In 1991 the defence contractor Ferranti International went bust following a fraud on it by International Signal and Control, a US arms company it had merged with. Ferranti’s chairman, Sir Derek Alun-Jones, briefed me as a journalist on the matter, sometimes with documents.
Later in the 1990s some of those documents vanished while I was having breakfast in the cafe at Taunton station. I learned where they had got to only when David Pallister, with whom I worked on the case, phoned to tell me they were at Royal Navy headquarters in north-west London. A mistake, the navy said, but only after David pressed them to hand them back.
I never found out how David had traced the documents and neither of us ever got to the bottom of what really happened at Ferranti.
