The Monster of Twenty Mile Pond Page 13

  “But is there any evidence,” I asked, “that Esme was purchasing hard drugs from him?”

  “The police have their suspicions. But no, we do not have a smoking gun, so to speak. And we are well aware that there will be little sympathy for the victim in the eyes of the jurors if evidence of his past criminal conduct, much of it exceedingly unedifying indeed, is slipped before them. He and his known associates and purchasers have criminal records for break and enter, holdups of convenience stores, and serious assault, all in connection with obtaining money to purchase hard drugs, and now there are allegations of physical and mental abuse of girls, no doubt in connection with trafficking to minors and even a possible child prostitution ring.

  “Two of those criminal associates, now deceased as a result of the automobile accident, actually used their leader’s acquaintance with Esme and Molly, following their purchase of drugs, to abduct them for what appears to be some pretty nefarious and despicable purposes. My point, Premier, is that the word has to get out there to young people that they need to stay as far as humanly possible from such low forms of humanity in order to avoid unforeseen consequences of a far more serious nature than simply toking up.”

  I was practically shaking with indignation. “Is that also part of this government’s zero-tolerance policy—blame the victims for being kidnapped and potentially murdered at the hands of hoodlums who seemed to have been acting with immunity from the criminal justice system? The other victims of the gangsters’ abductions and obscene public exposure around the world, are they to blame, too? The missing girl—possibly a dead girl—is she to blame?”

  “Mr. McGill. Please,” said the director, raising his hand for calm. “No, of course they are not. We do know there was previous connection between the victims and the criminal gang in those other cases, as well. But I will state categorically, to clarify our position against any attempts to confuse the issues, Madam Premier, that there is a world of difference between blaming the victim, on the one hand, and warning young people for their own safety not to associate with criminals, on the other. If I tell my daughter not to walk alone in dark alleys downtown at night, I’m not saying I will blame her if she is victimized, I am saying that for her own safety she should—”

  “Quite,” said the premier. “So . . . am I correct in my impression, Mr. Myers, that our all-out war on drugs is substantially fuelling your prosecution of Esme for murder, and, were it not for that, there’s a fair chance that you would not be proceeding with a charge of murder because of a significant risk of not obtaining a conviction?”

  “We would be proceeding,” said Myers, “but in the hope of obtaining a guilty plea and conviction on reduced charges—manslaughter, assault causing death, criminal negligence causing death. Anything, really, to hammer home our stated policy of lack of tolerance in drug cases.”

  “Now I understand your policy,” I said. “It may not be a case of blame the victim, but of being prepared to victimize two young women as a warning to other young women not to become victims. You have our complete assurance, of course, that neither Esme nor I nor her mother would consent to accepting your bribe to reduce charges, even if our lawyers recommended it, which they most assuredly have not and will not. Esme has told us she wishes that capital punishment were still in effect, because she would rather be hanged than falsely plead guilty to doing something criminal that she didn’t do.”

  I saw the premier suppress a smile. She didn’t know Esme, but she seemed to like her style. Then the premier turned to the justice minister. “Do you have any further questions or comments, Minister?”

  “Just one further point, madam, and I think it’s the crucial one. It’s a question to the prosecutor and the director, and it is a genuine question, not a leading question or a hint of any kind on how you should reply—an honest objective question requiring an honest objective answer. If these charges of murder and accessory to murder against the girls were to be withdrawn for lack of compelling evidence or the presence of a compelling defence, would that offend your concept of the rule of law or violate your legal consciences as officers of the Supreme Court?”

  The prosecutor and director looked at each other. The minister asked, “Would you like to go back to your office and discuss it? Because it would be entirely your decision based on your best judgment.”

  The director said, “I think that would be best, sir. We’d want to examine all the angles and be absolutely sure about this, whichever way we decide to go. But I must assert, Minister, that our overriding intention at present would be to press on in the direction we are already heading with the prosecution.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  After the premier had thanked the Crown prosecutor, the director of public prosecutions, and the assistant deputy minister of justice and excused them from the meeting, she looked hard at me in silence as they were gathering up their papers and briefcases and leaving. When the office was empty except for the minister of justice, the deputy minister of justice, the deputy minister of natural resources, and me, she said, “I understand, Mr. McGill, that you may be considering going public before the trial with some rather bizarre observations and anecdotes concerning a lake that provides our drinking water.”

  “There’s no ‘maybe’ about it, Madam Premier. I am going to hold a news conference today and disclose everything I’ve seen or heard to date on the mysterious happenings in the lake and invite others to contribute what they have seen or learned.”

  “Are you not a little concerned as a citizen that, with your allegation of some sort of a sinister presence, perhaps even a live monstrosity in the lake, you may cause serious anxiety and alarm? At least three roads run right by the lake within a few feet of the water. And what do you think you would be doing to people’s view of the water they are drinking, considered by everyone, currently at least, to be of the highest quality?”

  “I’ll be brutally frank, madam. I could not care less if it does alarm people. That’s small potatoes compared to the possibility of my niece and daughter being railroaded into prison and criminal records and ruined lives in aid of some misguided and overzealous advancement of a government’s political position. The more panic the better. If the existence of a monstrosity has already become a factoid in the minds of the public before the trial, then it will make Esme’s defence all the more credible in the eyes of the jury. So I certainly intend to go public with it, you can mark that down.”

  “I already have an idea of the information you possess, but would you mind just touching on everything you know or have heard so that I will be fully apprised?”

  “So that you or your colleagues can debunk it all beforehand in the hope of making me look like a kook when I come out with it?”

  “Your suspicions are understandable. But I promise you, we will not do that. We’ll keep it secret, and I will ask you for a commitment as a lawyer to keep confidential what I intend to tell you. But I believe we do need to compare and share information on this subject.”

  “On your word that you will not try to use it against me beforehand, Premier, I will tell you.” I related my experience with the osprey and the seagull twenty years before, and the stories from residents, including the permanent disappearance of Multi-Million Dollar Man, apparently while he stood alone by the lake, preparing to defile it.

  The deputy minister of justice spoke up. “Mr. McGill, that gentleman, also known as Walter Barnes, was the subject of a deathbed confession two or three years ago. One of his old comrades, in a state of dementia at the Hoyles-Escasoni Complex, told some staff members there that he helped kill and bury Barnes. But he died before staff or the police could get any details on the alleged murder or where he was buried, if, in fact, there were any. The police follow-up with others who might have been involved in the disappearance led up a blind alley. But I thought you should be made aware of the confession.”

  “Thank you, but
as you said, a state of dementia and a blind alley.” I went on to describe everything else in my grab bag—the governor and his little granddaughter, Tommy Picco’s two juvenile giant squids, Professor Atwood’s description of the flexibility and adaptability of cephalopods, the snapshot of the “eye,” and finally Esme’s and Molly’s description of what had saved them from certain death.

  The premier nodded as I spoke. After I’d finished, she said that although she’d already been told most of what I’d described, hearing it first-hand certainly made it ring eerily true. “The manner of the girls’ escape from the car was the clincher for me,” she added. “Some might say they could easily have cooked up that salvation story, but I don’t think so, not in the light of all the other anecdotal evidence. To me, this comes down to a choice between either believing Esme and Molly or believing in a divine miracle. As someone who has been in politics for many years, I do not much believe in miracles. Now, what I am about to divulge to you, I must ask you to swear to keep secret just as if you were a high public official. Do you agree to do that?”

  I held up my hand as if I was in court. “I so swear.”

  “The minister of justice, the deputy minister of justice, the deputy minister of natural resources, and I are the only ones who are in possession of all the information I am about to relate. Some of it was given to me by my predecessor as premier in a file marked ‘top secret.’ There are stories around publicly, of course, but in the nature of tall tales and fantasy. They are easy to dismiss. But your experience and those of your niece and daughter might raise the credibility level very high, especially when combined with your research. That was the main reason the minister of justice and I were hoping the prosecutors might obtain a guilty plea to a lesser charge—so as to avoid a full public trial where everything you knew, or had learned, might come out—yet, at the same time, preserve the good repute of the law. That was before, I assure you, we really accepted your theory, Mr. McGill, of how the drug dealer might have been killed by that branch high on the tree.”

  The premier paused and looked down at her open file folder. “Now, here’s the full situation: reports of sightings of something in the lake have come into the Department of Natural Resources over the years. A few years ago, a maintenance worker in the water treatment plant swore up and down to a fellow worker that he saw a seagull being seized in the air by a snake or an elephant’s trunk or the like rising up from the water. Very similar to your own experience.

  “Now this man was recorded as having a drinking problem, so it would have been easy to simply dismiss his oral report of his alleged sighting, and forget about it. But his foreman reported it in writing to get the man’s drunken hallucination or delirium tremens on the official record. If something went wrong at the plant, his fellow workers wanted management to know beforehand who to blame. The report found its way to the deputy minister of natural resources, because it was so bizarre. The poor worker later died of hypothermia in a snowdrift in the woods next to the lake on his day off, if you can believe it. But that report, combined with some other snippets the deputy heard as a result of his inquiries, piqued his curiosity, and he had the good sense to run a few tests. Please tell us what they indicated, Deputy Minister.”

  The deputy cleared his throat. “A device for detecting motion and tremors was placed in the lake and it definitely picked up unusual vibrations of an indeterminate nature, but from what source, we had no idea. We had a constant watch kept for a number of weeks, but nothing was ever sighted. One night, we commissioned two wildlife officers, volunteers, whom we’d made familiar with the rumours and the readings, to row a large boat out on the lake under cover of darkness, wearing their night-vision glasses, and confirm to me once and for all that there was nothing untoward going on in the lake. And, indeed, they saw nothing on the surface. Then, with their hearts in their mouths, they told me, they plumbed the depths of the water in various places, hoping against hope that they might disturb something alive down there. But nothing happened except that they discovered something unusual about the bottom.

  “What they found in one of the deepest spots was a narrow cave or tunnel. We’ll call it a tunnel because they were not able to reach the end of it. The main source of water for the lake is spring water that flows in from the bottom. But this tunnel seems to contain, not an inflow, but an outflow of water, an underwater stream outwards of some force, since it took the sinker right to the end of the several hundred metre line, and still no end was found to the tunnel.

  “We don’t yet know where the water goes. The altitude of the lake is quite high, about the same as Signal Hill, so there would be a fairly powerful gravity flow if in fact it reaches the sea. We conjecture that if there is anything there in the lake, it could very well hide in that tunnel. Perhaps it travels in and out of the lake to and from somewhere else, perhaps even Conception Bay, though I consider that scenario to be unlikely because of the salt water-fresh water adaptability problem.

  “We have thought about sending divers down to explore but decided that, in light of the reports of untoward incidents with other humans, it was unsafe. At some point, if we can do it without being detected, we may send down a small robotic device equipped with weaponry to sedate or even kill whatever might be there, if anything, and bring it up.”

  “Meanwhile,” said the premier, “we want to keep everything as discreet as we can so as not to cause any public disquiet. If you were to go to the media with your story, that could have dire results, we believe, and we earnestly wish to dissuade you from doing it. Minister Sullivan?”

  The minister of justice paused before he spoke. “We are prepared to attempt a trade-off with you, not of an ignoble nature that subverts justice, but an honourable one that would keep the lid on this thing, at least for the time being, until further experimentation and exploration can take place. We are hoping that the director of public prosecutions will see fit to drop all charges against Esme and Molly in connection with the death of Jason Power. It’s their call, but I have doubts that there’s enough direct evidence, and it would be easy for a defence lawyer of Morley’s capacity and competence to argue, perhaps successfully, that the death may well have been caused by accident, by misadventure, perhaps a stumble that caused a freak accident.

  “It was only today I was telling the premier of a case I recall from a few years ago when I was golfing in Las Vegas. A man charged with assault was found not guilty when his alleged victim was shown to have literally climbed the wall in a frenetic, drugged state, and put out his own eye on a coat hook nearly a foot higher than his height. Not unlike what Esme is alleging. Morley could argue that the hoodlum victim, under some insidious chemical influence, might well have climbed up that tree a couple of feet and jabbed himself in the eye and brain with that branch. Look, who in God’s name knows what was going on in his thuggish head? In other words, there could well be enough there to raise a reasonable doubt. So . . . my deputy minister will talk with the director and see what happens.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that the minister of justice had just done a better job of arguing our case against his own department than we were doing ourselves.

  There was a limit, though, to his fairness. “It goes without saying, however, that we must proceed with the charges relevant to the purchase of the marijuana. Esme and Molly have admitted to their involvement, and it would look very strange to the police if those charges were dropped. We all remember the Department of Justice’s cover-up of the abuse of boys by Christian Brothers at Mount Cashel when Premier Frank Moores and Justice Minister Alex Hickman were in charge, and we can’t have anything like that happen again. The police would go nuts. The chief would resign and join forces with the police association to condemn us on that one. But Morley and the prosecutor can discuss the extenuating circumstances—Esme was buying it for her mother for medical reasons. Perhaps a conditional discharge for both girls under laws applicable to youth, and the r
ecord expunged after three years if they keep their noses clean. That kind of thing.”

  I told the premier I’d discuss the possibilities with our lawyer and see what they could negotiate with the prosecutors. I’d wait two days for that to run its course before going public.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The negotiations, Morley told us, were by no means a walkover. But he did think that something in the Department of Justice was encouraging a new degree of reasonableness in the Crown. At the end of the first day, Director Myers said to Morley, “The prosecution under our system is not out for blood, or to win at any cost, but is interested in reaching a decision consistent with justice. If, I say if, this is a proper case for giving the benefit of the doubt to these young ladies, we would have no problem in principle or conscience in dropping the murder charges.” Morley had the impression that the director’s heart wasn’t really in that statement.

  By the middle of the second day, I was getting antsy. I called Morley and he told me that the Crown was still agonizing over the likelihood or not of conviction. They said they were having difficulty reaching a consensus on that. I told him I was going to call the minister of justice to confirm that my timetable was firm: if there was no deal at the end of today, then my news conference would take place tomorrow morning.

  When I called Padraic Sullivan, I was put right through. Even before I could speak, he said, “Bill, I know why you’re calling and I say to you: trust the system.”

  By four-thirty that afternoon, Morley and the prosecutors had reached an agreement. The charges in connection with the murder would be absolutely withdrawn, not just stayed, and all police files and justice files deleted from all and any databases and otherwise destroyed. If a police reference or police background check were ever to be required by Esme or Molly in the future for any purpose, including employment and passport applications, there would be absolutely nothing in existence to report on from those charges. Any official data on Esme and Molly would now be as non-existent as if the murder charges had never been laid.