The Case Against Owen Williams, Page 5

  Thanks to previous encounters of this sort, Dorkin took all this in in a moment, and he saw that in that unguarded moment Fraser had seen him take it in and had put him down as a hostile presence. Talking from the height of his rank, Fraser had hinted unmistakably enough that he regarded Dorkin’s being sent, even as an observer, as an intrusion on his authority and a questioning of his judgement. It was clear that he would have liked Williams hanged without even the bother of a trial and that he saw Dorkin as someone who might somehow sully the purity of these feelings. On his side, Dorkin had hidden behind his subordinate rank to stay clear of any argument, but he did not want to have to deal with Fraser again this morning or any other morning.

  When he had shaved and showered, in more or less cold water, and got himself into his uniform, Dorkin hunted out Sergeant MacCrae to ask where he could breakfast and was directed to the town’s main hotel, a great four-storey barn of a building with a balcony from which a Union Jack hung out over the street. Three-quarters of an hour later, breakfasted, feeling a little better about things, he walked slowly up Main Street through the centre of town and off along a little side street to the George County jail and his first business of the day.

  Dorkin had never seen a good-looking jail, and this one was particularly ugly. It was a square, two-storey building, constructed of some kind of cheap orange brick, and it was much too wide for its height so that it seemed to be crouching by the sidewalk like a gigantic toad. There had been some half-hearted passes at ornamentation which seemed somehow only to enhance the ugliness. There were remembrances of medieval stonework, pointed windows of vaguely ecclesiastical shape, and at one corner a squat tower topped with truncated sandstone battlements.

  Dorkin mounted the steps under the squat little tower, pushed open the door, and found himself in a short hallway with barred windows on one side, an open door on the other, and a much heavier, closed door in front of him. There was a stale smell and somehow an atmosphere of darkness in spite of the morning sun that was pouring in through the barred windows.

  Dorkin went to the open door. Inside, a tall man in an immaculately tailored grey suit was sitting behind a desk smoking a cigarette. He was fiftyish with a clean-lined, rather English face, dark hair going grey at the temples, and cool, hazel eyes. Dorkin noticed the thin scar that angled down across one side of his forehead.

  “Good morning,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Dorkin. I’ve been sent up from Area Headquarters. I’d like to talk with Private Williams for a few minutes before the hearing.”

  The man rose and held out his hand across the desk.

  “I’m George Carvell,” he said. “The local sheriff.”

  Some wry twist in the voice made it sound like a parody of a line from a western movie.

  “You’ve come to represent Williams?” he asked.

  “No,” Dorkin said. “I’m just here to look on and report back to Fredericton.”

  “He’s not going to have any counsel then?”

  “No, not so far as I know. That’s why I want to talk to him.”

  Carvell raised his eyebrows.

  “Captain Fraser gave me the impression that the army was sending someone up to act as counsel.”

  “No. Captain Fraser must have misunderstood the situation.”

  “He should have counsel.”

  “I agree,” Dorkin said. “But the army’s view, at the moment anyway, is that that is not its responsibility.”

  “It’s a nasty affair,” Carvell said.

  “It is,” Dorkin agreed. “In more ways than one.”

  “Well,” Carvell said, “I’ll take you out back.”

  He led Dorkin out to the door at the end of the hallway and took out a ring full of keys and inserted one into the lock.

  “The dungeon,” he said.

  Beyond the door there was a line of cells on either side of a corridor. They were empty except for one in which a man who looked like a tramp was lying curled up on his bunk facing the wall.

  “Thirty days for drinking and fighting in public,” Carvell said.

  From a door at the end of the corridor, a grotesquely fat man emerged.

  “Henry Cronk,” Carvell said. “Our county jailer. Lieutenant Dorkin is here to see Private Williams.”

  “I can lock you in,” he said to Dorkin, “but there’s an interview room down here where you’ll be more comfortable.”

  “I would prefer the room,” Dorkin said.

  “Open up, Henry,” Carvell said.

  Henry rattled his way along a ring of keys until he found the right one and turned it in the lock. He managed to convey a sense of ritual importance to the unlocking of the door, a sense of some imminent moment of high drama, as if the door were going to open on someone fabulous, like Bluebeard or Jack the Ripper. Instead it opened on a prisoner who looked as harmless as any Dorkin had ever seen. But then, he thought, Dr. Crippen would also have looked harmless. And Sweeney Todd. Even Adolf Hitler, whom someone very unlucky had just failed to kill with a bomb a few days before. Williams was the first murderer, putative or otherwise, whom Dorkin had ever seen.

  Williams had been lying on his bunk, but he got up warily when the door was opened. He was not wearing his battle dress but a rumpled work uniform.

  “This is Lieutenant Dorkin,” Carvell said. “From headquarters in Fredericton. He wants to talk to you.”

  Williams hesitated, still wary, watchful. Then he saluted perfunctorily, the kind of salute that in the wrong place to the wrong officer could get a soldier put on a charge.

  The room that Carvell showed them to was like other rooms Dorkin had sat in with other prisoners in other jails. It was furnished with a plain wooden table and four plain wooden chairs. On the table, there was a small tin ashtray that would have been quite useless as a weapon. The window, of course, was barred.

  Dorkin sat down at the table and motioned Williams into a chair opposite him.

  “You can smoke if you want to,” Dorkin told him.

  “I don’t smoke, sir.”

  He sat hunched forward with his fingers hooked nervously over the edge of the table. Dorkin noticed that the nails were bitten back almost to the quick. He seemed to remember that Williams was twenty or thereabouts, but there was something of the pimply adolescent about him. In spite of the jet black hair, his skin was white, untanned and untannable, like that of the Irish girls Dorkin had gone to school with in Saint John.

  “Why are you wearing clothes like that?” Dorkin asked. “Where is your uniform?”

  “The Mounties took it the night I was arrested, sir,” Williams said.

  “You didn’t get another uniform?”

  “No, sir.”

  That would be Fraser’s doing, Dorkin thought, with the idea of distancing Williams from the army and himself.

  “You still don’t have a lawyer?” Dorkin asked.

  “No, sir. My uncle tried to get one in Fredericton, but he couldn’t find anyone.”

  “Your uncle?”

  “Yes, sir. My mother and father are both dead. My father got gassed in the war. He couldn’t work much, and he died when I was ten years old. My mother died a couple of years ago. They had a farm in Carnarvon, but that went to my uncle for debts or something.”

  “I see,” Dorkin said. “Well, if you can’t afford a lawyer, the court will appoint one for you. You can’t be tried without a lawyer.”

  “Maybe after today I won’t need one,” Williams said.

  Dorkin affected not to be surprised by such naivety.

  “All I did was walk that girl a little way from the dance hall and leave her,” Williams said. “I didn’t do anything to her.”

  Dorkin studied him. He sounded confident enough, but he had had over three weeks to practise speeches like that.

  “That may be,” Dorkin said, “but I think I’d better warn you that a prosecutor doesn’t usually go to a preliminary hearing unless he is reasonably sure that he has a chance of his case being sent to trial.�
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  Dorkin saw Williams’s face whiten even further, and the fingers dropped from the table edge into his lap.

  “But I didn’t do anything to her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dorkin said, “but I have to warn you. They evidently feel that they have enough evidence to justify a trial, and that is what will probably happen.”

  “What will happen today?”

  “They’re going to present the evidence they have to a magistrate. If he thinks it’s enough to make it seem possible that you are guilty, he’ll set a trial date in two or three months. If you had a lawyer, he would contest their evidence. Since you don’t, you shouldn’t say anything yourself at all. You’ll only get yourself in more trouble. When you’re asked if there’s anything you want to say, you should say that you’ve been advised not to say anything until you have a lawyer to represent you.”

  “But then they’ll think I’m guilty,” Williams said.

  “No, they won’t. It’s the normal thing to do in the circumstances.”

  Williams stared across the table at the window beyond which the leaves of a maple tree stood against the sky, and birds came and went, and the ordinary world went on. Dorkin was afraid Williams was going to start to cry.

  “Do you understand?” Dorkin repeated. “You shouldn’t make any statements in court. Or to anyone about any of this until you get a lawyer. But listen to what is said so that you can tell your lawyer when you have one about anything which doesn’t seem to be an accurate account of what happened. Do you understand?”

  “Why couldn’t my uncle find a lawyer?” Williams asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dorkin lied. “There may not have been anyone who was free to take the case.”

  No one would take it, Dorkin knew, because it was a case where there was nothing to be gained—not money evidently and certainly not glory. If Williams were convicted, his lawyer would be seen as having chalked up a well-deserved defeat in defence of a bad cause, and he would have to endure such guilt as he might be capable of at having a client hanged—for if Williams were convicted, he would unquestionably be hanged. Everyone—the law, the army, public opinion—would certainly see to that. And in the unlikely event that Williams was acquitted, his lawyer would be seen by the public as a clever scoundrel who had contrived to subvert the course of justice.

  The lawyer whom Williams would end up with, Dorkin knew, would be some court-appointed incompetent who would simply go through the motions of a defence because in his heart he wouldn’t even want to win. Dorkin studied Williams and realized that he was almost certainly talking to a dead man. In the interest of his own peace of mind and his perhaps already fading belief in human justice, he could only hope that Williams was indeed guilty as charged.

  The central court of George County was a majestic room some sixty feet square and two storeys high with a spectators’ gallery at the back which made it seem a little like a theatre. The judge’s bench was on a raised platform about four feet above the main floor. To the right and lower was the witness box. Down one side wall was the jury box, down the other a long table. Facing the judge and completing the rectangle, were two long tables, the left for the defence, the right for the prosecution. Behind these, separated by a low rail, there was seating for a couple of hundred spectators. The room was panelled in oak and filled with light from four tall windows along each side.

  When he had left Williams, Dorkin had presented his letter of introduction from Meade to the presiding magistrate, Thurcott, a prim little man with rimless glasses, an old friend of Meade’s with the same unmistakable air of good family. But this morning, behind his polished manners and his surface assurance, he was clearly nervous. Like Dorkin’s, his normal clientele had been guilty only of petty crimes, where a little blood might have been shed, but no life had been taken and none was at stake. He was very unhappy that there was no defence counsel, and in its absence he arranged that Dorkin be seated at the table where the defence would have sat if there had been one.

  There Dorkin now waited, surprised and a little intimidated by the unexpected magnificence of the setting in which he found himself. Behind him, every seat on the main floor and in the balcony was filled with a small fraction of the crowd that had assembled over the last hour. The rest were outside, filling the sidewalk and street near the jail, hoping at least for a glimpse of Williams as he was led in, creating an atmosphere suggestive to Dorkin of what it must have been like at a public hanging.

  At five to ten, there was a commotion behind him, and Dorkin turned to watch the arrival of the prosecution: two attorneys followed by half a dozen assistants with briefcases and papers. Most of these people Dorkin did not know, but there was one whom almost everyone would have known if only from newspaper photographs.

  H. P. Whidden was one of the wonders of the provincial bar.

  Nearing sixty now, massive, with a great mane of white hair combed straight back, he was an extravagant courtroom performer. Florid of phrase, grandiose of gesture, his specialty was the emotional appeal to high principle and noble sentiment in the service of whoever could afford his considerable fees. That the government had appointed him special prosecutor for this trial was a mark of the importance that someone in authority attached to securing a conviction. That Whidden had accepted it was a mark of the publicity the trial could be expected to attract—and of the fact that he felt sure of winning.

  Twice when he was a student, Dorkin had attended trials where Whidden had appeared. Once he had heard him speak at the law school, and afterwards, as one of their most promising students, he had been introduced and had shaken the great man’s hand and been given the famous pointed scrutiny that had made him feel a little like a witness who had just given himself away on the stand. Dorkin had never heard what the H. P. stood for, but he recalled a much-told story in which some witty judge had once said to Whidden, “Don’t give me no sauce, H. P.”

  Leading his entourage today was his junior partner, Donald McKiel. Thirty years old, tall, lean, bespectacled, he was as great a contrast to Whidden as calculation could have devised. Dorkin had been in residence with McKiel, a freshman when McKiel had been in his final year. McKiel had been one of those frightening rarities, a student who had decided exactly what he wanted to become before he ever arrived at university and pursued his goal with unswerving singleness of purpose. No booze, no late nights, no dames. Some squash, at which he was very good, to keep fit, a movie or a game of bridge now and then to clear the head.

  It was possible to imagine Whidden, even at sixty, destroying himself through some spectacular act of folly. Not so McKiel.

  As they settled themselves, the clock on top of the post office down the street began to strike ten, the sound at first just registering above the buzz of conversation, then silencing it. In that silence, Thurcott emerged from the door behind the bench and took his place. Then from another door to the side, Carvell and a deputy sheriff escorted Williams to his place at the table along the side to Dorkin’s left.

  He was dressed as Dorkin had seen him earlier in his rumpled work uniform, which made him appear as if he were already a convict. As he sat down, obviously stunned by his surroundings, he seemed the very image of abject guilt brought before the bar of justice.

  Thurcott tapped his gavel, cleared his throat, and began. They were here to conduct the preliminary hearing of Owen Thomas Williams, private in the Seaforth Highlanders of Nova Scotia, lately of the County of York, in connection with the death of Sarah Elizabeth Coile of the County of George, who met her death by foul play at some time between July l and July 5 this year of our lord 1944.

  “The Crown is to be represented in these proceedings by special prosecutor H. P. Whidden and assistant prosecutor Donald McKiel. I regret to say that Private Williams is not represented by counsel. Is that correct?”

  He turned to Williams, and Williams mumbled something in-audible. “You understand that you yourself have the right to question witnesses if you wish,” Thurcott said, “b
ut I must warn you that anything you say will constitute evidence in this case and may be used against you. Do you understand?”

  “I have been advised by Lieutenant Dorkin that I should not say anything until I have a lawyer,” Williams said in a low voice, as if reciting a lesson.

  Thurcott turned to Dorkin.

  “I realize that you are not here to represent Williams,” Thurcott told him, “but you are naturally free to seek clarification of any of the testimony that is presented, if you wish.”

  Dorkin nodded, disguising the nervousness he felt under the scrutiny of so many eyes.

  “We may proceed then,” Thurcott said. “Mr. Whidden, if you will call your first witness.”

  Whidden rose slowly, leaning forward with one hand on the table.

  “I beg to inform you, sir,” he said, the rich voice booming effortlessly, “that I have turned this part of the proceedings over to my assistant, Mr. McKiel.”

  A murmur of disappointment ran through the spectators, and McKiel rose and called Corporal Drost of the RCMP.

  Corporal Drost, in full dress uniform, sat with a small notebook discreetly in his right hand and began the story of the discovery of Sarah Coile: the phone call from her mother, the interviews with Vinny Page and Williams, their futile enquiries, his expedition in the company of Sheriff Carvell to The Silver Dollar and their walk through the woods to the Hannigan Road, their investigation of the churchyard and their arrival at the gravel pit.

  “As we descended the road,” Drost said, “we became aware of a very pronounced smell, and on the west side of the pit, we came across the body of a young woman whom Sheriff Carvell thought he recognized as that of Sarah Coile. This was later confirmed. It was lying in some tall grass and weeds in a small hollow between two mounds of earth, and there had been no apparent attempt to conceal it. The body was lying on its back, fully clothed except for the lower undergarment, and it was obvious from the condition of the body that it had been the object of an act of violence and that it had been there for some time.”