The Case Against Owen Williams (18 page)

Although they didn't see much of each other around the armoury, Dorkin had quickly come to like MacCrae. In spite of his bluff, lumberjack face, he came across to Dorkin in their occasional chats as an intelligent, capable man, who, although he would never say it out loud of a commanding officer, saw as clearly as Dorkin did what a worthless shit Captain Fraser was. And in conversation with Carvell one day, Dorkin learned that one of the little ribbons on MacCrae's tunic was the Military Medal, which he had got for hauling wounded men out of the water when their landing barge had been hit by a mortar bomb off Dieppe. He was so badly wounded himself that he was later invalided home. Poor old Fraser, Dorkin thought. In addition to having to put up with a snotty-nosed Jewish lieutenant, he was saddled with a non-com factotum who was a decorated war hero.

Fraser's attitude toward Dorkin remained one of imperfectly concealed resentment and rage, but Dorkin pretended blandly not to notice. He saluted Fraser whenever they met and made the kind of regulation small talk about the weather and the war that a subordinate makes to a superior officer. But mostly he did his best merely to stay out of his way, closeting himself in his office with his papers.

He began by going carefully through everything: the transcript of the preliminary hearing, the depositions from the people who had been at the dance and those who had seen Williams in the hours and days afterwards, Williams's own, partially perjured statement about that night, Clemens's statement about Sarah (if it was Sarah) and the soldier (if it was a soldier), the dreadful autopsy report with its still more dreadful photographs, the forensic reports on the examination of Sarah's clothes and those of Williams.

He took his time, letting things settle of their own accord, not pushing, trying not to impose theories too soon. When he had gone through everything, he shuffled the pile of depositions so that he could deal them to himself in a different order and went through them all again. What he was searching for was the raw material out of which he could construct an edifice of reasonable doubt, but his more extravagant hope was that hidden somewhere in the criss-cross of evidence there would turn out to be some corner undiscovered by the Mounties in which the real murderer lurked.

Sometimes after lunch he took a walk around the centre of the town, becoming something of a familiar figure, exchanging nods and comments about the weather with storekeepers who occasionally stood outside their doors, soaking up the sun. Sometimes in the afternoon or in the early evening, he took his staff car and drove out into the country. Late one afternoon, travelling further afield than usual, he drove across the bridge to the other side of the river and up over the side of the valley eastward along a gravel road.

He drove for almost ten miles, the road deteriorating with every mile but still drawing him on, until he came out at last at a small settlement—a miserable collection of a dozen unpainted houses with swayback rooftrees and collapsing porches strung out along the road.

In one of the yards, watched by an enormous boy as shapeless as a slug, he turned the car around and headed back.

The valley came upon him suddenly. The road mounted a long, shallow rise, and at the top of it the trees abruptly opened out on both sides into hayfields, and there below was the river with the big island that the Zombies guarded so faithfully, the open land of the valley, the town with its roofs and steeples. He stopped the car and got out to look.

As he stood there, a three-ton truck turned out onto the road from a side road further down and began slowly climbing the steep gradient towards him, its engine labouring heavily in bottom gear. As it passed, the face above the steering wheel looked out at him with brazen indifference, a round face with several days' growth of beard under a dirty cloth cap. The body of the truck had four-foot-high slats on the sides and a slatted gate at the back, and it smelled like the yard of a slaughterhouse.

A little way up the hill, the truck stopped, turned on a culvert, and came crawling back and parked behind Dorkin's car. The driver got out.

He wore a checked shirt and trousers made out of some woollen material so heavy that they looked as if they could have stood up by themselves. He was perhaps five foot six, bowlegged, pot-bellied but with powerful shoulders and arms like a wrestler.

“Ya got trouble? Ya got a flat?” the man asked.

“No,” Dorkin said. “No trouble. I'm just admiring the view.”

The man threw a glance down at the river and then looked at Dorkin as if he thought he was being made the butt of some joke. He let it pass.

“I'm Louie Rosen,” he said. “You probably heard of me.”

“No,” Dorkin said. “Not yet.”

“No?” the man said. “I thought everybody knew Louie Rosen.”

“I'm not from here,” Dorkin said.

“I know who you are. Everybody knows Louie Rosen. Everybody but you anyways. And Louie Rosen knows everybody. Around here, everybody and everything. You're a Saint John boy. I got a sister in Saint John. Married. Two nice daughters. Her name's Abrams now. Her husband works in his father's furniture store. You know him?”

“No,” Dorkin said, “I don't. I know the store. And one of the girls went to school with me.”

“So,” Louie said, “what are ya doin' up here defendin' a sex murderer?”

“It's part of my job,” Dorkin said.

“You're gettin' us a bad name.”

“Oh? What ‘us,' Louie?”

“You know what ‘us,' for Christ sake. Us. God's chosen people who have to make a livin' around here.”

“What have you got in the back of the truck, Louie?” Dorkin asked. “I could smell you coming half a mile away.”

“Hides. Cow hides mostly. A couple of pigs. You know. You kill a cow. People eat some of it. Foxes eat some of it. Some of it gets ground up for fertilizer. The hides you make leather out of. I collect them and clean them and send them off to the guys who make leather.”

“You mean if I defend this guy, no one is going to sell you their cow hides? Who are they going to sell them to?”

“It ain't that exactly. It just don't look good. People say you want some dirty work done, go find a Jew. You've heard it?”

“Sure. I've heard lots of things. We boil babies up and eat them at midnight. Only sometimes it's Catholics who do that. Unless you happen to be a Catholic and then it's the Orangemen.”

“You bought him a radio,” Louie said.

“So who knows besides you and Mr. Meltzer?”

“Everybody in town.”

“Having heard it from you and Mr. Meltzer.”

“Who knows? Everything gets around.”

“Louie,” Dorkin said, “you're talking a lot of shit. Anyway it isn't dirty work. The boy didn't do it.”

“Are you gonna prove that?”

“Maybe,” Dorkin said. “Anyway, if you know everything, tell me who knocked the girl up before she got killed.”

“Now
that
I don't know,” Louie said.

“Any ideas?”

“No. I thought it must have been the soldier. And he killed her because he didn't want to marry her. She put the heat on him.”

“No,” Dorkin said. “He didn't knock her up. Somebody else did, and I'm wondering who. Did you know her?”

“Sure. I mean I knew her, but I never talked to her. I knew her to see. I bought some hides from her old man a couple of times. But I don't know nothin' about the girl's boyfriends.”

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“Maybe,” Louie said. “If you didn't let on to nobody where you heard it. I gotta live here, remember.”

He looked at his watch.

“I gotta go,” he said. “A man's waitin' for me. Take it easy.”

He climbed back into the truck, and Dorkin watched it labour up the hill and drop away over the crest.

By the middle of the second week, Dorkin had been back and forth over the written evidence half a dozen times. It told him nothing. He had found no nook where the real murderer might lurk. There was no neat, self-referencing little group whose members might have conspired to lie for each other. The only person unaccounted for during the hour between Williams's departure from the dance and his arrival at the canteen was Williams himself. Whoever had murdered Sarah (assuming that it wasn't Williams) had come from somewhere outside the magic circle that the Mounties and Whidden had drawn, perhaps from among the drinkers, the fighters, the loonies who had hung around outside in the woods or on the roads, someone perhaps whose act had been one of random violence to which no path of logic could lead.

There was one other angle that Dorkin had not yet explored, and that was the possibility of having Williams's statements to the Mounties thrown out of court on the grounds that Williams had not been properly cautioned. Dorkin had visited Williams every day since he had come back to Wakefield to see if he needed anything and to cheer him up as best he could, but he had avoided discussing the case until he had finished his search through the evidence. Now, he decided, it was time for another talk.

Williams still did not look good, but he was clean-shaven and as neat as it was probably in his nature to be.

“I want to talk to you about the second time the police questioned you,” Dorkin said. “Did they warn you at the beginning that what you said might be used as evidence against you?”

“I don't remember,” Williams said. “I don't think so.”

“All right,” Dorkin said. “Tell me what happened first. What did they say to you?”

“Corporal Drost asked me to tell him again about when I had last seen Sarah Coile the night of the dance. He told me what he remembered that I had said before and asked me if that was right and I said yes.”

“You didn't know at that point that she had been murdered?”

“No, they only told me later.”

“When?”

“I'm not sure now exactly.”

“Did they warn you that what you were saying might be used as evidence against you?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Who was there? Anyone besides Drost?”

“The other guy from town.”

“Hooper?”

“Yes, I guess so. He was writing things down.”

“What about Sergeant Grant? Was he there?”

“No, not then, I don't think. But the door was open, and I could hear people outside.”

“How did Drost talk to you? Did he accuse you of anything? Did he say that he didn't believe you?”

“No, he just asked about what happened.”

“So then?”

“I'm not sure. I guess after a while Hooper went out, and Drost just talked to me about that night. How many people were at the dance. If there was a lot of drinking. Stuff like that. He just seemed to be making conversation. Then Hooper came back with a paper. They'd typed up what I said, and they asked me to read it and see if it was right. So I read it and said yes.”

“Even though it left out the fact that you'd stopped in the woods with Sarah?”

“Yes, I guess so. I didn't think it made any difference. And I was afraid to change what I said before.”

“Did they warn you that the paper might be used as evidence against you? Did they say that specifically?”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

Shit, Dorkin thought.

“All right,” he said, “never mind. So then what happened?”

“I signed the paper. Then Hooper took it out, and Sergeant Grant and another Mountie came in. Sergeant Grant had a copy of the paper, and he read it and asked me again if that was what happened. And I said yes. And I remember he asked me again if that was
exactly
what happened, and I thought of telling him about stopping, but I didn't. I was getting scared. Then, I guess he told me that people had said I had left the dance hall about ten-thirty and that the waitress at the canteen had said that I got there about midnight and where had I been for an hour and a half? He started shouting after a while, and he told me that Sarah Coile had been found murdered and that I was the last person to see her alive. And he asked me if I had gone to the gravel pit with her. And where had I been all that time.”

“How long did they question you?”

“I don't know. Two hours. I don't know. Sometimes Grant and the other guy would go out and just leave Drost and sometimes Hooper, but Hooper didn't say anything, just sat there. Drost didn't shout or get mad. He said it would be better for me if I told the truth about things. He said things like what happened to Sarah happened sometimes, and people did things without really meaning to and the law understood that. Stuff like that. Then when I said that I had left Sarah on the road and I hadn't gone anywhere or done anything, Grant would come back. And he kept asking me about the time.”

“And what did you say?

“I said that we hadn't walked very fast, and we stopped to talk for a while along the path in the woods. And he said that I hadn't put anything about that in my statement and I was making it up now.”