BUT THE UNIVERSE was just getting warmed up. Soon after I got back to Britain, the main villain in the phone-hacking scandal, Rehabber
Kooks, was acquitted at trial.
June 2014.
The evidence had been strong, everybody said.
Not strong enough, the jury said. They believed what Rehabber Kooks testified on the witness stand, even though she’d strained credulity. No, she’d abused credulity. She’d treated credulity as she’d once treated a redheaded teenage royal.
Likewise her husband. He’d been caught on video throwing black bin liners full of computers and thumb drives and other personal belongings, including his porn collection, into a garage dustbin, just hours before the police searched their place. But he swore it was all a silly coincidence, sooo…no evidence-tampering here, sayeth the justice system. Carry on. As you were. I never believed what I read, but now I truly couldn’t believe what I was reading. They were letting this woman walk? And there was no furor from the general public? Did people not realize that this was about more than privacy, more than public safety—more than the Royal Family? Indeed, the phone-hacking case first broke wide open because of poor Milly Dowler, a teenager who’d been abducted and murdered. Rehabber Kooks’s minions broke into Milly’s phone after she’d been declared missing—they’d violated her parents at the moment of their worst pain and given them false hope that their little girl might be alive, because her messages were listened to. Little did the parents know that it was Team Rehabber listening. If these journalists were villainous enough to go after the Dowlers in their darkest hour, and get away with it, was anyone safe?
Did people not care?
They didn’t. They did not care.
My faith in the whole system took a serious hit when that woman got off scot-free. I needed a reset, a faith refresher. So I went where I always went.
The Okavango.
To spend a few restorative days with Teej and Mike. It helped.
But when I returned to Britain, I barricaded myself into Nott Cott.
