At the time in addition to my full time job I was doing some freelance work, not journalism but crossword creation.
What I did was put clues and solutions that referred to a company into the crosswords I created. The public relations officer for the company then placed these crosswords in a relevant trade magazine.
I was quite friendly with the PR man, who I had known off and on for many years (as you do in a small field like business magazine journalism) and for whatever reason we concocted a scheme whereby he sourced a central heating boiler for my flat. I needed one at the time.
In exchange for this I was supposed to do some work, mainly, I think, writing about the installation of the boiler for a heating magazine (though he wasn't actually working for that boiler manufacturer).
Things went badly wrong. It took ages after the installation before he asked me to write anything and by that time the photos I took had disappeared, or most of them had. I was being plagued by hackers, though I had absolutely no idea that the intelligence services might be involved.
I cobbled together a piece and somehow discovered a few pictures on a back up drive or something. I can't remember the details or find the photos.
Scroll forward 15 years and that same PR man took me out for lunch and attempted to put me through the third degree. He made it abundantly clear that he was either working for, or had influential contacts in, one of the security services.
The photos that disappeared were not the complete set of pictures I took, just the useful ones (from the point of view of the article I was writing). In my opinion they got rid of the photos because they identified the installer, who was probably some kind of spook. I think his real job was installing surveillance equipment either in the boiler or elsewhere in my flat.
Along with the missing pictures, I also photographed the delivery of the boiler and these are the pictures I obtained. The date comes from those pictures.
Jonathan Brind