A Search for Donald Cottee

by Philip Spires

  PM And how long did this last?

  JM Twenty minutes, half an hour maybe. Then we heard the car doors being closed quietly followed by the engine starting. As it pulled away, Ted got out of bed to look. We can’t see across to the Cottee’s pitch from our bedroom window, but we can see a car turn right at the end of the row and then turn again to get to the main gate. He said he’d get up to have a look what was going on and he said, “That’s unusual. It sounded like there was a car full of people tonight.”

  PM ...and it was then that you heard the bang.

  JM That’s right. He’d barely finished speaking when there was an almighty bang. Our van shook and Ted stumbled. He cursed, finished putting on his dressing gown and went outside to see what had happened. I got up, but I needed to put something on and was half a minute behind him. By the time I got to the door, all I could see across the way was a ball of flame. I saw Ted run towards the van shouting Don and Suzie’s names.

  PM And then there was a second blast...

  Jennifer Mason did not answer. Pérez Molino again consulted the clerk to his left. The information he sought was clearly at hand.

  PM And how is your husband now, Mrs Mason?

  JM He’s a lot better, thank you. His face, arms and chest are a bit of a mess, but the doctors say he will recover and, if things go well, there won’t be bad scars. We’ll have to wait and see. It will take time. At least now he’s comfortable. He has a lot less pain.

  There was a momentary consultation between the three council members. Pérez Molino then spoke again.

  PM Mrs Mason, we were diverted. You started to tell us about what happened the day before the fire, on the Wednesday afternoon when you went to visit Susan Cottee. You were talking about a camera.

  JM Oh yes. I told you we’d taken photos on our walk? Well I knocked on Suzie’s door which was open. She was getting ready to go out. I asked if I could do some photos and she said yes. Don’s laptop was already on. Suzie had been seeing to her emails, and she had left it on the logout screen, so I just closed the window and got to work. By the time she came out from the bathroom I had all the photos downloaded and on screen. We had a look at a few of them before she went back into the bathroom to do her face. She told me about their plans for the afternoon. Donkey was filling up the quad bike ready for a trip into the mountains for a barbecue. I really can’t remember where she said they were going. I’ve been trying to think back to what she said and what I think I recall is that she didn’t know where they were going. She mentioned a few names, but they were all places they’d been before. What she suggested was that they might be going back to one of those. But they were all Spanish names and they all sound the same to me. All I can remember was that it was a place where you go up some tracks to the top of one of the sierras where there’s some properly built barbecue places. She said they were having a big get-together with Mick’s friends. I mentioned that they’d not been away for their usual Wednesdays for a few weeks and she said something about being ill. I don’t remember if she said she had been ill or whether it was someone else. Anyway I do recall her saying that it was all cleared up now so their Wednesday get-togethers could start up again. I can remember her clearly poking her head round the panel to look at the screen while I was flicking though my pictures. She asked me what we were doing and I said nothing, but that we were going to the photo group meeting on Thursday morning. She said, “Why don’t you copy your photos onto the memory stick so you can take them with you this afternoon?” I’d never thought of that, but it was the obvious thing to do. I wouldn’t have to trouble her again to copy them. “There’s a stick on the shelf next to the computer,” she said and then disappeared behind the panel again. When I looked there were two. One was labelled ‘PHOTOS’ and I put that one into the slot. When the window opened, I saw it was full of files and folders. There were hundreds of photos on there. Some of them were taken at The Castle. There were performers, customers and I don’t know who else. Some of the photos weren’t new. They had been copied from prints. You could tell because some of them still had the photo border round them. Most of them, however, were Don’s photos, taken up in the mountains. Now I didn’t want to come between Don and his projects. I know how seriously he takes his projects, so I closed that memory stick down and tried the other one. When that one opened up, I could see there was just one file called dc090909.doc. It was a Word document and didn’t seem to be a very big file. There was nothing else on the stick, so I copied my files onto it. Suzie called out, “The stick’s Don’s. There’s nothing important.” I remember I said nothing. There was no need. I was convinced that the more important one was the one with the pictures, so I copied the folder with my own photos onto the other one. I said thank you, told her I was going and that I was taking the stick. She didn’t come out of the bathroom. She just said, “Tara,” and continued with her face. “Have a good barbecue,” I said as I left. I didn’t know, of course, that the Cottee’s van, Don’s beloved Rosie the Sundance, would get barbecued itself before the night was out, and that my poor Ted....

  PM And the memory stick you took, that was the one that contained Donald Cottee’s blog, the document that has been printed here and supplied to this hearing?

  Pérez Molino held up a hefty manila folder. Jennifer Mason nodded to confirm.

  PM Just for the record, Part One of this report is a printout of the document that was stored on the memory stick that Señora Mason took from the Cottees. And this document is now the only thing we have relating to Donald and Susan Cottee.

  Jennifer Mason looked visibly shocked.

  JM The only thing?

  PM We have checked everywhere - in The Castle, in the Watson’s house, in Paradise Club -and we have nothing whatsoever that even mentions the Cottees’ existence. We have even checked in their home town, Kiddington, but when they left they cleared their house, sold it and threw away everything they did not bring with them. We have contacted their daughter, but she has recently given birth and says she is unable to travel. She also claims to have nothing that belongs to either Donald or Susan Cottee. It seems that the parents were not on good terms with their daughter. What they had was in their mobile home and everything was destroyed in the fire. This document is quite literally all we have. I have one last question Mrs Mason. Was there anything about Susan Cottee’s manner when you spoke that morning that in any way suggested something was different, something had changed?

  Jennifer Mason shrugged her shoulders. She looked up. She looked down. She fiddled with the straps of her bag, blew her nose again and then scratched her cheek.

  JM It’s not for me... I shouldn’t say... No.

  PM Anything, Mrs Mason... what is it that you want to say? I remind you that this is not a court. You are not under oath. If there is information that might help, we need to know.

  JM Well, Suzie sounded different. She had been depressed. Ever since she and Don had come back from their last trip home, the trip when she was diagnosed... well, she seemed to get lower as each day passed. She cried quite a lot at first - never, of course, if Donald was anywhere near. And never, it seemed, if any other man was within hearing. It seemed that neither Philip Matthews nor that horrible Mike Watson knew anything was amiss. There was one day a few weeks ago when I stopped Philip Matthews as he drove into the La Manca Park to pick her up. I flagged him down. I asked him if anyone at The Castle had noticed what a state Suzie was in. He just shrugged his shoulders. He never said very much. Not that I’ve spoken to him more than a couple of times in my life, but he never seems to have anything to say. He’s a typical man, if you ask me. Anyway he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. But Suzie was very upset, and she was getting worse. A couple of times in the previous week when we met for coffee she just cried. She just sat there weeping. She talked at the same time, but I could see the tears in her eyes. But after that last weekend, she seemed to have perke
d up. She was putting on a face again...

  PM Putting on a face?

  It is a colloquial term that refers to the application of cosmetics by a woman, Your Honour.

  JM Yes, she was putting on make-up again as well before going to The Castle. She hadn’t done that for weeks. She wasn’t bursting into tears at the slightest prompt. She seemed to be renewed, as if she had some new focus, some new motivation. She’d been like that months ago, of course, when she first took over at The Castle. It was as if she had rediscovered a reason to live. She was like that again for two or three days before she disappeared. I even said to her on the Tuesday, the day before she disappeared, that she seemed so much better.

  PM And how did she react when you said that?

  JM That was the strange thing. She didn’t react. In fact, it was as if she had completely ignored the comment. She simply carried on talking about something completely different, as if I had never opened my mouth. But she smiled. Now that was strange, given her recent state. She smiled a kind of knowing smile...

  PM And she was in the same frame of mind on the Wednesday when you called in with your camera?

  JM Exactly. Yes. That’s why she was in her bathroom. She was putting her face on ready to go out. She was so busy at it that she didn’t even come out to say hello. We’d not had coffee that day, of course, because I’d been out walking with Ted.

  There was another pause here as the members of the council conferred. Jennifer Mason was looking more uncomfortable with the passing of each minute. The quiet was broken with a new question. The judge didn’t even look up.

  PM One last question, Mrs Mason. You have spoken a lot about Mrs Cottee, but have said very little about Mr Cottee. Do you have anything to say about him?

  JM Nothing, really. He was a typical northern male. He and Suzie were Jack Spratt and his wife, but the other way round...

  Pérez Molino had clearly not understood. She repeated.

  JM Jack Spratt would eat no fat, his wife would eat no lean. He was thin and she was fat. With the Cottees, it was the other way round. He was overweight and she hadn’t an ounce of flesh on her. Mind you she’d lost weight in those last few weeks... Donald was also a bull in a china shop...

  There was again immediate confusion. Un elefante o un pulpo en una cacharrería, an elephant or octopus in a pot shop, I offered. There was a wholly inappropriate moment of mirth.

  JM I had nothing to do with him, really. He always seemed completely bound up with his own things, his own ideas. It was as if he didn’t care too much about what other people thought of him. As far as I know, he spent a lot of his time alone, walking in the hills or riding his quad. When he wasn’t doing that he was reading, or going to the pub or typing on his computer. He never seemed to have the time to talk to anyone. That’s all I can say.

  The council members conferred momentarily. Pérez Molino then expressed his own and his colleagues’ thanks. He then invited Jennifer Mason to step down from the stand, but was very careful to ensure that she left the room via the door on the opposite side from where she entered. They had thought long and hard about the structure of the proceedings and they wanted to ensure that the people called did not have chance to exchange views. I learned later that they had even arranged separate meeting rooms in the foyer. They had clearly been aware from the start that the heavily incestuous nature of expatriate life might on occasions endow something quite trivial - a passing remark, or a word out of place - with significance out of all proportion to its apparent importance.

  It was about twenty minutes before the next person was called. I don’t know why there was a delay. There was a lot of muttered consultation between members of the council and the various clerks. Pieces of paper were passed back and forth, but there didn’t seem to be much going on. I suppose they were consulting their briefs, as these people say. Eventually, Pérez Molino nodded to the policeman by the door. He opened it, disappeared for only a second or two and then reappeared with Caspar Smit.

  Caspar is Dutch. You would know that even before he opened his mouth. The Belgians say you can spot a Dutchman a mile away, except that they would use kilometres! The Dutchman is the one that thinks he’s bigger and better than everyone else. The Dutch, on the other hand, regard Belgians as slightly less than human. A well-known joke of theirs has a straight road with two signs showing ‘In’ in the foreground and ‘Out’ in the distance. It’s a Belgian maze, they say.

  Well, as far as Belgians might be concerned, Caspar fits the bill. He breathes like a whale, has the presence of a bison and dresses like he just walked out of a boutique window. When he took the witness stand, he not only made a fuss, cleaning the chair with his handkerchief, he actually rearranged the entire stand, moving the low table to the side so he could reposition the chair to face the council members directly. As a consequence, he was three-quarters turned away from me. I didn’t miss a word he said, however, because he spoke loud enough to communicate with the courtroom next door. He also made a great point of putting his zipped bag onto the table at his side, retrieving a file from within and then opening it to study the contents of a sheaf of papers, squinting through half-lens spectacles that previously had swung across his front on a band round his neck. He even started the delivery of his material before he was asked.

  CS Caspar Smit. I am the owner and manager of the La Manca Caravan Park, Benidorm. I am Dutch, from Bergen op Zoom in the Netherlands. I have lived in Spain for eighteen years, am a Spanish resident, NIE X-6564332-T.

  He spoke in English, completely unaccented apart from the general Dutch tendency to chew the vowels. Pérez Molino seemed a little taken aback. He paused to consult before continuing.

  PM Thank you for coming. Mr Smit. I believe you have details of the Cottee’s arrangement with you?

  CS Thank you for the opportunity to put my side of the case...

  Pérez Molino was again visibly taken aback. He interrupted, spoke forcefully and quickly. It was clear that the two men instinctively felt they might be in competition for dominance.

  PM This is not a ‘case’, as such. Neither is it a trial. As yet, we have no idea if there is even anything to investigate. We do have a case in progress, which may or may not be related to what we are discussing in this investigation. I must remind you that what we are discussing may only be speculation, but there is a feeling that the people who are the subject of this inquiry might have something to contribute to those hearings. At the moment, however, this is merely a fact-finding inquiry into the possible whereabouts of missing persons. None of them is charged or, as far as we know, directly involved in the other case. They have disappeared and it is our intention to review anything that might help us to trace them. I must remind you, therefore, that you should limit what you say to what is relevant to the terms of reference of this hearing. Please say nothing that could possibly have a direct bearing on the other case. On the other hand, if you are in possession of material indicating that any of the people who are the subject of this inquiry might have information that might relate to that other case, then you should of course tell us and make a statement to the police. Is that clear?

  There was a flurry of papers while Caspar Smit remained quite motionless. It was amongst the three presiding members of the council that there seemed to be tension. García López seemed ill at ease, while Pérez Molino appeared to be in control. María del Mar remained placid throughout, but her calm was more of a statement of control than disinterest. Caspar Smit was clearly confused. There was a long silence during which no further prompt was offered. Eventually he began to speak, initially and obviously uncharacteristically without confidence. He had taken Pérez Molino’s statement as a personal put-down.

  CS I have here the details you asked for.

  Caspar opened a large ledger, leaned forward, his half-glasses perched on the end of his nose, and read his delivery, sounding the very epi
tome of rationality asserted.

  CS Arrived twenty-ninth of February two thousand and eight. They booked by telephone, not via the internet. Throughout I dealt only with Mrs Cottee, who was always very business-like. I had hardly any dealings with Donald Cottee...

  PM Twenty-ninth of February?

  CS Mr Cottee must have planned it that way. I remember that the only thing he said to his wife as she signed all the papers to register was, “Look before you leap in a leap year, dear.” He said it at least ten times. That’s why I remember it so well. They parked in a temporary space for five days and then took the plot where they remained ever since. They paid all of their bills on time without the need of a single reminder. They are not unique on the site for doing this, but they come pretty close. Apart from complaints about noise, we have had no problems with the Cottees. The noise problems were infrequent, and all of them related to Donald coming home in the early hours on his quad bike. I did ask him not to use the bike at those times, but he said that sometimes he had to bring his wife home from the bar after closing time. I accepted this and never pursued the matter further. As time went by, Mrs Cottee tended to use taxis more often than anything else, so the problem disappeared... ...except when they continued after they got home.

  Pérez Molino paused here. He flicked through a few sheets enclosed in plastic wallets, their crackling amplified by the near-silence that filled the room. Despite their best efforts at calming the atmosphere, the obvious tension that characterised relations between members of the council infected us all. Pérez Molino clearly recognised the paper he sought and paused again to read a single side of text.