The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “Tell me about Williams,” he said. “What was he like?”

  “Well, he never caused no trouble, sir. He did what he was asked to do well enough, and he never drank or got into trouble in the town.”

  “Do you think he killed the girl?”

  “No, I don’t. There was something sneaky about him, but I don’t think he was up to killing anybody. I never seen that girl in my life, but I heard she was a big, strapping girl, and one of the boys said that if her and Williams had got into a fight, she would have beat the shit out of him, if you’ll excuse the expression, sir.”

  “But not if he hit her over the head with a rock first.”

  “No, I guess not. But he seemed pretty much the same as always before the Mounties picked him up, sir. And if he’d beat that girl to death, I don’t think he could have come back here and acted as if nothing had happened.”

  “Did you ever hear who might have knocked her up?”

  “No. The boys talked about that. Nobody had any idea.”

  “You don’t think it could have been Williams?”

  “I just know what I heard from the boys. They say all he ever did was dance with her a couple of times over the last two or three weeks.”

  “Did she run around a lot?” Dorkin asked.

  “I guess so. She was supposed to be pretty well put together, and they say she liked to attract men. But she was supposed to be a cockteaser, sir, if you’ll excuse the expression.”

  “Well, there’s obviously someone around she didn’t cocktease,”

  Dorkin said.

  “Yes, sir. Or someone who wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “Could be. If you don’t think Williams killed her, have you heard anyone make a guess about who might have?”

  “No,” MacCrae said. “I don’t think it was any of the boys here. The Mounties spent two days questioning them. But that dance hall’s a rough place. There are a lot of guys who don’t go into the dance at all. They just hang around outside to drink and fight. Any one of those guys could have murdered the girl.”

  “But she was seen on the Hannigan Road with a soldier,” Dorkin said.

  “Yes, sir, but that could have been someone home on leave. Or someone in a tunic he’d picked up somewhere. It might not have been a soldier at all.”

  “Maybe. But there’s more than an hour that Williams doesn’t account for, and the Mounties say he lied to them.”

  “He was drinking, sir,” MacCrae said. “So were all the other people out there. That guy Smith, the one they call Brick, ran his car off the road on the way home that night. I wouldn’t put much stock in what any of them said about the time.”

  Dorkin thought about it and decided no. There were just too many people saying the same thing.

  “So what do you think will happen, sir?” MacCrae asked.

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t look very good.”

  “He didn’t do it, sir. I just don’t believe that he could have done that and come back here and for three or four days acted as if nothing had happened.”

  “You may be right, Sergeant, but that’s not evidence that’s going to cut much ice in court.”

  When he was gone, Dorkin opened the window and stood looking down at the parade square where a flock of ragged kids were chasing around kicking up the dust. MacCrae’s protestations about Williams’s innocence continued to roll around in his head. He also found himself remembering Thurcott’s remark about Whidden, and he reflected that Thurcott’s unease about making it imparted to it a strong ring of truth.

  Shit, Dorkin thought.

  A quarter of an hour later, driving the Jeep himself, he swung into the parking lot of The Silver Dollar and parked near the front door. There were no other cars in the lot, no signs of anyone around, but he felt as if he were being watched. He also had an odd sense of dislocation, as if somehow, notwithstanding the name proclaimed by the bullet-holed sign, he had stopped at the wrong place. The dance hall seemed smaller and meaner than the image he had formed of it from the testimony in court, and the parking lot with its dried-out potholes, its fringe of crushed weeds and grass, its litter of discarded papers and broken bottles, seemed smaller also and more squalid.

  He walked along the side of the dance hall and then back towards the edge of the woods, trying to imagine what it would have been like that night. There were half a dozen paths leading into the woods, and he took one at random. Beside it there was the kind of litter one saw in alleys where rubby-dubs went to drink, and it was only the buzzing of flies that alerted him at the last moment and kept him from stepping into a pile of shit in the middle of the path.

  After about twenty yards, the path swung off to the right and joined a wider track, which he realized must be the western re- mains of Birch Road. Gradually, this widened and became a sort of road, if two wheel tracks with grass and weeds down the middle could be called a road. In a place where there had been a puddle, he saw in the softened dirt the tread marks of a car or a small truck, and the testimony of summer nights began to reappear. The road was obviously a place to park and drink and, no doubt, make love. There were also several small clearings where a car could pull off the road, or where lovers could find privacy, and he passed three footpaths leading off to his left uphill into the woods, one of which looked well travelled.

  When he got to the Hannigan Road, he looked at his watch, saw that it was ten past nine, and realized that he had forgotten his intention to time how long it took him to walk from the dance hall to the Hannigan Road. He guessed perhaps no more than ten minutes, even walking slowly and looking around, but in the dark with a girl in dance shoes it might have taken a little longer.

  This was the corner where Williams claimed to have left Sarah Coile, and across the road and fifty yards further up was the corner of Hannigan Road and Broad Street, where the Reverend Clemens testified that he had seen someone whom he took to be Sarah Coile standing under a tree with someone whom he took to be a soldier and whom the Crown took to be Owen Williams.

  Dorkin walked up the road until he was abreast of Broad Street and then crossed over. Near the corner, just outside the rail fence that ran along the churchyard, there was a large, ancient pine, presumably the tree under which Reverend Clemens had seen his couple. Beyond that there was a line of younger maples, then the scrub below which would be the gravel pit.

  There were no streetlights out here, and there were no houses close enough to the corner to provide any real light. At eleven o’clock at night, even with a moon, it would have been very dark under those trees.

  Dorkin looked at the weathered, boarded-up church, the weathered, toppling tombstones, then walked on along Broad Street. Like the dance hall, the road down to the gravel pit was a diminished version of his imaginings, neither so long nor so steep, scarcely forty feet. Even without the photographs he had seen in court, he could probably have identified the spot where Sarah Coile’s body had lain. It was a little hollow among the mounds of earth that had slid down from the lip of the pit, and it seemed to Dorkin almost like a shallow grave. (Had her murderer thought that too?) What marked the place now was that all around it, the grass had been tramped away as on a footpath. Only in the middle where the body itself had lain was the ground still soft as it would have been then.

  He stood above it, remembering the photographs he had seen that morning, filling the grave again in imagination with its terrible occupant. He wondered if McKiel had ever come out here, and he felt sure that he had not. And he was surer still that Whidden had not. They lived, both of them, in a world of words.

  He crouched down and brushed his hand over the surface of the hollow and picked up a smooth pebble of sandstone a little bigger than the end of his thumb and put it in his pocket. Almost at once, in the real presence as it were, the questions began to swarm, and he again remembered Thurcott’s fussy unease with McKiel’s compelling logic.

  If Sarah had been the cockteaser MacCrae had described and this was her night for cockteas
ing poor, dumb Williams, what possible reason could she have had for bringing him here? And even if she did intend to let him make love to her, why would she walk past a dozen more comfortable places in the woods and in the churchyard in order to come to a gravel pit? It made no sense.

  The pathologist had been quite definite that she had not been dragged, but she could have been killed somewhere else, and then either carried here bodily or brought in a car. And Williams could have done neither. He was too small to have carried her even a short distance, and he had no car nor any likely access to one. What was more there was no real certainty that the body had been brought here the night of the dance. It could have been the next night or even the night after. He recalled Bourget’s expressing surprise that the body had not been more badly mauled by wild animals than it had.

  He found himself in a wilderness of speculation, and he was too tired to try to think it through now. The pit was already a deep pool of darkness, but the long summer evening was good for another hour of half-light, and Dorkin walked back the way he had come, timing it this time (it took fourteen minutes) and fixing the route between the dance hall and the pit more clearly in his mind.

  At The Silver Dollar, he got into the Jeep, drove back down the Bangor Road, and turned off up the Hannigan Road. As he turned, he checked the odometer. As he recalled from this morning’s evidence, Daniel Coile’s place would be about a mile from the intersection.

  Dorkin was almost past it when he noticed the homemade wooden mailbox with the single word coile printed on it in green paint. He drove on, found a place to turn where a culvert led to an old woods road, and came back more slowly for a better look.

  The house was a long way back from the road behind a snake rail fence. Dorkin recognized the early nineteenth-century colonial style, but whatever colonial elegance it may once have had was long gone. It hadn’t been painted for decades, and there was a string of crude sheds, one of them half fallen down, that had been tacked untidily onto one side.

  Lower down on the Hannigan Road, below the Coile place, there were a number of smaller houses that had never seen good times. In one of these, the Reverend Clemens had visited his sick parishioners on the night of July 1 before driving back down this road as Dorkin was now driving it, except that then it would have been after eleven o’clock and pitch dark.

  When he reached Broad Street, Dorkin turned left onto it and realized for the first time that Broad Street did not meet Hannigan Road exactly at a right angle, so that the effect was that of a shallow hairpin turn. Gawking around as he approached, Dorkin was surprised by it. Even if he knew the road, someone making that turn in the dark would have to have his wits about him.

  Yet in the second or two he would have had, the Reverend Clemens had recognized Sarah Coile and had seen that her companion was a soldier and had seen him turn his face away. He had known Sarah, so that was at least plausible. But the soldier in his dark clothing in the dark?

  At nine o’clock the next morning, when he should have been well on his way to Fredericton, Dorkin was standing in the visitors’ room at the George County jail looking out the window at the rain, a steady rain that was falling straight down as if through holes in the bottom of a bucket. When he was very young, it was in some such fashion that he had thought that rain must happen. It was to the sound of this rain that he had awakened a little before six after only three or four hours of sleep.

  When he had arrived back from his excursion to the Hannigan Road, he had sat by the window of his room while the nighthawks and swallows and the last light disappeared from the sky. He went over again and again what he had heard during the day and what he had seen that evening, and he was drawn back inescapably to two conclusions. The first was that it was very doubtful if Williams had killed Sarah Coile. The second was that if he let matters take their course, Williams would almost certainly be hanged. It was the second of these conclusions that he fought to escape from. He was not God and neither was he a policeman, and he had done everything he had been asked to do and more. The rest should be left to the system. It was not his business.

  Somewhere, from some corner in the depths of the mind, un-invited and unwelcome, there floated up Marley’s dreadful cry in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: “Mankind was my business.”

  Shit, he thought again.

  He could imagine even more clearly than he had before the kind of defence lawyer the system would be likely to provide Williams. He could, even when he thought about it, bring up particular names and faces—weakly ambitious, incompetent little men for whom the merest nod of approval from the great H. P. Whidden would matter more than their obligations to any client, let alone someone like Williams.

  He went back and forth over it all night, sleeping, then waking up to it again, then going back to a sleep troubled by obsessive anxiety dreams from which he now retained only vague memories of flight and imprisonment and humiliation.

  The upshot of the night’s excursions into these labyrinths was that he was back again at this ugly little jail.

  There were steps along the corridor, and then Williams was standing in the doorway with Carvell towering behind him. He hadn’t shaved, nor even combed his hair. He saluted his perfunctory salute. He seemed sullen and suspicious.

  “Sit down, Private Williams,” Dorkin said when the door had closed. “I’d like to have a talk with you before I go back to Fredericton.”

  For a moment, Williams remained by the door, then he slouched over and sat down, and Dorkin sat down opposite him.

  “When I go back to Fredericton,” Dorkin said, “I’m going to try to get the army to provide a lawyer for you, and it will make it a lot easier if I can give them a clear idea of what actually happened the night of the dance.”

  Williams sat, looking down into his lap, and said nothing.

  “Look,” Dorkin said, “I can’t make you talk to me if you don’t want to, but I’m trying to help you.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” Williams said, “but I don’t know that. I don’t know what side you’re on. You told me to say nothing in court, and it didn’t do me any good. How can I tell who you are?”

  “I’m a lawyer. I spend my time trying to keep soldiers out of jail when they knock out store windows and get in fights with civilians. I was sent here by headquarters in Fredericton to give you what advice I could and to see what was happening and report back. When I told you to say nothing in court, I was telling you what any lawyer would have told you. If you had started talking, you would only have got yourself in more trouble. Without any defence lawyer to protect you, McKiel would have taken you to pieces. I’m on your side, or I’m trying to be.”

  Dorkin had begun to raise his voice angrily. Williams blinked.

  “What is it you want to know about, sir?” he asked.

  “I want to find out what actually happened the night of July 1,” Dorkin said. “The Mounties think that you lied to them.”

  “No, sir, I didn’t,” Williams said. “I was mixed up about the time I left the dance hall. I wasn’t paying any attention to the time.”

  “Okay,” Dorkin said. “Tell me what happened. You went to the dance with some of the other soldiers from the armoury, and you met Sarah Coile there. How did that happen? Did you know her before?”

  “I saw her around, and I’d danced with her once before, that’s all.”

  “You weren’t the one who knocked her up?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “Okay, so what happened the night of the dance?”

  “I danced with her a couple of times, and we went out and had a drink. Then we went back in for a while and danced some more. Then there was an intermission, and we went outside again. She smoked a cigarette, and we had another drink. I heard the music starting up again inside, but she said she didn’t want to go back in because she wasn’t feeling good. She said she must have drunk too much and that she wanted to go home and would I walk her partway. She said she knew a shortcut through the woods, so w
e walked along a sort of trail from back of the dance hall out to the Hannigan Road, and I left her there, and she walked up the Hannigan Road, and I walked the other way. That was the last time I saw her.”

  “Then on Tuesday, Corporal Drost came to question you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you told him the story you just told me?”

  “Yes, sir. But not exactly. There were a lot of little things I didn’t tell him. I didn’t think they made any difference.”

  “Did Corporal Drost caution you that what you were saying might be used as evidence against you?”

  “No, sir.”

  There wouldn’t be any reason to at that point, Dorkin reflected. Still, it might be something for a defence to keep in mind since they were using what Williams had said as evidence.

  “Okay,” Dorkin said. “What did you tell me just now that you didn’t tell Drost the first time he questioned you?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. I didn’t say anything about stopping outside for a drink.”

  “And what did you tell them the second time? The same story you told Drost before?”

  “Yes, sir. Just about.”

  “And they got you to sign a paper with all that on it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you ever tell them the other things that you’ve just told me?”

  “Not all of them, sir. I’m not sure. They confused me. They never gave me time to think.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said that I lied to them. They said if I left the dance the time I said, I would have been at the canteen a lot earlier and that I must have stopped somewhere along the way.”

  “When did they tell you that they had found Sarah Coile? Right at the start?”

  “No, sir. Not until later. I didn’t understand what it was all about at first.”