The Case Against Owen Williams (28 page)

“Do you intend to reopen the investigation of the murder or not?” Dorkin said.

“On the basis of what?” Drost asked without turning around.

“On the basis of what I've just told you,” Dorkin said.

“I have to have some evidence.”

“I've given you evidence.” Drost looked at him.

“You've picked up some rumours about Dan Coile messing around with his daughters, so you've decided that he was the one who knocked Sarah up and then murdered her to keep her quiet. That's evidence?”

“Tell me,” Dorkin said, “did you ever make any serious attempt to find out who got Sarah Coile pregnant?”

“We were investigating a murder, not a paternity suit. Anyway, how do you know it wasn't Williams? Because he said it wasn't?”

“Not one person ever saw Williams with Sarah Coile outside the dance hall except that night,” Dorkin said.

“Maybe not, but there are plenty of other people who could have knocked her up. It doesn't have to be Dan Coile.”

“You're not going to check on any of this?”

“No,” Drost said. “Not unless I hear something more convincing than anything I've heard here. I wouldn't be given the authority from Fredericton anyway.”

“You're not going to ask?”

“No, I'm not going to ask.”

“And what about Louie? Do you intend to talk to Dan Coile about that?”

“I don't know,” Drost said. “I don't know who we're going to talk to. I'll take account of what you've told me. What we do with it and how we handle that investigation is none of your business, so far as I can see.”

“In other words, you're going to do nothing,” Dorkin said.

“God damn it!” Drost said. “I've had enough of this. You've told me what you've come to tell me. I'll make a report of it. Now I've got other things to do.”

Without looking at Dorkin, he went back to his desk and sat down. Dorkin hesitated, then angrily picked his coat off the rack and put it on. Carvell rose and followed him out.

On the porch, before they went their different ways into the rain, Carvell put his hand on Dorkin's shoulder.

“I'm sorry about Louie,” he said. “I don't think you should conclude that it was necessarily your fault. He was a sharpie, and there were all sorts of people who had grudges against him of one kind or another.”

“And he was a Jew,” Dorkin said.

“Yes,” Carvell said. “I suppose there's that too.”

“You don't think that quite apart from anything he may have known about Dan Coile,” Dorkin said, “someone may just have taken a random shot at him because they wanted to take a shot at me and didn't quite dare?”

“I don't know, Bernard,” Carvell said. “It's possible. Just about anything is. The world's an evil place.”

“I don't want to see whoever it was get away with it,” Dorkin said.

“I don't either particularly,” Carvell said, “but he probably will unless he's foolish enough to brag about it.”

He hesitated.

“You may be right about Coile and the girl,” he said. “I just don't know. I probably shouldn't be saying this, but I think maybe that under the stress of all this you're losing control of yourself a little. I'm saying this by way of being a friend. I wouldn't want you to take it any other way.”

The next day Dorkin found that there was a further blow in store. A message had come through that he was to phone Meade's office on a matter of urgency.

He got the
CWAC
clerk.

“Colonel Meade would like you to meet him for lunch at the officers' mess here at 1200 hours tomorrow,” she said.

Meade himself would certainly have phrased it so that it did not sound so peremptory, but peremptory it certainly was. Something was in the wind, and Dorkin felt certain that it would not be good.

Dorkin dined with Meade by a window in the mess. Outside there was a stretch of immaculately tended lawn ending in a thin screen of twelve-foot Lombardy poplars. Beyond them, the river flowed by, unruffled today under a cloudless sky.

Dorkin could remember this site as it was in the spring of 1940 when it was under construction and he was still at university: banks of raw earth, excavations, mud, water, piles of lumber, mess. Now, over four years later, it had an air of permanency that made it seem as if there had never been a time when there had not been the war.

They dined on salmon steaks, big and fresh, and Meade was moved to ask Dorkin if he fished (which he did not) and then went on to tell him about the fishing trip that he had made every June for the past twenty-five years, war or no war, to the wilderness of the Big Sevogle River. From there, the talk drifted inevitably to the war. On Sunday, the British had dropped a parachute division on Arnhem, and it was beginning to be obvious that something was going badly wrong. Whenever the press releases started describing Allied troops as “valiant,” one knew that they were being beaten. And the Canadians, grinding and sloshing up the coast, were not doing all that well either. The casualties, Meade said, leaning forward across the table and dropping his voice, were much heavier than was being let on. Any day now the conscription issue was going to blow up again. Did Dorkin know that MacKenzie King had been booed by Canadian troops when he had inspected them overseas?

When they had finished dessert and coffee, they walked for a quarter of an hour back and forth along the line of poplars by the river, and Meade smoked a cigar. Then, casually, he brought them at last around to his office. He settled himself behind his oak desk, and Dorkin took the chair that he had sat in when Meade had ordered him to attend Williams's preliminary hearing. Through dinner and their post-prandial perambulations, not a word had been said about Williams.

“Well,” Meade said, “I hear that you've been brewing up quite a storm up there.”

The tone was affable, indulgent. Caught off guard, Dorkin fished for some appropriate reply, and he was still fishing and beginning to realize that there was no appropriate reply when Meade continued.

“I'm afraid that I've had to call you down,” he said, “because I've had complaints from Whidden and the Crown prosecutor's office. I've wanted to leave the case entirely up to you since this was what seemed to me proper, but I've come under considerable pressure to speak to you about your handling of some matters.”

He paused. Dorkin said nothing, and he went on.

“Whidden is very upset that you've been talking to Crown wit-nesses.” He consulted a pad on his desk.

“To Miss Vinny Page, who I understand was a friend of Sarah Coile. And to a Mr. John Maclean, who testified about seeing Williams the night of the murder. I don't suppose there's any law against this so long as you weren't putting any kind of pressure on them, but it's generally regarded as unethical. Whidden is making noises about your tampering with witnesses.”

“I'm sorry,” Dorkin said. “I did talk to them because it seemed to me important. But I wasn't tampering with the evidence they gave at the preliminary. I never discussed that with them at all. I was talking to them about matters which were different altogether.”

“Well,” Meade said. “Whidden could not have known that. Could I ask what you did talk about?”

“I was talking to Miss Page because I thought that she might be able to help me find out who was the father of the child that Sarah Coile was carrying. I talked to Maclean about whether he had seen a truck that I was interested in tracking down on the night of the murder.”

“Are these not things that you could have asked in cross examination at the trial?”

“I felt that by then it would be too late for the information to be useful to me.”

“And did you get any information from them?”

“Some. What they said helped me to clarify my ideas about what might have happened that night.”

“I understand,” Meade said, “that there are rumours about that you think that it was the girl's father who murdered her. Do you really think that?”

“Yes,” Dorkin said. “I'm sorry that it's got around. I didn't intend it to, but I think that people began to realize what the point of my inquiries was.”

“Do you have any real evidence of this?” Meade said.

“That's what I've been trying to find over the last couple of weeks.”

“What you have then is a suspicion?”

“Yes,” Dorkin said. “A very strong suspicion.”

“I think you had better tell me about it,” Meade said.

Dorkin hesitated. He didn't like this at all, but he decided that he had no choice.

He talked without interruption for almost three-quarters of an hour, laying out as persuasively as he could what he had found out, what he suspected. When he had finished, Meade sat back.

“As I understand it then,” he said, “your case against Coile is that he is believed to have molested his daughters and that therefore he might have been the father of Sarah's child and might have murdered her to keep this quiet.”

He studied Dorkin from across the desk.

“That's very thin stuff,” he said. “You have no actual evidence of his having seen her that night after she left to go to the dance?”

“No. That's what I've been trying to collect.”

“I understand that you went to see the Mounties about it.”

“Yes.”

“I've had a complaint from them too,” Meade said. “Inspector Gregory phoned me yesterday. He was very angry. He felt that you were using your rank in the army to bully his officers into conducting investigations for you that they did not feel were justified.”

“I hadn't intended to bully. But I'm very unhappy about the initial investigation that Grant conducted into the murder. Within an hour or two, he decided that Williams was guilty, and they never pursued any other line of investigation.”

“But they have been co-operative,” Meade said. “They have made available to you all the evidence they have collected.You don't feel that they've withheld anything?”

“No. But it's the evidence they haven't collected that concerns me.”

“Bernard, I appreciate your concern for Williams. A lawyer should fight for his client. But you are not a policeman. It's not your job to chase around the country trying to catch murderers. Your job is to go into court and attempt to convince a jury that the evidence which the prosecution is presenting is not enough to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that your client is guilty. If he is found not guilty, then it is up to the police to chase around the country and try to find out who
is
guilty. I gather from what you say that you feel that the case which the police have built is a weak one founded on very questionable circumstantial evidence. If that is so, then that is what you tell your judge and jury. You tell them that on the basis of the evidence that has been presented it is easy to construct an explanation of the girl's death other than the one the prosecution is presenting.”

“I don't think it will be enough,” Dorkin said. “There's too much prejudice against Williams because of his being a Zombie. I think that it's going to be very difficult for him to get an impartial hearing from any jury up there, or anywhere else for that matter.”

“I take it that you are convinced that Williams is telling the truth,” Meade said. “Have you ever really seriously considered the possibility that he may not be?”

“Whenever I've talked to him it always comes out the same. I don't think he's capable of being that good a liar.”

Meade considered, shifted a pencil around on the desk. For the first time, Dorkin caught a flicker of irritation in his manner, but when he spoke, his voice was still level and reasonable.

“Bernard,” he said, “I have great admiration for you, and I respect your concern for Williams and your energy in doing what you believe is right. But in the time that remains, I want you to confine yourself to your proper duties as a defence counsel and to stop acting as if you were a private investigator. I don't like doing it this way, but in view of the representations that have been made to me from higher up, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to put that in the form of an order. Even if you were a civilian defence counsel, some of your approaches would have been a little improper. But you are an army officer, and in addition to the normal considerations, you also have to take into account the obligations you have not to do anything to bring your uniform into disrespect. You should not be roaming the countryside in a staff car knocking on doors and fishing around for the local gossip about Daniel Coile and his family.”