Three

Hi Joe. Here’s details of the third day. It proved to be a fundamentally different kind of day from the previous two. Until today, Pérez Molino was the dominant member of the council. Today, we had open warfare. There was real competition about who was going to push the hearing this way or that. I have the feeling now that García López came with a point to make, and perhaps another to prove. But the big surprise was Señora del Mar’s eventual domination of the day. The first testimony came from Doctor Steven Car. He was a small man in his late forties or early fifties. He wore a dark suit, light grey shirt and red tie. Surely this indicated some political statement. He carried an old fashioned briefcase, the type that has two straps with buckles at the front. He took the stand quietly, opened his case and retrieved a pair of reading glasses and then began to extract files from the bag, eventually selecting two bound in plastic wallets with clear covers and coloured backs. The green one was clearly his copy of the Cottee blog. The blue one, on the other hand, was much slimmer and clearly contained his own notes, material that he was obviously going to share with the hearing. He consulted this file throughout his presentation, but insisted, before he offered any acknowledgement of the existence of the three council members, that he should have the time and space to flick through its contents. Only then, after two or three minutes, did he look up to face the questioners. María del Mar began.

MdM Would you please introduce yourself.

SC My name is Steven Car, Doctor Steven Car of the University of Punslet.

MdM And your position?

SC I lecture in linguistics. My specialism is socio-linguistics, particularly the nature and context of the dialects of Yorkshire.

MdM And you are responsible for the Cottee blog, the document that has already been distributed, and now forms Part One of our report?

SC I am not responsible for it... I assembled it, but I used only the material that was supplied to me on the memory stick. I, myself, neither constructed nor re-constructed any of the material.

MdM Can you describe how the material came into your possession?

SC Certainly. I received an email and then, once I had replied accepting in principle, several phone calls from police officers, consular staff and others, some from Spain and others from within the United Kingdom. They asked if I would be willing to analyse a document purportedly partly written in a Yorkshire dialect. In addition, my participation was officially requested via my employer and so I was both willing and pleased to accept the commission.

MdM Can you tell us if you have done anything like this before?

SC I have analysed voice recordings presented as evidence in various trials and hearings. This happens quite regularly, perhaps two or three times each year. I am an acknowledged authority in the area. Occasionally I have worked with scribbled notes or letters. But this is the first time I have ever been presented with, shall I say, a substantial document of this type.

MdM So the existence of such a document would be, shall we say, unusual?

SC Certainly. As I said, this is the first time I have ever come across such a case.

MdM Thank you, Doctor Car, for putting that on the record.

This was strange. I remember looking across at the clerk and then the stenographer. They were also somewhat baffled by what was going on. It seemed that María del Mar had begun the day with an agenda whose number one item was to question the authenticity or at least the validity of the Cottee blog. Her motives were suddenly unclear.

MdM And now, Doctor Car, could you please summarise your findings?

SC I will come to findings later. I will start with a short description of the procedure I followed. Having agreed to do the work, I was told that the material would follow immediately. In fact it took over a week. It arrived via a courier service. The delivery was recorded, but no extra security had been applied to the packet. Presumably, it could have been opened for inspection at any time during transit. In the packet I found a single item along with a short note that did no more than refer to the content of the telephone conversations of the previous week. The item enclosed was a memory stick, a two hundred and fifty megabyte LG Xtick two point zero. On opening the stick, I found a single file in Microsoft Word nineteen ninety seven to two thousand and three format entitled dc090909.doc. It proved to be a large file for one without any graphics, approximately one point five megabytes in length. On opening the file, I found it contained an assemblage of smaller texts, purportedly authored by Donald and Susan Cottee.

MdM Purportedly? This is a strange word to use, is it not?

SC It is what I was told in my brief, madam. I have no reason to believe that this was inaccurate, but equally I have no reason to assume it is true. Any consideration of the authenticity of the material is beyond the capability of my powers of analysis.

MdM And was there anything else on the storage device?

SC No. There was nothing else.

The remark caused a stir.

MdM Now that is strange, Doctor Car. Our hearing has been told quite specifically that another user of the stick stored a series of photographs on it.

SC Perhaps these had already been deleted...

MdM I understand - please correct me if I am wrong - that it is possible for an information technology specialist to recover material that has been deleted?

SC It can be done, as long as the storage device has not been used very much since the deletion was made.

MdM And did you not investigate the stick to see if there might have been other files stored there?

SC No such request was made in my brief, madam. It was a task I never thought to attempt because no-one suggested it.

MdM Or perhaps the Cottee blog file had already been copied from the original memory stick onto a different one...

SC I was given no information about the origin of the stick. My brief was to analyse the text and nothing else. I merely used what was delivered.

MdM This would appear to be an internal matter for us to sort out. So, Doctor Car, please continue.

SC I did as I was requested. I read the material, assessed it for linguistic authenticity and checked what factual references I could. I also attempted to trace the origins of the entries in the file and what, if anything, was subsequently done with them.

MdM Authenticity?

SC The entries in the file were definitely created by people with an intimate knowledge of the areas described. But some of the names given to the characters recalled from the past are inaccurate. And some of them appear to have been changed to hide identity. Some of the references to popular culture are spurious, since some of the merchandise Cottee describes did not appear until after the age he implied he was when he saw it.

MdM So the material in the Cottee blog contains inaccuracies?

SC Certainly, but I believe they are only in matters of detail.

MdM Unfortunately, a hearing such as this deals in detail. And we understand that the files were published as blogs on the internet?

SC In fact most of them were not. Some of the material did appear, but there was no pattern to explain which ones had been published and which had not. The ones that were published generally came from what appeared to be the earlier material, however. The contents of the file suggest a project that was begun with enthusiasm, but which ran out of steam quite quickly.

MdM And yet the file contained a large amount of material...

SC That is true. It is an aspect upon which I cannot speculate. I checked the internet records for the pieces that were published on Donald Cottee´s blog and obtained the following results. Until July 2009 they had received between one hundred and four hundred hits each. There were four comments appended from people who had accessed the material. Three were from internet marketers, two of them trying to sell erectile dysfunction medication and one an employment opportunity, whose comment , “Donald Cottee, spotty, sooty, snotty, slutty, shut-eye, spooky, xyz, zyx, xxx, zzzpqs etc,” appeared to be facetious. The remaining comment contained the message, “0951 adult channel download, free video chat, adult sites, pornography goalkeeper, adult map area, adult video, self-timer sex, and 0204 map area, chat rooms ut, ec adult, adult video, IMs as text chat rooms, dodo Doudou chat rooms, Taiwan erotic network, 69 for adults, small high-chat rooms, free dating, roaring adult, Traditional Chinese, map Area, is chopped sister 100 are sister emptied, are sister tablecloths, free video chat, 1069 friends, and beauty friends, and 080 video chat rooms, 6k chat Museum, Big Breasts, The Lost World chat, color chat rooms, adult video, playing beautiful people, toot adult network, erotic dating network, adult film, video and audio video chat rooms, Area map leaf love, erotic video, friends, friendship, av sex, and,” It ended with a comma, was entered in Chinese and duplicated alongside each of the published Cottee blogs. I used an online translation system, because in my opinion, the perpetrator of the comment started in English and used such a system to generate Chinese text that he thought would not be noticed. The text exists, but I believe its content has no bearing upon Donald Cottee or anyone else involved in this inquiry. I do stress, however, that this is a value judgment and has no basis in fact. I contacted the moderators of the site to check if there was any basis in Cottee’s claim that his language had caused offence. I received a response from a Mr Slarig Doom, who confirmed that there were no records of any kind suggesting that anyone called Donald Cottee or even Susan Cottee had ever received any complaints about language on a blog. A search for the moderator cited by Donald Cottee, one Featherstone U Klondike, produced no results whatsoever. I conclude that this person was the invention of Mr. Cottee. It has to be said that Donald Cottee’s blog had only four published entries and Susan Cottee had precisely none. Now it is possible that the Cottee blogs presented to this inquiry were submitted to other sites and not the one where the original Donald Cottee blog was registered. If they had done this, however, their material would still be in existence somewhere. It would have been copied and would still appear in results from some search engines, especially ones that are not perfectly maintained. When I did searches on the material, however, I found that, though the Cottee blog had been indexed by major search engines, the only material that my searches found related to those first four articles and only those. It appears, therefore, that none of the subsequent material was ever published.

MdM Could they have been published and then later deleted?

SC It is possible, but highly unlikely. If they had ever been published, then references in search engine indexes would have persisted. These systems are managed by human beings, even if their systems are largely automated. Some search engine, somewhere on the internet would have relied upon the input of an incompetent individual and would therefore have retained references to deleted material. No reference to any such material was found.

MdM Was Donald Cottee saving them up into a series that could later have been published as a book?

SC It is impossible to read the author’s mind. It is possible that he thought it could become a book. But, given the nature of the material, if this is what he believed he was doing, then surely he was not of sound mind.

MdM Did you change any of the text?

SC No I did not. Some re-ordering was necessary to preserve meaning. And what I did do was add headers at the start of each section. I apologise here for some of those additions, because I am told that occasionally they were read as humorous or dismissive. On the contrary, my aim was merely to add a few words as pointers to give a rough, concise indication of what was contained in the piece without - and I stress this - without adding anything that might be construed as judgmental. The last thing I wanted to do was colour the way that people might read the material. I therefore included only the barest pointers to the content of the blog. I intended neither value judgment nor social-class dismissal, a crime of which I have been accused by at least one middle-class British newspaper. I also included minor footnotes. None of these was interpretive. All of them were mere pointers to assist the general reader to appreciate and locate the meaning of what was written. I could have footnoted almost every sentence of Cottee’s blog with references to literature, recent radio broadcasts, films, popular music, local history or even my own opinion of what was said, but it would have been out of place. But I did change the order of some of the entries.

MdM Why?

SC There were some glaring inconsistencies. For instance, if I claimed to own a donkey in one entry and then, a few entries later, I described in detail how my donkey was stolen, this would have left me bereft of donkeys. If, then, an entry or two later, I referred to my donkey, a donkey that had clearly already been reported as stolen and I make no reference either to its theft or to its replacement, then I suggest that this material is in the wrong order. All I did was replace the latter material into a position before the donkey was stolen. I accept that it is possible that a new donkey might have been procured in the interim, but if there was no material to suggest such an act, then all I can do as a mere reporter of discovered material is interpret that material as if it was originally recorded in a rational, consistent and sensible way. In this text, we might have assumed that Olga had disappeared and then we had Donald meeting her in Paradise. It made no sense, so I changed the order.

MdM So all the entries were in one long file.

SC Indeed. And that file had been created during the week before the Cottee’s disappearance.

MdM But the entries appear to originate from throughout the Cottee’s residence in Spain, from the very first days when they parked Rosie the Sundance on the La Manca site.

SC The content of the text appears to suggest that. But the file sent to me was definitely created during the few days immediately prior to the disappearance on the Wednesday. It was last accessed on the morning of their disappearance at six-thirty a.m. to be precise. All of these dates and times, however, rely on the source computer’s clock being correctly set. And since that computer is both unknown and has probably been destroyed, that is impossible to check.

MdM Do you have any explanation for this?

Doctor Steven Car shrugged his shoulders and smiled before answering.

SC I am a professor of socio-linguistics, your honour. My specialism is the accent and vocabulary of the West Yorkshire dialect, especially the language of the former mining areas. To answer your question, I would need skills that I don’t have. I am an academic, and it’s bad practice to speculate. Also, in this case, I am merely a spectator from outside. It would be unprofessional to express an opinion.

MdM But you will do so if I ask again?

SC There are many possible explanations, but the most obvious is that Donald or Susan Cottee was creating an archive of previous blog entries. The file was created just a few days before they disappeared. They might have assembled the file from the individual entries stored as separate files, thus creating one large file so that they could copy it onto the stick for long-term storage. By assembling the material into a rough chronological order, it would make a search for a specific entry quicker and easier than if they were forty or fifty separate files. It is my belief that when they tried to assemble the material chronologically, they made mistakes.

MdM But you are sure that the file you received was created on the Cottee’s computer?

SC I have no idea where it was created or who created it. The signature on the file stated the creation date and indicated it was last modified on that Wednesday morning. The details of the computer are embedded, but those details do not match any computer that I can trace. I have checked details of the machines available to me, being ones taken from Mr Watson’s house, from the Paradise night club, from the home of Pedro Onsoda and the ones that survived the arson attempt in The Castle. None of these machines match the serial number of the machine that created the file. I have checked with major retailers and operating system publishers, and none of them has any record of a purchase or registration by either Donald or Susan Cottee. It is pure speculation, but I think it is possible that the Cottees obtained their computer via a second-hand shop or local market. The machine in question has a processor chip whose serial number was originally registered as associated with a Windows XP Home Edition operating system. It was sold by a large electronics retailer in Alicante some five years ago. I traced the original owner whose name I promised I would not mention during these proceedings, because she has no connection whatsoever with any of the events under scrutiny. Over two years ago the machine developed a fault, prompting the original owner to upgrade to a new laptop. She threw away her old machine. She contacted her local council to come and collect it for disposal to ensure that its materials were disposed of in an environmentally responsible way. As local systems demanded, she placed the machine on the pavement outside her house on the appointed day. As usual, she told me, the council truck was preceded by a white van that seemed to know the schedule of the local authority’s recycling run. The van passed by her house regularly and she fully expected to see it arrive that morning. The van stopped, of course, and the men inside took her computer. The council truck arrived an hour later and went straight past because there was nothing to collect. One must assume that the computer was repaired and then re-sold. That might have been to the Cottees, or indeed Mr Matthews, who might have taken it to use alongside his equipment in The Castle. All of this is speculation. There is nothing definite to link the computer that created the text file with the Cottees. The fact is, of course, that if it was the one they used, then it was probably destroyed in the fire.

MdM So you cannot even be sure that the file was created on the Cottees’ computer?

SC Precisely. I do not have the Cottee´s computer. No-one does, I fear.

There was a silence. Señora del Mar’s gaze angled down towards a paper before her on which she made notes. Pérez Molino was visibly agitated. It was he who spoke.

PM Señora del Mar, I fail to see the significance of this point. Are you suggesting that the material we distributed before this hearing might not even be written by the Cottees?

MdM I am suggesting that we cannot be sure it was.

PM But who else might have written material in their names and planted it in their mobile home on the off chance that someone might pick it up and remove it?

Señora del Mar did not answer. She continued her line of question.

MdM And I believe there is more information about the text file.

SC The copy of Microsoft Office that was used to create it was licensed to a third party, who was not the original owner of the computer. The software was therefore a bootleg copy, which further suggests that the machine had been bought second hand. It might be surprising at first sight that someone with a history of internet usage and significant reliance on information technology might have come to Spain without either a computer or even the prospect of an internet connection, given that he intended from the start to live in a mobile home. This also ties in with Mr Smit’s recollection of the questions the Cottees asked when they first arrived. An internet connection was clearly not a priority. This may have been part of Donald Cottee’s complete break with his past, or perhaps Susan Cottee’s insistence that he did not sit for hours in front of a computer, as he had done while studying.

MdM So all we have is the file that we think is Donald and Susan Cottee’s blog.

SC Its existence is not in dispute, but its authorship cannot be proved. What I can verify, of course, is what the Cottees accessed via the internet, since their usage was recorded by their service provider.

MdM And there was a pattern?

SC The Cottees’ internet usage was fairly typical. The number of hours they spent online was quite small, because their connection was a pay-as-you go arrangement through a local satellite provider. The Cottees clearly had to use their resources carefully. They clearly counted every penny. Their largest time online was devoted to email that they accessed via a free account. The next largest access was to various pornography sites. There was a limited use of search engines, BBC and women’s health sites. And there were numerous short visits to sites devoted to campaigning on environmental issues.

MdM So let us be clear. The Cottees have left behind one file that appears to be blog entries, almost all of which were never actually published as blogs. Their internet usage did not reveal any intention to publish most of the material and we cannot even guarantee that what we have was written by them.

SC In terms of what we can say definitively, that is accurate. We have no independent verification. The first four entries were also submitted to free article sites in Donald Cottee’s name.

MdM Dr Car, you have indicated that entries in the file were indeed created by both Susan and Donald Cottee. Can you be sure of that?

SC I can say with reasonable confidence that there were two different authors. This is suggested by the content, but I also submitted the material to linguistic analysis.

MdM And such an analysis is conclusive?

SC It is indicative, and no more. I separated the entries into two files, with Donald’s entries assembled in one and Susan’s in the other. I subjected the two files to separate analysis and significant differences appeared. The lexical density of Susan’s entries was significantly lower than Donald’s. Her readability score was correspondingly different, with Susan’s work always easier to read. Donald’s regular usage of euphemisms for swear words was not present in Susan’s entries, and the Cottees’ internet access did demonstrate regular visits to a site that listed all the silly words he used. Perhaps most interesting of all was that Donald’s entries regularly refer to Susan. His wife’s name is always one of the most commonly occurring words throughout his entries. Susan Cottee, on the other hand, rarely mentions Donald, and when she does he is usually ‘Donkey’. In addition, Donald used consistently longer sentences, a difference that proved statistically significant at the 0.05 level on a chi-squared test. I can state, therefore, that there is evidence to suggest that the entries that appear to be written by Donald are by one person and those by Susan were written by someone else.

MdM So despite all of your work, you cannot say anything definite? It remains possible that it was planted by someone who wanted to publicise a particular story, or exploit events or even mislead an inquiry?

SC I have said what I can, Miss del Mar. I cannot speculate on the basis of the text I received. There is evidence that the Cottees may also have used a second internet connection, via computers in The Castle, and also via a wifi connection that served another mobile home near to their own in La Manca, a signal that they sometimes poached. But again there is no definite information on either of these possibilities. And, given the destruction or loss of The Castle’s facilities and the inability to prove they accessed another connection, I can say nothing definitive or specific about either possibility. And it would be irresponsible to speculate. It may be significant, however, that we only have this material by chance.

MdM So, Dr Car, what can you prove?

SC What can I prove? With due respect, I am an academic. I research. I analyse. I locate, evaluate and present evidence. And unless that evidence is manifest in a test-tube under perfect laboratory conditions, is one hundred percent monitored and measured, then I am afraid proof is never possible. All I can offer is informed opinion which may, or may not, be more accurate or more trustworthy than the uninformed.

MdM I want to ask about something different... I understand that you have also checked Donald Cottee’s academic record? Does it bear any resemblance to what he described in his writing?

SC Indeed. I contacted the registrar’s office of the University Of The Air, and the academic records office of the University of Punslet. I also trawled through other institutions well known for offering extra-mural studies. Donald Cottee was registered on a degree course with the University Of The Air and achieved a liberal arts degree some years ago, studying an almost standard mix of social sciences, media and environmental units. He was also enrolled in several other institutions, taking a wide range of courses, many of which he did not complete. In the limited time that has been available, I have already concluded that most of the references to courses studied in his journal are pure invention, except for S100 Statistics, which was a course he did with the University Of The Air, as part of his degree.

There was a moment’s silence when open eyes and strained expressions asked silent questions. It was clear that there was no more to be said on either side. María del Mar remained pointedly silent, but offered a gesture of the hand that invited Steven Car to vacate the stand and leave. It might have been interpreted by some as dismissive, but Dr Car seemed not to worry. He certainly took no offence. By the time Steven Car passed his final comment, María del Mar had already mentally moved on. And so it came as a lightning bolt that both stopped and numbed.

SC Was the memory stick subjected to fingerprint analysis?

There was silence from the bench for some time. Dr Car had paused near the exit. He was very interested in the response. It was Pérez Molino who spoke.

PM Why do you ask that, Dr Car?

SC Obviously I retain significant doubt as to whether either Donald or Susan Cottee ever handled that stick.

PM So you think that it might have been planted in the Cottee’s mobile home?

SC Obviously it’s unlikely, but it’s a possibility I would have wanted to be able to rule out. As things stand I cannot even be sure that anything about that file is authentic, though I have no reason to question its authenticity either. All we can say is that it was apparently written by someone who knew Kiddington and significant details of the Cottees’ lives.

PM We are not aware that anybody had records of the Cottee’s fingerprints.

SC Donald Cottee was arrested because of his campaigning against the wind farms. British police would have taken his fingerprints. I would have thought it would have been standard practice with evidence, unless, of course, you do police work as it is shown on television or the films, where intuition solves everything and evidence is irrelevant. Good morning.

And with that Steven Car left the room. The silence that hung over the proceedings felt very heavy. We were all aware that there had been an attempt to undermine Dr Car, to render his contribution either irrelevant or discredited. Throughout, he had retained a calm, balanced position and had not once given the slightest indication that he might react. Then, as a parting shot, he had traded fire with fire, effectively discrediting the entire process in which we were involved. It was a masterstroke. Without it, María del Mar might have carried the whole day. But from then she was more defensive. Her confidence was shaken and this probably resulted in her approaching the next witness with more force, even aggression, than was needed. As a result, though her obvious attempt to discredit her as well actually succeeded, it did not carry the impact that it otherwise might.

This next person to be called was Christine Gillespie, a resident of La Nucia. She appeared towards the end of Donald Cottee’s blog, on the day when Donald followed Phil and Karen Matthews in their Land Rover. And she actually met Cottee, though only momentarily, when he told her he had a message for Phil Matthews, a man she knew as Mr Mason. She took the stand when called. She immediately projected a rather defiant, argumentative manner. I hate to describe someone as stereotypical, but she was. She was overweight, flabby, pale-skinned, loose-limbed and clumsy. Her voice rasped, her words clipped and short, with even the shortest response sounding bad-tempered. She was Scottish, with a thick Glaswegian accent that the council members found difficult to understand. Their response was to run the proceedings more slowly, taking time to dissect and understand her replies. I thought it strange that none of her expressions were referred to me.

MdM Good morning Mrs Gillespie.

CG It’s Gillespie, not Hillepsie, thank you.

MdM Thank you. I am aware of that. I believe you have received a copy of the document we named The Cottee Blog?

CG I have.

MdM I assume that you have read it?

CG Not likely! It’s enormous. And it’s so boring. I got lost after page three. I just couldn’t pick up the story. He was against windmills, wasn’t he?

MdM Will you now please tell us about Mr Philip Mathews and his partner Karen McEvoy.

CG I don’t know any Mathews or McEvoy. I’ve been told they are the same people. I’ve seen photographs. They do seem to be the same. I know them as Mason, Philip and Karen Mason. They told me they were married.

MdM They were renting your apartment?

CG They were there for just three months before they disappeared.

MdM How much rent did you take in advance?

CG Just the first month.

MdM And they paid the rent on time?

CG Not likely. We never saw another penny. I went up to see them at the end of the second month and they asked me if I could wait a week or two. They seemed nice people, not rough or badly spoken in any way, so I said yes. We had them round for a drink when they answered our ad in the Costa Blanca News. They seemed so nice. They told us they had steady work and a good income. They had an expensive car that was quite new. It’s always a way of telling people apart, my husband says. Never trust anyone that can only afford a cheap car is what he thinks.

MdM That was how long before they moved in?

CG Probably just a couple of weeks. Their story was that they were in temporary accommodation and needed a place quickly. They came one weekend. They had hardly any possessions, which surprised us, but they said they had travelled light, and had left Britain quickly to take up a job offer. They said they would be bringing their own furniture eventually, so they may start moving some of our things around to make space for it. We didn’t give it a second thought at the time.

MdM This temporary accommodation, did they tell you where it was?

GC No.

MdM And did you ask for references?

CG No.

There was a moment of silence while María del Mar spoke to García López. She then questioned Christine Gillespie again.

MdM Mrs Gillespie...

CG Gillespie! How many times do I have to tell you how to pronounce my name?

MdM ...I find it incredible that you should rent your apartment to complete strangers without references or a signed, verified, legal contract. I am inclined not to believe you.

CG You can believe what you want. We work in cash...

MdM And you are non-resident in Spain, despite the fact that you live here permanently. You make no tax declaration and still run a British-registered car.

CG Look, we are honest, law-abiding people...

MdM Neither adjective holds true, Mrs Gillespie.

CG Gillespie, not Hillespie!

MdM And what contact did you have with Philip Matthews and Karen McEvoy after they moved in?

CG Hardly any at all. They were never in. We saw them a couple of times in the first week, but since then we’ve never been able to catch them in. They would leave around nine in the morning and come back around four. But then they went straight out again and didn’t come back until two in the morning. They’d make a lot of noise for half an hour and then it would all go quiet until the next morning.

MdM And when was the last time you saw them?

CG It was on the morning of the day they all disappeared. The Wednesday. They went off at the usual time, but they never came back. We didn’t hear anything, even at night, for two days. And there was no car parked outside. It was then that my husband decided to go into the apartment and it was then we discovered they’d cleared the place out. They took everything they could move, even the light fittings off the wall and the potted plants from the balcony.

MdM And you never heard anything? There were no strange noises?

CG Absolutely nothing. But then both my husband and I are out most of the day. There’s usually no-one in the house from around ten until around three, so they could have taken things out at any time.

MdM And you had no idea what they were doing?

CG We’d started to get suspicious. A neighbour called us the week before to say that she’d seen a white van parked in our drive when we were out. Now when the Masons - sorry, the Mathews or whoever they were - first visited us to ask about the apartment, they mentioned that one of the things they did was ‘Man with a van’ trips to and from Britain. Occasionally, they said, they might bring the van round, but we never saw it.

MdM Did they tell you where they kept the van?

CG No. All he said was that he had a garage.

MdM In his blog, Donald Cottee describes coming to your house late one afternoon. He had followed Philip Matthews and Karen home via Montesinos. After they later left, he says that he tried to deliver a message for them. That was when he realised they were using a different surname in their dealings with you. What do you remember of him?

CG Of Donald Cottee? Look, he was a total stranger. I didn’t know him from Adam. I wasn’t going to let him in, or trust him, was I? He’d rung our bell and was standing in the street. He had no obvious means of transport. Frankly, I was glad to see the back of him. I was afraid he might jump over the wall and attack me. I mean, you read all sorts of stories about women being attacked in the papers, don’t you? I wasn’t going to tell him anything. All I could see was a rough-looking man with a shaved head. He was dressed like he ought to be renting a lounger on Benidorm beach, or sinking lager at lunchtime in one of the one euro a pint British bars. And that’s all I remember.

MdM He tried to leave a message for Philip Matthews?

CG Well he did, but of course I didn’t know any Matthews. Our renters were called Mason, after all.

MdM And what did the message say?

CG I don’t remember any details. It was scribbled on a piece of paper. It mentioned somebody called Olga... I took no notice because it was addressed to a Mr Matthews and our people were called Mason.

MdM But he mentioned their first names? Did it surprise you that the first names were the same? Did it make you suspicious?

CG At the time I had no reason to distrust them. And I certainly had no reason to trust a stranger on the street. I thought no more about it until we discovered we’d been robbed.

MdM And that was just a couple of weeks later?

Christine Gillespie nodded. There were suddenly tears in her eyes. They dissolved as fast as they appeared. They were probably ‘on demand’ tears, but she had rightly concluded that there was nothing to be gained here by throwing a tantrum.

MdM And what did you do when you found you had been robbed?

CG Well, at first we didn’t do anything. Our insurance didn’t cover us if we had renters. So what we did was a bit stupid, but it made sense at the time. Look, I know what we did was wrong, but we’d been wronged ourselves.

MdM Why did you not report the theft to the police?

Christine Gillespie was silent.

MdM Was it because you were renting the apartment and not declaring the income?

Christine Gillespie remained silent.

MdM And was it also because both you and your husband are resident in Spain, but have never registered? Is it also because you are not even listed on the town’s padron? Is it also because you both work in Spain, but declare no income and pay neither tax nor social security contributions? Is it because your husband does freelance painting work up and down a ladder despite the fact that he is in receipt of full disability benefit in the United Kingdom where, officially, he is still resident, on the basis that his back was so badly injured in a fall five years ago that he can no longer work? Or is it because you run a British registered vehicle that is neither taxed nor tested for road worthiness? Or is it that you yourselves are tenants with a lease that specifically states you may not sublet? Is that why you broke the lock on the outside door and reported it as a burglary?

CG Look, Señora, it’s not us that’s on trial. We had nothing to do with these disappearances.

MdM But the point I am making, Señora Gillespie...

CG Gillespie!

MdM The point I am making is that we have several people involved as subjects or witnesses in this inquiry who are drawn, shall we say, from the lower social classes of the United Kingdom. It might be concluded, from what we have heard, that all of them have lied, all of them have been engaged in illegal activity, or vice, or both, and all of them have lived, at least in part, lives of deception. Since Donald and Susan Cottee are themselves of this same social class, it is my contention that what is written in the Cottee blog may well be pure fabrication and that the substantive points made about certain people’s intentions and behaviour should be discounted.

CG Look, I’m not on trial. We are the victims. We had all of our things stolen!

MdM Mrs Gillespie....

CG Gillespie!

MdM Were you aware that the information technology and photographic equipment that Philip Mathews and Karen McEvoy used at The Castle was also stolen?

CG I’d heard there’d been a fire.

MdM There was an attempt to hide the evidence. Someone emptied the place, took everything, and then attempted to set the building on fire. But they did not succeed. The only result was some charring of the walls. The upstairs room where Philip Mathews and Karen McEvoy used to work was not touched by the fire and it was empty.

CG Are you suggesting that I might have been involved in that as well?

MdM I merely ask if you saw Philip Mathews, Philip Mason bring any IT equipment back to your house?

CG I’ve already told you, they brought nothing. They took everything away!

MdM Mrs Gillespie...

CG Gillespie!

MdM ...according to your statement to the police, it was burglars who took your possessions during a break-in. I suggest that you are a liar.

CG I didn’t come here to be insulted.

Christine Gillespie stood up and marched out via the door where she had entered, despite attempts from the clerk to direct her the other way. I realised later that this ploy of María del Mar had effectively closed off any further useful examination of the role of Philip Matthews and Karen McEvoy. The diversion had become more significant than the substance.

The hearing had scheduled a full hour for Christine Gillespie so there was a considerable gap between her premature departure and the next witness. Unexpectedly the council members declared that they needed time to consult and left the room, but they did not call a recess, so the rest of us had to stay and twiddle our thumbs. The clerk went outside for a smoke, and the stenographer did her nails. I spent some time going over what I had already written. The time passed quickly enough. I have no idea what the three council members were discussing. What I do know is that when they returned, García López was a changed man. Where earlier, as in the previous two sessions, he had fiddled and fidgeted, ever nervous, he now seemed placid and calm, so calm that he never uttered another word. Pérez Molino, on the other hand, displayed an air of defeat from that moment. It seemed that every time he spoke, the others silently demanded he retract. And then on to the stand came the next witness, our penultimate testimony as far as the Cottees were concerned, at any rate. It was a gentleman called Squibb, Johnny Squibb. He was accompanied by his wife, Millicent - millipede would have been more appropriate since I’ve never seen a human being crawl so effectively - and a lawyer, no less. This was to be the first testimony to be delivered via a lawyer. Now we knew what they needed to talk about. It took another five minutes to find two extra chairs that would comfortably fit on the stand.

MdM Good morning, Mr Squibb.

Now you might have thought that was a fairly innocuous remark. It took a good minute and a half, however, before an answering comment emerged. Mr Squibb is a very large man. In his youth he must have been both impressive and imposing. He is tall, around one metre ninety, and even now well proportioned and muscular. He has a vast presence, apparently still towering over others when seated. His wife, on the other hand, is like a stringy, bent pipe-cleaner. She is exactly as Donald Cottee described, as is her husband’s voice, which sounds like a cross between Donald Duck, Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Pie. But, as Donald Cottee also said, when presented with a frame like that, you resist the temptation to laugh. Johnny squeaked into Millicent’s ear; she whispered to the lawyer and he spoke. He was completely nondescript, small, dark, dark-suited, wore glasses and delivered as matter of fact as any postman. His name was Juan Coltello and it was consistently he who delivered Mr Squibb’s second-order words that on each occasion seemed to reduce by half between their generation on the left of the stand to their utterance on the right, Milly in the middle apparently applying some filter in between. The lawyer also had briefing papers spread across his lap. Throughout the testimony, the entire process seemed to happen in slow motion. From the start, those of us listening felt we could almost predict what the answers would be. How wrong we were!

JC Good morning.

MdM Thank you for attending, Mr Squibb.

JC Thank you for inviting me.

MdM I hope it was not too disruptive...

JC No, not at all.

MdM Mr Squibb, could you please relate to the hearing how you became acquainted with Donald and Susan Cottee, Philip Mathews, Karen McEvoy, Michael Watson and Olga Markov?

The reply was forthcoming. By the time it was issued, it was in its third edition.

JC As you obviously know, Mr Squibb is now a junior partner and board member of VI. The company has multiple interests and employs more than fifty people. It is highly unfortunate and deeply regretted that the company has just lost four employees as a result of circumstances unknown. Mr Squibb, as head of personnel, however, is in a position to answer your question in more detail.

The silence that followed was comical. Johnny and Milly Squibb sat next to their lawyer facing the bench. The three council members stared back. It was like a stand-off in the ape house at the zoo. The bench was waiting for the stand, believing its question was still pending, whereas the stand was waiting for the bench, clearly expecting further cues. Eventually, they came.

MdM Olga Markov and Michael Watson?

JC Miss Markov arrived some five years ago. She was recruited to take over the eastern European side of the business where a vacancy had developed. Until recently she has been a responsible and trusted member of the company. Her contribution to the business in this area is greatly missed. Michael Watson has been involved with the company in some way or other for almost as long as its founder. Mr Squibb has known Michael Watson since he himself joined. Unfortunately, because of serious chronic illness, Mr Watson was unable to continue in his role and had been semi-retired for some months. He was, however, still on the company’s payroll when he disappeared.

MdM Philip Mathews and Karen McEvoy?

JC They were employed just over two years ago as photographers and information technology operatives. Their base was at The Castle in Benidorm, but they did work for all arms of the company.

MdM Susan Cottee?

JC Susan Cottee was the most recent appointee and strictly speaking not on the company payroll. She was covering for Michael Watson on a temporary basis.

MdM This fact, of course, is not mentioned anywhere in the text of the document that was circulated.

JC That is correct. It is a major omission. The sections of the document allegedly produced by Susan Cottee suggest that she thought she had full managerial control of The Castle. In fact this was never the case. Michael Watson maintained this position throughout, right up to the day he disappeared.

MdM And Donald Cottee?

JC Donald Cottee was not associated with VI. My client can offer no comment relating to Mr Cottee.

PM What about Donald’s observation that you ...

JC Señor Pérez...

It was fascinating to watch. For the first time, Juan Coltello did not consult with Johnny or Milly. He just spoke. It was clearly rehearsed.

JC Señor Pérez. The material that was circulated, specifically that which seemed to be authored by Donald Cottee, was pure make-believe. My client does not employ people to threaten others with violence. Mr Cottee and my client met only a handful of times, and always on social occasions at the Watsons’ house. They often attended a regular social gathering on Wednesdays.

PM He never followed you home?

JC That material in particular was pure invention, as was any reference made to a secret room underneath the Watsons’ house in Montesinos. Allegations have been made in the document - the Cottee blog, as it is called - that are patently untrue. In addition, the Watsons’ house is company property and VI is delighted to invite the police or representatives of this hearing into the property to carry out an inspection. In the opinion of my client, Mr Cottee had an over-vivid imagination.

PM And the circumstances of their disappearance? Do you have an official company position on that?

JC VI is unwilling to speculate. What we can say is that the people concerned did meet regularly on Wednesday afternoons. This was intended as a business meeting, but an informal one, to allow all those directly involved with the management of The Castle to review the week and plan for the next. It is company policy to keep such meetings as informal as possible. Hence we never raised any objection to Donald Cottee’s regular attendance, though strictly speaking he was not involved in the business.

Pérez Molino tried to interrupt but Juan Coltello held up a hand to enforce his silence.

JC I would like to complete the company’s statement if I can. It is the understanding of my client that the regular Wednesday meeting was scheduled for the week of the disappearance. You are aware that Miss Markov had not been attending for some weeks because she had been transferred to other duties.

PM But she did attend that day, didn’t she?

JC Please, let me finish. It is my client’s understanding that no meeting took place because Mr Watson was too ill to attend. We believe that those concerned simply went about their own independent business that afternoon.

PM I repeat. Olga Markov was there, wasn’t she.

JC I refer you, Sir, to my statement.

MdM I must intervene...

She held up a hand to stop further contribution from Pérez Molino.

MdM The purpose of this hearing is to review evidence that might assist in identifying the whereabouts of missing persons, not to conduct an inquiry into a company’s business. May I confirm, Señor Coltello, that you have said all that is currently known within the company about the events of that Wednesday?

JC That is correct.

MdM Could you please clarify what happened to Miss Markov?

JC She was initially transferred to different duties. She did arrange to meet with Mr Watson on that Wednesday. That meeting may have taken place, though we have no means of confirming the fact. We understand that the official meeting involving all six people did not take place. None of the six has been heard of since then.

MdM Thank you. Can I also ask you to confirm for the benefit of our records that this statement from the company carries the authority of all the partners?

JC It does. I have it here.

He held up a single sheet of paper with barely eight lines of typed text. There were three large signatures in blue beneath.

JC It is signed by the owner and the two other remaining partners, Mr Squibb and Mr Jones. Mayor Onsoda, of course, is no longer with us.

MdM And can you clarify the position with Mr Jones?

JC Indeed. He will not be testifying. He is away on urgent company business and will not return until it is complete. His testimony, by definition, is contained within the company statement, which is a joint position.

MdM And Mr Squibb’s background?

JC Mr Squibb has worked for Mrs Watson for seven years.

Coltello paused here. His brief probably included the act as a stage direction. I watched the three of them on the stand. Johnny and Millicent looked long and hard straight at Pérez Molino. They were clearly expecting something. I was expecting something. Incredibly, he stayed silent. He never even raised his head which was angled down as he made apparently meticulously drawn notes on his pad.

JC Mrs Watson’s business was expanding and she needed a head of security. Mr Squibb has been in that line of business for several years in London and was taking an early, semi-retirement in Spain. The arrangement they made suited both parties.

MdM And that early retirement was for health reasons?

JC Indeed. Mr Squibb had suffered a laryngectomy. He finds it hard to speak.

MdM We are aware of his difficulties and we thank him again for coming to testify.

JC Thank you. My client is only too willing to be of assistance.

MdM Thank you again.

JC Mr Squibb was interviewed at Mrs Watson’s house in Montesinos and has worked for her ever since.

MdM And would you please clarify the nature of Mrs Watson’s business interests?

JC She has a very successful website that she developed in partnership with Mr Jones. It was a very simple idea and came to fruition when restrictions on the travel of people from eastern Europe were lifted approximately twenty years ago. This coincided with the birth of the internet, of course.

MdM Mrs Watson, Mrs Voros, or course, speaks Hungarian, doesn’t she?

JC Indeed she does. She also at the time had a partnership with an old friend, a contact in Russia, so between them they could handle most inquiries.

PM It’s a dating agency, isn’t it?

JC My client prefers the term ‘introduction agency’.

PM And why would an introduction agency on the internet need a head of security based in Spain?

JC Mrs Watson’s business interests have expanded considerably, especially since she dissolved the relationship between herself and her Russian partners and entered a strengthened agreement with Mr Jones. There are significant interests here in Spain - bars, clubs, property, real estate.

PM And a little vice?

JC All the businesses submit regular accounts, pay tax, comply with all registration requirements and are regularly inspected by the relevant authorities.

What had just happened took a lot of explaining. I have spent hours thinking this one through, Joe, and I’ll give you the full version when I see you, but basically Pérez Molino had overstepped some agreed mark. Mr Squibb glared at him while Millicent whispered into their lawyer’s ear. García López wrote a note on his pad and shoved it forcefully under Pérez Molino’s nose. Meanwhile María del Mar offered the kind of smile an American doctor must learn to use just before offering a lethal injection at a death sentence. It was directed at Pérez Molino. What was amazing was that he chose to ignore all of these far from subtle prompts.

PM And Mrs Watson’s Russian partner, was she called Tatiana by any chance? And was she shut out of the business without a cent in compensation just after Mr Jones arrived on the scene?

There was tremendous commotion for several minutes. Johnny Squibb, led by Millicent, made a theatrical and angry exit from the room, ignoring all verbal and even physical attempts to dissuade them. Juan Coltello stayed behind. Again he read from a prepared statement.

JC Voros International has cooperated with this inquiry. Its status is that of an exploratory hearing. No charges have been laid and no allegations made. The company has done precisely as requested. It will not make any statement about any other issue, case or hearing whether in progress, pending or heard, unless specifically called before a formal, judicial session. Thank you.

PM Thank you, indeed.

His words bore a long-suffering air. García López, apparently and newly at one with the world, maintained a serene silence. María del Mar merely smiled. It was a statement of victory, confidence solidified. There followed a couple of minutes of winding down, while the witnesses vacated the room and audibly made their way toward the building’s exit. There were no other scheduled testimonies.

PM Well, have we learned anything from these sessions?

GL There is no place for speculation...

MdM I agree. We should not comment. There is not enough evidence.

PM But I would like each of us, off the record, of course...

At this point he paused to look at each of the clerks in turn. He did not continue until he had mumbled a few words I could not hear. He was clearly requesting that the session’s verbatim record should be paused until he indicated it should start again. Joe, how you handle this in the reports is up to you. I suggest a ‘sources say...’ or ‘contacts close to...’ as an opener would be enough. Everyone will know it has reached you via me, but - as usual - please try to avoid referring to me directly in any way.

PM I would like each of us to sum up where we stand individually on what we have heard. I have certainly learned a lot about these people, but I would ask the two of you to comment first, remembering that nothing you say will be on the official record. What we do need, however, is some pointer as to how to proceed. Señor García López, would you please start?

He looked uncomfortable. He took several seconds to begin, time he spent shuffling papers, pausing to read one or two here and there. I feared he was simply not going to comply with the request, but then he spoke.

GL It is clear, from my point of view, that these six disappearances are not the result of a single act. I believe that Olga Markov was not present at all, and thus should no longer be an object of our interest. Wherever she is, she is doing what she wants to do. I see no reason to pursue her further, since she is connected to these events and others - being the fate of Mayor Onsoda - only via the Cottee blog, a document I believe is not trustworthy. I further assert that neither Philip Matthews not Karen McEvoy were present. They have been revealed as common criminals and have fled with what they have stolen. A separate case of theft should be opened to deal with them. As for the three British, two were terminally ill and the third was clearly sufficiently unbalanced not to be able to distinguish fantasy from fact. They each had a motive. They had suffered mutual rejection and humiliation, so perhaps it was vengeance that provided the motive. Frankly, there was enough history here to have provoked any combination of attacker and victim, whether that be one person against two or two against one. Take your pick. The possibility that the still physically fit Donald Cottee committed what he saw as a mercy killing of the other two is perhaps the more likely, but then Susan Cottee might have wanted to obtain some retribution for her treatment by the two men over the years. Michael Watson, it seems, was always a bully, so perhaps he did not even need a motive. As I say, take your pick.

PM Señora del Mar...?

MdM I am satisfied, like Señor García López, though he did specifically say it, that the company Voros International played no part in any of this. I too think that the Cottee blog is make-believe. I do not, for instance, think that Donald Cottee ever broke into a cavern at the base of the Montesinos house owned by Señora Voros, and - even if he did, even if it ever existed - he certainly did not meet the people he described, except, of course, for Señora Voros herself who, after all, lived there. And she, clearly, was playing a joke on him at the time, probably because he was the kind of person no-one ever took seriously. His descriptions of passports and illegal immigrants were pure invention, aimed at discrediting Mr Watson, a man against whom he was perfectly justified in bearing a grudge. I regard the Cottee blog as nothing more than an attempt to implicate Mr Watson and to place the blame for everything on his shoulders. I believe that Donald Cottee’s obsession with Miss Markov was also calculated. He knew that she was Susan Cottee’s daughter, but also assumed that Mr Watson was the father. His pursuing of the young woman was merely his way of hurting his wife. And, like Señor García López, I believe that the Matthews-McEvoy couple were simple criminals, mere opportunists. I differ in my interpretation, however, in believing that they would not have left with their pickings without eliminating those people who knew a great deal about them. The house contents, the equipment from The Castle were no more than diversions. Their real motive was the cash that disappeared from the Paradise safe. But they would surely have covered their tracks, so I think they remain prime suspects in the disappearance of the others. But also like Señor García López, I believe that Olga Markov was not present on that Wednesday. She had left much earlier and Donald Cottee´s sighting of her driving Mayor Onsoda’s car is not to be trusted.

PM Thank you, Señora del Mar. As for myself, I take a completely different position. First: I believe that the Cottee blog is not only authentic, it is also accurate. If the Montesinos house no longer boasts a nuclear shelter in its basement, then I believe that Maureen Voros and others have had it walled up in the last couple of weeks. Given their property interests, they must know many builders who could do a quick job with a single delivery of concrete and payment in cash with no questions asked. Second: though the Cottee blog is genuinely the work of Donald and Susan Cottee, it never existed in its current form as far as the Cottees themselves were concerned. I believe it was assembled by Philip Matthews and given to Susan Cottee on the Tuesday, the day before the disappearances, when she left The Castle. I speculate that Philip Matthews offered Donald Cottee some free copies of the software he was using upstairs in The Castle and that the Cottee’s computer spent some days prior to the disappearance in Philip Matthews’s possession. This is why there are no entries in the Cottee blog after the discovery of the Onsoda murder. I find it inconceivable that someone like Cottee would not have related any of the events that transpired over the following week, especially Susan Cottee’s repeated coverage in the British press, alleging she was involved in an illegal people trafficking business, with documents printed, as alleged earlier by her husband, by Philip Matthews and Karen McEvoy in their room in The Castle. Keeping that activity based there allowed others to keep their own distance... They were getting worried that things were closing in on them, so Philip Matthews had a look at what was stored on the Cottee’s computer because at the time they did not know how much incriminating material might exist. So Philip Matthews then assembled the blog as we now see it from separate entries stored on the Cottees’ computer. His prime aim was to anger Susan Cottee. What he and the others expected was that Susan would read the material on the Wednesday morning and have a giant and public row with her husband, thus providing a convenient domestic motive for the planned disappearance later that day. Not only had Philip Matthews created the the file for Susan to view, he had also placed it - and it alone - on a memory stick to make sure that Susan could easily locate it. When Mrs Mason took the stick by mistake, it ruined the plan. Susan had not looked at it and, for that matter, had forgotten about the stick’s existence. Susan Cottee specifically told Jennifer Mason that there was one stick she could use to store her photographs when in fact there were two. Burning the Cottee’s mobile home was merely a means of destroying the evidence that we now possess by chance.

GL This is absurd...

PM It is less than absurd, Señor. My independent research has generated an original, hand-written and signed affidavit from a witness confirming that Philip Matthews had the Cottee’s computer in his room in The Castle and that it went back to the La Manca Park with Susan Cottee when Matthews took her home on the Tuesday evening. Hardly the activity of a common criminal about to steal goods and cash, is it?

MdM Excuse me, may I make a point? If what you are saying has even a grain of truth, then Matthews also had enough time to read the material, edit it, elide it and even add things he wanted. If he was employed by Voros International, why would he have left material that might incriminate his employer?

PM Good question... It also occurred to me. First: the material was always going to be destroyed when the Cottee’s mobile home was torched. I believe that was always part of the plan, in which case no-one was ever going to see it. Second: if Matthews deliberately left material in place that might incriminate Voros International, knowing that it might be shared by Susan Cottee, then it raises the question as to whom he was actually working for, doesn’t it? The thefts and apparent disappearance, in the case of Matthews-McEvoy, are mere diversions. Either position is a possible way of interrepting these events.

The pause that he left here was fascinating. Pérez Molino looked left and right repeatedly. He was possibly prompting mere acknowledgement, or it might have been that he believed that what was to follow was known by the others. He was scrutinising their reactions to his words, but the others remained utterly stone-faced throughout and concentrated on the papers immediately before them. At this point I had the distinct impression that his speculation was calculated to drive a wedge between his colleagues. He was assessing their reaction, but they offered none.

PM This is off the record, of course, as are my following points, Señor Garcia and Señora del Mar. Señor Garcia, I believe that you are employed by a law firm based in Alcoy and that you are attending this hearing purely as the legal representative of Voros International. Am I correct?

Of course there was not even recognition that he had spoken.

PM And Señora del Mar, you are fulfilling that same role here on behalf of a large construction company, I believe? There are contracts at stake - one for a large new residential block and another for several proposed wind farm sites. Is that not correct? And the purpose of burning the mobile home was to destroy all evidence in the form of the Cottee word processor files. It was pure luck that any of the material survived. And as for motive, it was Miss Markov who had the most to gain. Her goals were both professional and personal. There was the mother who deserted her and two men, either of whom might have been her father, and neither of whom seemed to care. Donald had pursued her and, no doubt, so had Mr Watson at some time, but he was also aware she might be his daughter. Philip Matthews and Karen McEvoy were loyal employees and accomplices and under her management. And she is now, I believe, either a senior operative in the business and being protected or, and this is a real possibility, she has been recruited by an opposing interest. Matthews and McEvoy have disappeared with new identities to continue their work elsewhere. The thefts and arson were mere diversions, aimed at confusing the police and covering tracks.

MdM I hope this nonsense is not being recorded!

She turned to look at the clerks who confirmed that none of these speculations would see the light of day. What they did not realise, however, was that I, the translator, had a freelance contract with you, Joe. In the light of all this, I can not stress how important it is that you handle the material sensitively. After all, you don´t want to make enemies or pick fights you can’t win. Pérez Molino continued.

PM And, as for the rest, we may speculate that it had already come to light that Mayor Onsoda had switched camps. He was ready to ally himself with another, competing interest and also about to refuse all wind power applications in his area.

GL This is a bigger fiction than the Cottee blog.

PM We know so little about people... I doubt that any of the stories we have heard is true. They contain grains of truth, but those seeds grow only into what their owners want to be seen.

MdM But we do know who you are, don’t we Señor Pérez? We do know that you, yourself, are here to represent a consortium of businesses and property owners who oppose the application to develop The Castle site.

It was a statement, not a question. Pérez Molino did not look in the least perturbed. García Lopez looked down at his papers and, for once, smiled. A glance across to Maria del Mar shared the mirth. It was left to Pérez Molino to sum up. He had started the proceedings and so it was his responsibility to bring them to a close.

PM Can I ask, please, that the official record is restarted from now? Thank you. It would have been better for everyone if this hearing had delved deeper, but our remit was limited and consequently our achievements few. Without these hearings, there would merely be six disappeared people. As a result of the testimonies we have heard, there are still six disappeared people, but now we know just a little of how they related to one another and perhaps have some idea of what might have happened to them. And thus we have a suggestion of what inquiries should be pursued. What is also clear is that progress on the other matter will depend on the testimonies that some or all of the six disappeared can supply. We three council members must meet again at a date to be decided to sign off the transcript of these proceedings, a transcript that must be dissected thoroughly for clues that might suggest where further investigations might be pursued. Our future deliberations would be assisted if the material we have circulated was more widely read. I therefore make an official request that the document we have called ‘the Cottee blog’ be translated into Spanish. It is within my powers to suggest that this task be allotted to Señora Quejada. I therefore call upon our administrators to arrange a contract to this effect as soon as possible. But what is clear is that we must immediately use the powers at our disposal to identify the whereabouts of those people who might assist us. We call therefore for international authorities to be contacted. We request officially that a search be initiated to establish the whereabouts of Olga Markov, and of Michael Watson. We need also to locate Philip Mathews and his partner Karen McEvoy. Crucially, we need to talk to Susan Cottee. And, of course, we need a search for Donald Cottee.