The Case Against Owen Williams (37 page)

When he looked out the window, he saw that a rain that had been threatening all day had begun, very light, as yet hardly more than a mist.

Near midnight, he went to bed and turned on his radio and waited through some cowboy music for the news. You are my sun-shine. The last paratroopers had been withdrawn from Arnhem, and someone British had issued a communiqué saying that the set-back had been a gallant success. In four weeks, a new victory loan campaign would begin. The Tigers had taken a one-game lead over the Browns. A barn and all its contents had burned in the village of Stanley. Private Owen Williams, testifying in his own defence, had proclaimed his innocence in the death of Sarah Coile. The case would go to the jury tomorrow.

Dorkin turned off the radio and the light and let the demons of the darkness have their way. All the things that he ought to have done, all the things that he ought to have said, or ought not to have said, came swarming down on him. He woke and slept and woke and was not sure whether he had slept or not. The oppression that he had felt all evening was shot through now with vast, terrifying, insubstantial anxieties, and he thought that madness would be something like that. He remembered a house that he used to pass on his way to school where in warm weather they used to put out on the verandah a crazy old woman, who would sit all day rolling her head from side to side, in hell for the crime of having been born.

After one final half-sleep, longer than most, he was awakened by the familiar clatter of metal-shod boots and the familiar mutter of voices. In intervals of quiet, he could hear the whisper of the rain. He tried to go back to sleep again but couldn't and was at the same time exhausted and preternaturally awake when Smith knocked on his door an hour later to rouse him for the last day. One thing only gave his heart a faint lift, and that was the reflection that, however it turned out, in twelve hours or so, there would be an end.

When he descended for breakfast in the mess, he found the armoury strangely deserted.

“Where is everybody?” he asked the cook who made his break-fast. “They've gone on a route march, sir, around the island.”

“In the rain?”

“Yes, sir. Captain Fraser's orders, sir. Wars don't wait for the weather to be good, do they, sir?”

“I suppose not,” Dorkin said. “Sergeant MacCrae too?”

“Yes, sir. Everybody but me, sir. I've got a bad knee. That's why I'm a cook.”

When Dorkin entered the courtroom with Private Smith following dutifully a pace behind, he noticed that for the first time they had allowed spectators to stand, two deep, along the back of the court. The second thing he noticed as he walked down the centre aisle was the row of brass in the seats behind Whidden's entourage. Colonel Meade. Another, heavy-set lieutenant-colonel whom he had never seen before. A moustached lieutenant who had the air of an aide-de-camp. Captain Fraser, in the presence of all this authority, sitting hunched and obsequious. Behind them was a second row of vips, this one made up mostly of what were evidently men of the law who had come for the show.

Meade and his party were standing, and Meade was talking to Whidden across the little oak fence that separated the public from the official area of the court, introducing the others, chatting. Feeling that it would seem impolite not to acknowledge Meade's presence, Dorkin hovered, awkward and uncertain, waiting his opportunity. Finally, Whidden turned back to his place, and Dorkin came forward. He saluted the four officers, and Meade made introductions. “Lieutenant-Colonel Hepworth. Lieutenant Keys. Captain Fraser, of course, you know.”

Hepworth's manner was distant, and Dorkin guessed that he had been one of the officers who had not wanted the army involved in Williams's defence.

“So,” Meade said. “Good luck. I'm sure you will acquit yourself well.”

Hepworth stared straight ahead.

Sometimes over the previous two weeks, in the watches of the night, or in the interval between the dawn uproar of the soldiery and Smith's discreet tap on his door, Dorkin had fantasized eloquent speeches about such things as the presumption of innocence, and reasonable doubt, and the high principles of the British system of justice above all mere prejudice and personal inclination. But in the cold light of morning in front of his shaving mirror with his real self staring back at him, he knew that he was not an orator. For one thing, he was too young to mouth such high sentiments and make them credible. For another, he had come no longer to believe them.

And this morning, beneath the surface nervousness, he felt flat, uninterested, dead. Partly it was the lack of real sleep over the last couple of weeks, and especially over the last four days. Partly it was that he had been over it all too many times. If he was not an orator, he was evidently not an actor either with the talent to speak the same lines a hundred times as if the words had just that moment flooded into his mind.

Williams arrived, looking small and frightened, as usual, between Carvell and the Mountie. The jury filed in and were polled, the murmur of conversation faded, died, and Dunsdale entered through his little door behind the bench. All rose, all sat.

Dorkin had never addressed a jury before. The simple crimes of his innocents at Utopia did not warrant such an outlay of public money and were dealt with by a magistrate.

He went through it all again, slowly, reasonably, logically, point by point. It was the only choice he had anyway since the weight of feeling was going to be all on the other side. That morning on the front page of the local weekly paper there had been the faces of two more dead soldiers, and inside a last letter to his mother from a soldier now dead these two months outside Caen.

He talked of the unethicality of the
RCMP
interrogation of Williams, of the absence of any physical evidence connecting Williams to the murder, of the normality of his behaviour in the days following the murder, of the improbabilities inherent in the prosecution's contention that it was Williams who brought Sarah Coile to the gravel pit, of the grave potential for error in the evidence of Reverend Clemens, of the absence of any evidence whatever other than that of Clemens which was inconsistent with Williams's later account of his activities that evening, of the failure of the
RCMP
to locate as a potential murderer the father of Sarah Coile's child, of the numerous possible explanations of the indisputable facts other than that offered by the prosecution, of the airy insubstantiality of Dr. Sach's testimony and of the prosecution's attempt to create a profile of Williams as a psychopath.

It took him over two hours to cover the ground, and he knew that he was not doing it well. Now and then, he had the sense of listening to his own voice as if he were detached from it, and he was struck by how curiously flat it sounded. Looking at the members of the jury, he found it difficult to read their reactions, but the signs did not seem propitious. Most of them looked away after a moment whenever he met their eyes, and the three businessmen whom he had judged to be the hard cases made it clear from small signs—a pursing of the lips, a slight, abrupt tilt of the chin—that they did not care much for what he was saying.

Out of the corner of his eye, he was conscious of Whidden, his bulk sprawled casually in his chair, sometimes looking down at the table, sometimes upward at the high ornamental ceiling, with an air of indulgent amusement.

Twice he was aware of jurors watching Whidden rather than himself and realized that he was being upstaged. Now and then, he allowed himself a glance at the row of vips. Meade looked attentive and thoughtful, the other colonel impassive and stern. Fraser watched him with a kind of skulking hostility.

Towards the end of his speech, some of the spectators, even some of the newsmen, began slipping out. He finished and stood in a cavern of silence, the jurors in front of him looking down at their hands or their feet or the floor or at Dunsdale or Williams, anywhere but at him.

Dundsale tapped his gavel and adjourned the trial until two o'clock that afternoon.

At ten minutes past two, Whidden rose to a packed house. He waited for the stir he had created to wash back and forth across the courtroom, and then in an expectant silence moved out from behind his table like a great actor coming onto the stage.

Overweight, slightly awkward, shuffling, untidy in his baggy trousers and crumpled gown, he had the true popular touch. He was not just someone whom the jurors could admire but someone whom they could fantasize themselves as having become had a few of the cookies crumbled another way. And he himself, Lieutenant Bernard Dorkin, trim in his officer's uniform, precise in thought and speech, with the aura of the university still about him, was not someone whom they could imagine themselves being, even if he had not been defending the Zombie Owen Williams. Even if he had not been a Jew.

Whidden took them through the evidence again, but as he moved around, now staring down at the floor, now up at the ceiling, now at some space above and behind the banked spectators in the gallery, he seemed to be addressing, not just the jurors, but spectators, newsmen, the greater public outside, even history. What Dorkin had struggled to get through to the imagination of the jurors was that the evidence that had been presented to them was a chaos—a tangle of uncertainties on the basis of which no reason-able judgement was possible. What Whidden presented them with was an illusion of order. Weaving an alternate cosmos in which it was difficult not to believe once lured inside, he made vanish with his magic wand all the stubborn, squalid untidinesses that make life unsimple and ungreat and replaced them with something to free the imagination—the mythlike spectacle of a simple girl destroyed by an ogre. It was a myth, Dorkin felt sure, that almost everyone there already wished in some confused way to believe in—a myth that was all the more compelling in that it left open, for anyone who wished to imagine himself stepping into it, the role of winged avenger.

Dorkin listened with impotent rage at the unscrupulous-ness of what was happening. The context of Williams's untruths to the Mounties was ignored so that only the untruths remained, Clemens's evidence was treated as indisputable fact, the absence of any hard evidence against Williams was adroitly kept out of sight or transformed into further proof of guilt, all the shoddy insinuations based on Sachs's testimony were resurrected.