The Case Against Owen Williams (6 page)

“Yes,” Drost said, and before he could qualify it, Grant interrupted.

“Have you got a positive identification?” he asked.

“No,” Drost said. “Not exactly.”

“Well,” Grant said, “before we start chasing around, maybe we'd better make sure who it is we're chasing around over.”

“She fits the description we had of Sarah Coile,” Drost said. “I saw a photograph. The clothes are right. And George feels sure that it's her. He's seen her around town.”

Grant glanced at Carvell.

“It's too big a coincidence,” Drost said.

“Famous last words,” Grant said. “Where did she live, assuming it's her?”

“About a mile up the road out there,” Drost said. “I didn't send anyone up there because I didn't have anyone I could spare. And I didn't want to cause any more stir than there was already until you got here with some more men.”

“Any idea how she got down here?” Grant asked.

“No,” Drost said. “Down the road presumably.”

Grant looked around the pit and up at the trees that fringed the top.

“Have those people out there been on the ground?” he asked.

“Not down here,” Drost said, “but some of them were partway down the road before I chased them off, and they've been around the edge of the pit up there. I only had Hooper and George here. It was hard to control them.”

“Couldn't you have got some help from the town police?” Grant asked.

“They'd have created more problems than they solved,” Drost said. “You don't know the town police.”

“No,” Grant said, “I don't know the town police, but if those people have been all over the place, our dog is going to be useless.”

Through all this, the figure from under the tarpaulin lay staring blindly up at the sky. Grant gestured, and Drost gave her back her privacy.

“Have you found anything?” Grant asked. “What about the rest of her clothing?”

“Nothing,” Drost said. “Nothing down here. All this rubbish seems to be old. We haven't looked in the bushes.”

Grant looked around the pit, and as he stood meditating, Kroll and the dog man from Moncton came down, Kroll with a camera and tripod. Grant introduced them perfunctorily. The name of the constable in charge of the dog was Martin, which Grant anglicized in spite of Martin's obvious Acadian accent.

“Do her first,” Grant said to Kroll. “Then the area—everything.”

“We might as well try the dog,” he said to Martin, “since it's here, but we're not going to find out anything.”

Martin went back up for the dog, and Grant turned back to Drost.

“You say that no one has seen her since Saturday night at the dance?” he asked.

“No. Not that we know of anyway,” Drost said.

“Funny no one found her before this,” Grant said. “That's almost four days. You think she's been here that long?”

“I don't know,” Drost said.

“You say she went to the dance with some friends, but she left with a soldier named Williams?”

“Yes,” Drost said. “Williams said that she told him she wasn't feeling well. According to Williams, he walked her out to the Hannigan Road just out there and left her to walk home by herself.”

“What time did Williams get back to his barracks?” Grant said.

“I don't know,” Drost said.

“You haven't checked his story?” Grant asked.

“There wasn't any reason to especially,” Drost said. “Until we found her here, we thought we were just dealing with another missing persons case. Since we found her, we haven't had time.”

“Okay,” Grant said. “But there's lots of time now. Tell Hooper to go back to town and go over all the ground again. Tell him to find out when Williams got back to his barracks and to check everything about his story that he can. Do you think he can manage that?”

“Yes,” Drost said.

“And while he's there, get him to send someone out here to pick her up.”

As Grant had foreseen, the dog was useless. It was a German shepherd, dark-grey, thick-coated, alert to everything. It was the best in the business, and Martin was very proud of it, but the trail it might once have followed was cold, and there were scents everywhere. It went around the pit on its lead, snuffling the ground, stopping every now and then to look at Martin, eager but unsure of what it was supposed to be looking for. After a while Martin took it back to the van and came back to help the others with the ground search.

Kroll finished photographing everything worth photographing and followed them around carrying his camera to record anything new, but they found nothing but the remains of nights much longer ago than the night the girl had been brought there.

Halfway through the search, an ambulance arrived. The body was loaded onto a stretcher, covered with a clean sheet, and Reynolds and Kroll carried it up out of the pit. Then Daniel Coile arrived. Drost told him what they suspected, and Reynolds took him to town to confirm it.

Finally, when the light was beginning to fade, Hooper came back.

“It doesn't add up,” he said. “There's almost an hour missing. He's been lying.”

“Well,” Grant said, “it looks as if we have an open and shut case.”

CHAPTER
THREE

Lieutenant Bernard Dorkin, awaking from a troubled sleep, became conscious of the clatter of metal-shod boots on a metal staircase. He rolled over onto his back on the crude army cot and looked at the room. The walls were a bilious institutional green. From the ceiling an unshaded light bulb hung on a cord. On a clothes rod along the wall, his uniform, dispossessed of him, hung on a cheap wire hanger among a line of cheap wire hangers. There was a wooden chair against the wall, on which he had placed his kit. And that was all. Apart from the uniform and the kit, it might have been a more than ordinarily spacious jail cell.

Dorkin looked at his watch. It was just after seven. He willed himself to get up and went over to the window and ran up the blind. The sky was cloudless, and there was the look about it already of a hot day. Below his window, there was a small gravel parade square, bordered on the other three sides by a collection of ramshackle sheds. Beyond these, he could see larger brick buildings dropping away down the hill towards the creek that divided the town in two. On the other side of the creek, the roofs and gables of white wooden homes showed through a dense canopy of leaves. In the early morning sunlight, they seemed an image of small-town tranquility—an image more attractive certainly than the one he had formed in his imagination of a ramshackle farm town full of hillbillies and horseshit. When he had arrived the night before, it had been too dark for him to see any of this, and in any case he had been too exhausted and too angry at being there at all to give a damn what the town looked like.

This time yesterday, he had been two hundred miles away at Camp Utopia on the Bay of Fundy coast, where for two years he had served as a provost officer, dealing with the usual trail of soldiers' offenses—drunkenness, disorderly conduct, assault and battery, petty theft, damage to property, paternity—while he waited for what he had heard rumoured was going to be a favourable response at last to his request for a transfer to an infantry unit and an overseas posting. As the casualties mounted around Caen, a reinforcement crisis was brewing, and what was going to be an ill wind for the Zombies was going to be the wind of freedom for Dorkin.

It was this that he had hoped to hear about the day before when he was summoned into the presence of the Officer Commanding, Camp Utopia. Instead, he was ordered to report that afternoon to the senior Provost Officer, Colonel Meade in Fredericton, on a matter of urgent importance. As was the way, he wasn't told what the matter of urgent importance was. He was assigned a Jeep and a driver, and an hour later he was being bounced along the coast road through the early morning fog towards Saint John en route to Fredericton.

When he arrived in the early afternoon, he found that Colonel Meade was in a meeting, and he waited for over two hours in Meade's outer office while a cwac clerk, blonde, attractive, and remote, typed and answered the phone and took down messages and departed and returned and went away with files and came back without them. There was clearly a flap on, and the longer it lasted the more uneasy Dorkin became. Finally, Meade arrived, expansively apologetic, with a briefcase and an armload of folders.

Colonel Kenneth Meade was a man in his fifties with an ample figure and a taste for formal rotundities of speech, a staunch monarchist, a staunch imperialist, a man whom it was not difficult to find ridiculous if one forbade him his premises. But in his few dealings with him, Dorkin, though a very junior officer, and half his age, had always found him open and friendly, and partly in spite of himself, he had come not only to respect, but rather to like him and to feel that he was in some measure liked in return.

The office into which Meade ushered Dorkin was furnished as it might have been in a civilian firm rather than an army H-hut. There were heavy curtains, a heavy oak desk, bookcases of real wood, opulent, upholstered armchairs.

Meade dropped into the chair behind his desk and sighed heavily.

“You're wondering,” he said, “not unnaturally, what this is all about. Well, what it's all about is the Williams case. You've heard about the Williams case, of course?”

Dorkin nodded. Everyone had heard about the Williams case.

“The preliminary hearing is tomorrow, as you may also have heard,” Meade continued, “and what all this has been about today is making some decision about what attitude the army should adopt to the proceedings.”

It struck Dorkin that it was a little late to be getting around to deciding that, but he kept the observation to himself.

“There has been a view abroad from the beginning,” Meade said, “that the army should wash its hands of the whole affair by giving Private Williams an immediate dishonourable discharge and leaving him to be tried as a civilian. The first advocates of this view were Williams's commanding officer, Captain Fraser, and the commander of the local branch of the Legion, Colonel Blaikie. Blaikie has a lot of influence with important people, and he's been bombarding people here and in Ottawa with letters and phone calls for a month. What Blaikie and his people are arguing is that Williams will bring the uniform into disrepute if he is tried as a soldier. And they point out that Williams is a conscript who was brought into the army against his will and who has refused overseas service— that he is a Zombie, in short—and that therefore he has no right to involve the army in his infamous crime and certainly no claim to any assistance from it, legal or otherwise.”

Meade paused and lit a cigarette.

“The trouble with this view,” he went on, “as I have spent several hours pointing out, is that it assumes Williams to be guilty before he has even been committed for trial, let alone convicted.

“What was decided yesterday and then argued all over again today was that for the time being the army should adopt the compromise of sending someone with a watching brief to the preliminary hearing tomorrow and make a further decision after that. They didn't want anyone too senior, and of the people who were available we thought you seemed the most suitable. You have no objection?”

“No, of course not,” Dorkin said.

He had learned long ago that what you can't help in the army, you may as well pretend to like.

“Good,” Meade said. “I was sure we could rely on you. Now, unless he has found one today, I understand that Williams does not have legal counsel. Before the hearing, you should see him and tell him not to say anything whatever during the preliminary hearing unless he has got legal counsel. We've already told the magistrate that you're coming, and he'll probably give you the right to examine witnesses, but I don't want you to do that. You're not to give the impression that the army is conducting a defence for Williams. I want you to listen and form an opinion of the evidence and come back to me and report. Then someone somewhere will have to make some clear decision about what is going to be done.”