later that there was a car. So there could have been a car, and he could have had light enough to see what he said he saw.”

  “It is just possible that he could have seen her without the lights from another car,” Hooper said. “He knew her well enough that he wouldn’t have had to see much.”

  Dorkin walked across the office and looked out the window at the church across the street and the little nook where Maclean had waited for him.

  Shit, he thought. It went round and round.

  “Look,” he said, turning back to them, “he was out there that night, and the account he gave in court of what he did there was a lie. If he spent time roaming around in the woods, all that talk of what time it must have been when he left Salcher’s place was just bullshit. He perjured himself. He had also been talking to Sarah that afternoon, and he never said anything about that until we bluffed it out of him.”

  “Could you bring him in,” Carvell asked Hooper, “and tell him what we know from Salcher about his movements and ask him to make a new statement about what he did that night? If he is the one who murdered Sarah Coile, he’s going to be pretty rattled after this afternoon, and it’s possible he may go to pieces. And even if he didn’t do it, the fact that his testimony in court was perjured would certainly ensure that Williams got a new trial. It can’t just be let go now.”

  Hooper looked at him unhappily.

  “I shouldn’t do anything without getting permission from Fredericton,” he said. “It isn’t my investigation.”

  “But it isn’t anyone’s investigation now,” Dorkin said. “Williams is in the jug. That investigation’s over.”

  “I don’t know,” Hooper said.

  “There’s something else,” Dorkin said. “If Clemens did kill Sarah Coile, we’ve put Salcher in danger by what we told Clemens this afternoon. If he’s a killer, he may also kill Salcher.”

  “That would be pretty risky in the circumstances,” Hooper said.

  “It would,” Dorkin said. “But Clemens doesn’t know we talked to Salcher. We just said we’d heard a rumour about a man in the woods. He may think he’s covering his tracks by getting rid of Salcher before we get to him. If he is the murderer, he’s going to be desperate.”

  “I tell you what,” Carvell said to Hooper. “If you get in hot water with Fredericton, tell them what Bernie and I did by going to Salcher and Clemens. Tell them that we’re a couple of irresponsible assholes. It won’t bother me if it doesn’t bother Bernie. You were forced to act quickly because you were afraid for Salcher’s safety. So you decided to talk to Clemens to get to the bottom of what really happened that night.”

  “I shouldn’t be doing it,” Hooper said. “Not without some authority.”

  “But if Salcher is killed after what we’ve told you,” Dorkin said, “you’ll be in even deeper shit.”

  “Not if I check with Fredericton first,” Hooper said.

  “Do you think you can explain all this stuff to them so they’ll make a quick decision?” Dorkin asked. “They’ll have to get hold of Grant and god only knows who else. It could take all night.”

  “Probably,” Hooper said.

  “And the truth is,” Carvell added, “that when you look at what we’ve got, it doesn’t necessarily add up to all that much. Particularly to someone like Grant who doesn’t want to believe it in the first place.”

  “You’re afraid that if I talk to Fredericton first,” Hooper said to Dorkin, “they’re going to tell me to leave it alone.”

  “Yes,” Dorkin said, “I am.”

  “Okay,” Hooper said. “But I don’t want to make it look like an official interrogation by bringing him in here. If it blows up on me, I’ll be in less trouble if I talk to him out there without any formalities.”

  “But I’d better have some kind of witness to what goes on,” he said to Carvell, “so I’d like you to come along. It’ll also make it more difficult for him to shift his story around from what he told you.”

  “I’m coming too,” Dorkin said.

  Hooper hesitated, gathering himself to say no.

  “I was the one who started all this,” Dorkin said. “I was the one who tracked all this down. I want to be there. I’ll go in my own car.”

  “Okay,” Hooper said. “But I’ll ask the questions. I want you to stay out of it. I have the feeling that when this is over, I’m going to end up serving the rest of my career in the Northwest Territories.”

  Clemens’s Ford was still parked in the yard where it had been earlier in the day, and they drove in and parked side by side behind it, first Hooper and Carvell in the RCMP patrol car, then Dorkin in his staff car. It looked a little like a raid.

  Once again, they rang the bell, once again waited, so long this time that they began to wonder if it was going to be answered at all. When eventually the door was opened, it was again by the daughter. She looked one after another at their three faces.

  “There were just one or two more questions which we thought your father might be able to help us with,” Carvell said.

  She stood with her hand on the door, looking past them at the cars in the drive, then above them, beyond the cars, at some-thing higher—the tops of the autumn trees, a passing bird, perhaps merely the sky—a trifling act of seeming inattention whose import Dorkin only came to understand when he remembered it later.

  “My father has been having a nap,” she informed them. “If you want to come in, I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  She stood aside by the open door, and they filed in. She ushered them once more into the parlour and with a small nod slipped away, closing the door quietly behind her.

  They stood together awkwardly in the middle of the room. They looked at their shoes, at the furniture, at the pictures on the wall. Dorkin found himself studying the awful milksop Jesus. Except for their own breathing, and the shuffle of their feet, there wasn’t a sound in the room, nor from beyond the closed door, seemingly anywhere in the house. Their wait stretched to five minutes, then ten, and still there was no sound of Clemens’s oxlike tread in the hall.

  The realization of what this silence might mean came abruptly to all of them at once, but it was Carvell who moved first. He flung the door open and strode down the hall to the kitchen at the back. It was empty.

  A flight of very narrow stairs, as steep almost as a ladder, led up from beside the back door.

  “Take the front ones,” Carvell said to Hooper.

  He hurled himself up the stairs on all fours lik
e an ungainly dog, and Dorkin followed. They met Hooper in the upstairs hall. There was a bathroom, a back bedroom, a storeroom, all empty. In the front bedroom behind drawn blinds, a small, grey-haired woman in a long-sleeved print dress was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap. She looked up at them without surprise, as she might have looked at someone from the household who had happened to glance in at her while passing. Then she looked down again at her hands. She seemed so much older than Clemens that Dorkin thought for a moment that she must be his mother or some aging parishioner he had taken in.

  “Mrs. Clemens,” Carvell said, “we wanted to have a word with your husband. Do you know where he’s gone?”

  “I was afraid,” she said without looking up.

  “Your daughter,” Carvell said. “Do you know where your daughter and your husband have gone?”

  “I have no daughter,” she said, almost as if she were talking to herself. “I had two sons.”

  “Is she always like this?” Hooper whispered to Carvell.

  “I don’t think so,” Carvell said. “I’ve never heard anything about it.”

  “Your daughter Elizabeth,” he said to her again. “She let us in. Do you know where she and your husband have gone? Have they gone to the church?”

  “Yes,” she continued in the same abstracted tone of voice. “To the church. I was afraid, and they couldn’t wait. We were going home. At last, we were going home.”

  “There must be a path at the back,” Carvell said to Hooper. And then to Dorkin, “You’d better stay here with her. We’ll see if they’re at the church.”

  At the door, he turned back to Mrs. Clemens.

  “Mrs. Clemens,” he asked, “does your husband have a gun?”

  “Yes,” she said without looking up. “Yes, we have a gun. There’s always danger for us. Evil men.”

  “Shit,” Carvell whispered to Hooper. “We should have got him to come back with us when we were here the first time. Come on.”

  They pounded down the front stairs and out of the house. Mrs. Clemens continued to sit, oblivious to the noise of their departure, oblivious to the presence of Dorkin. He did not want to be there, dropped out of what was really his show. He looked at Mrs. Clemens. She wouldn’t know whether he were there or not, and there must be neighbours who could be sent in.

  He descended the stairs quietly so as not to arouse her from her reverie and went out the front door. Across the street, a white-haired man was raking leaves, or pretending to, while he watched the goings-on at Clemens’s house. Dorkin sprinted across to him.

  “There’s an emergency,” he said. “Do you know the Clemenses?”

  “Yes,” the man said. “Sort of. They’re neighbours.”

  “Mrs. Clemens is upstairs. Is there anyone—your wife or someone—you could send in to stay with her for a few minutes?”

  “Well, yes,” the man said. “My wife…”

  He looked over Dorkin’s shoulder.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Look at that.”

  Dorkin turned. A cloud of dirty grey smoke was boiling up above the trees and drifting off towards the creek.

  “Send your wife in to stay with Mrs. Clemens,” Dorkin said. “And phone the fire department. I think it’s the church.”

  Dorkin set off down the street at a run. There were already other people running—children, men, a few women. From far away beyond the creek, Dorkin heard the faint sound of the bell in the tower of the fire station. His man would not have had time. Someone else had phoned already.

  Clemens’s Church of the Witnesses of the Lord Jesus Christ was on a little street only a block long, which ended in a thick wall of trees and bushes, beyond which would be the steep slope that ran down to the creek. Somewhere in there presumably was the path that Clemens and his daughter had taken from the back of the house.

  The church stood in a little field, all mud and weeds and oddly reminiscent of the parking lot around The Silver Dollar. Like Clemens’s house, the building had the appearance of having been cobbled together by some ragtag group of parishioners. It was a kind of rectangular shed perfectly plain except for the little tin-sheathed steeple, not more than eight feet high, that perched near the front of the shallow-pitched roof. The roof was also sheathed in tin, a fireman’s nightmare. Once upon a time, the church had been painted white, but the paint was turning grey, flaking and peeling, leaving patches of bare wood. The fire was raging at the back of the building. There were half a dozen windows along the side wall. The last two had been broken by the heat, and dense smoke was rolling out. As it rose, it became grey, then white, but inside at its source it was black, as if choking for air, and inside the black there was an unholy, dark turbulence of fire. The smoke had also begun to seep out along the top of the wall under the eaves and around the base of the steeple, as the fire smouldered its way along the rafters.

  Four steps led up to the front door of the church, but there was no porch, and Hooper was balanced on the top step, holding onto the little two-by-four railing and trying ineffectually to kick in the door. Carvell stood at the bottom watching. There were already dozens of people around the church and along the street, all talking and chasing around. More were arriving every second. In the distance, Dorkin heard the siren of the approaching fire engine.

  “What’s happening?” Dorkin asked Carvell. “Where’s Clemens?”

  “I think he’s inside,” Carvell said. “The girl too, probably.”

  “Are you sure?” Dorkin asked. “This could be a diversion.”

  “No,” Carvell said, “I don’t think so. One of the people next door said he thought he heard shots.”

  “They must have bolted it top and bottom,” Hooper shouted.

  He gave the door one final kick and retreated back down the steps, just as the fire engine rounded the corner of the street, sending the crowd scrambling for the ditches.

  “You couldn’t have done anything anyway,” Carvell said to Hooper.

  The fire engine turned into the yard and swung around. Half a dozen men in ordinary work clothes were hanging onto the back and sides. Two of them threw off a pile of black firemen’s coats, hats, boots. The other four freed the ends of hoses from the back of the truck, and the truck drove off again down the street towards a hydrant, flip-flopping the two hose lines behind it, as the rest of the volunteer fire-men began arriving in cars. They outfitted themselves from the pile of gear on the ground, and while they waited for water, a giant of a man mounted the front step with an axe, smashed the lock side of the door, kicked it in, and was promptly driven back by a rush of smoke.

  “Do you think there’s anyone in there?” he asked Carvell.

  “Yes,” Carvell said. “But I don’t think there’s anything you can do about them now.”

  “What the hell’s going on?” the fireman asked.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Carvell said.

  “It sure got a start,” the fireman said.

  “I think it had some help.”

  Along the street, the hose lines snapped full and became fiercely alive, fighting the men who held the nozzles. They directed one of them through the windows at the back into the inferno inside, the other through the front door down the length of the church, sending rows of chairs tumbling end over end towards the pulpit.

  Within a quarter of an hour, the main fire at the back was out, but it had already burned its way up into the low attic under the tin roof and was smouldering forward along the rafters. It took over an hour to get it out. The firemen cut a hole through the gable at the front of the church, ripped off sheets of tin roofing, and cut more holes and poured water inside. Gradually, the smoke ceased. Then, when it seemed almost out, the little steeple gave an oddly human groan and settled backward into the roof. The firemen scrambled off their ladders, but for a minute nothing more happened. The steeple stayed where it was, half sunk at a forty-five degree angle into the roof. Then with a final groan and a rending of timbers, the whole thing came down
bringing part of the roof with it into the front of the church.

  Through all this, Dorkin, Carvell, and Hooper stood beside the fire truck, waiting their time, now and then getting notices from the fire chief, a fat, garrulous man, who addressed Carvell casually as George. Finally, the firemen came down off their ladders, and the hoses were turned off.

  “I’m going to put more water on it later,” the fire chief said, “but if we’re careful, we can go in and see what’s there. You better put these on. It’s going to be dirty and wet.”

  He got three sets of boots, coats, and hats off the truck, and Dorkin, Carvell, and Hooper got into them and followed him to the back of the church.

  The back door had been smashed with an axe. All that remained was a single upright board, blackened by fire, still attached to its hinges. On the other side, a heavy bolt holding some blackened splinters of wood was still shot into its housing. The floorboards inside were unsafe, and the firemen had laid planks across the joists. The three of them followed the fire chief inside. The stink of wet, burned wood was overwhelming.

  Inside the door, there was an entrance hall, and to the right of that a small room. The fire chief stood to one side of the doorway, and one by one first Hooper, then Carvell, then Dorkin looked in.

  The fire had burned up through the ceiling, and shafts of sun-light fell down into the room from cracks and holes in the roof above. The room held a desk, sodden and half burned, covered with debris from the ceiling, two chairs both overturned, and a couch. It was here that the fire must have been at its most intense—intense enough to burn through the floorboards so that the legs of the couch had punched through and the frame was now resting on the floor joists. The figure on the bed had been covered with a blanket that had been drawn up under the chin as it might have been in sleep, but the blanket, the clothing, skin, and flesh were charred and soaked into a single mass without distinguishable borders. The face on the pillow was like that of an Egyptian mummy, black, shrunk by the heat, the lips drawn back over the clenched teeth. It was evident that the figure was that of a woman, and there was in the face and the general proportions of the figure nothing that was inconsistent with its being the woman whom presumably it had to be.