The next morning, Dorkin sat in his office, looking out the window at a dark, unwelcoming day, autumnal raw, with a low cover of dirty grey cloud. He had gone late to breakfast at the hotel, ate slowly, killing time, and now sat, killing more time, afflicted by a gathering sense of depression.
He was still sitting, as if waiting, it seemed to him afterwards, when the phone rang.
It was Carvell, and Dorkin sensed at once from the calculated care in his voice that something bad had happened. His immediate thought was that it was Williams. He had killed himself, or tried. But it wasn’t Williams.
“Louie Rosen’s been killed,” Carvell said. “His truck went off the road. I thought you’d probably want to know.”
It was too abrupt for Dorkin to take it in all at once. It also seemed somehow too improbable. Louie didn’t seem the sort of person to die of anything but extreme old age.
“When did it happen?” Dorkin asked.
“A couple of hours ago,” Carvell said. “I’ve been out of town, and I just heard about it now. He went down into a gulley. The cab of the truck was smashed in, and they only got him out a few minutes ago. I heard about it from Drost. The truck’s still there, and they’re trying to haul it out. I thought I’d better go out and have a look in case there’s an inquest.”
“Where did it happen?” Dorkin asked.
“The Berkeley Road. It’s about four miles out the Bangor Road on the right. You know it?”
“Yes,” Dorkin said. “I’m going to go out too.”
There was nothing much on the three-quarters of a mile of the Berkeley Road—no farms, no cleared land, just a couple of small hunting cabins and one ramshackle tarpapered house. It was probably a logging road that had later been fixed up a little to make a shortcut between the Bangor and Hannigan roads. In its better stretches, it was gravelled. In its worse ones, it was just dirt. It started flat from the Bangor Road and then climbed steeply through the woods for half a mile. It was near the bottom of that hill that Louie had gone off the road.
Dorkin saw the wrecker and the collection of cars and trucks that marked the spot as soon as he turned off the Bangor Road. Carvell was already there, and Constable Hooper, and a couple of dozen other men, garagemen and onlookers in mackinaws and slickers. The drizzle had now turned into a light, steady rain, and the road, which was dirt here, shone dully.
Louie’s truck was at the bottom of a little gulley maybe twenty feet deep that angled down across the face of the hill. The side and bottom of the gulley were scattered with granite and sandstone boulders dropped by the glaciers, some of them the size of basket-balls, some of them bigger than the cab of Louie’s truck. The truck was lying on its side between two of the larger boulders, the top crushed, the engine driven partway back into the cab. The door on the driver’s side, which was the one that was turned up, was twisted and crumpled, hanging on one hinge. The windshield was completely broken out except for a fringe of pointed shards. The wooden body was smashed to pieces.
For a quarter of a mile on either side of the gulley, there weren’t even ditches, and the road was bordered closely on both sides with evergreens, slender-trunked, soft-branched, into which Louie could have driven and hardly scratched a fender.
“He sure picked his spot,” Carvell said.
There were lines from the wrecker hooked onto the back of the truck, and as Carvell and Dorkin watched, the wrecker started up. The lines pulled taut, the wheels of the wrecker spun on the wet road, spitting mud and small stones. Louie’s truck did not budge. The wrecker stopped, and the driver got out.
“I’m gonna take the clutch out of her,” he said.
Down in the bottom of the gulley, two other garagemen stared at Louie’s truck, meditating their next move, while Constable Hooper looked on.
Carvell began to descend the steep bank, cautiously over the wet grass and weeds, and Dorkin followed him. There was a trail of devastation where the truck had gone down—vegetation gouged and sheared off leaving raw clay, small rocks dislodged, pieces of broken slats from the back of the truck, shards of glass, unidentifiable bits of metal, cow hides, pig hides, a shovel, a peavey.
“Not much left of her,” Carvell said to Hooper.
“No,” Hooper said.
“What happened?” Carvell asked.
“I don’t know.”
“He lost control on the hill maybe.”
“Maybe,” Hooper said.
Dorkin leaned over the corner of the truck and looked down into the cab. There was blood everywhere, the seat and the floor soaked, the twisted steering wheel and the dash smeared.
“He was broke up pretty bad,” one of the garagemen said.
“I can imagine,” Carvell said.
“He wouldn’t have suffered none anyways,” the garageman said. “He wouldn’t have known what hit him when he got to the bottom here.”
Hooper, after another turn around the truck, was looking at the left front tire.
“That could have been what put him off the road,” Carvell said.
“Maybe,” Hooper said.
The tire was partway off the rim, the red inner tube protruding. The tire and the tube had both been given a thorough mauling as they had been rolled around under the rim, but there was no obvious reason for the tire to have gone flat.
Hooper went over it inch by inch. When he had finished, he sent one of the garagemen back up to the wrecker for a tire iron, and he carefully got the tire and tube off the wheel himself. He put them on the ground and took out the tube. As Carvell, Dorkin, and the garagemen watched, he extracted a small blob of metal. Dorkin did not at once recognize what it was.
“A .303?” Carvell said.
“Yes,” Hooper said. “Or a 30/30. Something like that.”
It was a small, unpretentious frame house among other unpretentious houses on the lower side of a little street without paving or sidewalks that ran for a quarter of a mile along the side of the valley just downhill from Main Street and just uphill from the CPR tracks. All the curtains were drawn.
Dorkin tapped discreetly, and the door was opened almost at once by a man whom Dorkin recognized as the owner of a clothing store on Main Street, a small, brisk, balding man, a sidewalk talker and joker, now solemn and officious. Dorkin introduced himself.
“I know, I know,” the man said. “I’m Milton Geltman. It’s an honour to have you come. A terrible thing.”
“Yes,” Dorkin said.
He was led into the living room, where a dozen people were crowded together.
“Ruby,” Geltman said, “this is Lieutenant Dorkin. Mrs. Rosen.”
She had a long face, a long nose, a small mouth, full-lipped but narrow, one of those homely faces that looks as if it were being seen in a distorting mirror. She lifted her heavy eyes and a long hand.
“I’m sorry,” Dorkin said.
“You knew him?” she said.
“A little,” Dorkin said. “We met a couple of times.”
Geltman took him around the room, and names flew by in lowered tones. Among the mourners, Dorkin recognized J. Meltzer, from whom he had bought the stuff for Williams. Apart from Meltzer, they all seemed a little intimidated by him, and he had the feeling that his arrival had broken an atmosphere of intimate grief that would only be restored by his departure. He stood awkwardly in the silence.
“What will I do?” Mrs. Rosen suddenly burst out, sweeping the room with her eyes. “I have nothing. Nothing. We only had what he made. He never even bought the house.”
“Everything will be all right,” Geltman said. “You have your friends. You will have your house. We will see to it. You should lie down for a while.”
He gestured behind him, and two of the women helped Mrs. Rosen to her feet and walked with her out of the room to the stairs.
“Do they have any children?” Dorkin asked Meltzer.
“One boy,” Meltzer said. “He was no good. He and Louie didn’t get on. He went away five or six years ago. Nobody knows where he is. In the States somewhere. I suppose we’ll have to try to find him, but I don’t know how. What a terrible thing.”
“Yes,” Dorkin said again.
He stayed on for another half an hour and drank coffee, unable to effect an exit that would not seem rude, regretting that he had come, filled with guilt and rage. He felt sure that if he had not talked with Louie, Louie would not now be dead.
It was early afternoon when Dorkin arrived at Louie’s yard. The big double doors in the fence were closed, but to one side there was a smaller door, like a house door, and Dorkin let himself in. The doors to the big warehouse were also closed, and there was a general air of desertedness. Dorkin picked his way among the rain-filled potholes in the yard, tried the door of the office and, finding it locked, went across the yard and around to the back of the warehouse. In the far corner of the yard, almost up against the fence, there was a small shack.
When he was still a dozen paces from the shack, the door opened, and Cat Polchis stood watching him.
“I’d like to talk to you about Louie,” Dorkin said.
Cat continued to stand, as if he hadn’t heard him. His eyes were so black that there was no sense of there being an iris and a pupil, only blackness, uniform, opaque, impenetrable. After an uncomfortably long pause, he stepped back, holding open the door.
“Okay,” he said.
Except for a cubicle in one corner, presumably the bathroom, the shack was one big room. There was a black cookstove for heat as well as cooking, a pine table, some pine chairs, a big pine cupboard with pans and dishes, a single bed, and an old Morris chair, the kind of thing that Louie might have picked up somewhere. On the wall above the table, there were two pictures of baseball teams and one of Cat by himself in a baseball uniform. Everything was very neat, very clean, with an almost military orderliness.
Dorkin sat down at the table.
“You want to be more comfortable?” Cat asked, motioning towards the Morris chair.
“This is fine,” Dorkin said.
Cat sat down opposite him.
“You heard that somebody shot out Louie’s tire?” Dorkin said.
“Yes,” Cat said. “I heard. It’s all over town.”
“You didn’t hear anything about who might have done it?”
“No.”
“Any idea?”
“No,” Cat said. “Not yet.”
“Do you think somebody might have been waiting for him?”
“Could be. I don’t know.”
“Do you know if anybody phoned him this morning?” Dorkin asked. “Do you know if somebody might have set it up?”
“No,” Cat said. “I was over in the warehouse. I don’t know who he talked to.”
“Did he say where he was going when he left?”
“Across the river to a couple of places. After that, I don’t know. Might not have been set up anyway. Somebody might just have been out with a gun and seen him comin’ and took a shot.”
“Just for the hell of it?”
“Maybe. Maybe for some reason.”
“Such as?”
Cat shrugged.
“The talk around town is that you think it may have been Dan Coile himself who killed his daughter and that you were out here questionin’ Louie. Louie fired Toady a couple of days after you were here. He probably spread it around.”
“I talked to a lot of people,” Dorkin said, suddenly turning defence lawyer on his own behalf, trying to deflect the accusation against himself that he himself had already made. “Why should someone pick on Louie?”
“Because he knew stuff,” Cat said.
“He didn’t tell me anything that I couldn’t have found out from almost anyone,” Dorkin said.
“I know that,” Cat said. “But Dan Coile and his pals didn’t know that.”
“I don’t understand,” Dorkin said.
“Louie knew that Coile was messing around with his daughters,” Cat said. “A couple of years ago, he was driving into the Coile place, and he saw Dan and the sister of the one who got killed coming out of the barn. Louie could tell that something funny was going on, so he pretended he hadn’t seen them and kept on going and parked up by the house, but he could tell from the way Coile acted afterwards that he knew Louie had seen him and the girl.”
In the doorway, as Dorkin was leaving, Cat said, “You should have left Louie out of it. It didn’t have nothin’ to do with him.”
Outside the window, the rain poured down, sweeping along the street in gusts, bringing down with it cascades of sodden leaves. In spite of the rain, Dorkin had walked from the armoury to the RCMP office, and his raincoat now hung on the rack by the door, dripping water onto the floor.
Carvell was sitting in his chair against the wall. Hooper was manning the desk with the phone and the typewriter. Drost was seated behind the desk where they did business with their assorted visitors, willing and otherwise. Dorkin stood in the middle of the room. Except at a distance, he had not seen Drost since the day he had gone through the boxes of evidence. He had not liked Drost from the day he had first seen him in court, and he sensed clearly enough that Drost did not like him.
“Whoever did it,” Hooper said, “was ahead of him up the road on the left-hand side. The bullet went in just by the corner of the tread and then hit the back of the wheel. If he’d waited until the truck was a little closer, it would have gone out the other side, and we’d probably never have known it wasn’t just a flat tire.”
“You’ve no idea who it was?” Dorkin asked.
“No,” Drost said.
“I doubt if whoever it was intended to kill him,” Carvell said. “It was just Louie’s bad luck that it happened on a wet day and he went off the road where he did. Someone could have been out with a gun and just decided to play games.”
“A dangerous game,” Dorkin said.
“Yes,” Carvell said. “But it isn’t the first time somebody’s shot a tire out just for the hell of it.”
“You don’t think that it might have been someone who had something against Louie?” Dorkin asked.
“Could be,” Carvell said. “Louie could be pretty sharp when it came to dealing with people. I imagine he’d made his share of enemies. But I still doubt if anyone intended to kill him.”
“You said that you had some information that you wanted to give us,” Drost said.
“Yes,” Dorkin said. “I don’t think it was just a prank. I’ve found out that Dan Coile was molesting his daughters, and Louie knew it. He caught Coile and the older daughter coming out of the barn a couple of years ago.”
“So Coile shot his tire out?” Drost asked.
“I think it’s worth looking into,” Dorkin said. “I think it’s worth finding out where Coile was this morning.”
“Have you ever heard anything like that about Coile?” Drost asked Carvell.
“Not about the daughters,” Carvell said. “But he was in trouble over a young girl out there a few years ago. A neighbour’s kid. But it blew over, and he was never brought to court or anything like that.”
“Who told you about the daughters?” Drost asked. “That’s a pretty serious accusation.”
“I’d rather not say,” Dorkin said, “but it was from someone reliable.”
“Louie?” Drost asked.
“No,” Dorkin said, “not Louie.”
“But it was Louie who told you about him seeing them coming out of the barn.”
“No,” Dorkin said. “That wasn’t Louie either. In fact, he deliberately didn’t tell me about it when I was talking to him about Coile. It was Cat Polchis who told me about it this afternoon after Louie was killed.”
“Bernie,” Carvell said, “let me tell you something.”
It was the first time Carvell had ever called him by his first name, let alone this nickname, which he had always hated, and the effect was paternal, at once affectionate and superior.
“I know that Louie was a likeable guy,” Carvell said, “but he was a storyteller. He was full of them. Some of them were true, but a lot of them weren’t. He liked to talk. He liked to weave tales. And most of the time he never expected people to believe half of what he was saying.”
“But he didn’t talk this one around,” Dorkin said, irritated by Carvell’s manner. “The only person he told was Cat, and so far as I know the only person Cat has told is me. Louie may have told tales around town for the fun of it, but this wasn’t one of them. He didn’t spread it around because he was afraid of Coile.”
“But even if it’s true,” Drost said, “why should Coile all of a sudden two or three years afterwards decide that he’s going to shoot up Louie’s truck? And how would he even know that Louie was going to be there?”
“He could have phoned and set it up,” Dorkin said.
“I’m sorry,” Drost said, “but I can’t see it. He was going away from the Coile place, not towards it. Do you think that Coile got him to come out to his place and then when he’d left got a gun and ran through the woods faster than Louie could drive in his truck and waited for him?”
“Coile has relatives by the dozens,” Dorkin said. “He could have worked it out with one of them. Or more than one. They could have staked out the road and waited. When they shot his tire out, they may not have intended to kill him, but I think they certainly intended it as a warning.”
“But why all of a sudden now?” Drost asked. “Even if what Louie said is true, why all of a sudden after two or three years?”
“Because,” Dorkin said, “whatever reason he may have given to anyone he had help him, he had another reason of his own.”
“Oh?” Drost said. “What was that?”
“I think that he was the one who killed Sarah, not Williams,” Dorkin said. “I think that he was the father of the child that she was carrying, and I think that he waylaid her that night and killed her and left her body in the gravel pit.”
Carvell whistled softly.
“Do you have any evidence to support this?” Drost asked.
“Not court evidence,” Dorkin said. “Not yet anyway. But I know that Williams could not possibly have got Sarah pregnant, and I know that he didn’t kill her. I know that whoever got Sarah pregnant was someone she couldn’t marry. I know that Coile had been messing around with her and that he had also been messing around with the older sister before that. I know that Coile knew that Louie had seen him in compromising circumstances with the older girl. I know that Coile knew that I had been talking to Louie. And this was now dangerous stuff for him if he had killed Sarah.”
There was a long silence. Drost looked down at his desk. Carvell looked thoughtfully at Dorkin.
“Did you ever check on what Daniel Coile was doing the night of the murder?” Dorkin asked Drost.
“No,” Drost said. “I had no reason to. But we checked everyone who was in or around the dance hall. Hooper spent almost a week doing nothing else.”
“But you didn’t check Daniel Coile.”
“The town is full of people we didn’t check,” Drost said. “We checked everyone who was on the road that night.”
“But Daniel Coile isn’t just anyone in town,” Dorkin said. “Most people who are murdered are murdered by their own relatives, as you well know.”
“Or by their boyfriends,” Drost said.
“Do you think that Williams was the father of Sarah’s child?” Dorkin asked.
“I don’t know,” Drost said.
“Did you ever find any evidence that Williams had ever had anything to do with Sarah Coile before that night?” Dorkin asked.
“I don’t see that we needed to,” Drost said. “We weren’t trying to find out who knocked her up, we were trying to find out who killed her. I don’t think there has to be any connection. She could have been screwing everyone in town. She probably was.”
“You have no evidence for that,” Dorkin said. “The truth is that once you decided that Williams was guilty, you ignored everything else and simply concentrated on assembling a case against him.”
Drost flushed.
“Why are you telling me all this?” he said. “Tell it in court.”
“I intend to,” Dorkin said. “But I’m telling you now because I want you to do two things. I want you to find out where Daniel Coile was the night of the murder. And I want you to find out where he was when Louie’s tire was shot out.”
“I can’t just haul people in off the street for questioning,” Drost said.
“There are ways if you want to use them,” Dorkin said. “What you’re worried about is that you may get heat from Grant if you start interfering with his case against Williams and perhaps spoil his record for having solved a murder in six hours.”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” Drost said. “You have no authority to order me around. You have no right even to be in this office. If you have a case, go make it in court.”
“I’ve got a case,” Dorkin said. “Unlike the prosecution, what I don’t have is a police force at my disposal to collect the evidence. I can understand the pressures you may be under, but I think you should also consider what will happen if it turns out that you’ve been a party to hanging the wrong guy in spite of everything I’ve told you.”
“I don’t hang anyone,” Drost said. “The judge and the jury do.”
“That’s bullshit,” Dorkin said.
Drost pushed his chair back angrily and stalked across the room. He stood looking out the window at the rain. There was a long silence.
“Do you intend to reopen the investigation of the murder or not?” Dorkin said.
“On the basis of what?” Drost asked without turning around.
“On the basis of what I’ve just told you,” Dorkin said.
“I have to have some evidence.”
“I’ve given you evidence.” Drost looked at him.
“You’ve picked up some rumours about Dan Coile messing around with his daughters, so you’ve decided that he was the one who knocked Sarah up and then murdered her to keep her quiet. That’s evidence?”
“Tell me,” Dorkin said, “did you ever make any serious attempt to find out who got Sarah Coile pregnant?”
“We were investigating a murder, not a paternity suit. Anyway, how do you know it wasn’t Williams? Because he said it wasn’t?”
“Not one person ever saw Williams with Sarah Coile outside the dance hall except that night,” Dorkin said.
“Maybe not, but there are plenty of other people who could have knocked her up. It doesn’t have to be Dan Coile.”
“You’re not going to check on any of this?”
“No,” Drost said. “Not unless I hear something more convincing than anything I’ve heard here. I wouldn’t be given the authority from Fredericton anyway.”
“You’re not going to ask?”
“No, I’m not going to ask.”
“And what about Louie? Do you intend to talk to Dan Coile about that?”
“I don’t know,” Drost said. “I don’t know who we’re going to talk to. I’ll take account of what you’ve told me. What we do with it and how we handle that investigation is none of your business, so far as I can see.”
“In other words, you’re going to do nothing,” Dorkin said.
“God damn it!” Drost said. “I’ve had enough of this. You’ve told me what you’ve come to tell me. I’ll make a report of it. Now I’ve got other things to do.”
Without looking at Dorkin, he went back to his desk and sat down. Dorkin hesitated, then angrily picked his coat off the rack and put it on. Carvell rose and followed him out.
On the porch, before they went their different ways into the rain, Carvell put his hand on Dorkin’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry about Louie,” he said. “I don’t think you should conclude that it was necessarily your fault. He was a sharpie, and there were all sorts of people who had grudges against him of one kind or another.”
“And he was a Jew,” Dorkin said.
“Yes,” Carvell said. “I suppose there’s that too.”
“You don’t think that quite apart from anything he may have known about Dan Coile,” Dorkin said, “someone may just have taken a random shot at him because they wanted to take a shot at me and didn’t quite dare?”
“I don’t know, Bernard,” Carvell said. “It’s possible. Just about anything is. The world’s an evil place.”
“I don’t want to see whoever it was get away with it,” Dorkin said.
“I don’t either particularly,” Carvell said, “but he probably will unless he’s foolish enough to brag about it.”
He hesitated.
“You may be right about Coile and the girl,” he said. “I just don’t know. I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but I think maybe that under the stress of all this you’re losing control of yourself a little. I’m saying this by way of being a friend. I wouldn’t want you to take it any other way.”
The next day Dorkin found that there was a further blow in store. A message had come through that he was to phone Meade’s office on a matter of urgency.
He got the CWAC clerk.
“Colonel Meade would like you to meet him for lunch at the officers’ mess here at 1200 hours tomorrow,” she said.
Meade himself would certainly have phrased it so that it did not sound so peremptory, but peremptory it certainly was. Something was in the wind, and Dorkin felt certain that it would not be good.
Dorkin dined with Meade by a window in the mess. Outside there was a stretch of immaculately tended lawn ending in a thin screen of twelve-foot Lombardy poplars. Beyond them, the river flowed by, unruffled today under a cloudless sky.
Dorkin could remember this site as it was in the spring of 1940 when it was under construction and he was still at university: banks of raw earth, excavations, mud, water, piles of lumber, mess. Now, over four years later, it had an air of permanency that made it seem as if there had never been a time when there had not been the war.
They dined on salmon steaks, big and fresh, and Meade was moved to ask Dorkin if he fished (which he did not) and then went on to tell him about the fishing trip that he had made every June for the past twenty-five years, war or no war, to the wilderness of the Big Sevogle River. From there, the talk drifted inevitably to the war. On Sunday, the British had dropped a parachute division on Arnhem, and it was beginning to be obvious that something was going badly wrong. Whenever the press releases started describing Allied troops as “valiant,” one knew that they were being beaten. And the Canadians, grinding and sloshing up the coast, were not doing all that well either. The casualties, Meade said, leaning forward across the table and dropping his voice, were much heavier than was being let on. Any day now the conscription issue was going to blow up again. Did Dorkin know that MacKenzie King had been booed by Canadian troops when he had inspected them overseas?
When they had finished dessert and coffee, they walked for a quarter of an hour back and forth along the line of poplars by the river, and Meade smoked a cigar. Then, casually, he brought them at last around to his office. He settled himself behind his oak desk, and Dorkin took the chair that he had sat in when Meade had ordered him to attend Williams’s preliminary hearing. Through dinner and their post-prandial perambulations, not a word had been said about Williams.
“Well,” Meade said, “I hear that you’ve been brewing up quite a storm up there.”
The tone was affable, indulgent. Caught off guard, Dorkin fished for some appropriate reply, and he was still fishing and beginning to realize that there was no appropriate reply when Meade continued.
“I’m afraid that I’ve had to call you down,” he said, “because I’ve had complaints from Whidden and the Crown prosecutor’s office. I’ve wanted to leave the case entirely up to you since this was what seemed to me proper, but I’ve come under considerable pressure to speak to you about your handling of some matters.”
He paused. Dorkin said nothing, and he went on.
“Whidden is very upset that you’ve been talking to Crown wit-nesses.” He consulted a pad on his desk.
“To Miss Vinny Page, who I understand was a friend of Sarah Coile. And to a Mr. John Maclean, who testified about seeing Williams the night of the murder. I don’t suppose there’s any law against this so long as you weren’t putting any kind of pressure on them, but it’s generally regarded as unethical. Whidden is making noises about your tampering with witnesses.”
“I’m sorry,” Dorkin said. “I did talk to them because it seemed to me important. But I wasn’t tampering with the evidence they gave at the preliminary. I never discussed that with them at all. I was talking to them about matters which were different altogether.”
“Well,” Meade said. “Whidden could not have known that. Could I ask what you did talk about?”
“I was talking to Miss Page because I thought that she might be able to help me find out who was the father of the child that Sarah Coile was carrying. I talked to Maclean about whether he had seen a truck that I was interested in tracking down on the night of the murder.”
“Are these not things that you could have asked in cross examination at the trial?”
“I felt that by then it would be too late for the information to be useful to me.”
“And did you get any information from them?”
“Some. What they said helped me to clarify my ideas about what might have happened that night.”
“I understand,” Meade said, “that there are rumours about that you think that it was the girl’s father who murdered her. Do you really think that?”
“Yes,” Dorkin said. “I’m sorry that it’s got around. I didn’t intend it to, but I think that people began to realize what the point of my inquiries was.”
“Do you have any real evidence of this?” Meade said.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to find over the last couple of weeks.”
“What you have then is a suspicion?”
“Yes,” Dorkin said. “A very strong suspicion.”
“I think you had better tell me about it,” Meade said.
Dorkin hesitated. He didn’t like this at all, but he decided that he had no choice.
He talked without interruption for almost three-quarters of an hour, laying out as persuasively as he could what he had found out, what he suspected. When he had finished, Meade sat back.
“As I understand it then,” he said, “your case against Coile is that he is believed to have molested his daughters and that therefore he might have been the father of Sarah’s child and might have murdered her to keep this quiet.”
He studied Dorkin from across the desk.
“That’s very thin stuff,” he said. “You have no actual evidence of his having seen her that night after she left to go to the dance?”
“No. That’s what I’ve been trying to collect.”
“I understand that you went to see the Mounties about it.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve had a complaint from them too,” Meade said. “Inspector Gregory phoned me yesterday. He was very angry. He felt that you were using your rank in the army to bully his officers into conducting investigations for you that they did not feel were justified.”
“I hadn’t intended to bully. But I’m very unhappy about the initial investigation that Grant conducted into the murder. Within an hour or two, he decided that Williams was guilty, and they never pursued any other line of investigation.”
“But they have been co-operative,” Meade said. “They have made available to you all the evidence they have collected.You don’t feel that they’ve withheld anything?”
“No. But it’s the evidence they haven’t collected that concerns me.”
“Bernard, I appreciate your concern for Williams. A lawyer should fight for his client. But you are not a policeman. It’s not your job to chase around the country trying to catch murderers. Your job is to go into court and attempt to convince a jury that the evidence which the prosecution is presenting is not enough to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that your client is guilty. If he is found not guilty, then it is up to the police to chase around the country and try to find out who is guilty. I gather from what you say that you feel that the case which the police have built is a weak one founded on very questionable circumstantial evidence. If that is so, then that is what you tell your judge and jury. You tell them that on the basis of the evidence that has been presented it is easy to construct an explanation of the girl’s death other than the one the prosecution is presenting.”
“I don’t think it will be enough,” Dorkin said. “There’s too much prejudice against Williams because of his being a Zombie. I think that it’s going to be very difficult for him to get an impartial hearing from any jury up there, or anywhere else for that matter.”
“I take it that you are convinced that Williams is telling the truth,” Meade said. “Have you ever really seriously considered the possibility that he may not be?”
“Whenever I’ve talked to him it always comes out the same. I don’t think he’s capable of being that good a liar.”
Meade considered, shifted a pencil around on the desk. For the first time, Dorkin caught a flicker of irritation in his manner, but when he spoke, his voice was still level and reasonable.
“Bernard,” he said, “I have great admiration for you, and I respect your concern for Williams and your energy in doing what you believe is right. But in the time that remains, I want you to confine yourself to your proper duties as a defence counsel and to stop acting as if you were a private investigator. I don’t like doing it this way, but in view of the representations that have been made to me from higher up, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to put that in the form of an order. Even if you were a civilian defence counsel, some of your approaches would have been a little improper. But you are an army officer, and in addition to the normal considerations, you also have to take into account the obligations you have not to do anything to bring your uniform into disrespect. You should not be roaming the countryside in a staff car knocking on doors and fishing around for the local gossip about Daniel Coile and his family.”
He stood up and held out his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but these things had to be said. I would have had to say them even if I didn’t want to because of the directive I’ve been given. I hope that it will not cloud our good will towards each other.”
“No,” Dorkin said. “Of course not. I understand your position.”
“Do your best,” Meade said, “as I’m sure you will. And remember that a lawyer is a little like a doctor. He can’t save everybody, not even everybody who is saveable, and if he can’t accept that, he’d better get out of the profession or he’ll go crazy.”
He came around from behind the desk and put his hand on Dorkin’s shoulder and walked with him to the door. As Dorkin emerged into the outer office, the CWAC corporal studied him from over her typewriter, briefly, but in a way that made him feel that she was looking for bruises. Or burns. In a phrase that had made its way from the RAF through every branch of the forces, he had just, however politely, been shot down in flames.
After leaving Meade’s office, Dorkin had driven downtown, parked his car, and walked the city for almost two hours—one hour while Meade’s dressing-down in all its implications sank in and another hour while he came to terms with it as best he could.
Now it was ten o’clock and dark, and he sat in his office with only the old army-issue gooseneck lamp on his desk turned on. The papers he had been through so many times were neatly piled in their place in front of him. Beside them lay the stone he had picked up from Sarah’s shallow grave at the gravel pit.
It was a flat oblong of grey and white sandstone, half an inch thick, an inch and a half long, almost perfectly symmetrical, rounded at the edges and polished as smooth as any craftsman could have done. He picked it up and held it in the palm of his hand. Somewhere, perhaps a hundred million years ago, the sand it had been made of had been laid down at the edge of some shallow sea, then buried, compressed, hardened, pushed up, twisted, broken, shattered into innumerable pieces of which this was the remains of one. Then sometime, perhaps about the time of the first Homo sapiens, it had been picked up by a glacier, ground along, dropped as the glacier retreated and for thousands of years rolled back and forth in a stream or on some shore. Finally it had been buried in the deposit of gravel that had been dug into twenty or thirty years ago to make the pit where Sarah was to be found.
Turning it over in his palm, closing his fist on it, he had an abrupt, vivid sense of the immensity of time and of the brevity of the tiny spark of the individual human life and of its piteousness and sanctity. He found himself remembering the photograph that MacMillan had shown him of Sarah as a child standing beside an enormous dog in the sunlight of that one unique day. Her face floated before him, alive and dead, followed by other faces. Louie. Daniel Coile. Whidden and McKiel, Grant and Drost, for whom it was all a game, a competition to be won for the gratification of their egos. Meade was probably right in suggesting that perhaps he wasn’t cut out for this.
Meanwhile, there was this. There was Sarah and Louie and Daniel Coile. And poor, dumb Williams. He would have to fight it out in court, but one way or another he was going to win. He was going to put Daniel Coile behind bars.