“That is correct,” Bourget said.
“And the traces of semen on Private Williams’s trousers. Would these not be consistent with an act of intercourse that took place while Private Williams was still clothed—as would almost certainly be the case if he had assaulted Sarah Coile?”
“That is also correct,” Bourget said.
“Thank you,” McKiel said.
“Do you think,” Dorkin asked when Bourget had been turned over to him, “that the absence of incriminating evidence on Private Williams’s clothing would be consistent with his having assaulted Sarah Coile in almost total darkness in the bottom of a gravel pit?”
“If he had knocked her unconscious at the very beginning, yes,” Bourget said.
“You have given evidence that the body of Sarah Coile showed no signs of having been dragged,” Dorkin said. “I wonder if you have any reflections on why Private Williams and Sarah Coile should have walked past numerous places where they could have had privacy and some degree of comfort in order to go to a gravel pit?”
“People sometimes have extraordinary tastes,” Bourget said and drew a ripple of laughter.
“Would you consider it possible that the body of Sarah Coile might have been brought to the gravel pit by car, perhaps sometime that night, perhaps as much as two nights later?”
“That is certainly possible. Many things are possible. It might, for example, have been thrown over the back of a horse or lowered gently from a balloon.”
This time the laughter was louder, more general. Dorkin waited it out.
“Quite so,” he said. “But Private Williams doesn’t own a horse or a balloon any more than he owns a motor car, and since Sarah Coile by your evidence weighed one hundred and fifty pounds to Private Williams’s one hundred and forty, it seems unlikely that he carried her there bodily.”
Behind him, Dorkin heard the scrape of a chair.
“Your Honour,” McKiel said, “my learned friend is conducting a line of questioning with this witness which is quite out of order. Dr. Bourget is a pathologist, not a policeman.”
“Quite right, Mr. McKiel,” Dunsdale said.
“I apologize,” Dorkin said. “But I am trying to make it clear that it is a great deal more likely that Sarah Coile, alive or dead, was driven to the gravel pit in a car rather than chased or even walked there. One final point. The traces of semen on Private Williams’s trousers. In the preliminary hearing, I believe you made it clear that it was impossible to know how long they had been there. I believe you also suggested that there were ways they could have come there other than by an assault on Sarah Coile?”
“I don’t recall.”
“What you suggested, Dr. Bourget,” Dorkin said, “is that young men without access to female companionship sometimes make their own satisfactions and that such furtive activities could easily account for the traces of semen on Private Williams’s trousers. Would you not still agree that that could be so?”
“Yes. I suppose so.”
“Thank you. In other words, there was absolutely nothing in your examination of Private Williams’s clothes to connect him definitively to the murder of Sarah Coile?”
“I suppose not, but nothing in the world is definitive, Lieutenant Dorkin.”
“No doubt,” Dorkin said. “But if we are going to convict someone of murder, we would like to have something a little more definitive than anything arising from your testimony.”
The afternoon was fading, the sun now shining almost level through the tall windows into the faces of the public in the gallery. Dunsdale consulted his watch, consulted Whidden, then declared the court adjourned until nine o’clock the following morning.
Except for the judge’s chambers and the jury room, all the other rooms in the courthouse, including the small, bare office that Dorkin had been assigned, were at the front of the building and could only be reached by leaving through the same door as the public. Dorkin collected his papers slowly to give the crowd outside time to disperse before he and Smith made their way out, but the crowd was not in a dispersing mood, and he found the lobby and the corridors still filled with people.
As he made his way through them, Dorkin became aware of Daniel Coile and his cronies standing together by the front door, watching him silently. He met one pair of eyes, not those of Coile but of a younger man, hulking, stooped, wearing a coarse mackinaw jacket, fixing him with a look of cringing hatred, a look which if it were to seek its fulfilment would seek it silently, anonymously, from ambush, as he or someone like him had done with Louie Rosen.
Dorkin ate his supper alone in the mess at the armoury after the others had finished, picking without much appetite at some kind of fish covered with some kind of white sauce accompanied by the usual overcooked vegetables.
There was a strange quiet in the armoury. Captain Fraser had decreed that for the duration of the trial everyone except Sergeant MacCrae should be confined to barracks when they were not out on essential duties. The effect was to make the armoury seem a little like a prison.
As he ate, Dorkin read the newspaper. The front page was full of news of Arnhem. The British were reporting that General Horrocks’s Second Army had reached the Meuse and was proceeding against Arnhem. The Germans were announcing that they were mopping up the remnants of the British paratroopers. Dorkin was inclined to believe the Germans, and it seemed obvious that, as with Dieppe, the British were preparing to present a calamity as a victory in disguise.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Next morning, the stage having been prepared for him, Whidden took over, rising and advancing grandly to the centre of the court-room like a great actor. One might almost, Dorkin thought, have expected a round of applause.
His first move was to recall Corporal Drost. Unlike the other witnesses, the Mounties sat near the front of the court, and this afternoon, not only Drost but Hooper was there. While Drost was being sworn in, Hooper took the map of the Hannigan Road area from the stand where it was displayed and replaced it with a sheet of bristol board covered with rows of numbers.
Once again, as at the preliminary hearing, Drost described the meticulous interviews to establish the whereabouts of everyone who had been at or near the dance hall the night of the murder, but this time there was an additional twist. When all of this testimony had been collected, it was transferred to the chart that was now before the court. In this chart, everyone who was at the dance was identified by a number. After each number, there followed the identification numbers of the people who had accounted for that person’s movements in the period after the intermission when Sarah Coile had left the dance hall.
Standing in front of the chart, with a pointer like a school teacher, Drost showed that if the list were examined it was clear that there was no small group of people accounting for each other. Dorkin saw that the Mounties had examined the depositions exactly as he had done, and like him they had found no other potential murderer lurking among those whom they knew to be at the dance hall that night. But unlike him, they were not disposed to move outside that circle of suspects, and Dorkin saw that what they and Whidden were engaged in was the fabrication of an artificial world, like that of an Agatha Christie novel, with a carefully circumscribed locale and a carefully defined roster of suspects, so that conclusions could be removed from the untidy realm of the merely possible and rendered undeniable.
“Of all the people known to be at the dance that night,” Whidden said, “I take it that there was only one whose movements were not accounted for by anyone during the critical period, and that person was Private Williams, who was seen to have left the dance hall with Sarah Coile?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I should explain also,” Drost added, “that we asked everyone at the dance if they had seen anyone who was totally strange to them in the area and in particular if they had seen any such person with Sarah Coile. In all cases, the answer was that they had not.”
“In summary,” Whidden said, “this exhaus
tive investigation produced only one possible suspect, and that was Private Williams.”
“That is correct.”
“Corporal Drost,” Dorkin said, “I’m sure that everyone joins the Crown in its admiration for the thoroughness with which you and your constables conducted this part of the investigation. However, there are a number of questions which trouble me. As you yourself have made clear, there were people outside the dance hall that night who never went in. You have identified some of these, but would you not agree that there could have been others out there in the darkness who remained unidentified?”
“Yes,” Drost said, “in theory, I suppose, that is possible.”
“Is it not also possible that some such person could have way-laid and murdered Sarah Coile after she and Private Williams separated?”
“In theory, perhaps.”
“Is it not also possible that Sarah Coile met someone on her way home, someone perhaps with a car or a truck, that she was murdered wherever that person took her, and that her body was taken to the gravel pit, perhaps that night, perhaps even a night or two later?”
“In theory.”
“Corporal Drost, the case you have created against Private Williams is also only theory. You don’t have one scrap of concrete evidence connecting Private Williams with Sarah Coile’s death.”
Drost hesitated, considered, then let the comment pass.
“Corporal Drost,” Dorkin went on, “an article of Sarah Coile’s underclothing was not with the body and was never found in spite of a thorough search of the entire area. Nor was it found among Private Williams’s possessions at the armoury. How do you explain that?”
“Private Williams could have disposed of it on his way home. It could have been thrown into the creek, for example, as he crossed the bridge.”
“But why should Private Williams carry off this item of under-clothing and then simply throw it away somewhere?”
“It’s possible that he was not in a rational state of mind.”
“Is it not more possible that it was taken off somewhere other than in the gravel pit in the company of someone other than Private Williams and that it was used to suffocate her and then disposed of?”
“Many things are possible.”
“Corporal Drost, there is someone who had a very good reason for killing Sarah Coile. Could I ask you if you ever made any attempt to find the person responsible for getting Sarah Coile pregnant?”
“We questioned all of her close friends,” Drost said. “None of them were aware of her condition. And none of them knew any-thing which would be of help in identifying the person in question.”
“Does it not strike you as odd that this person has never come forward?”
“There could be many reasons for that.”
“So your conclusion is that it was mere coincidence that Sarah Coile should be pregnant and that she should be viciously assaulted and murdered?”
“We felt that her pregnancy had nothing to do with her death,”
Drost said.
“The jury might be interested to know,” Dorkin said, “that at the preliminary hearing the Crown floated the suggestion that the reason Private Williams murdered Sarah Coile was that she was pregnant by him. It was only when they came to find out that Private Williams could not possibly have been the father of Sarah’s child that they decided that Sarah’s death and her pregnancy were unrelated. I suggest that the Crown was right the first time. Sarah Coile’s pregnancy and her death were related, and the author of both is still at large somewhere. For all we know, perhaps among the public in this very courtroom.”
This produced a stir and a tap of Dunsdale’s gavel, and Dorkin went back to his place well pleased with himself.
Whidden’s next witness was the Reverend Zacharias Clemens. While Drost removed his chart of names, Clemens extricated him-self from the middle of a row of seats at the back and plodded heavily to the witness stand. Dorkin saw that he had undergone something of a transfiguration since the preliminary hearing. He had a new, dark-grey suit and a dark-green tie. He had even had a haircut. The overall effect was to make him look more like a benign United Church minister than a shaggy evangelist prophet.
“Now, Reverend Clemens,” Whidden said, “perhaps we can turn to the night of July 1, and you can tell the court in your own words what you saw that is of relevance to these proceedings. I have had the map of the area placed before the court again, and you can perhaps refer to that to make your account clearer.”
The Reverend Clemens cleared his throat and turned slightly in his chair so that he was addressing the jury. Once again he went painstakingly through his account of working at his church, of visiting the Salchers, of departing to return to his church somewhere around eleven o’clock, and of seeing at the corner of the Hannigan Road and Broad Street the couple whom he identified as Sarah Coile and a soldier whose appearance was consistent with that of Private Williams.
All through this, Dorkin watched Clemens closely—watched the eyebrows, the muscles at the side of the face, the hands resting on his knees—looking for telltale signs of a lie that he had still not become entirely comfortable with. But there was nothing. The impression created was that of an honest citizen who had become a part of these painful proceedings out of a sense of duty. Dorkin could see that the jury found him totally convincing.
Dorkin looked at Williams. He was staring at Clemens in a sightless sort of way, his face a blank, and Dorkin wondered how much of all this he was really taking in.
In the middle of the courtroom, his arms negligently sweeping the air, Whidden was engaged in a peroration on Clemens’s conscientious accuracy as a witness. When he had finished, Dorkin rose. If Clemens was apprehensive about being cross-examined, he didn’t show it, and Dorkin knew that he was going to have to deal with him very cautiously if he was not going to antagonize the jury.
“Reverend Clemens,” he said, “I too must compliment you on the scrupulous care you have taken in giving your testimony, and I am not for a moment questioning your conscientiousness in de-scribing what you believe you saw that night, but I am wondering if perhaps you may have been mistaken about what you saw. You said that when you came around the corner, the couple you saw were talking to each other, and when they saw you, they turned their faces away towards the graveyard.”
“Yes, that is so.”
“So you had only a brief glance at their faces. Are you sure that that glance was enough to allow you to be sure that the girl was Sarah Coile?”
“It wasn’t just that. She was someone whom I had seen many times.”
“You’re absolutely certain that the girl whom you saw was Sarah Coile? Are you sure you didn’t leap to the conclusion that it was Sarah Coile on the basis of a few superficial similarities and then later fill in the rest of the detail from your own imagination? That happens, you know, and there are numerous cases where wit-nesses have done that in court. These were not people who were attempting to deceive. They genuinely believed what they said, but other evidence proved incontrovertibly that they could not possibly have seen what they testified to. Are you sure that you have not deceived yourself in this way about Sarah Coile?”
“I believe that the girl whom I saw that night was Sarah Coile. I wish that it had not been.”
“Beyond doubt?”
“Yes. Beyond doubt.”
“Reverend Clemens,” Dorkin said, “if you look at the map which has been prepared of the area, you will notice that the way the inter-section of Broad Street and Hannigan Road has been drawn is not quite accurate.”
Clemens looked at the map.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“The map shows the intersection as a right-angled turn, but in fact that is not a right-angled turn. Broad Street joins Hannigan Road at a slight angle, so that if you are coming down the Hannigan Road and making a left turn onto Broad Street, you are making a slight hairpin turn. Is that not correct?”
“I believe it is,” Cleme
ns said. “I hadn’t thought about it before.”
“This means,” Dorkin said, “that since you are coming down a hill, that is a slightly difficult turn which does not leave you a lot of time to look around, especially in the dark. It also means that when you are around the turn, anyone standing on the corner will already be slightly behind you, over your left shoulder. I know because I went out there and drove that corner several times in the dark, and I could not see very much of the tree under which the two people you saw were standing.”
“The girl was wearing a white dress, which stood out,” Clemens said. “I suppose that was what caught my eye. I am also a very slow, cautious driver. I expect I don’t take corners as quickly as you might do.”
“Please understand,” Dorkin said, “that I am not for a moment questioning your attempt to describe accurately what you believe you saw, but I must point out that even allowing for your driving slowly, in that very brief period of time, only two or three seconds, the two people had time to see you and turn their faces away, and you had time not only to recognize Sarah Coile but to note the details of what she was wearing and to see the height and build of the man, the fact that he had dark hair and was not wearing a cap, and the fact that he was dressed in army uniform even though that also would be dark.”
“I can’t say how long it took,” Clemens said. “It may have been longer than you say, but anyway that was what I saw.”
“I believe it was on the Friday, two days after the body was found, that you went to the police,” Dorkin said.
“That is so.”
“By that time, there had been a good deal of talk about what had happened. You would have heard this too.”
The Case Against Owen Williams Page 21