‘They ran the story,’ Poe said.
‘And they made a mistake.’
‘Which was?’
‘Journalism 101: protect your source,’ Stahl said. ‘That doesn’t just mean not giving them up; it also means providing a plausible explanation if the real source is illegal. You certainly can’t admit you were listening to a private voicemail.’
‘How do you get around that?’
‘Simple. Once you have the story through voicemail hacking, you work backwards and confirm it. You speak to sources, offer money, go through bins. Basic journalism skills, unfortunately.’
‘And this gossip reporter didn’t do that?’
‘Didn’t even know she was supposed to. Her stories were handed to her on a silver platter. Publicity-hungry celebs, desperate for exposure. The inbox of a gossip reporter is never empty, believe me.’
‘So she just wrote it?’
‘She did.’
‘And Dominic Denly went to the police?’
‘Can you blame him?’ Stahl said. ‘He told the detective that the paper had shared confidential medical information. There was already a low-key hacking investigation going on by then, but the Met had never had such a blatant example. Dominic Denly’s case really speeded things up.’
‘Spin forward a bit,’ Poe said. ‘The first arrests are made. How long until they got to you?’
‘The day after they’d arrested the gossip reporter who wrote the story. She gave up the editor and he denied knowing where the information came from.’
‘He denied knowing about the voicemail?’
‘You’ve never seen a bigger example of collective amnesia, Sergeant Poe. Everyone could see where this was going, so it all came down to plausible deniability. My editor had told me to hack voicemails, but he wasn’t stupid – there was nothing in writing.’
‘But the money led back to the PI?’
‘Who, when facing a prison sentence, couldn’t name me fast enough.’
‘And you had no one to trade up?’
‘Buck stopped with me on the Dominic Denly story.’
‘You didn’t go to prison, though?’
‘By the time of my trial, people knew the bigger picture. That it was endemic across the whole paper. My solicitor argued that the pressure put on me to come up with stories meant I’d been effectively coerced into doing it. I was found guilty but spared prison. Got a year’s probation and three hundred hours community service.’
‘What happened then?’ Poe asked.
‘Do you know who Pearl Rigby is, Sergeant Poe?’
‘No.’
‘She’s the girl who broke the internet.’