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‘We all did. We listened to the tapes.’

‘Which was why people went to prison.’

‘Not therightpeople,’ Stahl said.

‘Talk me through hacking a phone,’ Poe said.

‘Hacking’s such a grandiose term. It was essentially taking advantage of the lazy and the technically incompetent. In those days mobile voicemail was new and exciting. You could leave messages for people and they could access them wherever they were. Remote access it was called. Godsend for people like us.’

‘What equipment did you need?’ Poe said.

‘Nothing. That was the beauty of it. All you had to do was ring their number. If they didn’t answer, you entered their personal identification number, or PIN, which gave you full access to their messages.’

‘How did you get their PINs, though?’

‘Most people were either too lazy or didn’t know how to change them. Their PIN was invariably the four-digit factory-set number you needed to enter. One, two, three, four, or four zeroes, or if it was Vodafone, three, three, three, three.’

‘It was that easy?’

‘You can see why it was so tempting. A chance to listen to the private lives of anyone. Senior politicians, A-list celebs, anyone.’

‘The parents of murder victims?’

‘Yes,’ Stahl said quietly. ‘And that’s not even the worst of it. To stop other journalists getting the same story, it was common practice to change the PIN once you had got in. That way, no one but you had access to the messages, not even the intended recipient. That part was underplayed in court but it always bothered me.’

Poe nodded thoughtfully. Wondered if there was an angle to this that no one had considered. Maybe it wasn’t a hacked message, maybe it was a message no one had listened to. He’d get Bradshaw to go through all Stahl’s hacking victims, even the ones where no stories emerged.

‘And it was you who hacked Dominic Denly’s voicemail?’ Poe said. ‘You listened to the message about his son’s leukaemia?’

‘Technically, it was my private investigator, but I’d hired him so, yes, it was me.’

‘You weren’t named on the byline,’ Poe said. ‘Why’s that?’

‘I didn’t write the story. Didn’t even show what I had to my editor. I knew we had crossed a line – Denly’s boy was eight years old and he was dying. I was immoral, but I wasn’t a monster.’

‘You didn’t want to run it?’

‘I did not.’

‘How did your editor get hold of the voicemail?’

Stahl shrugged. ‘That’s the problem working with people whose only motivation is money,’ he said. ‘If they think they can get more, that’s what they’ll do. In hindsight, what happened was entirely predictable.’

Poe skipped ahead a couple of pages. ‘When the PI realised you hadn’t used his information, he went to your editor?’ he said. ‘Tried to get paid again?’

‘And, as it was the paper that had paid the PI, it was technically their information to use. I begged him not to run it, but my editor couldn’t risk the PI going above his head. I refused to have anything to do with it so he asked one of the gossip writers if they fancied writing it.’

‘They did?’

‘Jumped at the chance. And why not? It was a guaranteed front page, all the work was done and she was using information she’d been handed by her editor.Shehadn’t hacked anyone’s voicemail. Absolute no-brainer for someone young and ambitious.’

‘And it was one of the stories that broke the scandal,’ Poe said.

‘Which was exactly what I’d told my editor would happen. After I’d tried and failed appealing to his sense of decency, I told him that a story like that would bring the world crashing down on his head. Onourheads.’

‘But he ignored you.’

‘You’ve got to understand, the editor of a big paper is in an impossible position. He gets shit off his reporters for trimmingtheir budgets and he gets even more shit from the owner who wants increased sales with fewer overheads.’