The Case Against Owen Williams (12 page)

CHAPTER
FIVE

In the uproar that followed, the pushing back of chairs, the scraping of feet, the sudden release of voices that all together sounded somehow inhuman and murderous like the sound of the sea among rocks, Thurcott rose and walked out of the courtroom, very straight and dignified with his papers under his arm. Williams, staring wildly around like someone who has just been violently awakened, was got to his feet by Carvell and guided out his different door.

Whidden placed his hand on McKiel's shoulder in a gesture of Olympian approval. Dorkin sat looking down at the random notes and doodles he had begun making during the afternoon. He was still contemplating them when Thurcott's clerk slipped up to his table, with his waiter's air of trying to seem invisible, and murmured in his ear, “Mr. Thurcott would like a word with you, sir, before you go, if that would be convenient.”

Dorkin packed his papers into his briefcase and followed the clerk out of the courtroom. Thurcott was seated behind the desk in his office, looking very small and worried. He rose, directed Dorkin to an armchair, and sat down again.

“From now on, this case will be no affair of mine,” he said, “but before you left I wanted to ask you to explain to Ken Meade how very unhappy I am about these proceedings. There should have been legal counsel, and if there were difficulties about getting one, the hearing should have been postponed until one was found. Given the evidence that was presented, I had no choice but to send the boy to trial, but there were a great many things that should have been questioned. Perhaps I should have intruded myself into things more than I did, but when you're on the bench, you really can't act as a defence counsel as well.”

“Do you think Williams may be innocent?” Dorkin asked.

“I don't know,” Thurcott said. “I don't know. The evidence presented today seemed to me far from conclusive. Whidden wouldn't have agreed to act as prosecutor if he hadn't felt pretty sure that he would win, but…”

He hesitated for several seconds before he went on.

“But—I probably shouldn't be saying this, and I would be grateful if you wouldn't repeat it to Ken—but with Whidden, feeling that he can win and feeling that the accused is guilty are not always the same thing…”

He hesitated again, as if there were more that he wanted to say, and Dorkin sensed the presence of an imperfectly suppressed anger. Then, with an almost imperceptible shake of his head, Thurcott changed the subject.

“Anyway,” he said, “tell Ken about my unease with the hearing. Also, someone should see about getting Williams proper counsel. I understand that his uncle is here today. Perhaps you should talk to him now. Could you do that?”

“I could,” Dorkin said, uneasily. “If I could find him.”

“He's probably gone back to the jail. He was there earlier in the day. But Sheriff Carvell will know where he is, I expect. You could ask him.”

Dorkin looked at his watch. It was already getting late for driving back to Fredericton. He could leave in the morning. And he would be able to tell Meade more clearly what the situation was.

“All right,” he said. “I'll see what I can do.”

Dorkin left the courthouse by a side door that led out onto a little walk that ran between the courthouse and the jail. The sidewalk, the far side of the street, the parking lot by the
RCMP
office, were still crowded with people, hanging around, gawking, drawn by the scent of death. As he walked the few yards to the jail and mounted the steps at the bottom of the squat tower, he was aware of their eyes upon him.

He found Carvell sitting behind his desk and explained his errand.

“Yes,” Carvell said, “the uncle's here. Also his wife. They're in with Williams. You can wait and talk to them here if you like.”

Dorkin sat down in one of the armchairs.

“What sort of shape is Williams in?” he asked.

“Not very good,” Carvell said.

“What's the uncle like?”

Carvell shrugged.

“I don't think you're going to find he's much help. Nor the wife either. She's the blood relative. A sister of Williams's father. Their name is Whittaker. Hubert and Alice Whittaker.”

Dorkin had only to look at them to recognize the accuracy of Carvell's assessment. Hubert was a heavy-set man of fifty or so, with a watch chain across his paunch, a bluff round face, and a walrus moustache. The wife was dark, small, thin-lipped. She seemed burning with rage, her black eyes under her straight, black brows, glittering like anthracite. They were both dressed in black, as if for a funeral.

Dorkin met with them in the room where he had talked to Williams. He sat on one side of the table, they on the other, stiff and hostile.

“Before I go back to Fredericton,” Dorkin said, “I wanted to talk to you about arrangements for defense counsel for your nephew.”

At the word
nephew
, Mrs. Whittaker glared fiercely at her husband.

“I understand,” Mr. Whittaker said, “that I am not legally responsible to pay for lawyers in this business.”

“No,” Dorkin said. “You have no legal responsibility.”

“I also understand that if I don't pay for a lawyer, the government will. Is that right?”

“Yes. He can't be tried without having legal counsel, and if no one else can provide it, the court will.”

“Then why not let them?”

“You can let them. But your nephew would be better represented if he had his own lawyer rather than one appointed by the court.”

“Suppose I did pay for a lawyer,” Whittaker said, “and they decided that Owen didn't do it after all. Would I get my money back from the government?”

“No,” Dorkin said, “I'm afraid not. That's between you and your lawyer.”

“Do you call that justice?”

“No, probably it isn't, but it's the law. I didn't make it.”

“The rich made it, Mr. Dorkin. The rich and the lawyers.”

“That may be, Mr. Whittaker, but I can't help it. All I'm trying to do is find out what needs to be done in relation to your nephew.”

“I already talked to a lawyer, Mr. Dorkin. I had a hard time finding one who would even talk to me. The one who did sent me a bill for twenty dollars for half an hour's talk. He told me that paying a lawyer for the trial could cost a thousand dollars or more.”

“Possibly,” Dorkin said.

“I don't have a thousand dollars, Mr. Dorkin, and I have two sons of my own that I have responsibilities to. I'm not going to mortgage my farm to defend a nephew.”

Dorkin thought of observing that he had two farms if you counted the one he had possessed from Williams's mother for debts, but he let it pass. It wasn't his business.

“What was he doing at that dance hall anyway with that girl?” Mrs. Whittaker said.

“I don't know,” Dorkin said. “It was a dance, that's all.”

“Do you think he killed that girl?” Whittaker asked.

“I don't know,” Dorkin said. “Possibly not.”

“He says he didn't,” Whittaker said.

“He never did a day's real work in his life,” Mrs. Whittaker said. “Emma—his mother—spent every cent she had and a lot she didn't have putting him through high school so he could get a job in an office where he wouldn't have to get his hands dirty. And this is what it comes to.”

“The army is a curse,” Whittaker said. “His father was another fool. He couldn't wait to enlist, and in a year he was back with his lungs burned out so he couldn't ever really work again.”

“Does Private Williams have any brothers or sisters?” Dorkin asked.

“No,” Mrs. Whittaker said. “There were two boys before him, but they both died of the croup.”

She made it sound as if this too were a well-deserved punishment for something or other. Dorkin looked at them exuding their air of greed and ignorance and decided that he had had enough.

“Thank you,” he said, getting up. “I just wanted to be clear what the situation was.”

The Whittakers looked at each other, too slow and gauche to disguise their relief at getting out of it so easily.

“It will all be looked after then,” Whittaker said.

“Yes,” Dorkin said. “Somehow it will be looked after.You needn't trouble yourselves.” He saw them out the front door and watched them descend the steps. He felt sure that no one here would be seeing them again.

“A nice couple,” he said to Carvell when he was back inside.

“Salt of the earth,” Carvell said.

“I'd better see Williams for a few minutes,” Dorkin said. “I can talk to him in his cell.”

Carvell led him down the line of cells, and Cronk appeared from wherever he lurked and unlocked the door. Williams was lying on his bunk, curled up facing the wall. He turned over when they came in, and seeing Dorkin, started to stand, but Dorkin gestured him back, and he sat down on the edge of the bunk.

“Before I go back to Fredericton, I wanted to explain to you about what will happen now,” Dorkin said. “I talked to your uncle, and it seems that he doesn't have the financial resources to pay for a lawyer for you.”

“He always hated me,” Williams said. “He didn't need our farm. He could have given it to me. I could have farmed. I probably wouldn't have been conscripted then.”

“I'm sorry,” Dorkin said. “I can't help that. He can't be made responsible if he doesn't want to be. He's not your guardian or anything like that, and you're not a minor. When I go back to Fredericton, I'll report the situation, and either the army or the court will pay for a lawyer for you.”

“I didn't do anything to that girl,” Williams said. “What's going to happen?”

He looked as if he were going to start to cry.

“Calm down,” Dorkin said. “A preliminary hearing is not a trial. All it means is that there are enough grounds for suspicion to warrant a trial. In a trial, those grounds are going to be questioned by your lawyer, and you can't be convicted if there's any doubt whatever about your being guilty. They have to prove you guilty. You don't have to prove yourself innocent. The odds are all on your side.”

Dorkin became conscious of his own voice, detached from himself, rushing along, filling the stale air with these pious half-truths—if they were even so much as half-truths. Williams was sit-ting looking down at the plank floor between his boots.

When Dorkin left the jail, the crowd was still there, though much thinned. The better dressed had gone home to their suppers, their newspapers, their respectable evening's rest, leaving behind the un-ashamedly, insatiably curious, those eternal, unoccupied watchers of life's calamities. Dorkin noticed that there was a surprisingly large number of women among them, mostly in their twenties, the age of women whose husbands would be in the army, fighting the war that Williams was refusing to fight. They all watched him in silence as he descended the steps, and he found himself hating them more than he could find reasons for, and also, to his surprise, fearing them a little.

Back at the armoury, he had hardly been in his room long enough to take off his tunic when there was a tap on the door, and he opened it to Sergeant MacCrae, who had waited for him on what Dorkin felt sure was merely the pretext of asking if he needed anything.

MacCrae was somewhere in his mid-twenties with one of those rectangular, plain, sun-roughened faces that Dorkin thought of as the regulation enlisted man's face of the Canadian Army. Unlike his flock of Zombies, he had a gs badge on his sleeve. He also had four ribbons on his tunic. Ribbons all looked the same to Dorkin, and as he wondered what they were, MacCrae worked his way towards what he had really come for, which was to get the inside story of what had happened at the hearing. Dorkin gave it to him, or all of it that mattered, because there were also things that he wanted to ask.

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