The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  Dorkin had never before seen so swift a transition from life to death. He was badly shaken, and as he stepped back from the door, he reflected that it was probably in that room and on that bed that Sarah Coile had also died before being taken to the gravel pit to be stoned and left for the dogs.

  At the back of the entrance hall, a second door, charred to a cardboard thinness but still in one piece, led onto the platform in the main hall of the church. The ruins of the steeple filled the area by the main door, and in front of the platform there was the pile of chairs tumbled forward by the force of the fire hoses. A steady rain of black water was falling through the ceiling from the charred timbers under the roof.

  On the platform there was a pulpit, blackened but upright, and just beyond it, lying curled up on its side as if it had been kneeling and fallen over, much less burned, much more recognizable than the other, lay the body of the Reverend Zacharias Clemens. Just beyond it lay a small .32 revolver.

  When Dorkin and Carvell arrived back at the Clemens house, there were cars parked along the street and a small crowd of people on the lawn in front of the house.

  “The Reverend’s flock, I expect,” Carvell said.

  Dorkin looked at them with a mixture of pity and distaste: men whose trousers stopped six inches above their boots, slatternly women in ill-fitting print dresses, people grotesquely fat or grotesquely thin, or cross-eyed, or wall-eyed, people whose limbs seemed somehow to have got hung on wrong. The misfits of the countryside whom Clemens had taught to see themselves as the chosen of God.

  Inside, there were more of them. Elders, perhaps, or whatever the especially chosen were called.

  “Hello, Ezra,” Carvell said to one of them. “Is Mrs. Clemens still here?”

  “Upstairs,” the man said. “Upstairs with some of the women.”

  “Does she know what’s happened?” Carvell asked.

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “I don’t know. I ain’t been up.”

  He looked fearfully at Carvell, then at Dorkin.

  “But you know?” Carvell asked.

  “Yes,” the man said. “I guess so.”

  Mrs. Clemens was still sitting on the edge of the bed where Dorkin had left her. There were three other women in the room, sitting on straight-backed chairs facing her. They stared at Dorkin and Carvell without getting up or speaking. Mrs. Clemens seemed hardly aware of them.

  “I’m afraid we have some bad news,” Carvell said to her.

  She looked at him for a moment, then her eyes drifted away and fixed themselves on something only she could see. Then they became hard. She looked back at Carvell.

  “That girl,” she said fiercely. “That whore. She was even leading her own father into sin. Everyone knew it.”

  Carvell turned to the women.

  “I’d like to talk to her alone for a minute,” he said. “Could you wait outside?”

  They glanced at each other and, still without speaking, rose and went out into the hall. Carvell moved as if to close the door, then changed his mind and left it open.

  “Your daughter,” Carvell began.

  “I have no daughter,” she said, repeating what she had said before. “I had two sons.”

  “Your husband’s daughter, then,” Carvell said. “Elizabeth.”

  “Nor his daughter either. She was his Bride in God. As I was. I first, then Elizabeth.”

  She looked at Carvell impatiently as at someone who lived in ignorance in some outer darkness, hardly worth her attention.

  “He was a prophet,” she said. “Like Abraham. He had the right to more wives than one. They freed him so that he could bear wit-ness to God.”

  “And Sarah Coile?” Dorkin asked. “Was she also a bride in God?”

  “That one! She took possession of his soul and left him no peace. She was destroying him. She clothed him in a coat of fire. She was a witch. An agent of Satan. She would have brought destruction down on our house. She would have scattered our flock and left them to the mercy of the storm. It was the devil in her that was destroyed so that her soul could be saved.”

  She stopped.

  “I was afraid,” she went on. “When the time came, I was afraid. The time came, as he always said it would. But I was afraid.”

  “I don’t want to distress you,” Carvell said. “But is there anyone we can get in touch with? Do you have relatives? I heard you were from the States.”

  “I have no relatives,” she said. “I had a mother and a father and a husband and two sons, but I went out of their house because I had been shown the way.”

  “Can we get in touch with them?” Carvell asked.

  “No. It was long ago. Long ago.”

  Downstairs, the people started to sing, raggedly, some hymn, and after a few bars, it was taken up by some of the people outside on the lawn.

  “You should have heard him,” she said. “You should have seen him. The light of the Lord was upon him. I was afraid. But I was honoured still more that he should come to me. In the night. In a cloud of fire.”

  Just before seven o’clock, Grant and his team arrived, three carloads of them. Dorkin stood at the corner on Broad Street and watched them drive up to the church and disembark. They had brought the tracking dog with them. They had also brought Corporal Drost. As he emerged from the back of one of the cars, he looked down the little street, and his eyes and Dorkin’s met. Surprised, he stared briefly, but he made no sign of recognition, nor did Dorkin. Dorkin watched the first of them enter the ruined church, then turned away, back to his own car, and left.

  Now he sat in his office, waiting for the call that Carvell had promised him. It was almost midnight when it finally came.

  “So?” Dorkin said.

  “So,” Carvell said, “they spent over an hour talking to Mrs. Clemens. You were right. It was Clemens. You were probably also right about Coile. He was apparently messing around with Sarah, though it’s hard to say exactly how far it went.”

  “Was it Coile or Clemens who got her pregnant?” Dorkin asked.

  “It’s hard to say, but I suspect it was Clemens. It’s also hard to say exactly what happened. Mrs. Clemens wasn’t very coherent, and there were probably things she just didn’t know. It looks as if Sarah may have gone to Clemens about her father, and Clemens took advantage of her. Although I suppose it’s possible that she took advantage of him. That’s the way Mrs. Clemens sees it any-way, but I’m not sure I’d put much stock in that. Whichever way, he became involved with her, and it obviously got out of control. Out of his control, I mean. It sounds as if he was out of his mind over her.”

  “What about the murder?” Dorkin asked.

  “It’s hard to know exactly what happened there either. Apparently, Mrs. Clemens and Elizabeth weren’t at the church on the Saturday afternoon when Sarah went there to see Clemens as he said they were. It may be that she threatened him. She may have wanted money to get away with and maybe get rid of the baby. Maybe he didn’t have it. Maybe he thought that if he started giving her money, there’d be no end to it. If Sarah was trying to set Williams up, she must have had doubts about Clemens looking after her, and she was looking for another way out. It’s also possible that she told Clemens she was going to find someone else, and he was crazy with jealousy. But we’re never going to know.

  “I don’t think we’re ever going to know exactly what happened that night either. After she left Williams, Clemens obviously intercepted her somewhere, probably on one of the paths up through the woods. It’s difficult to know how planned it may have been. Or where it happened. I suspect he may have lured her back to the church on some pretext or other. It’s pretty doubtful that he killed her there in the woods. There were too many people around, and he couldn’t have carried her very far given her weight. And it’s hard to know when she was taken to the gravel pit.”

  “But there’s no doubt that it was Clemens?” Dorkin asked.

  “No. No doubt at all. Apparently the three of them talked about it. It’s
all crazy as hell.”

  “Have you told Williams about it?”

  “No. I thought you might want to.”

  Dorkin hesitated.

  “No,” he said. “You tell him. I’ll talk to him tomorrow before I leave. He’s not my problem anymore.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  Dorkin sat at the front of the restaurant by the window, looking out at the square with its neat, geometric criss-cross of walks, its ornate, Victorian bandstand, its old-fashioned iron benches that had survived five years of patriotic scrap drives. These things were to him as old as his memory of himself, the setting of summer walks with his mother, of summer concerts and summer games. The bandstand was boarded up now for the winter, and the triangles of grass between the walks were covered with a thin pack of dirty snow. In spite of the raw cold there were, as always, a few men on the benches—bums and merchant seamen pausing to reflect on their further peregrinations through the city in search of warmth or liquor or love. And on the walks they sat beside, there was a continuous traffic of shoppers. It was Friday, December 22, and Monday would be Christmas Day, the sixth Christmas of the war. And perhaps not the last after all.

  On the table beside Dorkin’s coffee cup lay the morning news-paper, its front page full of calamity. Once more, as in the spring of 1940, the panzers had struck through the Ardennes. This time it was the Americans who had been smashed, and the headlines were ominous. NO HINT THAT GERMAN OFFFFENSIVE SPENT. GERMANS USING MORE TROOPS THAN WON BATTTTLE OF FRANCE. In the middle of the page, there was a photograph of long lines of American vehicles bumper to bumper pulling back. It was obviously a rout.

  Whether as reward or punishment, Dorkin’s request for a transfer to regular army duties in Europe had at last been granted, and he was home in Saint John on embarkation leave. It was strange as always to be back among these familiar surroundings, strangest of all to be back in his own room with its relics of childhood and the haunting background murmur of the city outside the window, pervasive and elusive, like some quality of the air itself. Inside, pervasive and elusive also, there was the sad Jewish atmosphere with its sense of distances of space and time, those distances whose memory his father fought so furiously to deny and bury. But for weeks now rumours of unimaginable massacres had been filtering into the news reports, and Dorkin was aware that his father was more talkative even than usual, about nothing, about trivialities, filling the air with words. Behind this also, Dorkin knew, there was his departure, hardly ever mentioned. Dorkin did not believe for a minute that he would not be back. Soldiers never did. Parents nourished no such illusions, finding themselves almost daily on the edge of an abysm of grief, every arriving mail a heart-stopping moment of fear, every telegraph boy on the street an agent of terror.

  The inquest for Zacharias and Elizabeth Clemens had been held two weeks after their deaths. Since there was nothing that Dorkin could add to the more official evidence that Carvell and Hooper would give and since it was not directly an army matter, it was not thought necessary by the army that he be there. The inquest was also in effect a trial, and when it was over, the Reverend Clemens stood condemned and Private Williams exonerated. But the law does not so willingly let go those whom it has decided to remove, temporarily or permanently, from the world, and it was another two weeks before Williams was released and returned to the army, his crimes expunged from his record, the papers ordering his dishonourable discharge made quietly to vanish.

  One evening in mid-November when Dorkin was in the officers’ mess back at Utopia, a fellow lieutenant brought him a newspaper folded over to an inside page. The item was a single sentence, reporting that a body recovered from the St. John River below Wakefield had been positively identified as that of Mrs. Roseann Clemens. A week after that, a letter arrived from George Carvell, a long letter in a surprisingly elegant hand—by way, it said, of an epilogue to these late, strange events.

  The day after Dorkin’s departure, Mrs. Clemens had been taken to the hospital. She was given a room by herself, and she spent most of her time just sitting. Sometimes when the nurses spoke to her, she acted as if she hadn’t heard. Sometimes she talked to herself, and sometimes the nurses had the impression that she was imagining that there were people in the room whom she was talking to.

  Since there seemed to be nothing that could be done for her in the hospital, she was released and went to live with one of the families from the church. She stayed with them for a couple of weeks and seemed to be getting better. She helped with housework, and she started going out to do shopping. Then one day a man walking across the St. John River bridge from the far side saw a woman standing looking over the rail. She looked up at him, and when he was a dozen yards away, she climbed up onto the rail, let herself slide off feet first, and dropped the thirty feet into the river. About a week afterwards, some boys in a boat found her four miles downstream, wedged up against some bushes and frozen into the first skim of winter ice.

  Constable Hooper had continued his search into her back-ground. He knew that the Clemenses had come to Wakefield from a church on the Miramichi, and the people there said that they had come from Ontario, but no one knew where. The Mounties checked in Ontario and found nothing. They sent descriptions of Clemens and the two women to the FBI and found nothing. The FBI checked with state police in the south and found nothing.

  Hooper thought that they had probably changed their names, perhaps more than once. Both the women had apparently been married before they went with Clemens and perhaps were being pursued by husbands and relatives. Somewhere in the States, there were obviously people through whom the story could be pieced together, but it seemed unlikely that they would ever be found and that anything would ever be known beyond what was known now.

  “If you believed in spirits,” Carvell wrote, “you might think they were a visitation from another world. As for Clemens, I suspect that his little room at the church was host to more female companion-ship than just Sarah Coile, and I wonder if there may have been other victims elsewhere.”

  On the Sunday morning after the fire, when he had gone to the jail, Dorkin found Williams sitting by the table in his cell reading a book printed on cheap, wartime, pulp paper. The Seventh Angel. A trashy religious tract, from his spiritual mentor no doubt, with a cover lurid with the lightning of the final judgement.

  “Sheriff Carvell has told you what happened?” Dorkin said.

  “Yes,” Williams said. “When are they going to let me out of here?”

  “I don’t know,” Dorkin said. “It’ll be a few days, I expect. There will have to be some ruling made in Fredericton.”

  “Will I get compensated?” Williams asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dorkin said.

  “I should be. I shouldn’t have been arrested at all. It wasn’t fair.”

  “No, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all. But life isn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to Sarah Coile either.”

  “She was a whore,” Williams said belligerently. “All she wanted was to trap me into marrying her.”

  “No,” Dorkin said. “She wasn’t a whore. Just a poor, lonely girl life never gave a chance to. Now that you’ve been given a chance, you should start by showing some compassion.”

  Williams ignored him.

  “Reverend Limus always said that God would save me,” he said.

  “It wasn’t God,” Dorkin said. “Don’t flatter yourself. God had nothing to do with it. It was blind luck and one of the local drunks.”

  Back at the armoury, Dorkin had packed up his papers and his kit in preparation for his immediate and final departure from Wakefield. He had not been thanked, nor had he expected or wanted to be, and when he looked back on all that had happened, he felt more depressed than elated. He had, by mere luck, rescued an innocent boy, who was also a mean-minded, self-righteous little shit. Not that these were capital offences. But still. He had avenged Sarah Coile, but vengeance does not raise the dead. Louie Rosen, unavenged, was also dead. An end h
ad been put to the Reverend Clemens, but his two wives in God had been taken down with him. Daniel Coile and his cronies were all alive and well. The irrepressible H. P. Whidden would no doubt go on to compensatory triumphs, the cool-blooded McKiel to still more.

  The dark tower forever awaits, the knight errant forever rides out, and in the end the only thing he ever really changes is himself.

  He finished his coffee, put on his great coat, and walked out into the cold. On the other side of the square, the movie theatres were advertising Going My Way with Bing Crosby and Hollywood Canteen with Barbara Stanwyck. He had no interest in either, but he noted the titles in case he might want to affect an interest in order to escape from the house for a couple of hours some evening.

  He turned down King Street into the raw cold rising up from the harbour. At the corner of Dock Street, two merchant seamen, one very drunk, were arguing in a Germanic-sounding language, perhaps Swedish. A Canadian sailor and his girlfriend gave them a wide berth, and a policeman on the other side of the street had stopped to keep an eye on them.

  Dorkin made his way past and walked out to the end of the slip and leaned on the rail to look across the harbour. The commercial docks on the other side were lined solid with merchant ships, squat, ugly, their paint peeling, leaving patches of rusted metal.

  Down the harbour beyond the commercial docks, small clouds of mist shifted, dissipating, reforming above the ice-cold water. Once long ago, when he was in grade three or four, his class had been brought down here as part of an outing, and the teacher had pointed down the harbour to the place where nearly three and a half centuries before, Champlain’s little ship had anchored. Now in the place, or near it, Dorkin could make out through the mist the shape of a destroyer, grey, low, clean-lined, and deadly, riding at anchor, awaiting its charges.