by Paul Ilett
Within a couple of days Uncle Adam had assembled a small group of ex-journalists to crack the Daily Ear. I never met any of the team. Everything I uncovered I fed to Uncle Adam and he passed it on. He really wasn’t prepared to trust my identity with anyone. But I insisted that I still do the majority of the grunt work. I didn’t want Project Ear to be something that just happened around me. I wanted to do as much as I possibly could. After a few weeks, they had photographic evidence of Colin’s affair. It turned out he was seeing his best mate’s wife (skanky!) and the reason he kept interfering with my hotel bookings was that she was a businesswoman and travelled around the country quite a bit and he was always looking for opportunities to stay in the same hotel. We’d caught the Kiss-and-Tell King with his pants well and truly down! Once we had one in the bag, the others followed very quickly.
I worked with Valerie as a researcher for her column and soon I was managing her emails and her calendar and listening to all of her stories. Valerie is incredibly indiscreet once you’ve won her trust, so it was easy to collect all manner of information about her. I fed it all through to Uncle Adam – some of it factual, some anecdotal – and he sent it onto his team. One thing I’d noted was that she had two separate wedding anniversary dates in her diary. I have to be honest – for me, it didn’t stand out as a major discrepancy. I fed it through to Uncle Adam all the same along with everything else and our team looked into it and quickly uncovered her secret first marriage to a gay man called Ray. Imagine that – the homophobic columnist had a gay ex-husband. They quickly tracked him down, living an idyllic life with his partner Pete in the middle of the Kent countryside. But Uncle Adam felt a bit torn about involving them. He said they were a couple of innocent by-standers who hadn’t done anything wrong. So he made it clear that if we couldn’t legitimately get their agreement to take part in the exposé then we’d go with one of the other stories we had about Valerie (we had loads!).
So we sent a couple of ex-journalists from the Project Ear team to meet with them who had plenty of experience negotiating in situations like that. At first they tried to coax Ray and Pete into doing the story by explaining we had a number of far worse revelations up our sleeve, including a hushed-up drink-drive conviction. But that didn’t work. After all the revolting homophobic things Valerie has said and done over the years, Ray didn’t feel he owed her anything. Next we offered them money, £20,000, which apparently is the current going rate for a standard kiss-and-tell story. But they turned that down too. So after a long discussion we found the clincher was actually something pretty simple. We offered them a five-page colour spread in Country Homes and Gardens magazine (which is published by one of the media companies owned by Uncle Adam’s husband). We gave them copy and picture approval, even promised a little air-brushing if they wanted it. They nearly snatched our hand off, they were so thrilled. We put them on the front page of the latest edition and it’s led to other opportunities for them too. They’ve just done a couples version of ‘Come Dine with Me’ and OK! Magazine has offered to pay for their wedding next year. There’s even a rumour they’re being lined up for the next Celebrity Big Brother. They’ve really caught the ‘fame’ bug. I hope they know what they’re doing, though.
Next up was Derek Toulson. Now, there’s a lot of confusion as to why I targeted him because he didn’t even join the paper until after you died. We had a very clear remit for Project Ear and just being vile didn’t meet our criteria. So, then, why Derek? It all started when I was asked to work in his department for a few weeks as part of my placement. I genuinely didn’t think anything would come from it but luckily every new employee goes through a brief honeymoon period with Derek. On my first day I was immediately his new best friend and he gave me access to his email, calendar and planning folders and he asked me to do a piece of work around his Pound-for-Pound scheme. At first it seemed to be pretty straightforward. Derek would offer a local council £50,000 to invest in the local community and all they had to do was match that donation to make the investment up to £100,000. He asked me to pull together a load of stats about the scheme’s success for a board report he was writing and what started off as an incredibly arduous task resulted in me having another name for my list.
You see, Derek is a little and spiteful man. It turned out his intentions were far from philanthropic. Whenever he went to a local council to discuss the scheme he would take with him a hitlist of local charities he didn’t approve of. He would then explain to the councillors that it was actually very easy to find their half of the £100k by simply cutting funds to whoever was on his list. I cross-referenced his lists with funding decisions across the councils he visited and it became clear that, unfortunately, he was a very persuasive man. One of the charities that lost its funding was a little support group in east London for single parents suffering from depression. It was a charity Auntie Pat set up with the money you left her. It was just a small affair but they did some amazing work over the years and helped a lot of people. Because of that charity and its support and advice, there are dozens of children who were able to stay in their family home rather than being taken into care like me.
I couldn’t find any evidence to suggest Derek knew who was running the charity or its link to you. I think he just saw the ‘single parent’ tag and immediately added it to his hitlist. But that’s immaterial because, whatever his motivations, he was still responsible for closing it down, and there was no way I was letting Derek Toulson walk away from that. So I sent the list through to Uncle Adam and I was really excited because I thought I’d uncovered something truly corrupt. I thought we could prove the Daily Ear didn’t just report negatively about the country’s poorest families but actively worked against them, too. However, the Project Ear journalists said it wasn’t enough. Apparently we couldn’t just expect the public to care. I needed to find something simple they could latch onto, something that would sum up the whole scandal in an easy, bite-size chunk. And that’s when I found Gay’s Horse Sanctuary. Thanks to Derek it had been forced to close a few months earlier but I couldn’t understand why he would target a horse sanctuary. What did he have against horses? And I couldn’t find any links between the charity and his usual targets (the poor, the unemployed, the disabled and anyone who wasn’t white, married or straight). Even by Derek’s standards, horses seemed a bit of a stretch. But after a few weeks of head-scratching and searching, I finally found an exchange of emails between Derek and Gayesh’s son Tharindu which explained it all. Now before I go on, I need to explain to you about Gayesh’s children. They are famously stupid (the words ‘apple’ and ‘tree’ spring to mind) but their father had somehow stumbled into a very well paid and influential position and he was using every resource and contact at his disposal to shoe-horn his kids into the first top job he could find. There would be no ‘entry level’ for Gayesh’s kids. They would go straight in as management, if he could just find someone to hire them.
So he’d get staff like me to write their CVs for them, and then directors like Derek to offer them work experience to make their CVs seem more impressive. And it was during the two weeks Tharindu worked with Derek that ‘Gay’s Horse Sanctuary’ mistakenly ended up on the Pound-for-Pound hitlist. Tharindu researched the charities in one local authority area ahead of a meeting Derek had with the councillors, but completely misunderstood what Gay’s Horse Sanctuary did. He gave Derek a briefing note which included a reference to ‘a council-funded sanctuary for gay horses’. Well, that was a red rag to a bull for Derek. He couldn’t get the funding pulled quickly enough and handed me my easy bite-size chunk on a plate. The good news is the sanctuary’s up and running again now, as are quite a few of the other charities closed by Derek. That’s the power of the local press. And of course Uncle Adam’s now funding your charity. He told Auntie Pat she should have let him know that she’d run into financial trouble. It’s already helping dozens of families and they’re looking at expanding across a greater area. I’m so proud to know that it all started wi
th you.
I’m particularly pleased with what happened to Jason Spade. Out of everyone at the Ear, he was the one I really wanted to get. He was the one who had caused you the most harm and I thought it would be easy to find some dirt on him. How could it not? The man has no morals whatsoever and so I was expecting to find a trail of clues leading to dozens of revolting, scandalous secrets that would bury his career forever. But that was me being naïve. The moment I set foot at the Ear I approached his boss and gave her this whole spiel about how I was really into photography and she agreed to give me a couple of days each week managing their diaries and expenses. And I genuinely thought a couple of days would be all I would need to find my silver bullet. But there was nothing. Or rather, nothing the Project Ear team thought was any use. It’s hard to soil the reputation of a man who’s spent his entire life in the gutter. Whenever I thought I’d found something that would nail him, the team just sent it back to me and said it wasn’t strong enough.
Booking two seats on an airplane because he’s so obese - so what? Looking at porn on his work computer - who cares? Claiming twice as much for his meal expenses as he was allowed - big deal! I searched and searched but could not find a single thing that the team thought strong enough. Eventually Uncle Adam had an emergency meeting with the team to talk tactics. It became obvious that out of everyone we were targeting, Jason was the one Adam also wanted to nail the most.
Our break came when I found an exchange of emails between Jason and the Ear’s IT department. He was asking for advice about his laptop and obviously needed help to get it working again. The IT team kept emailing him back and telling him they would happily fix it if he would just bring it in. But Jason was adamant that he should fix it himself. I realised there must be some pretty dodgy stuff on his hard drive and that’s why he didn’t want to drop it into the shop for repair. After all, that’s how Gary Glitter was caught.
So I told Uncle Adam and the Project Ear team put Jason’s house under surveillance, rummaging through his rubbish at night and following him whenever he left the house with anything even remotely resembling a laptop.
After a couple of days, they followed him from his house to a nearby underground car park where he dumped a package in a bin. After he left, they retrieved the package and found it was a laptop. Our plan had worked. Uncle Adam sent it to his own team of IT experts who quickly unlocked the content and found hundreds of photographs Jason had taken with some hi-tech mini-camera the Daily Ear had bought for him. This included shots from inside the female changing rooms during the London Olympics. We finally had the bastard.
You know I did meet Jason before, just the once. He wouldn’t remember it though. A few months after I went into foster care he turned up at my new school. To this day, we still don’t know how he found out I was there. Social services had been really careful and you always registered me at school under Nan’s maiden name, Snow. As far as everyone was concerned, I was just an ordinary little girl whose mummy was a housewife and whose daddy was a security guard. But somehow Jason got a tip that this was the school where Pearl Martin’s daughter was a pupil. At the time I didn’t really understand what was happening, just that a large man was taking photographs of all the girls as we filed out the school gates to go home. He kept asking each girl in turn, “Is your mummy on the telly?” Some of the parents confronted him and started to threaten him. Eventually the head teacher came out and said he had called the police. But that didn’t faze Jason, of course. He just carried on as if he was an ordinary man doing an ordinary job. In my innocence I trotted up to him and pulled on his jacket and said “My mummy’s on the telly.” But he just laughed at me and then nudged me aside with, “No, you’re alright love,” while he carried on taking pictures of all the white girls. My foster mum whisked me away in her car and a few days later I started at another new school. I knew I’d been moved again because of the fat man with the camera, so my issues with Jason go back a long way. He’s in prison, now. The content of his hard drive got him four years and he’s been placed on the sex offenders register too. It has been noted, by many women in the public eye, that none of those hundreds of spy-cam photographs are as explicit or revealing as the pictures he used to take on a daily basis for the Ear. It seems a man can get away with a lot if he has a press card. He can lie on the pavement and take photographs up women’s dresses as they climb from a car and that’s just fine. Or he can travel to a remote island and hide in a bush with a telephoto lens and take pictures of a future queen as she sunbathes topless at a private villa. And that’s fine too. But if he takes the same pictures for personal use, suddenly he’s a pervert and needs to go to jail and be on a register. I still struggle with the idea that a little bit of plastic with ‘Press’ printed across the top can protect the likes of Jason Spade from the repercussions of his perverted ways. I hope he rots in prison.
When it comes to Leonard Twigg, I’m going to start by saying I am not sorry he’s dead. I’m not happy about it either because it caused poor Uncle Adam a lot of problems. But I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending to grieve for that horrible man. The truth is, I didn’t need a huge scandal to ruin Twigg. His status and reputation were everything to him. All I needed was something that would really embarrass him and that would make it more difficult for people to take him seriously, to prick that monstrous ego because his self-image was everything to him. I’ve seen rooms fall silent the moment he walked in. I’ve seen him reduce a government minister to a babbling wreck without even raising his voice. And Twigg liked that. I could tell how much pleasure he got from seeing the fear and anxiety he caused in others. So whatever I could dig up about Twigg needn’t be huge, just humiliating. I had access to his office of course, and on the few occasions when he wasn’t around I made myself useful and ‘tidied up’. I eventually plucked up the courage to look around his private bathroom and after finding several reels of double-sided sticky tape and special shampoo I realised his flawless, quaffed hair was hiding a very embarrassing secret. It seemed the perfect exposé for such an impeccably private man, the sort of mortifying story he would have printed without a second thought if it was about someone else. Our private detectives quickly located the clinic he went to and it wasn’t long before they found an adjoining building that had a direct view into the fitting rooms. I kept an eye on his diary and alerted Uncle Adam when Twigg had his next appointment. We went right up against deadline with that story. If he’d delayed his next fitting by a couple more days it would have really mucked up our schedule. But he didn’t. As bad as things were at the Daily Ear, he clearly felt the need to keep up his immaculate appearance.
But I have to tell you about something else and this is difficult to admit because it involves a lie I told to Uncle Adam. Perhaps not a lie exactly. A piece of information I withheld from him. Not long after I started at the Daily Ear I discovered something in Twigg’s desk, an invoice from an undertaker for a funeral and burial. I phoned them to double-check the details and found that Twigg’s mother – the centre of his entire world – had died. He hadn’t said a thing, to anyone. The impeccably private man, grieving alone in his glass walled office. I struggled with it at first. Not out of sympathy for Twigg, of course. He never let any family mourn in peace or privacy if he could flog a few more papers. This is the man who sent Jason Spade into mortuaries each time a celebrity died to try to get a photograph of the corpse. Why should he be given special treatment? The problem was that Uncle Adam is a better man than Leonard Twigg. I knew if he found out the truth, out of either concern or compassion, he would drop Twigg from our list. And I couldn’t let that happen, because Twigg had to pay for what he did to you. And so I didn’t tell Uncle Adam what I’d found out. I did regret it, of course. For a day or so it genuinely seemed my silence had cost Uncle Adam everything. There was a moment, the day after Twigg killed himself, when every radio news story, tweet and conversation seemed to accuse Uncle Adam of murder. I was in tears for most of the day, thinking of
the terrible harm I’d caused to this wonderful man who had trusted me so completely. Everyone thought I was crying because of Twigg. But I wasn’t. I was crying because of what I thought I'd done to Uncle Adam. But then the truth started to come out. Believe it or not, it was Valerie Pierce who turned it all around. She stormed out of the Daily Ear and told the world what had really happened, that the Harvey family had as good as pushed Leonard Twigg under that train. She shouted so loudly that no one was able to ignore her. She explained how the Harveys had stripped Twigg of his position and his power, made him feel obsolete and out of touch. Perhaps even a liability. I can’t even begin to imagine how many bridges she burnt that day or what that decision cost her. But she showed the world who was really responsible for Leonard Twigg’s suicide and, as much as I hate to admit it, for that I owe her some sort of thanks.
Because of Valerie, everyone knows there is no truth in those ridiculous claims that the wig exposé made Leonard Twigg jump under that train. He killed himself because he finally saw his time was at an end. His power was gone, his limitless ability to attack and destroy anything and anyone he pleased. The Harvey family had turned their backs on him, he was facing a demotion at work and even his closest allies had deserted him. Most of all, in his hour of need, Twigg realised he didn’t have any friends and in his final seconds, as that train sliced him into a thousand pieces, I hope he knew no one would mourn him.
And then finally there was Audrey. Poor Audrey. Howard Harvey’s loyal ex-wife. Always on the side-lines, innocently tending her garden whilst her husband built a fortune by devastating the lives of other people. Year after year she portrayed herself as the benevolent lady from an old-money family who didn’t really understand what her down-market husband did for a living. I spent quite a bit of time with Audrey and she showed me how easy it was to pretend not to be involved. But she knew, of course. Audrey always knew exactly what was going on. And it all started with her. Everything you went through, Mum, started with Audrey. All it took was one spiteful comment, a carefully placed criticism during one of her casual ‘afternoon tea’ appointments with Valerie, and she knew you’d be front page news by the end of the week. And do you know what it was, Mum? What you did that was so terrible it resulted in the Daily Ear hounding you until the day you died? Valerie relayed the story to me during one of her self-indulgent afternoon monologues. It all started at one of Audrey’s stupid Amazing People Awards, where you’d been asked to hand out a trophy. At the end of the evening, as everyone was going home, you careered into Audrey because, she claimed, you were so drunk. You had guzzled as much free champagne as you could (being a trashy soap actress) and were so intoxicated you couldn’t even walk in a straight line. The whole spectacle was witnessed by a crowd of horrified mums and kids who could not believe your appalling behaviour.