A Search for Donald Cottee

by Philip Spires

  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 delete
d?

  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. Sh
e 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.