A Search for Donald Cottee

by Philip Spires

  The television report showed several more shots of the house, some from angles where I would not have recognised it. Then the cameras moved inside, and it was completely deserted but neatly and tidily presented. If there was a problem, then it clearly wasn’t burglary. And then outside we went again. The garage doors were still open and the strands of yellow tape stretched across its doors still ruffled in the breeze.

  It was a long shot this time while someone voiced over in that strange tongue. There was no longer any doubt. It really was the beige BMW behind whose wheel I had recently seen my goal. They only showed the car from the rear. As was local habit, it had been driven into its housing nose first. There was a close-up shot of a policeman who was talking in that strange local language again, not a word of which I can usually understand. All I can remember is that they have almost the same word for love as Germans have for death. I noted with remorse how the two might have come together in this evening’s report.

  Then we were in the street again. There was more yellow tape along the stone wall and across the gates, which were closed, as I would have expected, since I had watched the regime many times of late. Whoever was driving the car always closed the gates from the remote. Usually, by the time the car had reached the garage, it was no longer visible from the street. I had tried to watch many times with only marginal success. In fact, I had only managed to get a better view by locating a nearby hillside that overlooked the drive and employing rather powerful zoom-enabled binoculars purchased specially for the task from a Chinese emporium in Benidorm. Tonight it seemed that the place was infested with people dressed as moon-walkers. They were crawling around on hands and knees in the garden, apparently inspecting grit.

  There was a picture of Alicia, another still, a detail from an official function with her standing beside her husband, Pedro the Mayor. So she was still around. I was marginally surprised. I had seen her many times in recent days, usually in dark glasses, usually being picked up along the road, down at the end of the street, calculatedly away from the house in different cars, whose ownership or driver I never once recognised. I watched her do that several times. I wondered why she never had them pick her up by her gates. Twelve inches, I thought.

  If truth were told, I had quite learned to fancy her in recent times. I had never really appreciated what a beautiful body she had, since more often than not she kept it covered in rather frumpish cardigans and denims. While up above, hidden amongst the vegetation, I began training my binoculars on other parts of the compound to see if they might reveal anything of substance from glimpses they might afford. I learned nothing on that front, but what I did see was Alicia by the pool, sunbathing topless on occasions, always alone at home, and sometimes, in the perceived privacy of her enclosed garden, on occasion seeking the solace of the self. It was just a chink through the trees from a nearby promontory on a patch of waste ground. I needed to negotiate the innards of a giant prickly pear to achieve the vantage, but it sufficed. She had a lot to offer, I soon realised. There was far more to her than met the casual eye.

  Now I will take this opportunity to state that my interest never went beyond that of a distant admirer. I swear I never once rang the bell, picked the lock, nosed around or suggested anything other than a coffee at the local bar. I was glad she accepted, however, because she clearly wanted to talk. I hadn’t realised before that she had spent two years in Britain studying the local lingo. She was surprised when I told her that there was a view of her pool surround from above. I could spend some time relating what she said, but her language was laced with ripe fruit and just at the moment that seems a tad inappropriate.

  The picture of her that filled the screen showed her decked in finery, in the formal gown of the mayor’s wife at a function. She looked quite different from when I watched her lying by the pool. You would never have thought that underneath that spangled dress...

  She was from a well-to-do family and it seemed that it was their influence that had got Pedro’s career in politics onto the right foot. It definitely went nowhere near a left one. It was their presence that influenced the competition for candidacy, and later it was their social capital that assisted willing co-operators through the polling stations, the mere detail of a few boxes of paper being destroyed by fire being treated at the time as the irrelevance it was later to become. Local newspapers also avoided covering stories suggested by numerous town hall employees who lost their jobs in favour of political sympathisers when Pedro eventually took office. Let’s say his path to the top was an escalator and someone else was providing the power. But let’s also not take anything away from the bloke. He did a good job, I’m reliably informed. Alicia, on the other hand, could relate numerous channels he had explored that were obviously beyond the call of duty, a habit that often kept him decidedly on the job and away from home.

  And then Pedro’s face reappeared full screen and stayed there as a voice-over mouthed about a page and a half of script. It was in the fourth level communications course, M444, Media: Understanding Generalised Systems, Althusser Revisits Socialist Eras, where I first learned that it is inherent in the sub-text of popular mass broadcasting that long-lasting shots accompanied by large blocks of spoken text are only ever used to deliver obituaries. The black border that enclosed the screen also gave a clue. Pedro was dead.

  There followed several minutes of apparently adulatory reports of Pedro’s mayoral tenure. Various vistas of the town were showed, including the controversial mountain tops reputedly earmarked for power generation, sites where No Molesta had campaigned for the opposing camp. Then shots took us back inside the house again, the report offering nothing less than a guided tour of the interior. I particularly liked the solid jasper double-sized bath with air jets that tickle your adumbration. A blacked-out room full of red costumes was also fetching, as was the well-equipped torture chamber beneath the garage that no domestic situation should be without. I lost the plot somewhat when a half a dozen quite ordinary apartment blocks appeared in quick succession, a couple of which I recognised being in Benidorm, just along the street from The Castle. When, a moment later, the said public house, Poncho Suzie’s Ribthwaite Castle also appeared full screen, followed by a mug-shot of my favourite mug, Mick Watson and then, much to my surprise, a recent picture of one Susan Cottee, whom at first I hardly recognised, I almost regurgitated my margarita. Twelve inches, I thought, and then the story changed. I still only had an inkling of what I clearly ought to know.

  So I went next door and knocked up Jenny and Ted to ask if they knew what had happened. And they did. News had travelled a few hours before, it seemed. They knew the full story by about two that afternoon, four hours before the first television broadcast that I had just seen repeated. The story they related took me immediately back to the Origin Of The Specious, competition and market forces. Clearly something had been and probably remained specious. The competition was alive and well, but as yet ill-defined, even unidentified. Motives were ultimately related to an intensely lucrative market. An evolutionary dead-end, however, had been pursued and its usefulness subsequently identified as limited Thus its longevity, even survival, had been questioned, and questioned so severely it had already suffered extinction.

  “Hello, Ted,” I said as he opened his van’s door. “Have you seen the news?”

  “Seen it?” he asked. “Living next to the Cottees means I am usitative making it! What the widdershins are you and Suzie playing at?”

  “Playing at? Playing at?” I repeated tautologically. “We aren’t ridibund playing at anything. Buddle me, Ted! The last time I played something I pulled a sporuliferous muscle and tore a molinary ligament! So what the discepting gorsedd are you talking about?”

  “It’s all over the shikaring news, Don. You’ve just seen it on the television yourself.”

  “And what makes you think I’ve just seen it?”

  “Because as per haemotoxic usual, we could hear
your blepharal tele from our front room! And you came across here the very minute the ondoyant thing ended. And no doubt you came here to ask if we’d seen your missus and The Castle on the refrangible programme!”

  “Look, Ted,” I said, “it’s all news to me...”

  “Of course it’s news to you, you blockhead! It’s news of you!”

  “Ted, please, what’s it all about?”

  “Alfie?”

  “Bonze off, you maieutic moron!”

  “Don, I can’t believe that you don’t know what I am talking about. Your mate Pedro the Mayor has copped it and copped it good and proper. We heard it through the grapevine from people in our university group.” The reniform skeg has the habit of tapping the side of his nose with a finger whenever he wants to indicate the linguistic employment of euphemism. He phemisms regularly, and always taps his nose. I said nothing, knowing full well that any secret would bore a hole through his teeth in thirty seconds. “Shot. Five times in the garage. Straight through his windscreen.”

  “Shot? When?”

  “It all happened last night, Don, some time in the early hours, about the time when you were bringing Suzie home from The Castle. He’d been out on the town, perhaps at The Castle...”

  “He wasn’t there last night...” I was about to say, “He was in Paradise,” but I didn’t.

  “... or perhaps he’d been out on the tiles, or even the tiles in the town, or perhaps other tiles that used to be in town and have been replaced...”

  “You can be a right leguminous kumquat when you try, Ted. Cut the craquelure and tell the fustic story!”

  “He’d been out on the town and he went home...”

  “Alone?”

  “No idea. No-one has mentioned anyone else being involved, apart from his wife... and no-one seems to be saying whether she had been with him in the car of had stayed at home.”

  “She was at home,” I muttered inaudibly.

  As he spoke my memory recreated the half-experienced, perhaps imagined, perhaps stolen vision of my goal behind the wheel of the beige BMW with the matching leather seats and walnut fascia, the composite without the series number in chrome on the boot lid. In a mind’s eye I could see her, still driving, but waiting for the electric gates of Pedro’s drive to open and anticipating the tilting garage door rising beyond as Pedro, the passenger, fingered his remote at her side. In that mind’s eye, I could see her behind that wheel, with Pedro suitably shocked, suitably sated and suitably rewarded as a result of his competition with the forces of markets, half-reclining in languorous comfort of the bucket seat whose angled backrest had no doubt been adjusted after the salpinx chauffeur had reassumed her erect posture after bending over one of his while parked out of the streetlights at the bottom of the hill.

  “We’ve not heard anything to suggest there’s anyone else involved, other than Pedro and his wife. I can’t remember her name...”

  “Alicia.”

  “Alicia, is it? Well they are presenting it as a domestic.”

  This is about as domestic as an African buffalo, I thought as he spoke.

  “Apparently...” said Ted, using that wonderful word that means, ‘this is what the windage told me’, “he came home late. From what I have been told it was around two in the morning, about the time that he usually came home, is what is being said.”

  “Paradise,” I muttered. Ted heard and stopped speaking. For once he said nothing, but a raised eyebrow asked for further qualification. Deciding that mere knowledge could not hang me, I offered. “He was a regular in Paradise. He was known for his research into electrical circuit theory.” Ted ignored the comment and continued his tale.

  “Well he drove his car into the garage. Now they say that the house is a bit spectacular. I’ve just seen it on the tele and it certainly looks a bit special.”

  “It is a bit special,” I said, “specially stupid. There’s no proper front door. You go inside through the garage which is below the house. There’s even a decurrent escalator linking the garage and the upstairs. You can’t get into the place without operating the electric doors, and there’s no controls on the outside.”

  “So you have been there?”

  “Not actually invited in, but Pedro and Alicia were often part of the group that we go out with on Wednesday afternoons. We’ve often dropped them off at home on our way back with Phil and Karen. They always had to use the remote to get through the gate. He’s part-owner of the business that owns The Castle. And I’ve met Alicia several times...”

  “Well he didn’t make it into the house this time. He only got as far as the garage.”

  “It sounds strange. I happen to know that you can’t get into that house from the street except through the garage. You have to close the outer door behind you using a remote because there are no manual controls. Only then, once that is closed, does the lock for the escalator open up. Then you have to use the remote again to open the door that gives access and starts the motors. Only then does the escalator start. They were security mad, those two. They had it all built that way in case they were attacked by intruders or hijacked on the way home. If there’s someone in the house they can use the internal control on the door into the house and it overrides the remote in the car. That way they can actually trap people in the garage - even inside the car! - until the police arrive.”

  “Then that’s what she used,” said Ted. “That explains everything. Don, somehow you seem to know more about that house than the people on the tele. And I bet you know more about the murder than anyone else as well.”

  “Murder?”

  “I thought you saw it on the news... Well the story is that the wife was in the garage when he drove in. She was standing in front of the car as he stopped, and then she pulled a gun on him. She’d had enough...”

  “She’d had quite a lot of her own, I can tell you,” I thought.

  “...of his fooling around. She’d obviously closed the garage doors and then locked him inside the car. None of us could work out why he didn’t get out of the car. Now we know. Anyway, she pointed the gun at him through the windscreen. Why she didn’t point it through the side window defeats me...”

  “You have to walk round the front of the car, Ted,” I offered. “The entrance into the house is on your right if you drive in nose first. It’s a vast garage, but I do remember that you have to get out of the car and walk round the front to get to the escalator exit. She might have been on her way to the driver’s window, but she would have had to walk across the front of the car to get there. And what’s more I happen to know that the glass in that car was all bullet-proof.”

  “Well it didn’t stop these ones...”

  “It wouldn’t, Ted. I happen to know the type of gun they kept in the house. It was a Smith and Wesson 500. The glass is not bullet-proof when one of those is pointed at it, but then I am sure they would also have known that. Their planning was always meticulous.”

  “For once, Don, you make perfect sense,” said Ted. “We’ve been speculating about this all day over at the club. We couldn’t work it out, but now it’s all clear. He must have seen her carrying the gun and on her way round to his side. The engine was running because he’d just driven in so he put his foot on the gas and ran into her.”

  “He did what?”

  “He ran into her - trapped her, it seems.”

  “What? There’s a solid bench across the back of the garage. The car would have gone under it. She would have been bent double, almost lying face down on the bonnet.”

  “Precisely described, Sir! Uncanny, if you ask me! That’s exactly the story. I’m beginning to wonder if you were there as well! So you’re prime witness as well as perpetrator, eh? Anyway, it broke both of her legs above the knee. She couldn’t have moved even if she had not been trapped.”

  “Except that she could mov
e, couldn’t she? She could move her arm...”

  “Again precisely, Don, my old chum. I thought I was telling this story? That’s what she did. A moment after the impact she raised her arm and let go with the gun at the windscreen, five times in all.”

  “It had to be five. She couldn’t re-load.”

  “He was hit in the head and chest... he died instantly.”

  “From a range of about a metre and a half at most with an S and W 500...”

  “There haven’t been any pictures of the body yet.”

  “I’m surprised there’s very much left to photograph. It would have blown his head off, even through the glass. Tell me, Ted, who has the body now and who is responsible for identifying it?”

  “Don, I’m just a retired gossip. It seems to me that you are far more likely to know that than I am.”

  “And what about Alicia? She obviously didn’t shoot herself because she had no shells left and she couldn’t move.”

  “He’d left the car running, Don. He was dead and the car was ticking over. There was no-one near enough to hear...”

  “The whole building is sound-proofed as a protection against surveillance from outside.”

  “...and she was there all night. She had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The maid raised the alarm this morning when she couldn’t get in. From the street she could hear the car still running in the garage.”

  “And they are sure there was no-one else involved?”

  “There was no-one else around...”

  “...at least there was no-one when they were found...”

  “I saw a picture of Suzie on television.”

  “So did I.”

  “They were doing a survey of his business interests. He owned several apartment blocks in town, and The Castle, it seems.”