GL Doña Crawshaw ...
PC Paula! It’s Paula bleeding Crawshaw, you garlic-smelling, olive-oil greasy dago! Don’t you Donna me this or Donna me that. I’m Church of England. I’m not even a bloody Catholic!
She stood up and pointed at García López who looked nothing less than terrified. The clerk who had sat quietly next to me throughout, stood and reached across to touch her right arm. The contact provoked Paula Crawshaw to lash out. It wasn’t violent, more of a dismissive gesture, a wave of the arm to say, “Don’t you touch me!” It worked. It also threatened, because the arm had such bulk that even the slightest contact would have hurt. The clerk sat down. It was Pérez Molino who spoke.
PM Doña Quejada, can you please read the translation of our brief to Mrs Crawshaw.
Paula, I said in the most sympathetic tone I could muster given the obvious distaste I had for the woman and all like her, this is not a court of law. No-one is on trial and no-one has been charged with any offence. A murder has been committed and a case relating to that crime is due to be heard in the near future, but there is a lack of evidence. Six people, Donald and Susan Cottee, Michael Watson, Olga Markov, Philip Mathews and Karen McEvoy have disappeared. The mobile home belonging to Donald and Susan Cottee has been destroyed by fire. There was attempted arson at the Castle Bar, but it did no significant damage. We suspect, though we have no confirmation, that a substantial amount of property and perhaps a large sum of money is also missing, taken from the Castle Bar, Paradise Club and from Michael Watson’s rented house. No records have been found, so we cannot be sure what, if anything, has been taken. The purpose of this preliminary hearing is to examine the circumstances of the disappearances in an attempt to identify possible motives of those involved. It is believed, though there is currently no evidence, that these disappearances are linked to the shooting of Mayor Pedro Onsoda last month. You are under no obligation to give evidence, but you are invited to cooperate with the process and answer the questions truthfully and in full. Do you understand what I have just said and are you willing to cooperate? She did not answer. Neither did she move.
I think, Joe, you could lighten up your report at some stage with the joke about the Brits who visit Benidorm. It seems completely apposite to the performance of Paula Crawshaw and it may have applied to Susan Cottee as well, if her blogs are a reflection of her linguistic skills. The locals say that people who speak two languages are called bilingual. Someone who can speak just one language is called monolingual. Someone who can’t speak their own language is called British! Usually the Brits don’t see the funny side of it. They are usually quite good at laughing at themselves. But when others on the outside laugh at them, they consider it an insult and always take offence. Eventually, after extensive consultation between the council members, Paula Crawshaw broke her silence.
PC That’s what it said in the letter you sent. That’s why I’m here.
PM Then, please, will you answer the question? Could you tell us about your holiday with the Cottees?
PC Look, I was thirty-five. Our Darren was seventeen years old and already living with his girlfriend. We only had the one. For the first time in our lives we had money - not much, mind you, but at least some - and it was burning holes in our pockets. We wanted to spend it, live like stars, if only for a couple of weeks. Nowadays, people have their big parties, rent limousines for the day. They get dressed up and then crawl through the village waving at their neighbours from the back seat of their stretch limo as if they were on their way to the Oscars ceremony. They do it for an eighteenth, a twenty-first, a wedding, a christening, or whatever they want. People have to show off, show they have money to spend. It gives them status, tells others who they are. Well, in our day we came on holiday. It was just a fling, nothing more. Everybody has to have a fling every now and again. Life wouldn’t be worth living without occasionally letting your hair down. It was only because of their Dulcie, who wanted all the attention, that things went wrong. If she hadn’t had all her tantrums, we’d just have had a good time, gone home and forgotten about it. Don should have told her where to get off.
PM Get off what?
It’s an expression that is hard to translate, Sir. It implies that someone has gone too far...
PM Gone too far? On a bus? They then get off the bus?
No, Sir, they have gone too far metaphorically. The person has behaved in a bad way or has said something that has caused offence. The phrase, ‘Tell someone where to get off’ indicates that someone involved will speak up, say something stern or critical, with the aim of stopping the outburst and thus ensuring that no further problems arise.
PM But we have already heard that Donald Cottee did precisely that with the intention of moderating his daughter’s behaviour.
PC Her behaviour? That one has never known how to behave. Let me tell you something about Dulcie Cottee. She’s had a different bloke in that house of hers just about every day - every day! - a different bloke! - for about the last five years! She’s nothing but a dirty nympho is their Dulcie. And now she’s even pregnant, just about ready to have a baby. They say it’s a girl. No doubt it will turn out just like her. It’s due any time. And she’s over forty! They say she doesn’t even know who the father is, that she’s done it with a whole string of fellows on purpose so that even none of them knows who the father is. She reckons it’s a woman’s right to have her own child without the interference of a father. It’s a disgrace, if you ask me...
PM Mrs Crawshaw, that is precisely what we are doing. We are asking you. But we want to hear your views and your memories from your holiday with the Cottees in nineteen eighty-one.
PC I don’t understand why you are so interested in something that happened nearly thirty years ago. I mean, you’ve said that this man was shot a month ago and that six people have since disappeared. Shouldn’t you be investigating what’s happened in the last month, rather than muck-raking through the past?
PM At this stage I cannot reveal the council’s motive for concentrating on this issue. Suffice it to say that we have enough information to believe that it is completely relevant and indeed important to establish the circumstances that led up to Mrs Cottee’s decision not to return to England at the end of the holiday. There is a question of identity...
Tempers had risen considerably. The heretofore impeccable Pérez Molino had raised his voice. García López was constantly fidgeting with paper and pen. Doña María remained a placid island, apparently unmovable in an increasingly stormy sea. Paula Crawshaw’s reply was not spoken: it was shouted at near-ear-splitting volume and her face turned an apparently painful, brilliant red. The ample flesh of her upper arms quivered like jelly as she remonstrated to add effect.
PC All right, all right, you clearly know, so why shouldn’t I say it? Tell me, please, why I should not tell you!
Paula Crawshaw did in fact pause here. Her question seemed to have been asked of herself, and we all waited for an answer. We sensed how difficult it was for her to continue. Her speech slowed, her voice gave way a little.
PC I promised - twenty odd years ago I promised Susan Cottee that these words would never pass my lips. She pleaded, she cried, she shouted down that telephone a week after we got home. “Never, never, never, never, never tell anyone what I have just told you, Paula. If you do,” she said, “and I am not joking, I will bloody kill you. You are the only person back home I have told, and I have only done that because I needed to tell someone. I have confided in you, trusted you. Only you know the reason why I stayed on. Swear to me that you will never repeat it!” Now that’s what she said. And it frightened the living daylights out of me at the time and it still does! Suzie could be a right cow, you know, when she wanted her own way. By God she could manipulate. She had her Don wound round her little finger, but she could never get Dulcie to lie down and say uncle. They just competed, those two, got right up one another’s noses...
PM ... got up one another’s noses...?
Arriba del nariz, I mumbled. Me enferma, become annoyed, irritarse, I said timidly, the words were almost completely drowned by the torrent that continued to flow from Paula Crawshaw.
PC I told her at the time when she phoned she’d never keep it quiet, that it would be better just to come home to Don and face the music. After all, he had put up with her airs and graces for over twenty years already. I told her, told her straight that she still thought that she came from a family of Punslet Road shop owners and that she’d never come to terms with having no more than a council house and then a semi in Kiddington. Don would never have turfed her out onto the street. He was a gentle enough soul, for all his airs and graces. He’d have forgiven her. She could have come home...
Pérez Molino interrupted, himself shouting.
PM But he did forgive her. He took her back a year later!
PC Forgive her? Forgive her? The stupid bastard never knew. He knew about her fling with Mick Watson, but he never had any idea about the... about the... and she never let on. But you know, don’t you? You’ve been nosing around, haven’t you? And there’s someone else, someone round here that knows the whole story, isn’t there? You know! And whoever it is that knows what happened has already told you the whole story.
The last words echoed into the silence that descended. García López chose the moment to intervene, and again inappropriately. He was as confused as the rest of us.
GL Don Pérez Molino knows what, Mrs Crawshaw? You imply that we all know what you are referring to. I assure you we do not.
PC He knows.
She did not actually stand when she lifted her sagging arm to point at the bench. But it felt like she towered above the proceedings. I have never seen a person so angry. It was here, half way through the second day of the hearing that Doña María del Mar chose to make her first significant contribution. Its impact stunned us all.
MdM Mrs Cottee was pregnant, wasn’t she?
Paula Crawshaw almost collapsed to the back of her chair with an audible thud. Her arm dropped onto her thigh with a flat slap of flesh on flesh. Her black stretch pants were stretched to their physical limit, flesh rolls protruding like compressed, straining balloons.
PC There, it’s said, and the word did not pass my lips. I am a woman of my word. I’ve lived my life that way and will always do so. I have never once let down a friend.
MdM But she did not know for sure...
PC Of course she couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. But you’re a woman. At least I think you are! You seem to be equipped with some of the things that women have. And, believe it or not, Suzie Cottee was also a woman. Of course she didn’t know for definite just a couple of weeks after the holiday. But she had a clear and, as it turned out, definite suspicion that she might be. What she said on the phone at the end of August was that she was going to hang on in Spain for a while until she knew for sure. Then she would come home with her tail between her legs if she was all right, or get rid of it first, if she wasn’t. There would never be any need for Don to know anything and, to this day, he still thinks that she stayed because she left him for Mick Watson.
MdM And he was the father?
PC That’s the whole point. She didn’t know who the father was. She missed a period and Suzie always said that you could set your watch by her body, she was so regular. She should have come on in the middle of the second week of our holiday, but she didn’t. I had no idea at all what was wrong with her at the time. She went all surly and difficult. By the end, none of us were speaking. We were even trying to avoid seeing one another, which wasn’t easy, given that we had adjoining rooms and had already booked evenings out together. I even suggested we move down the corridor, swap with Dulcie, but that seemed to provoke an even bigger argument, so I shut up. When the phone went a week or so later and I heard Suzie speak, I nearly put it straight down. But then I’m a woman as well. I could tell from her first word that something was up.
MdM Sorry... what was up?
Northern dialect, Doña María. Que hay? It means something is wrong.
MdM Something had certainly been up...
PC Something was up. She told me straight away she thought she was... and what she planned to do. She said she’d been thinking back to her last period and had decided she couldn’t be sure whether it might be Don’s kid or Mick Watson’s...
MdM Or indeed your husband’s, given what you did while you were on holiday...
PC Not on your bloody Nellie, you dirty cow. Don’t you accuse my Pete of causing all this. It was twenty-eight years ago! And he couldn’t have been the father for certain because he’d already had the snip well over a year before. My Pete is not under any suspicion on that matter.
MdM I apologise, Mrs Crawshaw. Was there anything else that Susan Cottee told you in that telephone call?
PC She said what I’ve told you already. She said that under no circumstances should I ever tell anyone she was... That Don need never know... That she was not going to have another because she’d had such a hard time with their Dulcie... That she didn’t want another because she had other things to do with her life, that she’d be tied down for the next twenty years if she kept it, that she didn’t want to stay with Mick, but that he was being a great help to her, that she first needed to be sure one way or the other, that then she’d make her mind up what to do, and probably arrange an abortion through Mick who knew people who would do it, no questions asked, and then she’d come home, telling Don that she’d had her fling with Mick, that it had turned sour, and that she wanted to come back home, and that’s how it turned out. She didn’t say much at all.
MdM Then why did she spend a whole year in Spain?
PC I don’t know. We never spoke about it again. I had no number for her, so I couldn’t call her and she never phoned again. That was before your telephone recorded the caller’s number. She didn’t say. And in any case, you didn’t phone abroad in those days. It used to cost an arm and a leg. By the time she was settled back at home, I thought it better to let a few months go by before I raised the subject. She seemed depressed. She’d lost a lot of weight. Frankly, if I’m honest, I assumed the abortion had gone wrong and that she’d been ill for a while, and that explained why it had taken so long. But, as I said, having waited for her to settle back in at home, we were then in the run up to the strike, and it was obvious that Don was not going to come out. The whole village sent the Cottees to Coventry...
MdM Why there?
It’s a colloquial expression. Hacerle el vacio a algun, Sir. It means that no-one would speak to them.
PC That’s precisely right. Thank you. And we have never spoken to them again. I, for one, could never have an abortion. I’m not a Catholic, but I could never kill a baby.
PM Neither, it seems, could Susan Cottee.
María del Mar seemed to have quickly established a rapport with Paula Crawshaw. So when Pérez Molino reasserted control it killed the flow. But also, his words were a bombshell. It’s hard to describe the effect of these few words. Their succinct simplicity drifted into an increasingly uneasy silence. Paula Crawshaw was stunned. I can describe her state as speechless which, as you will appreciate from her testimony thus far, was something of a transition. Her face contorted into a form that put twenty years on her appearance. García López turned and stared at Pérez Molino, his face barely twenty centimetres from his colleague’s left ear. Pérez Molino, meanwhile looked sternly ahead and with obvious concentration directly at Paula Crawshaw, as did Doña María, except in her case it was clear that the meaning of the comment was already crystal clear. She already knew. Slowly, the meaning dawned on Paula Crawshaw. She understood immediately, that was clear, but she kept trying her utmost to reject the obvious.
PC You mean... You are saying... She had the baby... and never...
Pérez Molin
o nodded. García López turned to face Paula Crawshaw and was about to speak, but Pérez thrust an extended left hand in front of him to beg silence. García López complied. Paula Crawshaw swore several times. It was quite an outburst.
PC Well bugger me! Whatever happened to it? Was it a boy or a girl?
PM It was a girl. She was born in nineteen-eighty-two. Michael Watson was officially recorded as the father. But after the first few months, a period about which we have no record whatsoever, the girl never again lived with her parents. And then, of course, Susan Cottee went back to her husband in Kiddington. The child was brought up in Benidorm by a foster mother until sometime near the end of the decade. The foster mother and child then disappeared. We are also interested in that disappearance, because we feel it may be related to events in this area in the recent past.
García López had openly expressed growing impatience throughout his colleague’s short speech. His face had quickly turned bright red, his shoulders hunched and his hands either fiddled with papers or lifted open-palmed in his attempt to force a pause. By the time he spoke, it was merely a rude interruption.
GL This is completely out of order, Señor Pérez. You are clearly in possession of material relating to this case that has not been seen either by myself or Señora del Mar.
PM I do apologise, Señor García, but this material came to light only this morning in a conversation that lasted barely a minute as I entered the building. I was told the gist yesterday, but I needed a final word of confirmation this morning. There was neither the time nor the opportunity to brief you. But now I am sure it is correct. I expect all... all will be revealed in the next testimony. It is not a planned testimony, I’m afraid. It’s not on our schedule but I believe it to be so important that we should extend the session to hear it. I want to propose that we hear again from Maureen Voros, Mrs Michael Watson.
There were reluctant nods of agreement. But Pérez Molino still had one point to raise with Paula Crawshaw.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 58
