The Case Against Owen Williams (19 page)

“And?”

“Nothing. It just went on and on, the same things over and over. After a while I didn't really know what I was saying I was so tired. Then they stopped, and they told me that I was being arrested and charged with murdering Sarah Coile.”

Dorkin looked at him. Shit, he thought again. It was hopeless.

“Okay,” he said. “There are a couple of other things I want to ask you about. When they found Sarah, she wasn't wearing any pants, and they never found them. Do you know if she was wearing pants when you were with her?”

Under the dirty prison grey, the familiar blush of embarrassment spread over Williams's face.

“It may be important,” Dorkin said.

“Yes, she was,” Williams said.

“You're sure?”

“Yes.”

“When you were petting with her, did you touch them?”

“Yes.”

“Did you take them off?”

“No.”

“Do you know what they were made of? Cotton? Rayon?”

“I don't know. Some slippery stuff.”

“Okay,” Dorkin said. “Something else. There were only two safes in the tin the police took from your kit. What happened to the other one?”

More blushing, even deeper, and a long look at the table.

“I took it out to see what it was like. I unrolled it and couldn't get it rolled up again, so I threw it away.”

“When was that?”

“I don't know. Maybe a month before. When we started going to the dances.”

“It had nothing to do with Sarah?”

“No.”

Dorkin sensed something odd in Williams's manner, a kind of wobble. A lie finding its footing? Or merely Williams's habitual embarrassment? “One thing you have to understand,” he said, “is that the prosecution may know things they haven't told me. And if I go into court, and they spring things on me that you should have told me about and didn't, it's not going to do you any good at all.”

“I'm telling you the truth,” Williams said.

The next day Dorkin went to the library at the courthouse and spent all day reading whatever he could find about the admissibility of evidence. The day after that he drove to Fredericton and spent another day in the provincial law library doing the same.

It was evening when he got back to Wakefield. He parked the car behind the armoury and went up to his office and sat down at his desk. He had found nothing he didn't know already. The police had an obligation to warn suspects before taking evidence from them, that was all, and there were a thousand loopholes. Williams hadn't been a suspect the first time he was questioned, and he was so confused about the second time that it was hard to be sure what had happened. If Dorkin put him on the stand, in ten minutes Whidden would have him in such a state that he wouldn't know his own name. And the prospect of putting him on the stand to explain to a jury that he had spent the hour that was unaccounted for rummaging around in Sarah Coile's underwear didn't bear thinking about.

For the first time, Dorkin allowed himself to acknowledge the fears that had been gathering, quietly, surreptitiously, for over a week. He looked at the pile of paper, so neat, so ordered, so satisfying in its illusion of completeness, and he thought of the wilderness of possibility outside. In other circumstances, he might have been able to invoke those possibilities—to weave a plausible alternative explanation for Sarah's death at the hands of someone she had met on the road. But this was a case where everyone felt that someone deserved to be hanged, and a culprit once settled upon was not going to be ungrudgingly given up because of unsubstantiated possibilities.Dorkin put his head down in his hands and sat. He saw that he had been deluding himself about the vulnerability of Whidden's case. Even if he could construct an edifice of reasonable doubt (and he was not sure now that he could even do that), he felt certain that it would not be enough—not in these circumstances and not against the likes of Whidden and McKiel. What he needed was a real, live, alternative culprit to serve up to the jury, not just some theoretical phantom. He thought about it, and he was drawn back to the idea that from the beginning had hovered around the edge of everything he had thought about the case. Somewhere out there, there was someone who had knocked Sarah up, and if reality were behaving itself, that someone ought also to be the murderer.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Dorkin began his quest the next morning with the United Farmer's Dairy. Its manager, a brisk bantam of a man, was wary at first, but he settled down and led him back through the dairy with its over-whelming noise of flapping drive belts and clattering milk cans and introduced him to the two girls Sarah had worked with.

Their names were Dora and Jackie. Dora was plain and shy and had a set of very false-looking false teeth. Jackie was homely but brazen. They were both awed at being talked to by an army officer about a murder.

But they knew of no particular boyfriends Sarah had had, and they had not been aware that she was in trouble. (At this question, much blushing by Dora, much sly sideways glancing by Jackie.)

“Did she seem any different in May or June?” Dorkin asked. “Did she seem upset or worried?”

“She was talking about going to Saint John or somewheres,” Dora said.

“Did she say why?”

“She said she could make more money,” Dora said.

“The other reason she wanted to go to Saint John,” Jackie said, “was to get away from her father.”

“Oh?” Dorkin said. “Why was that?”

“She said he never did any work, and he took most of her money,” Jackie said.

“I think he hit her, too,” Dora said. “She had a bruise on her cheek once that she said she got running into a cupboard door, but I think someone hit her, and I think it was her father.”

“When was that?” Dorkin asked.

“In the spring sometime,” Dora said. “Three or four months ago.”

“You've no idea why he hit her?”

“No,” Dora said. “Maybe she wouldn't give him her money.”

“What else did she say about her father?” Dorkin asked.

“Nothing,” Jackie said. “Nothing that I remember.”

“Do you remember what you used to talk about with her?”

“Nothing special. Just movies and clothes and stuff like that,”

Jackie said.

Dorkin gave the girls a quarter each for a coke and a treat and, as if in afterthought, got the names of three girls who sometimes chummed with Sarah.

All that afternoon and most of the next day, Dorkin plied the town and the surrounding country, hunting out the girls whose names he had picked up and picking up more names from them. When he had finished, he had talked to another Jackie, two Bettys, a Mary, a Daisy, a Mildred, a Pearl, and a Ruby. He had found out that Sarah liked Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, but not Wild Bill Elliott. She also liked Wilf Carter and Hank Snow. She thought Frank Sinatra was a sissy. Her favourite colour was blue. She liked cats. And other than that nothing that he hadn't already heard. She didn't like her father or her job, and she was talking about moving away. But no one knew of any serious boyfriend. Sarah's lover remained as invisible as her murderer, his act perhaps as single.

The next morning, taking a different tack, he drove to the Hannigan Road and began calling systematically at every house there and along Broad Street, inquiring about anything anyone might have seen on the night of July 1 or the three nights following. His hope was that someone would remember seeing a vehicle driving down into the pit on any of those nights. Even if his witness couldn't identify it, the mere fact of such traffic could serve to sow doubts in a jury's mind about Williams's role as sole suspect. There was also the possibility that someone would remember even at this distance some unconsidered, crucial trifle that would put one end of the thread in his hands. And it seemed to him too that the mere fact of his enquiries, the mere idea that an investigation was still going on, might make his murderer nervous enough to do something that would give him away. So at every house he visited, he contrived to suggest that there were still unanswered questions about Sarah Coile's death and facts that the public in general did not know.

His uniform with its magical pips on the shoulders meant that no one slammed a door in his face, but most of the people he talked to were cautious, suspicious, wary of some trap. A few were garrulous, made to feel important by being involved however distantly in a murder investigation, but they told him nothing that was of any use. No one had seen vehicles driving down into the pit, or parked cars, or suspicious late-night walkers of the roads.

Near the end of the afternoon, he stopped at a house on Broad Street near the entrance to the gravel pit. It was small, merely a one-room cabin, to which had been added a screened-in verandah at the front and a couple of rooms at the back.

As Dorkin got out of his car, he saw a man sitting on the verandah watching him. He made no move to get up until Dorkin had climbed the steps, tapped on the screen door, and pushed it open. Then he heaved himself out of the chair, came to attention, and snapped Dorkin a mock-smart salute.

“Private Alden A. Bartlett, sir,” he said, coming down hard on the
sir
. “Number two-two-six-four-nine, 10th Canadian Infantry.”

He laughed, and Dorkin made a vague pass at returning his salute. Ex-private Bartlett was fifty, maybe older, shorter than Dorkin, lean, wiry, with dark hair thinning and going grey.

“Lieutenant Dorkin, I presume,” he said. “Have a chair. I been wonderin' when you were gonna get to me. I been watchin' you all afternoon. And one of my neighbours hiked around this mornin' by the back way to warn me you were comin'.”

“Oh?” Dorkin laughed. “What did he warn you of?”

“This smart young army lawyer goin' around askin' everybody questions.”

“Do you mind?” Dorkin said.

“Not a bit. But you'll probably be wastin' your time. I told the Mounties everythin' I knew—which was nothin'. You could have saved yourself a lot of time by just talkin' to them.”