The Case Against Owen Williams (20 page)

Dorkin had already heard that he was treading a path that the Mounties had trod before him, as he should have known.

“I like to hear it for myself,” he said.

“Don't trust them, eh?” Bartlett said. “Don't think I would neither. Anyway, why don't we sit? I don't stand too good.”

They sat, and Bartlett pulled up his right pant leg. The leg had been amputated just below the knee, and an artificial lower leg and foot were attached by an ugly arrangement of straps.

“May 12, 1917,” Bartlett said. “Just after Vimy. It wasn't no big battle or nothin'. We were just settin' behind an old blowed-up house, and the next thing we knowed there was a jeezless great bang, and we were all knocked ass over teakettle. Broke my ankle all to pieces. They took me back to England to a place called Bradford. A hospital full of cripples and lunatics, and they tried for a while to fix it. But it went bad, and so they took it off. I'd sooner of had two legs than one, but I was gonna be alive anyways. Not goin' back to get my head blowed off instead. And I didn't even need to be over there in the first place, but I was young and stupid. And it was all for nothin' that I could ever see. Does anybody know what it was all about? Do you know?”

“No,” Dorkin said, “I don't. The vanity of a few hundred old men, I guess.”

“Yes, that'd be it, all right,” Bartlett said.

“What did the Mounties ask you about?” Dorkin said.

“Wanted to know if I'd seen your soldier on the road that night. Or him and a girl goin' down into the pit. But I hadn't. I couldn't have seen that far in the dark even if I'd been standin' up lookin'.”

“Did they ask about anyone else?”

“No. Just him. But I hadn't seen nobody else neither.”

“Did you see any cars on the road that night?” Dorkin asked.

“Some, but I don't know whose. On Saturday, some of the boys come around, and we sit out here when it's warm and play cards and have a beer or two. Nothin' too fierce at our age, you know. So I sort of notice cars going by without payin' much attention.”

“You didn't happen to notice any cars late that night? After midnight?”

“You think somebody might have brought the girl there in a car?”

“Could be. It might even have been a night or two afterwards.”

“I wondered about that too,” Bartlett said. “But I never seen anythin' any of them nights. I sleep pretty sound, and it's a ways up the road. But, you know, I seen that girl out here that Saturday she was killed. I wouldn't have paid no attention to it, but I remembered it after they found her.”

“What time was that?” Dorkin asked.

“Middle of the afternoon, maybe a little later. I expect she'd been to town to see the parade. She went along the road out here, and then she took the shortcut across to the Bangor Road. It goes off just beyond the end of my lot here. I expect she was goin' to see her friend, that Page girl.”

Dorkin recalled Vinny Page's testimony at the preliminary that Sarah had come to her house and they had arranged to go to the dance together.

“Did you often see her on this road?” he asked.

“Every once in a while. It's a quarter mile longer if she goes and comes by the Bangor Road, but she'd be more likely to pick up a ride out there. And I used to see her sometimes on Sunday goin' to that church over there.”

He motioned down the street to where the metal spire of Clemens's church rose up between the trees.

“Her family went there. At least her mother did and the other kids. I never seen Dan very often. But sometimes the mother and Sarah and the rest of them would walk there. Sometimes see the mother in the evening too. They have church at funny times, them people. And sometimes in the summer when they got the doors open, you can hear that fool Clemens halfway to the American border hollerin' about being saved. I don't care much for that kind of religion myself, do you?”

“No,” Dorkin said. “Not much.”

“Not a religious man?”

“No,” Dorkin said.

Bartlett hesitated, uncertain.

“I understand you're of the Jewish faith.”

“Not exactly,” Dorkin said. “I'm Jewish, but I'm not of any faith.”

“Me neither,” Bartlett said. “Not since the war.”

“Did you ever see Sarah Coile going by here in a car?” Dorkin asked.

“Sometimes with her father. He's got an old Ford truck. Sometimes with that Page girl.”

“You've never heard anything about who may have knocked her up?” Dorkin asked.

“No. Just thought it must have been your soldier, and he killed her to get out of it.”

“He didn't kill her. He didn't knock her up, either.”

“Had to be someone with a car, you figure?”

“Probably.”

“You think you can get your soldier off?” Bartlett asked.

“Yes,” Dorkin said.

“A lot of people gonna be disappointed,” Bartlett said.

“Yes,” Dorkin said, “I expect there will be.”

“Anyway. I ain't been much help to you.”

“Worth a try. Thanks for your time.”

“Time I got lots of.”

He got up and saw Dorkin to the door with his cripple's gait, the lower right leg swinging forward dead from the knee.

“If I find out anythin' might be of any use, I'll let you know,” Bartlett said. “But I wouldn't be too hopeful.”

Dorkin walked to his car. He visited three more houses, ritualistically, hardly listening to the same useless answers he had already gleaned two dozen times, and all the while he was thinking about Vinny Page. One thing he had heard from almost all the girls he had talked to the day before was that if anyone knew something that others did not know about Sarah Coile it would be Vinny Page. She was the prosecution's witness, but it was not about the testimony she had given in court that he wanted to ask her. He debated it with himself the rest of the afternoon. After supper, he made up his mind. The days were trickling relentlessly away. He no longer had time for the higher refinements of legal ethics.

Half an hour later, he was sitting facing Vinny Page across the parlour of the Page house. Outside in the hall, just out of sight beyond the doorway, their presence betrayed by the faintest of sounds, her father and mother hovered, listening.

She had brought an ashtray with her, and she sat smoking and listening with an elaborate show of attention as Dorkin explained that he was not here to discuss the testimony she had given at the preliminary hearing but simply to find out more about the back-ground of Sarah Coile. Everyone he had talked to, he said, had told him that she was Sarah's closest friend. Everyone had told him that if Sarah had confided in anyone it would be Vinny Page.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I suppose that's true. For the last couple of years anyways.”

“Some of the people I've talked to,” Dorkin said, “have told me that over the last few weeks Sarah was talking about leaving Wakefield. Did she talk to you about that too?”

“Yes. Quite a lot.”

“One of the girls she worked with at the dairy said that she wasn't getting along very well with her father. Do you think that was one of the reasons she wanted to leave?”

“Yes, I guess maybe.”

“What was the problem between her and her father?”

“I don't know. A lot of things, I guess. He didn't work much, and he used to take a lot of her money.”

“Did Sarah ever say anything to you about his beating her?”

Vinny puffed her cigarette.

“Yes.”

“Do you remember when Sarah told you about his beating her?” Dorkin asked.

“Not too long ago. I think he did it more than once, but that time there was a mark on her face. Maybe that's why she told me.”

“Do you think Sarah was talking more about leaving here in the month or two before she was killed than she had before?”

“Yes. I think she was gettin' serious about it. One day I said that she would need some money to get started somewhere else, and I asked her did she have any saved up. And she said she'd saved a little, but she knew where she could get some more.”

“Did she say where?”

“No. She said it was a secret. She said she might tell me some-time but not now.”

“You haven't any idea who she was going to get the money from?”

“No, I don't know. I thought maybe she was gonna steal it or somethin' like that. But she never did things like that before.”

“You don't think it might have been from whoever got her in trouble?”

“I don't know. I didn't know anythin' about that then.”

“Did she ever say she might be going away with someone? A man, I mean?”

“No, she never said nothin' about that.”

“Did she have any steady boyfriend that you knew of?”

“No. She used to see people at the dance, but she never went there with anyone.”

“And she'd never said anything to you about being in trouble?”

“No, never. I just heard about it afterwards.”

“If she were going to confide in anyone, I guess it would have been you. I wonder why she didn't.”

“I don't know. I've wondered too.”

“You've no idea who it might have been who got her in trouble?”

“No.”

“Not Williams, you think?”

“I don't know. It could have been, I suppose.”

“She never talked about Williams?”

“No, nothin' that I remember.”

“What did you think of Williams?”

“I didn't know him except just to see. Sort of shy, I guess.”

“Why do you think Sarah was dancing with him that night?”

“I don't know. Maybe some of them other guys was pesterin' her, and he was a way of keepin' clear of them. He was someone she could manage maybe.”

Dorkin sat and thought. He had come up with nothing that he hadn't heard from the others. He wondered if Vinny were hiding things from him, but he decided not. Nor the others either. The silence was too complete. No sense of a chink in it anywhere.

He rose and thanked her for her co-operation.

“I know it must be a painful thing to have to remember.”

“Yes,” Vinny said. “She was my best friend.”

Dorkin had the sense that she would have liked to have managed a tear, but none came.

Three hours later, after his solitary dinner at the hotel, Dorkin sat at the desk in his office, meditating on the futility of the day's enquiries. The darkness was beginning to gather, but he didn't turn on the lamp. What was needful now, he decided, was a long systematic think.

Begin with the indisputable facts, he told himself. These were few and simple. First, Williams left the dance with Sarah around ten-thirty, they stopped to make unconsummated love for half an hour or so, then walked out to the Hannigan Road. Sarah walked up the road towards home, and Williams walked back to the canteen and then to the armoury. Second, Reverend Clemens testified that he saw someone whom he took to be Sarah with someone whom he took to be a soldier and whom everyone now took to be Williams. It was possible, of course, that Clemens was mistaken and that the girl whom he saw was not Sarah at all. Third, on Wednesday, Sarah was found in the gravel pit, raped, suffocated, and badly beaten, having been dead for about three days—meaning that she might have been killed within an hour of leaving the dance or as late as the next morning. And meaning also that the body might have been conveyed to the gravel pit any time during the next three days.

The puzzling thing about the first set of facts was what Sarah was doing walking away from the dance with Williams in the first place. Dorkin had found no evidence that Williams had ever had anything to do with Sarah before the dance the previous week and no evidence that he was the father of her child. It was also strange that she should choose him for a little lovemaking when she clearly had other, more attractive choices. He had wondered from time to time whether she had used Williams merely as a blind to cover her leaving the dance so that she could meet someone else, choosing Williams because he would be easy to get rid of, as Vinny Page had suggested. But if that were the case, she would not have stopped to make love with him as she had. Whatever her motives may have been for going off with Williams, it seemed obvious that she had no plans then for meeting someone else. To make way for her real interest, she might have paid Williams off with a kiss or two but not with the heavy petting he had described. Whoever Sarah had met after she had left Williams, it seemed clear that it was a meeting that she at least had not planned.