The Case Against Owen Williams (16 page)

“I understand you weren't very well accommodated when you were up there for the preliminary. It probably wasn't anybody's fault, but there's an officer's room next door which is better than what you had. There isn't any officers' mess there, so you can eat in the town. I've also arranged with Fraser for an office for you and Smith and for any equipment you need. And you'll also need transport, so I've arranged for a car from the pool in Fredericton. It isn't very grand, but again it'll be better than having your guts shaken out in a Jeep. Does all this sound all right?”

“Yes, sir,” Dorkin said. “It sounds fine. I couldn't ask for more.”

“I've also been doing a little legal spade work for you,” Meade said. “I've had a talk with the prosecutor's office, and I've had them pass over to me copies of the various depositions which the Mounties took in Wakefield. I'll give them to you before you leave. I've also got approval for you to examine the evidence that the Mounties collected on the site. I understand they brought in every-thing they found in the gravel pit but the birdshit.”

“Thank you very much,” Dorkin said. “I think I would have had trouble getting that material on my own.”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” Meade said. “Whidden isn't known for giving away his advantages if he can help it.”

He gazed briefly at the river, then said, “You genuinely believe he didn't do it?”

“Yes,” Dorkin said. “I do.”

“You don't have to, you know. All you have to do to fulfil your duty as defence counsel is to say everything on behalf of your client that can be said. And, if necessary, do whatever you can to get the charge and the penalty reduced.”

“He didn't do it. I'm certain of it. For one thing he just isn't the type.”

“In the right circumstances,” Meade said, “we're all the type.”

The next morning Dorkin arrived in Wakefield equipped with everything that Meade had promised—Private John Smith, amanuensis and spear carrier, the Ford staff car, the files with the depositions from Whidden, McKiel, and Co., a large envelope containing copies of the orders that had been dispatched to Captain Fraser concerning his accommodation and working facilities, a copy of the letter arranging for his board at the Carleton Hotel compliments of His Majesty, copies of letters that had been dispatched to Sheriff Carvell and Corporal Drost informing them of his appointment as defense counsel and respectfully hoping for their co-operation.

On the parade ground at the back of the armoury, he found Sergeant MacCrae drilling the company of Zombies. They were in full battle dress, complete with steel helmets and Lee-Enfields. This, Dorkin learned from MacCrae, had become a regular morning routine as a cure for what Captain Fraser considered a general lack of discipline. When Dorkin presented himself to Fraser, he found that Fraser's manner towards him had become stiffly, grudgingly correct. Someone, Meade probably, had obviously roasted his ass for him, and the drilling outside was, no doubt, his way of kicking the cat.

Instead of the bare cell to which he had been consigned on his first stay, Dorkin found himself with a room completely furnished with bed, dresser, clothes press, desk, easy chair, floor lamp. Some tasteful predecessor, perhaps back in the heady days of 1940, had put his own imprint on it, repainting it a restful cream and filling it with this unmilitary furniture requisitioned from god knows where. Even nicer than the furniture was the luxurious sense of privacy. It was the first time in over two years that he had had a room that was not part of some barrack line of similar rooms into which someone might burst unannounced at any time of the day or night.

His office was also pleasant—a second-floor room at the front of the building with two windows that looked down on a quiet residential street. It all seemed so fine that it completely overwhelmed his soldierly persuasion that good fortune was merely fate's way of softening one up for the bad fortune to follow.

Even Private Smith had been accommodated with a room of his own—a tribute perhaps to the magical little
GS
badge on his sleeve. He would have volunteered for overseas, Dorkin reflected, secure in the knowledge that no one in his right mind would have turned him loose with a loaded gun. He was tall, gangling, awkward, with a perpetual air of vague abstraction as if struggling unsuccessfully to remember something. But Meade's cwac secretary had repeated the assurance that he was a good clerk, and that was what mattered.

For starters, Dorkin put him to work getting their office set up, and after lunch he went to the jail for his first meeting with Williams. The building was every bit as ugly as he remembered it, and as he mounted the front steps under the squat, crenellated tower, a quotation began floating around somewhere just out of reach of consciousness. It came to him as he was pushing open the door, a snippet from Browning that had struck him as fine stuff when he had come across it in a second-year English course:

In a sheet of flame,

I saw them and I knew them all. And yet

Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set.

And blew. “
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
.”

Inside, he became aware, as before, of the smell of dust, and behind that, not altogether masked, another smell, stale and pervasive, perhaps the smell, infused into the very woodwork, of years of unwashed, vomiting rubby-dubs.

He found Carvell in his office reading the newspaper. Here too Meade's letter had smoothed his way.

“So,” Dorkin said when they had shaken hands, “how is he?”

“Not good,” Carvell said. “I think he's getting a little stir-crazy. Sergeant MacCrae and some of the other soldiers from the armoury come to see him. Otherwise nobody. And the Mounties don't want him exercising with the other prisoners because they're afraid he may be attacked.”

When they got to Williams's cell, Henry Cronk appeared with his ring of keys. He seemed even grosser than Dorkin remembered him. Perhaps all by himself he was what made the place smell so bad.

Dorkin was shocked by Williams's appearance. He hadn't shaved that day, nor maybe the day before either, and there was something sick about his eyes. He also seemed to have lost weight. The three weeks since the preliminary hearing seemed to have broken him. The sullen belligerence was gone and had been replaced by despair, terror, god knows what all.

“What's going to happen, sir?” he asked Dorkin when they were alone together in the visitors' room.

“I'm going to get you acquitted,” Dorkin said. “But I can't do it unless I get some help from you. I know it's hard, but the first thing you should do is to try to pull yourself together. The more you let yourself go to pieces, the more people are going to think you're guilty. You could start shaving regularly for one thing.”

“The water they bring me isn't hot enough,” Williams said. “It hurts my face to shave in cold water.”

“Perhaps you should change your razor blade more often.”

“They don't let me have a razor, sir. They bring it with the water, and it's always dull.”

“Okay. I'll see what I can do about it.”

“That man Cronk hates me,” Williams said.

“What does he do?”

“He treats me as if I were a dog. He won't come if I need him. He leaves my pail sometimes all morning before he empties it.”

Whom the gods intend to destroy, they first make contemptible. But there was also something inherently craven about Williams, and Dorkin felt the sense of irritation with him that he had felt before and was to feel many times again.

“All right, I'll see about that too,” Dorkin said. “You mustn't just sit here and brood. Do you read at all? Would you like me to bring you some books?”

“I used to read magazines some.”

“Any particular kind?”

“I used to read cowboy magazines.”

“I'll get you some. Is there anything else?”

“No, I can't think of anything else.”

“All right,” Dorkin said. “I'll be seeing you often. Maybe next week we can go over what happened again when I've had time to look through the testimony from the preliminary hearing. Think about that night and try to remember everything you can. Even little things may turn out to be important.”

He had almost said, the difference between life and death.

“So how did you find him?” Carvell asked when Dorkin was seated back in the office.

“Not good,” Dorkin said. “I don't want to seem to be asking for special treatment for him, but I'd like to ask a couple of favours.”

He told him about the water and the razor blades.

“I'll buy some fresh blades myself,” he said.

“No, that won't be necessary,” Carvell said. “I'll see to it.”

“I wondered about a radio. I haven't said anything to him, but it would help to pass the time.”

“It's not usually allowed because of the noise. But if he keeps it down, I can make an exception.”

“He seems to think that Cronk is being deliberately unpleasant to him,” Dorkin said.

“Could be. Henry's a bit of an asshole. But being a jailer isn't a job many people want. And he had both his boys killed in the Great War, and he has to do something. The other guys back there treat him as a clown, so I suppose he welcomes the chance to bully somebody. I'll see what I can do.”

He smoked his cigarette and studied Dorkin.

“So how did you come to be involved in this affair?” he asked. “Orders from on high?”

“No, nothing like that. I asked to do it.”

“Why?” Carvell asked. “Or should I be minding my own business?”

“Not at all. I was very uneasy after that preliminary hearing. And I thought the chances of Williams getting a lawyer who was really interested in his case weren't very good. So I volunteered.”

“Out of a sympathy for the underdog?”

Dorkin shrugged.

“I suppose. Something like that.”

“And a dislike for H. P. Whidden?”

“Maybe that too,” Dorkin said. “Although I never thought about it. Thurcott was also very unhappy about that hearing. And he didn't seem to have a very high opinion of Whidden's integrity.”

“Neither do I. I wouldn't trust him around the corner. Well,” he added after a thoughtful pause, “as sheriff I'm under certain constraints when it comes to an affair like this, but if there's anything I can do to help you that's within the constraints, I'd be happy to do it. You've taken on quite a load.”

That night, Dorkin slept well in his new room, got up just after eight when the clatter on the drill floor below had moved outside, shaved, showered, and dressed, taking his time over everything. He had breakfast at the hotel, then set off to find the store that Carvell had recommended.

It turned out to be a plain wooden building, one of a line of similar buildings that ran unbroken for a whole block off Main Street. The sign across the front, rather grandly painted with little gold curlicues at the corners, proclaimed:
MELTZER
'
S FURNITURE
.
J.
Meltzer, Prop.
(Jacob? Joseph? Jonathan?) Below in the window be-side the door a smaller sign, hand-printed on cardboard and a little faded by the sun, more modestly read:
Furniture and Furnishings Bought and Sold.

Dorkin opened the door and went in. He took in the store in a glance—the jumble of furniture in every stage of newness and decay, the stoves and heaters, the tables full of clocks and pots and dishes and god knows what, the ranks of old books, the piles of old magazines—and he knew it instantly for what it was, a place where a precarious living was made in a dozen small ways, buying, selling, trading up, trading down, repairing or having repaired, cleaning, scraping, upgrading, sometimes perhaps lending a little money.

From a glassed-in office at the back, a man emerged. He was in his fifties, small, grey-haired with a high, receding hairline, sad, lustrous eyes, a slight stoop, the sort of man his father might have become if he had let life break him. Dorkin caught the slight break in the man's step, the faint flicker of surprise, as he saw the officer's uniform. Then he came on, smiling, deferential.