The White Van Papers

April 2012 My name is Frank Donahue. I’m a mostly out-of-work journalist, exiled for want of cash in Chingford on the edge of Epping Forest. Some time ago I began receiving nudges (for want of a better word) that something in the vicinity of where we live 'would be of great interest to me'. The cryptic message – at least that's what I first thought it was – read: 'Wiltshire plumber, packed with insight, key under Venus'. As a journalist as near to skid row as I ever wanted to be, I felt I didn't need to be teased by a crossword nut - one who I have quite probably worked with in one of my previous newspapers posts. Perhaps some kind soul was trying to re-engage me back into normal life by setting me some kind of a task. ‘What kind of helping hand is that?’ I asked the dog. Had the news of our dire financial straits become that public? Or was it a job I was being offered? I chose the moment to ask my better half, as a crossword buff, if the clue meant anything to her. Her unkindly snarl helped me put the whole tease out of my mind for some time. The long-heralded web changes for the future of the newspaper industry were now becoming all too apparent. With my grim prospects in mind, it seemed that navel gazing had become my preferred daily routine. Unemployment felt to me like I was giving up on life itself. I was in danger that I might just stop trying. It was a whole month later, walking the avenues and byways of Chingford, kicking a ball for my fat, reluctant dog, that I noticed an old builders’ van, parked off the road, picking up loads of threats of removal notices. There it was: the clue I wasn't looking for. Painted on the side of an ageing Ford van was the inscription, 'Theo Snowden Wiltshire's 24-Hour Emergency Plumbers'. Okay, nothing ventured, nothing gained: I cleaned the grimy passenger window and could just make out boxes of files and other assorted packages stacked inside. It came to me like a shot. In our garden we have a statue of Diana the goddess of hunting. Hardly Venus but nevertheless a classical statue of a naked woman with concrete tits and a moss-covered curvy bum. Sure enough, under the statue I found the vehicle’s keys. It’s a wonder the van had survived so long without being towed away. I can only suppose it was the words ‘24-Hour Emergency Plumbers’ and being parked up on a grass verge in a non-restricted zone that confused the parking authorities into uncustomary leniency. Still, we were lucky, if that’s the right word - in more prosperous times Waltham Forest Council felt obliged to clear the streets as soon as day broke. About the same time that I discovered the records, files and video tape, I received the first of four e-mails from Gus Redknapp, a sub-editor hanging on to his job at The Guardian. He had been ‘officially’ asked if I was still working on Home Office stories. Originally I had written on the case of Delroy Denton, a Home Office and Customs and Excise controlled 'plant' who brutally murdered three women and to this day remains in a British prison. More recently, I knocked out an article for Gus on the continuing practice by the bashful authorities of using foreign stooges, speculated on the composition of the ‘plants’ and queried their current whereabouts and use. At first I thought that it might be good news from Redknapp, yet I pondered the word 'officially'. The Metropolitan Police hadn't been pleased with my efforts in the past. The next message read like another puzzle. ‘What's your link with the Land of OZ?' It took me some time to work that one out. Then came, 'I keep being asked what you are up to these days’ followed by 'Must plod on'. I got it - 'plod' as in the Met. In the middle of the night I forced myself to actually get up and go and start the plumbers’ van. The battery was totally flat and it took the RAC man ages to arrive and quite some time to get the sad old van running again. Despite having no insurance or road tax and without telling anyone we were going, the dog and I drove slowly through Epping Forest and, by-passing the M25, took the van to my wife's cousin’s farm near Aylesbury and there under the trees, in a misty dawn in a flat field, I left it. The van contains records and loads of video footage, all from the first half of 2010, around the time of the General Election. As the implications build I still hesitate to publish. I have laid the records out for you to read - they are in chronological order. What its importance is and where it will lead I am still not certain. The jury is out, as they say. But what to do? This is how they came to me. The first item appears to be the transcript of a conversation between two detectives in a stake-out car in London in the spring of 2010. One is male and middle aged - I expect he is ready for retirement and quite probably a Detective Sergeant of long standing – and the other female, somewhere in her thirties, recently seconded from a parking division and now I imagine is a Detective Constable. The ‘records’ below are presented in the order that they came to me.