The Case Against Owen Williams (44 page)

Just before seven o'clock, Grant and his team arrived, three carloads of them. Dorkin stood at the corner on Broad Street and watched them drive up to the church and disembark. They had brought the tracking dog with them. They had also brought Corporal Drost. As he emerged from the back of one of the cars, he looked down the little street, and his eyes and Dorkin's met. Surprised, he stared briefly, but he made no sign of recognition, nor did Dorkin. Dorkin watched the first of them enter the ruined church, then turned away, back to his own car, and left.

Now he sat in his office, waiting for the call that Carvell had promised him. It was almost midnight when it finally came.

“So?” Dorkin said.

“So,” Carvell said, “they spent over an hour talking to Mrs. Clemens. You were right. It was Clemens. You were probably also right about Coile. He was apparently messing around with Sarah, though it's hard to say exactly how far it went.”

“Was it Coile or Clemens who got her pregnant?” Dorkin asked.

“It's hard to say, but I suspect it was Clemens. It's also hard to say exactly what happened. Mrs. Clemens wasn't very coherent, and there were probably things she just didn't know. It looks as if Sarah may have gone to Clemens about her father, and Clemens took advantage of her. Although I suppose it's possible that she took advantage of him. That's the way Mrs. Clemens sees it any-way, but I'm not sure I'd put much stock in that. Whichever way, he became involved with her, and it obviously got out of control. Out of his control, I mean. It sounds as if he was out of his mind over her.”

“What about the murder?” Dorkin asked.

“It's hard to know exactly what happened there either. Apparently, Mrs. Clemens and Elizabeth weren't at the church on the Saturday afternoon when Sarah went there to see Clemens as he said they were. It may be that she threatened him. She may have wanted money to get away with and maybe get rid of the baby. Maybe he didn't have it. Maybe he thought that if he started giving her money, there'd be no end to it. If Sarah was trying to set Williams up, she must have had doubts about Clemens looking after her, and she was looking for another way out. It's also possible that she told Clemens she was going to find someone else, and he was crazy with jealousy. But we're never going to know.

“I don't think we're ever going to know exactly what happened that night either. After she left Williams, Clemens obviously intercepted her somewhere, probably on one of the paths up through the woods. It's difficult to know how planned it may have been. Or where it happened. I suspect he may have lured her back to the church on some pretext or other. It's pretty doubtful that he killed her there in the woods. There were too many people around, and he couldn't have carried her very far given her weight. And it's hard to know when she was taken to the gravel pit.”

“But there's no doubt that it was Clemens?” Dorkin asked.

“No. No doubt at all. Apparently the three of them talked about it. It's all crazy as hell.”

“Have you told Williams about it?”

“No. I thought you might want to.”

Dorkin hesitated.

“No,” he said. “You tell him. I'll talk to him tomorrow before I leave. He's not my problem anymore.”

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

Dorkin sat at the front of the restaurant by the window, looking out at the square with its neat, geometric criss-cross of walks, its ornate, Victorian bandstand, its old-fashioned iron benches that had survived five years of patriotic scrap drives. These things were to him as old as his memory of himself, the setting of summer walks with his mother, of summer concerts and summer games. The bandstand was boarded up now for the winter, and the triangles of grass between the walks were covered with a thin pack of dirty snow. In spite of the raw cold there were, as always, a few men on the benches—bums and merchant seamen pausing to reflect on their further peregrinations through the city in search of warmth or liquor or love. And on the walks they sat beside, there was a continuous traffic of shoppers. It was Friday, December 22, and Monday would be Christmas Day, the sixth Christmas of the war. And perhaps not the last after all.

On the table beside Dorkin's coffee cup lay the morning news-paper, its front page full of calamity. Once more, as in the spring of 1940, the panzers had struck through the Ardennes. This time it was the Americans who had been smashed, and the headlines were ominous.
NO HINT THAT GERMAN OFFFFENSIVE SPENT. GERMANS USING MORE TROOPS THAN WON BATTTTLE OF FRANCE.
In the middle of the page, there was a photograph of long lines of American vehicles bumper to bumper pulling back. It was obviously a rout.

Whether as reward or punishment, Dorkin's request for a transfer to regular army duties in Europe had at last been granted, and he was home in Saint John on embarkation leave. It was strange as always to be back among these familiar surroundings, strangest of all to be back in his own room with its relics of childhood and the haunting background murmur of the city outside the window, pervasive and elusive, like some quality of the air itself. Inside, pervasive and elusive also, there was the sad Jewish atmosphere with its sense of distances of space and time, those distances whose memory his father fought so furiously to deny and bury. But for weeks now rumours of unimaginable massacres had been filtering into the news reports, and Dorkin was aware that his father was more talkative even than usual, about nothing, about trivialities, filling the air with words. Behind this also, Dorkin knew, there was his departure, hardly ever mentioned. Dorkin did not believe for a minute that he would not be back. Soldiers never did. Parents nourished no such illusions, finding themselves almost daily on the edge of an abysm of grief, every arriving mail a heart-stopping moment of fear, every telegraph boy on the street an agent of terror.

The inquest for Zacharias and Elizabeth Clemens had been held two weeks after their deaths. Since there was nothing that Dorkin could add to the more official evidence that Carvell and Hooper would give and since it was not directly an army matter, it was not thought necessary by the army that he be there. The inquest was also in effect a trial, and when it was over, the Reverend Clemens stood condemned and Private Williams exonerated. But the law does not so willingly let go those whom it has decided to remove, temporarily or permanently, from the world, and it was another two weeks before Williams was released and returned to the army, his crimes expunged from his record, the papers ordering his dishonourable discharge made quietly to vanish.

One evening in mid-November when Dorkin was in the officers' mess back at Utopia, a fellow lieutenant brought him a newspaper folded over to an inside page. The item was a single sentence, reporting that a body recovered from the St. John River below Wakefield had been positively identified as that of Mrs. Roseann Clemens. A week after that, a letter arrived from George Carvell, a long letter in a surprisingly elegant hand—by way, it said, of an epilogue to these late, strange events.

The day after Dorkin's departure, Mrs. Clemens had been taken to the hospital. She was given a room by herself, and she spent most of her time just sitting. Sometimes when the nurses spoke to her, she acted as if she hadn't heard. Sometimes she talked to herself, and sometimes the nurses had the impression that she was imagining that there were people in the room whom she was talking to.

Since there seemed to be nothing that could be done for her in the hospital, she was released and went to live with one of the families from the church. She stayed with them for a couple of weeks and seemed to be getting better. She helped with housework, and she started going out to do shopping. Then one day a man walking across the St. John River bridge from the far side saw a woman standing looking over the rail. She looked up at him, and when he was a dozen yards away, she climbed up onto the rail, let herself slide off feet first, and dropped the thirty feet into the river. About a week afterwards, some boys in a boat found her four miles downstream, wedged up against some bushes and frozen into the first skim of winter ice.

Constable Hooper had continued his search into her back-ground. He knew that the Clemenses had come to Wakefield from a church on the Miramichi, and the people there said that they had come from Ontario, but no one knew where. The Mounties checked in Ontario and found nothing. They sent descriptions of Clemens and the two women to the
FBI
and found nothing. The
FBI
checked with state police in the south and found nothing.

Hooper thought that they had probably changed their names, perhaps more than once. Both the women had apparently been married before they went with Clemens and perhaps were being pursued by husbands and relatives. Somewhere in the States, there were obviously people through whom the story could be pieced together, but it seemed unlikely that they would ever be found and that anything would ever be known beyond what was known now.

“If you believed in spirits,” Carvell wrote, “you might think they were a visitation from another world. As for Clemens, I suspect that his little room at the church was host to more female companion-ship than just Sarah Coile, and I wonder if there may have been other victims elsewhere.”

On the Sunday morning after the fire, when he had gone to the jail, Dorkin found Williams sitting by the table in his cell reading a book printed on cheap, wartime, pulp paper.
The Seventh Angel.
A trashy religious tract, from his spiritual mentor no doubt, with a cover lurid with the lightning of the final judgement.

“Sheriff Carvell has told you what happened?” Dorkin said.

“Yes,” Williams said. “When are they going to let me out of here?”

“I don't know,” Dorkin said. “It'll be a few days, I expect. There will have to be some ruling made in Fredericton.”

“Will I get compensated?” Williams asked.

“I don't know,” Dorkin said.

“I should be. I shouldn't have been arrested at all. It wasn't fair.”

“No, it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair at all. But life isn't fair. It wasn't fair to Sarah Coile either.”

“She was a whore,” Williams said belligerently. “All she wanted was to trap me into marrying her.”

“No,” Dorkin said. “She wasn't a whore. Just a poor, lonely girl life never gave a chance to. Now that you've been given a chance, you should start by showing some compassion.”

Williams ignored him.

“Reverend Limus always said that God would save me,” he said.

“It wasn't God,” Dorkin said. “Don't flatter yourself. God had nothing to do with it. It was blind luck and one of the local drunks.”