How about that! The Independent reports today that "missing" News of the World emails have turned up.
During the perjury trial of Tommy Sheridan in November, the NoW's Scottish editor, Bob Bird, told the court that "six months" worth of the newspaper's emails had been lost due to a decision to archive them in India.
But The Independent says it "has established that not only is the database intact but it apparently contains a full record of email traffic between the company's senior staff."
The archive evidently covers the crucial period of 2005 and 2006. The paper's royal editor, Clive Goodman, and the private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, were arrested in August 2006.
As the Indy points out, the archive will give the new police team now inquiring into the whole affair "no excuses for ignoring a data trail that may yield fresh clues to the investigation."
Bird's courtroom revelation prompted the office of the privacy watchdog, the information commissioner, to launch an inquiry in mid-December.
But News International's lawyers have since denied the claim about the Indian transfer of emails, telling the information commissioner in a letter that they were in Britain after all.
Knowing Bird, I cannot believe that he would have lied on oath, and I accept the word of a News Int source who told the Indy that Bird had "unintentionally given the court inaccurate evidence."
But the revelation that the emails exist is embarrassing for News International. Not only might it open the way for Sheridan's legal team to press for an appeal against his conviction and three-year jail sentence, it might help the Met police to cast more light on the substantive matter of phone-hacking.
There is an important, further question, too. When the Commons culture, media and sport select committee was holding its inquiry into press standards, it was told that News Int had carried out an internal inquiry in May 2007 "of emails still on its IT systems."
Does that mean that the archive was not on Wapping's IT systems?
Note once again the relevant section of the committee's report, released in February last year (paras 434 and 435), which quoted a statement by Lawrence Abramson, the managing partner of the solicitors, Harbottle & Lewis:
"I can confirm that we did not find anything in those emails which appeared to us to be reasonable evidence that Clive Goodman's illegal actions were known about and supported by both or either of Andy Coulson, the editor, and Neil Wallis, the deputy editor, and/or that Ian Edmondson, the news editor, and others were carrying out similar illegal procedures."
As we now know, Edmondson has been sacked precisely because - according to a News Int statement - material evidence linking him to hacking has been found.
So where was it? Why didn't Mr Abramson get to see it in 2007? When were the newly-discovered emails archived? Why did the internal inquiry in 2007 fail to consider archived material?
If the police inquiry is to get to the bottom of this murky business, its officers have many questions to ask. But will they?
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