This was probably a period of time when we were trying to contact potential victims of the interception. At that time we were concentrating on those who were in a position to give evidence, had been most affected, and probably where our best evidence laid in relation to the investigation.

I'm aware that was the case. That was my colleague, Keith Surtees, who informed them.

From the -- throughout this investigation -- I continued to service the prosecution until they were sentencing in January of 2007, but I was involved in other investigations throughout this period as well.

I would have explained to him how our knowledge of the activity had been occurring, but I would have probably also caveated that by saying we do not know to whom that information was provided.

Who would I be addressing that concern to? Sorry, I missed that point.

That's correct, yes.

(Nods head).

No. That's a matter for the witness protection unit, because I wouldn't want to know who was in the scheme and who wasn't. That's a sensitive matter from a police point of view.

That's correct, yes.

That's correct, sir, yes.

No.

I'm aware of this document. Obviously the email came to me, and you'll see the rather large numbers at the top. Pretty much they relate to the royal household. Those individuals received the most attention.

Yes.

That's it, yes.

On the front cover, the actual email itself, he's explaining that this is a spreadsheet of the DDNs -- as I mentioned earlier that the O2 language that was a direct dial number, so voicemail numbers. And it's the number of times that the voicemail numbers were called by ...

If I just explain the fact it's an email, it's the cover, it's an email from a counterpart at O2.

I mean, call pattern analysis, which is the police term that we would refer to it by, it can be very good circumstantial evidence, but as I mentioned earlier that sort of Mr Mulcaire's billing was slightly more chaotic than that.

So from that point of view, I could identify, for example, one of these three journalists, I had his mobile number, and I was aware that that mobile number appeared in billing data.

In the billing data for Mr Mulcaire, there were calls by him to other journalists. We were aware in the material he had written down those journalists' mobile numbers on bits of paper.

Certainly we believe that to be the case. The difficulty that we had with Mr Mulcaire's billing is that quite often he would just ring one voicemail after another, and in his billing data, you would just get a long list of voicemail type numbers. So it's quite ...

The three journalists that I was interested in following lines of enquiry, I believed that their first names appeared on some of the documents that were recovered from Mr Mulcaire's files.

It is, but it requires something more substantial to obtain a successful prosecution at the end of the day.

Circumstantial evidence, inference --

We had some inference; we had no evidence.

There would have been aspects of the case that I would have liked to have asked them about, but I had no firm evidence of either their knowledge of voicemail interception or of them tasking Mr Mulcaire. That is something that I would have looked to find before speaking to ...

If I could just clarify that point, I believe one of them may have potentially moved on and was part of another company at that point.

That's correct, yes.

There were still lines of enquiry that I would have been keen to follow. In particular, I'd identified three names who, if I had the sufficient evidence, I would have liked to have spoken to. I accepted the decision that, you know, the resources were not there to widen ...

That's correct.

I can assist with that. I've seen the unredacted document and that particular voicemail number is one digit different to a member of the royal household, so I believe it was a misdial.

Yes. That's correct, yes.

Yes.

Yes.

All right, the information that you have would have been the result of a billing data request. The list of numbers that you have alongside the 2228 number, it has a list of the people that were called, their voicemails were called by the 2228 number, and the number that ...

Yes. The 2228 number related to Mr Mulcaire's office and was registered to his offices in Kempton Road.

Tab 135 is an email from Lindsey Hudson.

Yes.

Definitely.

That's correct.

That's correct. And in later applications through BCL solicitors I think one of my requests was to ask for a list of the desk phones and diagrams as to where people were sitting.

That's correct, yes.

The advice that I had from Mr Bristow is that no large firm would have unaccounted for billing. For instance, if you had someone at a particular desk, a lady that was calling her boyfriend in America on a daily basis, they would want to know why there was billing ...

Yes. We -- that was part of the conversation that we had with Mr Bristow, our telephone expert, and I believe that we also made enquiries with Vodafone, it was on their network, the 312 number, and we were told that we would have to get that information from News of ...

Exactly that.

We carried out an analysis of the billing data in our possession. Over a period of time, Mr Mulcaire had a number of different office numbers. We looked at those. We also looked at the 5354 number that was the hub number for News International. They also had another number ...

I can't say off the top of my head, but as and when we put in the applications, we would have received the results back over a number of weeks. Because this wasn't a threat to life enquiry, we were just on the standard return rate for our ...

That's correct, yes.

Not off the top of my head. We put in a number of applications to the service providers. Initially they had difficulty, and some of our applications had to be submitted several times because they were saying that number didn't exist, when in reality it was a voicemail number.

Exactly that, sir. What I would say is that none of the phone companies flagged up to us that they had a large amount of incoming calls to voicemails that they'd traced -- you know, the rogue numbers that we provided was where the bulk of our information came from.

That's correct. We were looking at other potential numbers at the time. I can't give you details of these from memory. What I would say is that in addition to our investigation, Vodafone and O2 were carrying out their own assessments of their systems and who potentially was ...