The Case Against Owen Williams Read Online Free PDF Page A

road?”
    â€œNo. I just went down the road the other way to the main road. I stopped at the canteen out there for a soft drink, and then I walked the rest of the way back here.”
    â€œAnd you haven’t seen her since? You haven’t heard anything about her? No one around here has said anything?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œDid you see her dancing with anyone else?”
    â€œYes. Once with a young guy. I don’t know his name. And once with a guy named Huddy. He was in a fight out there a couple of weeks ago. And once with a guy named Brick who was there with her friend.”
    â€œYou seem to have watched her pretty close,” Drost said.
    Williams flushed and shifted in his chair.
    â€œDo you think she might have been more interested in one of them than in you?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œShe didn’t say anything about going somewhere else after the dance?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œDid she say anything about what things were like at home? She didn’t say anything about wanting to run away or anything like that?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhat did you talk about?”
    â€œNothing much,” Williams said. “Just about the dance and the people there and stuff like that.”
    Drost looked at his watch and then at Williams, wearily. This was a waste of time, he thought. The whole thing. He got up.
    â€œOkay,” he said. “I guess that’ll do, for now anyway. If you hear anything about her from anyone, I’d like you to let me know.”
    He went down the hall and out onto the street past the guard, one of the rotation that stood out there uselessly twenty-four hours a day with an unloaded Lee-Enfield .303.
    Tomorrow, he thought, he would give Hooper the list of names he had got from Matilda Coile, and since Hooper enjoyed driving around the country so much, he would send him off to see what he could find out.

    Drost sat at his desk. Constable Hooper stood in the middle of the office, all regulation six feet of him, handsome, blond-haired, scrubbed, clipped, square-shouldered, the very image of everybody’s image of the Mountie. Near the window that looked out at the jail, George Carvell, high sheriff of George County, slouched in an armchair tipped precariously against the wall, a tall, casual man in his late forties with a prominent scar across the left side of his forehead, the only outward damage that had been done to him in his year and a half in the trenches.
    Drost had met him the first day he had taken over the Wakefield detachment the previous October. It had been Carvell’s habit to drop in on Drost’s predecessor, as the mood took him, for a talk and a coffee, and he had simply continued the habit with Drost. At first Drost had been polite but distant. He didn’t want to antagonize the sheriff because he had learned as a good Mountie that you don’t antagonize people if you can help it. But as a good Mountie, neither did he like the idea of a non-Mountie hanging around his office, listening to the traffic.
    It had gradually dawned on Drost, as it must have dawned on his predecessor, that he needed Carvell more than Carvell needed him. There wasn’t a person, a house, a farm, a road, a woods track in George County that Carvell didn’t know about or couldn’t find out about in an hour. Without him, Drost would still have been floundering helplessly, struggling to extract even the most innocent information from people whose minds became vacuums the minute he stepped out of the car in his uniform and addressed them in his Upper Canadian accent. Without Carvell, he would still have been blind and deaf.
    So there Carvell sat that July afternoon with his legs stretched out as if he owned the place, and it never crossed Drost’s mind or Hooper’s not to say what they had to say in front of him.
    â€œThere’s nothing,” Hooper said. “Not a thing. Nobody has seen her. No one knows