PM Egged him?
Incitar. Sir. The egg has nothing to do with huevo. It’s a corruption of an old Norse word that means both edge and urge, and so it leads to edge forward, urge on.
PM Claro. Please continue, Mr Crawshaw.
PC Well we stayed in Mick’s club for a couple and then...
PM Sorry... a couple?
PC A couple of pints, your honour, and then we went back to the hotel. I can remember it like it was yesterday. We’d had a lot to drink. It was our first night on holiday and we had our own little promise to keep. We were all a bit nervous, if truth were told, and Dulcie made it worse. As soon as we left Mick Watson’s place, she became all surly and bad tempered again, while the four of us got the giggles and started laughing like kids.
PM Surly...
Turkey time, Sir. La eded del pavo... Suddenly all was clear. Even Peter Crawshaw sensed the closure and he continued without prompt.
PC Back at the hotel Dulcie went up to her room in a real huff - a bad mood, Sir. She slammed her door and probably woke up the whole landing. I think the bad name we got started from the noise she made before going into her own room. Everyone else was probably in bed by the time we got back.
PM And then you went to your adjoining rooms to begin... to begin your project?
PC That’s right. We started on the duty-free vodka. Paula and Suzie chatted while Don and I set up the video camera. We couldn’t get it to work. We tried everything, even reading the instruction booklet, but we couldn’t get it to record. We were drunk, and whatever we were doing probably made things worse. After about an hour, Paula announced she felt poorly, and she dashed off to the bathroom to be sick. She blamed it on the airline food. She then just collapsed and went to sleep, and that’s all that happened on the first night.
PM So you did not achieve your goal? There was no drunken orgy?
PC We managed the first part of the phrase, all right, but not the rest.
PM And it was the next day that you had the emergency with Dulcie Cottee?
At the time we were all too interested in the story to pay much attention to this remark by Pérez Molino. Looking at it now, of course, it is obvious that in the days between the two hearings he had been conducting his own inquiries. On several occasions he seemed to anticipate the content of the testimony. His prompts moved witnesses in particular directions, and he clearly knew where he was pushing them. It is not clear whether they would have applied the same priorities if they had been left completely to their own devices.
PC It was. She went missing. On the Sunday morning we were late going down to breakfast. We only just made it in time, just before they closed the dining room. We assumed that Dulcie had been down earlier and had gone to the pool. When we finished - it wasn’t long because none of us wanted more than coffee and toast - we went to look for her but couldn’t find her anywhere. We asked at reception if she had left a note, but she hadn’t. We spent the rest of the day looking for her. We walked the length of the beaches, revisited all the bars we’d gone to the previous evening in case she might have lost something and gone back to see if it had been handed in. No-one had seen her. And of course none of us had mobile phones in those days. By five o’clock we were worried sick. We’d even got a policeman round to the hotel foyer when, cool as a cucumber, in strolled Dulcie.
PM And she had spent the day with Mick Watson.
PC That’s right. She had been with him all day. They’d arranged it in the pub the previous evening and she hadn’t even mentioned it. Mick, of course, would have thought nothing of it. He’d have known that Suzie would have objected. And you can bet that Dulcie knew what her mother would think. She was stirring things up. She said that they had been right up into the mountains, all the way past Guadalest and up as far as the top of the pass beyond Confrides. Mick had a motorbike at the time and, no doubt, he had been showing off its paces along those little mountain roads.
PM But that drive could not have taken more than a couple of hours...
PC She said that he’d bought her lunch and they’d been sightseeing.
PM But it sounds that neither you nor anyone else believed her...
Peter Crawshaw paused for a long time. He was dressed formally in a dark grey suit, an obviously new white shirt and tie. Throughout he was clearly uncomfortable, unused to the tightness around his neck. He regularly reached up with his left hand to slip a couple of fingers beneath the collar in an apparent attempt to loosen it. He was also conscious of the discomfort of his jacket slipping off his shoulders, because it was at least a size too big. During this long pause, he adjusted and readjusted collar and jacket several times. The discomfort was, however, clearly psychological and not primarily physical.
PC Dulcie was a difficult child at a difficult age. But she was also very mature, your honour. She was seventeen years old, but would easily have passed as twenty-five. She had big ... an enormous ...
The court knew what he meant.
PC ... presence, your honour. She was already a good deal taller than her mother. She was very like her mother to look at, but had much bigger... bigger ... She was much bigger. How can I put it? She was mature beyond her years. And what was obvious was that neither Don nor Suzie trusted her. And they certainly didn’t trust Mick Watson, or should I say they did trust him, trust him to do exactly what they didn’t want. But their reactions to Dulcie were completely different. I remember remarking to Paula at the time how different they were. Don went immediately into a huff...
PM Huff?
Enfurruñarse, Sir.
PC He was effing and blinding...
Peter Crawshaw paused to look at Pérez Molino and then me.
PM Don’t worry, Mr Crawshaw. Please continue. We have enough British people in Benidorm to know what effing and blinding means. Continue, please.
PC Well, he was effing and blinding at the top of his voice, saying that he was not going to have his daughter going off with every Tom, Dick or Harry off the street, that she would be on a tight leash from then on, and that she would have to watch her step. And while he was doing that, Suzie and Dulcie just sat and looked at one another, smiling. But it wasn’t an affectionate smile. It was clearly a competition, a kind of silent warfare. Dulcie had gone off with Mick to get one up on her mother. She must have picked up the previous evening that Suzie still fancied the man, so she had gone with him out of spite. And now she was claiming her victory. Suzie smiled back to accept the challenge, as if to say, “You wait. You just wait!” I remember that Suzie did say something to Dulcie, but none of us heard it. We all do remember Dulcie’s reaction, however, which was to laugh out loud and then dance her way to the lift to go to her room. Don told her to stay put, but the lift was parked in the foyer. The doors opened and closed before we could get there and all she did was laugh more as the doors closed on us.
PM Mr Crawshaw, I realise that this was some time ago. I realise that the events are also very personal, but we do feel that they could help us to understand what has happened here in the last month. Can you remember what Donald and Susan Cottee did that evening?
PC I can. I’ll never forget. Suzie walked straight out into the street without saying a word. We didn’t see her again until after ten o’clock. Don went upstairs to talk to Dulcie. He wanted to give her what for.
PM What for?
Reñir, Sir.
PC He’d only been gone a few minutes when there was a call to the reception from another room. Paula and I were still waiting in the foyer because, of course, we had no idea if the two of them had gone their separate ways for five minutes, half an hour, or the duration! The policeman was still in the foyer and the receptionist came over and asked him to go up to the room with her. I went as well, but Paula stayed put downstairs in case Suzie came back. When we got up to the landing, you could hear them even before the lift doors opened
. They were effing and blinding, cursing one another, cursing Suzie, cursing me and Paula. Dulcie was screaming her head off and Don was trying to shout her down. The door to her room was wide open and that’s why people down the corridor had raised the alarm. A couple of people were peeping out of their doorways to watch. As I said, Dulcie was big for a seventeen-year-old - almost as big as Don. He’d got her in a headlock and she was trying to stab him with a nail file. She was naked from the waist down. We assumed that she must have started to change and that he’d barged in on her without knocking.
PM Was there, had there been any suggestion of sexual abuse of his daughter by Donald Cottee?
Peter Crawshaw was visibly shocked at the question, but just as clearly not at the suggestion.
PC Who am I to say? You hear so much of things like that nowadays. It seems like it’s every time you turn on the television there’s a report or a story about abuse in the family. Open up any newspaper and there it is. All I can say is that Don and Dulcie were always very close in some ways, very distant in others. He was incredibly protective of his daughter. It often seemed that he didn’t want her to leave his sight. He doted on her, stroked her hair, told her how beautiful she was... But fathers are like that with their daughters, aren’t they? I am no authority because Paula and I only had the one and he was a boy. It doesn’t necessarily mean that...
PM This is very important, Señor Crawshaw. Was there anything to suggest that Donald Cottee sought to achieve sexual relations with his daughter?
PC No.
The reply was definitive, but the manner concessionary. If all I did in this report was to record what was said, then I would be failing in the task that you set me, Joe. I know how important it is not to impose my own beliefs and suspicions on events, but I have to comment here that Peter Crawshaw quite literally shook when he gave his response. He shuddered from head to toe. It was a wave that ran through his body, rippling it. He tried to hide it by adjusting his posture. He crossed his legs and then uncrossed them, shifted to the left and then to the right.
PM And then what happened, Peter? We are outside Dulcie’s room with father and daughter fighting.
PC Well, Don and Dulcie were marched off to the police station. I went with them. We were made to wait around for a couple of hours and then the two of them were marched into an office, given a good dressing down as a warning, told to keep their noses clean for the rest of the holiday and then told to go. We were back at the hotel at around ten, by which time, of course, it was clear that we had lost Suzie, because she hadn’t come back. We had also missed our evening meal. But Don clearly knew where Suzie was. You could tell that.
PM And how did they behave while they waited at the police station?
PC As you would expect. They were both contrite. They said very little, each occasionally blaming the other for what had happened. Don promised Dulcie that he was going to keep her on a tight rein and she kissed her teeth, pretended not to listen and made inaudible comments under her breath. We just sat and waited.
PM And the rest of your two weeks, your dream holiday in Benidorm?
PC It went to plan, you might say, except it was not quite the plan that we had made. We didn’t make any videos because the camera was on the blink...
PM Blink...
No marchar bien, Sir.
PC ...but we did, several times during the week, have the... the sessions we had planned. It makes me feel embarrassed to admit it now, but then we were younger. We didn’t see anything wrong with it...
PM But not with Donald Cottee. He did not take part, did he?
PC That is also correct, Your Honour. There was me and our Paula, of course. But then there was Suzie and Mick Watson. And we tended to have our flings in the afternoons, because he started at the club at six. We were on half board, so we had no fixed time for lunch. One day, I remember, we got started immediately after we got up, around eleven, I think. What Mick Watson supplied to the gathering seemed to set it alight. It was if he was in his element. He definitely led things. He just couldn’t get enough.
PM And when you had your... sessions, Donald Cottee was with his daughter.
PC That’s right. Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to suggest that they slept with one another. No. He just wouldn’t let her out of his sight. I doubt she was further than an arm’s length from him during all of her waking hours, all through the rest of that fortnight.
PM But I do not know how you can be so sure you know what Donald and Dulcie did when you were so preoccupied with your afternoon sessions.
PC Obviously we took their word for things. They said that they went to the pool, to the beach, the shops. You should have seen what Don bought for her during that holiday. They had to buy an extra suitcase to get it all in when we went home.
PM But then they had Susan Cottee’s baggage allowance, didn’t they? Because Susan did not go home.
PC That’s right again, Sir. She stayed in Benidorm with Mick Watson. She was back home, though, a year or more later. Donald completely withdrew into his shell. You never saw him. He went to work and he came back. He never went to the pub and never went to the shops in the village. He even stopped going to watch the rugby games at Bromaton, where he had been a fixture on the terrace at the scoreboard end. Dulcie had left school by then, of course, but she had no job. She didn’t seem to go out either.
PM And then Susan Cottee came home...
PC She did. And everything was suddenly back to normal. It was like someone had switched them on so that they continued exactly as they had left off from before the holiday. And what was so strange was that none of the three of them ever talked about what happened during that year. It was as if it never existed.
PM But when Susan Cottee came home, her daughter moved out.
PC She did, just a few weeks after Suzie came back. She never lived with her parents again, or even had anything to do with them. By then she had taken up with her Tommy. He was a miner, and quite a few years older than her. Paula and I always said that she took up with him as a kind of substitute for Don. And then a few months later, the strike started to brew.
PM That would be the miners’ strike of nineteen eighty-four?
PC Correct, sir, the strike when Donald Cottee worked while the rest of the village didn’t. He’s never been forgiven. Since then it’s not just his daughter that would have nothing to do with Donald Cottee. No-one in the village would have anything to do with him - including me. I doubt I’ve spoken to him twice in the last twenty-five years, and that would only ever have been to say “Hello” for sake of politeness.
PM Thank you very much, Señor Crawshaw. I think that will be all...
He turned to face García López for the first time in several minutes. There was no reaction, no communication. Peter Crawshaw left the stand and immediately his wife, Paula, arrived. They actually passed one another and offered one another a reassuring pat on the arm before the clerk reminded Peter that he should leave via the other door. Mrs Crawshaw took the stand while the council members were still conferring, if that word can used to describe their merely partial communication. Paula Crawshaw is a large woman, extremely large. She is short of stature, about one metre sixty, roughly the same height as her husband, but she must weigh four times as much. She is so large she can only walk with a waddle, with her feet pointing out to the side. She took the stand, her apparent collapse onto the witness’s chair causing a great clatter as she knocked the low table to the side. She did not wait for any prompt. The council members were still talking when she spoke.
PC Well I hope he hasn’t told the pack of lies that he usually comes out with! He’s not been the same since his colostomy last year. He’s very conscious of it, though I always tell him you can neither see it nor smell it, so shut up! Neither he nor I have had anything to do with the Cottees for over twenty years. Of course I’ve seen he
r at the shop, sometimes at the hairdresser or the fish shop, or the Chinese takeaway, or the Indian takeaway or the kebab shop. It’s amazing, isn’t it? When I was young the village had four fish and chip shops. Four! And now there’s just the one, and that can’t keep going much longer. Mind you, it doesn’t surprise me, with what they charge for the fish these days. You know if you get haddock and chips these days there’s barely any change left from a fiver. A fiver! That’s if you order a special, of course. But then there’s no point in having the ordinary fish any more because it’s so small and it’s probably been under the lights in his cabinet for an hour before you arrived. The pies are quite good, and quite reasonable as well, but then they are only the same as the ones you get in Morrisons, but then you don’t have to go all the way into town to get them, do you? So you do save on the fares. Not that Pete and me are paying fares any more. We’ve already got our passes now that we’re retired. But then those that do have to pay might just as well get a takeaway as go to the supermarket. It costs four pounds return on the bus now. Four pounds! And you can get a burger and chips from the kebab shop for a quid. I mean, it stands to reason. Mind you, they’re all foreigners, you know, in those shops. Not that I have anything against them. I’m no racist, believe me, but I do think they ought to go back to their own countries. You can’t even go a week without hearing about how there’s thousands of them coming through the Channel Tunnel every day. And then, when they get to Britain, they either take our jobs or go straight onto the social and get a house bought for them. It’s disgusting. I mean, you people over here in Spain, you don’t know you’re born! What with...
GL Doña Crawshaw...
PC My name’s not Donna, No, you’ve got the wrong person. I’m Paula, por-la. Mrs Crawshaw, Peter’s wife, for my sins. There is a Donna, though. She lives a few doors down from the Cottees old house. Never had anything to do with them, of course, because no-one ever did, so she wouldn’t have anything to tell you. It was all because of the strike, you know. He was maintenance was Donald. I kept saying to people, “It’s not his fault. He’s maintenance.” But they didn’t want to hear. As far as they were concerned he was a scab because if he and his kind had come out like the rest of them they’d have won and the pit would have stayed open. Well the pit did stay open, didn’t it? But then it closed when they’d ripped out all of the coal with half the number of miners they used to employ. Shut down in ninety-one, it did. They landscaped it all, made it look really nice. And then three years ago they came back to open cast the old tailings! It’s an absolute mess down there. We live in the new part of the village, of course, so we have it right outside the back bedroom window. And they’re all foreigners, you know, the blokes they have working there...
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 56
