The Case Against Owen Williams (36 page)

Now there was no alternative. He would have to do what he had dreaded all through the last six weeks. It would have to be Williams. There were things that only he could tell and that Dorkin could not now risk leaving untold, if only for his own peace of mind. But the thought of what some of Williams's evidence entailed appalled him. Even in murders such as this people sometimes found a certain villainous grandeur (witness Jack the Ripper), but the truths that Williams was going to be made to tell were neither villainous nor grand, merely squalid and ignominious. Perhaps, Dorkin thought, their very squalor might serve to convince, since the jury might feel that someone who was going to lie would choose lies that were less humiliating. Or would they think that this was just what was so clever about the lies?

There was a tap on the door, and before Dorkin could move to open it, Carvell stepped in.

“I came to tell you that they're just about ready to reconvene,” he said.

Dorkin looked at him with surprise. It was not Carvell's job to run such errands.

“I'm sorry about the Coile thing,” he said. “I didn't know. They didn't let me in on it either.”

“Thanks,” Dorkin said. “I set myself up for it. I shouldn't have lost my temper with Drost.”

“Still,” Carvell said. “They were doing what you had asked them to do. They should have told you the result.”

“I guess so,” Dorkin said, “but the damage is done now.”

“I'm sorry,” Carvell repeated. “What are you going to do now?”

“I'm going to have to put Williams on the stand,” Dorkin said. “I haven't any choice.”

“No,” Carvell said, “I suppose not.”

With the courtroom as quiet as any room with three hundred people in it could be, Dorkin walked Williams to the witness box. His voice as he was sworn in was barely audible. He looked at the clerk of the court. He looked at Dorkin. Otherwise he sat slumped in his chair looking down at his hands. There is something in almost everyone, thanks to the power of fairy tales, childish and adult, that says that innocence does not look like this, but is clear-eyed, upright, God's truth shining from the face for all but the wilfully blind to see.

Dorkin took it slowly, carefully, little by little, the easy things first, the date and place of his birth, the names of his mother and father, the fact of his growing up an only child, the death of his father of lung disease as result of gas, the prior deaths of the uncles, his schooling, his job in the lumber yard, his conscription.

“And why did you not volunteer for overseas service?”

“I was helping to support my mother. She didn't want me to. And she remembered what happened to the others.”

“And after your mother died?”

“I felt that if they wanted me to go overseas, they should have conscripted me.”

“If the government ordered you to go, you would go?”

“Yes.”

Then on to the night of July 1, following the group of them going to the dance, recounting the dances with Sarah, following them on their walk along the path behind the dance hall and along Birch Road, coaxing him gently through the humiliations of their three-quarters of an hour of abortive lovemaking and of her leaving him angrily to walk away by herself towards the Hannigan Road. Finally, he took him through his interviews with the Mounties.

As the questioning went on, Dorkin glanced now and then at the jury. They were listening intently. He couldn't tell whether they were believing what they heard or not, but it seemed to him to be unfolding with the ring of truth. He began to hope.

It was not Whidden, but McKiel, who rose to cross-examine. He walked slowly around the table and stood in front of it with a pad of long, legal-size paper. He scanned the top page once, then a second time, before turning to a second and then a third page. Finally, after a minute of silence, he turned to Williams.

“Well, Private Williams,” he said in his toneless, clinical voice, “we have seen a very polished performance here in the last hour or so. I must congratulate Lieutenant Dorkin. I don't think that the most experienced criminal lawyer in Montreal could have done it better. But I do have a few trifling reservations about what we have heard you say under the expert guidance of your learned counsel. A few trifling reservations and a few trifling questions.”

He studied the notepad again, more briefly, then put it down on the table behind him.

Then for a quarter of an hour, he made Williams repeat his account of his abortive lovemaking with Sarah, spinning out the episode of the condom, peppering him with questions about every detail, pretending not to understand answers, forcing him to repeat them, reducing him to a state of incoherence.

“Well,” McKiel said, “perhaps we'd better go on. Now let me see if I've got this straight. Miss Coile left you for whatever reason and walked away, and you never saw her again. But when the
RCMP
first questioned you, that is not what you told them.You told them that you left the dance hall and walked Miss Coile straight out to the Hannigan Road and left her there. Why did you tell them that?”

“I didn't think it made any difference. I didn't know anything had happened to her.”

“But why not tell them the simple truth—if it was the truth— even if you didn't think it made any difference? What would have been wrong with that?”

“I didn't like to.”

“But tell me, Private Williams. Why the additional lie of saying you walked with her as far as the Hannigan Road? Why not say that you walked her partway there and that you left her to walk the rest of the way by herself? Why the extra lie?”

“I don't know.”

“Or perhaps you really did go to the Hannigan Road with Miss Coile, where you were seen by the Reverend Clemens, and that little bit of the real truth remained embedded in your lie. So anyway your story is that when you first talked to Corporal Drost you lied because you were too embarrassed to tell the truth.”

“Yes.”

“But you lied again when you were interviewed by Sergeant Grant. Why was that?”

“I didn't know there was anything wrong.”

“You also signed a statement attesting to all these lies and saying that you left Miss Coile on the Hannigan Road. By that time, surely, you had been told what had happened and warned that what you said might be used in a criminal prosecution against you.”

“No, I still didn't know anything.”

“You're telling me that you signed the paper without being warned that it might be used in a criminal proceeding. But the clear evidence of the
RCMP
officers is that you were warned. They have no particular reason to lie. Are you sure you have not forgotten the sequence in which things occurred?”

“I don't know. There were a lot of policemen. They confused me. They told me if I changed my story I would be in trouble.”

“When did they tell you that?”

“I don't know. After a while. It was a long time before they told me about Sarah Coile. I didn't understand what it was all about.”

“And you are telling the court that when you signed that statement, you had not been warned? You yourself have just said that you were very confused. Are you sure of that?”

“I don't know. Maybe I didn't hear it. Maybe I didn't under-stand.”

“I see. I suspect you understood perfectly well. But however that may be, you did sign a false statement?”

“Yes, but…”

“Never mind the ‘buts.' We have heard them already. You knowingly signed a false statement?”

“Yes.”

“But the statements you have made here today are true?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I just wanted to be sure. When I talk to you I sometimes find it difficult to keep track of what is supposed to be true at any given moment and what isn't. The statement that you walked with Miss Coile out to the Hannigan Road is false, but the statement that she left you and walked out there by herself is true? Have I got it right?”

“Yes.”

“I see. So the true statement is the one you made after you learned at the preliminary hearing that the Reverend Clemens had seen you at the corner of Broad Street, fifty yards further up the Hannigan Road than you would have been if you had left Sarah Coile where you said you had. I presume this statement was made first to Lieutenant Dorkin?”

“Yes.”

“After you had come to realize that your first statement could not be made to seem true? Is that correct?”

“Your Honour,” Dorkin interrupted, “I must object. Prosecuting attorney is bullying the witness. Under the kind of questioning he is conducting, almost anyone could be made to seem confused. Private Williams is saying that at a time when he did not know it made any difference, he was embarrassed by the circumstances of his experience with Miss Coile and disguised some of the facts about it. When he came fully to understand what had happened and when he was not being bullied by the police who had not troubled to tell him what the inquiry was about, he told me what had actually happened, and that is the evidence which he is giving in this court. There is nothing very mysterious about that.”

“Perhaps,” McKiel said. “But I would like to hear these things from the witness, not from his counsel, whose voice, it seems to me, I have heard speaking through the witness a good deal this afternoon already. Private Williams seems quite the ventriloquist's dummy.”

“The jury should note Lieutenant Dorkin's objections,” Dunsdale said.

“I am curious, Private Williams,” McKiel said, “about when exactly you did tell what you say is your true story to Lieutenant Dorkin. Was it two weeks after the preliminary hearing? Three weeks? Whenever, you would have had plenty of time to construct and ornament a more plausible story than the one you told to the
RCMP
. Tell me, Private Williams, did Lieutenant Dorkin rehearse you in the story you were to tell here today?”

“He made me go over it.”

“I object to this,” Dorkin said. “The prosecuting attorney knows perfectly well that every counsel has a witness go over his evidence in order to get it clear in his mind so that he will not be nervous in court. If I had asked the Reverend Clemens, for example, if he had gone over his evidence with the prosecutors, I think you would find that he had.”

“That is speculation, Lieutenant Dorkin,” McKiel said.

“Would you like me to recall Reverend Clemens and ask?” Dorkin replied.

“That won't be necessary,” Dunsdale said. “The jury will note Lieutenant Dorkin's objection.”

“I don't wish to prolong this unnecessarily,” McKiel said. “I am sure that by now the members of the jury understand clearly enough what has happened here, which is that Private Williams, however he managed it, lured Sarah Coile away from the dance hall and brutally murdered her in the gravel pit off the Hannigan Road. Is this not what happened, Private Williams?”

Williams stared at him, but as Dorkin started to rise, he said, “No,” in a voice that was scarcely audible.

“I have no further questions,” McKiel said.

“Have you any other questions you wish to ask of this witness, Lieutenant Dorkin?” Dunsdale asked.

“Yes,” Dorkin said. “I think that the jurors may not clearly have heard Private Williams's reply to Mr. McKiel. Private Williams, did you murder Sarah Coile?”

“No,” Williams said, once again almost inaudibly.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

It was the worst by far of the bad nights that Dorkin had spent in Wakefield. For four hours, he worked in his office on the speech that he would make to the jury the next day, carefully getting it all in order: heading, subheading, sub-subheading. He felt exhausted and oppressed, and the words as he looked at them on the paper seemed to have an existence only in a world of words, without any relationship to any reality, to any truth. But it wasn't about truth anymore anyway, if it ever had been. It was a contest between him-self and Whidden, in which what was involved for Whidden was not the guilt or innocence of Williams but his own ego and reputation, as Magistrate Thurcott had suggested after the preliminary hearing.