The Case Against Owen Williams (7 page)

So it was that an hour later Dorkin was back in his Jeep on the way up the river to Wakefield, and here he was this morning looking out the window of his spartan quarters in the local armoury.

He got into his trousers and shirt and took his shaving kit and went off towards the officers' bathroom to shave and shower. His room opened onto a walkway above the back end of the drill floor, which doubled as a dormitory for the garrison of Zombies. Between the rows of double-decker bunks that lined the wall, they were getting themselves put together under the eye of Sergeant MacCrae, who had looked after getting Dorkin and his driver settled the evening before.

The evening before, Dorkin had also met Captain Fraser and had recognized him at once for what he was: one of those pre-war reserve officers who after supper a couple of evenings a week had played at being soldiers so that other nights of the week they could drink Scotch in the local Legion Hall away from their boring wives. When the war started, in the days before anyone really knew what was what, they were called up, given real commissions and jobs they were incompetent to fill and for a few months officered a good part of the Canadian Army. Then reality set in, and most of them found themselves shunted off into dead-end postings like Wakefield.

Thanks to previous encounters of this sort, Dorkin took all this in in a moment, and he saw that in that unguarded moment Fraser had seen him take it in and had put him down as a hostile presence. Talking from the height of his rank, Fraser had hinted unmistakably enough that he regarded Dorkin's being sent, even as an observer, as an intrusion on his authority and a questioning of his judgement. It was clear that he would have liked Williams hanged without even the bother of a trial and that he saw Dorkin as someone who might somehow sully the purity of these feelings. On his side, Dorkin had hidden behind his subordinate rank to stay clear of any argument, but he did not want to have to deal with Fraser again this morning or any other morning.

When he had shaved and showered, in more or less cold water, and got himself into his uniform, Dorkin hunted out Sergeant MacCrae to ask where he could breakfast and was directed to the town's main hotel, a great four-storey barn of a building with a balcony from which a Union Jack hung out over the street. Three-quarters of an hour later, breakfasted, feeling a little better about things, he walked slowly up Main Street through the centre of town and off along a little side street to the George County jail and his first business of the day.

Dorkin had never seen a good-looking jail, and this one was particularly ugly. It was a square, two-storey building, constructed of some kind of cheap orange brick, and it was much too wide for its height so that it seemed to be crouching by the sidewalk like a gigantic toad. There had been some half-hearted passes at ornamentation which seemed somehow only to enhance the ugliness. There were remembrances of medieval stonework, pointed windows of vaguely ecclesiastical shape, and at one corner a squat tower topped with truncated sandstone battlements.

Dorkin mounted the steps under the squat little tower, pushed open the door, and found himself in a short hallway with barred windows on one side, an open door on the other, and a much heavier, closed door in front of him. There was a stale smell and somehow an atmosphere of darkness in spite of the morning sun that was pouring in through the barred windows.

Dorkin went to the open door. Inside, a tall man in an immaculately tailored grey suit was sitting behind a desk smoking a cigarette. He was fiftyish with a clean-lined, rather English face, dark hair going grey at the temples, and cool, hazel eyes. Dorkin noticed the thin scar that angled down across one side of his forehead.

“Good morning,” he said. “I'm Lieutenant Dorkin. I've been sent up from Area Headquarters. I'd like to talk with Private Williams for a few minutes before the hearing.”

The man rose and held out his hand across the desk.

“I'm George Carvell,” he said. “The local sheriff.”

Some wry twist in the voice made it sound like a parody of a line from a western movie.

“You've come to represent Williams?” he asked.

“No,” Dorkin said. “I'm just here to look on and report back to Fredericton.”

“He's not going to have any counsel then?”

“No, not so far as I know. That's why I want to talk to him.”

Carvell raised his eyebrows.

“Captain Fraser gave me the impression that the army was sending someone up to act as counsel.”

“No. Captain Fraser must have misunderstood the situation.”

“He should have counsel.”

“I agree,” Dorkin said. “But the army's view, at the moment anyway, is that that is not its responsibility.”

“It's a nasty affair,” Carvell said.

“It is,” Dorkin agreed. “In more ways than one.”

“Well,” Carvell said, “I'll take you out back.”

He led Dorkin out to the door at the end of the hallway and took out a ring full of keys and inserted one into the lock.

“The dungeon,” he said.

Beyond the door there was a line of cells on either side of a corridor. They were empty except for one in which a man who looked like a tramp was lying curled up on his bunk facing the wall.

“Thirty days for drinking and fighting in public,” Carvell said.

From a door at the end of the corridor, a grotesquely fat man emerged.

“Henry Cronk,” Carvell said. “Our county jailer. Lieutenant Dorkin is here to see Private Williams.”

“I can lock you in,” he said to Dorkin, “but there's an interview room down here where you'll be more comfortable.”

“I would prefer the room,” Dorkin said.

“Open up, Henry,” Carvell said.

Henry rattled his way along a ring of keys until he found the right one and turned it in the lock. He managed to convey a sense of ritual importance to the unlocking of the door, a sense of some imminent moment of high drama, as if the door were going to open on someone fabulous, like Bluebeard or Jack the Ripper. Instead it opened on a prisoner who looked as harmless as any Dorkin had ever seen. But then, he thought, Dr. Crippen would also have looked harmless. And Sweeney Todd. Even Adolf Hitler, whom someone very unlucky had just failed to kill with a bomb a few days before. Williams was the first murderer, putative or otherwise, whom Dorkin had ever seen.

Williams had been lying on his bunk, but he got up warily when the door was opened. He was not wearing his battle dress but a rumpled work uniform.

“This is Lieutenant Dorkin,” Carvell said. “From headquarters in Fredericton. He wants to talk to you.”

Williams hesitated, still wary, watchful. Then he saluted perfunctorily, the kind of salute that in the wrong place to the wrong officer could get a soldier put on a charge.

The room that Carvell showed them to was like other rooms Dorkin had sat in with other prisoners in other jails. It was furnished with a plain wooden table and four plain wooden chairs. On the table, there was a small tin ashtray that would have been quite useless as a weapon. The window, of course, was barred.

Dorkin sat down at the table and motioned Williams into a chair opposite him.

“You can smoke if you want to,” Dorkin told him.

“I don't smoke, sir.”

He sat hunched forward with his fingers hooked nervously over the edge of the table. Dorkin noticed that the nails were bitten back almost to the quick. He seemed to remember that Williams was twenty or thereabouts, but there was something of the pimply adolescent about him. In spite of the jet black hair, his skin was white, untanned and untannable, like that of the Irish girls Dorkin had gone to school with in Saint John.

“Why are you wearing clothes like that?” Dorkin asked. “Where is your uniform?”

“The Mounties took it the night I was arrested, sir,” Williams said.

“You didn't get another uniform?”

“No, sir.”

That would be Fraser's doing, Dorkin thought, with the idea of distancing Williams from the army and himself.

“You still don't have a lawyer?” Dorkin asked.

“No, sir. My uncle tried to get one in Fredericton, but he couldn't find anyone.”

“Your uncle?”

“Yes, sir. My mother and father are both dead. My father got gassed in the war. He couldn't work much, and he died when I was ten years old. My mother died a couple of years ago. They had a farm in Carnarvon, but that went to my uncle for debts or something.”

“I see,” Dorkin said. “Well, if you can't afford a lawyer, the court will appoint one for you. You can't be tried without a lawyer.”

“Maybe after today I won't need one,” Williams said.

Dorkin affected not to be surprised by such naivety.

“All I did was walk that girl a little way from the dance hall and leave her,” Williams said. “I didn't do anything to her.”

Dorkin studied him. He sounded confident enough, but he had had over three weeks to practise speeches like that.

“That may be,” Dorkin said, “but I think I'd better warn you that a prosecutor doesn't usually go to a preliminary hearing unless he is reasonably sure that he has a chance of his case being sent to trial.”

Dorkin saw Williams's face whiten even further, and the fingers dropped from the table edge into his lap.

“But I didn't do anything to her.”

“I'm sorry,” Dorkin said, “but I have to warn you. They evidently feel that they have enough evidence to justify a trial, and that is what will probably happen.”

“What will happen today?”

“They're going to present the evidence they have to a magistrate. If he thinks it's enough to make it seem possible that you are guilty, he'll set a trial date in two or three months. If you had a lawyer, he would contest their evidence. Since you don't, you shouldn't say anything yourself at all. You'll only get yourself in more trouble. When you're asked if there's anything you want to say, you should say that you've been advised not to say anything until you have a lawyer to represent you.”

“But then they'll think I'm guilty,” Williams said.

“No, they won't. It's the normal thing to do in the circumstances.”

Williams stared across the table at the window beyond which the leaves of a maple tree stood against the sky, and birds came and went, and the ordinary world went on. Dorkin was afraid Williams was going to start to cry.

“Do you understand?” Dorkin repeated. “You shouldn't make any statements in court. Or to anyone about any of this until you get a lawyer. But listen to what is said so that you can tell your lawyer when you have one about anything which doesn't seem to be an accurate account of what happened. Do you understand?”

“Why couldn't my uncle find a lawyer?” Williams asked.

“I don't know,” Dorkin lied. “There may not have been anyone who was free to take the case.”

No one would take it, Dorkin knew, because it was a case where there was nothing to be gained—not money evidently and certainly not glory. If Williams were convicted, his lawyer would be seen as having chalked up a well-deserved defeat in defence of a bad cause, and he would have to endure such guilt as he might be capable of at having a client hanged—for if Williams were convicted, he would unquestionably be hanged. Everyone—the law, the army, public opinion—would certainly see to that. And in the unlikely event that Williams was acquitted, his lawyer would be seen by the public as a clever scoundrel who had contrived to subvert the course of justice.

The lawyer whom Williams would end up with, Dorkin knew, would be some court-appointed incompetent who would simply go through the motions of a defence because in his heart he wouldn't even want to win. Dorkin studied Williams and realized that he was almost certainly talking to a dead man. In the interest of his own peace of mind and his perhaps already fading belief in human justice, he could only hope that Williams was indeed guilty as charged.

The central court of George County was a majestic room some sixty feet square and two storeys high with a spectators' gallery at the back which made it seem a little like a theatre. The judge's bench was on a raised platform about four feet above the main floor. To the right and lower was the witness box. Down one side wall was the jury box, down the other a long table. Facing the judge and completing the rectangle, were two long tables, the left for the defence, the right for the prosecution. Behind these, separated by a low rail, there was seating for a couple of hundred spectators. The room was panelled in oak and filled with light from four tall windows along each side.

When he had left Williams, Dorkin had presented his letter of introduction from Meade to the presiding magistrate, Thurcott, a prim little man with rimless glasses, an old friend of Meade's with the same unmistakable air of good family. But this morning, behind his polished manners and his surface assurance, he was clearly nervous. Like Dorkin's, his normal clientele had been guilty only of petty crimes, where a little blood might have been shed, but no life had been taken and none was at stake. He was very unhappy that there was no defence counsel, and in its absence he arranged that Dorkin be seated at the table where the defence would have sat if there had been one.