The Case Against Owen Williams (34 page)

It was obvious to Dorkin that, like the calling of Whittaker and Sachs, this had been the strategy all along and that the names that had followed theirs on the list of witnesses had been merely a blind. It was the latest move in a campaign in which he had been out-manoeuvred at almost every turn. And so, abruptly, a day or more before he had expected it to happen, he was going to have to fight his fight. Always, always, one of his instructors at officers' training had said, keep your enemy off balance. Surprise. Surprise. That, gentlemen, is the secret of victory.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

Following his meeting with Meade the week before, Dorkin had done what he knew he should have done a long time before. Affirming the certainty of Williams's innocence, cajoling, beseeching, some-times bullying, he had combed Carnarvon and Fredericton and had managed to assemble a little contingent of witnesses willing to testify on Williams's behalf.

Carnarvon had been settled by Welsh fleeing the depression that had overwhelmed their valleys at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Dorkin had imagined it as a neat little village, rather like the ones on the lids of cookie tins, but there was no village, only a ruined schoolhouse, a decaying chapel, and a succession of farmhouses strung out along two miles of road, most of them set among fields whose edges were being eaten away by the forest. Though he did not know then that Uncle Hubert had yielded up his services to the prosecution, Dorkin had avoided him and found instead a cousin of Williams's mother. A pig-farmer, sixty years old, balding, greying, half-toothless, guileless, awkward, he was to tell again the story of the massacre of Williams's family in the Great War, and Dorkin hoped that his rustic simplicity would strike some responsive chord in a rustic jury.

From Carnarvon Dorkin had also managed to pluck forth a Presbyterian minister, a short, black-haired, round-faced man, who in the twenties had fled another depression in the Welsh valleys and fired by some youthful Celtic idealism answered the call of Carnarvon's little flock. He knew Owen for a good boy always, not drinking or fighting, a model son to his mother.

In Fredericton, Dorkin had found a history teacher with socialist leanings (which Dorkin had prevailed upon him to disguise) who had taught Williams and was willing to attest to his character and conscientiousness, if not his intellect. He had also found a fellow worker from the lumber company where Williams had worked who was willing to testify that Williams had never exhibited any evidence of murderous intentions towards anyone. ( “Williams wouldn't have lasted two minutes with my grandmother, or anybody else's grand-mother.” ) But Williams's boss had refused to testify, and when Dorkin had tried to pressure him had turned patriotic and ugly.

When Dorkin had set about arranging for testimony from some of the soldiers in Wakefield, Captain Fraser had also turned patriotic and ugly, and it was only through veiled threats of court orders that Dorkin had persuaded him to grant the necessary leave from duties. Later, Dorkin knew, Fraser would make them pay, but there was nothing he could do about that. Only Sergeant MacCrae, the untouchable hero of Dieppe, would perhaps escape, and perhaps once again get a few others out with him.

Now all of them, civilians and soldiers, sat in a row at the back of the court waiting their turn, a motley crew, badly coached, in-secure in their honesty.

The preliminaries over, Dorkin rose and began working his way through his roster, beginning with the witnesses from Carnarvon and Fredericton. His purpose was to dislodge the image Whidden and Sachs had created of Williams as a subhuman monster and to replace it with the image of an ordinary human being, shy and awkward, but fundamentally normal.

On his side, Whidden picked away, dressing up the image of Williams as the maladjusted outsider waiting only for the circumstances that would transform him into a homicidal maniac. But with the exception of the history teacher, whose social persuasions Whidden shrewdly intuited, these were witnesses with whom he had to go easy if he were not to alienate the worshipful members of his jury, and some of his darker hints about Williams's suppressed perversions went over the heads of both the witnesses and the jury.

With the outcast Zombies from the armoury he was on happier ground, and he once again played to a fully appreciative house as he swept back and forth across the front of the court, by turns whimsical, sarcastic, scornful, never for a moment letting his audience forget that these were the cowards who lounged in Wakefield while their sons and brothers were fighting and dying in Europe. What he sought to elicit from them without bewildering subtleties was evidence to establish Williams as a sullen and dangerous misfit.

Dorkin's concern was to emphasize once again that following his return from the dance Williams behaved normally and that no one saw any physical evidence of any kind that he had murdered Sarah Coile. He wound up the morning with Sergeant MacCrae. In his battledress uniform complete with his campaign ribbons and the ribbon of his Military Medal, he was a formidable presence— someone not even Whidden could cross with impunity. He had no evidence to add to what the other soldiers had said, but his saying it removed the taint that their being Zombies had given it.

“So,” Dorkin said in conclusion, “as sergeant in charge of that platoon, you would be familiar with the behaviour of Private Williams, and you saw no change whatever in this in the days following the dance?”

“No, sir,” MacCrae said. “None.”

“Do you believe that Private Williams murdered Sarah Coile?”

“No, I do not.”

“Thank you,” Dorkin said.

“Sergeant MacCrae,” Whidden said, “as part of your training, did you have any training in psychology?”

“No, sir,” MacCrae said.

“So your assessment of Private Williams's behaviour is not rooted in any kind of professional training?”

“No, sir.”

“Yesterday, Dr. Sachs, a professional psychiatrist, testified here that there was not necessarily anything inconsistent in Private Williams behaving normally and his having murdered Sarah Coile. I take it that you would agree that Dr. Sachs would be more knowledgeable about such matters than you would be?”

“I suppose he would be.”

“Thank you,” Whidden said.

And then Dorkin had a stroke of luck. Not content to take what he had and run, Whidden pushed for more and made one of his rare false moves.

“Sergeant MacCrae,” he said, “I think that almost everyone here must be aware of your heroic military record. I am wondering what you think of men who refuse to fight and leave men like yourself to bleed and die in defence of our country while they loaf and go to dances?”

Before answering, MacCrae looked down at Whidden with a dislike that he was at no pains to diguise.

“I don't think that anyone should be forced to go overseas who does not want to, sir,” he replied. “And I don't think that people who are not going themselves have the right to make judgements. Some of the men who do not go have very good reasons for what they are doing.”

“Such as Private Williams?”

“Private Williams's father died because of the Great War, sir, and three of his uncles were killed. That seems to me enough for one family.”

Somewhere at the back of the gallery someone—an old veteran perhaps of the Somme or Passchendaele—applauded briefly.

“You are a very tolerant man, Sergeant MacCrae,” Whidden said, recovering what he could. “More tolerant, I dare say, than I would be in your place.”

“Before I leave, sir,” MacCrae said, “I'd like to point out that Dr. Sachs did not know Private Williams and I did, and I still do not believe that he murdered Sarah Coile.”

“Thank you,” Whidden said. “I have no more questions. I am sure that the jury, like myself, cannot help but admire your loyalty to your men.”

MacCrae was Dorkin's last witness of the morning. He felt that he had not done badly. But it was the afternoon that would tell. First there would be Coile. And then if he could not break Coile, enough at least to lodge an irremovable doubt in the minds of his jurors, there would have to be Williams. The day before the trial began he had spent the whole day with him, going over everything that had happened, fishing, probing, trying to find out anything that still remained to be found, trying to be sure that in court there would be no unpleasant surprises.

When he was away from Williams, Dorkin's feelings towards him were ones of compassion, but when he was with him, what he often felt was irritation, and he sometimes experienced a curious shock of displacement, as if the person he had committed himself to defend had been supplanted by some shabby imposter. And he would ask himself whether, if he could go back to July, he would do this again. He wasn't sure. And sometimes he found himself asking what difference Williams made anyway. In a world where millions were being shot, blown up, drowned, tortured, frozen to death, hanged, gutted, what difference would one more make?

Dorkin walked for a quarter of an hour before going back to the armoury, where he ate a sandwich and washed and changed his shirt and then set off for the jail for a final talk with Williams.

Everything was more formal now. Dorkin was met by a Mountie and ushered to Williams's cell. He found him sitting on his bunk, looking very small and frightened. He looked up suddenly at Dorkin as if he were the hangman come to lead him the few steps to the gallows.

“Dear God,” Dorkin thought, “if there is a God, don't let him go to pieces yet. Keep him together for another three or four hours.”

Dorkin stood in the centre of the court, as in an arena, conscious as always of the weight of people above and behind him, and watched Daniel Coile make his way down the aisle. The companions who had been with him every day at the back of the courtroom were still there in their rough mackinaws, but Coile was dressed up in a grey tweed suit that fitted him well enough but still didn't look as if it belonged on him. He walked with a belligerent, I-don't-give-a-shit-for-anybody slouch.

As he sat down in the witness box, he turned on Dorkin a look of sullen hatred. Dorkin noticed that his eyes were small and set too close together, and everything about him suggested something petty and mean, a scavenger rather than a predator.

“Mr. Coile,” Dorkin said, “I wonder if perhaps we might begin with what you can tell us about Sarah's movements during the day of July 1. This was a holiday, so I presume she did not go into town to her job at the dairy.”

“That's right,” Coile said after a moment's hesitation, as if searching Dorkin's question for some clever trap.

“She was home all day?”

“No, she wasn't home all day. She went into town sometime before noon.”

“To see the parade?”

“I don't know what she went in for. I didn't ask. I didn't know she was gone until after.”

“I see. And what time did she come back from town?”

“End of the afternoon sometime. Four o'clock maybe.”