Read at the Counter: News of the World

200.



She was called Milly Dowler,
and she was a 13 year old schoolgirl from Surrey.


picked off and murdered at the start of this turgid century,


and she would have been nothing more but a name on a court
register, had not a slavering tabloid beast


gnawed at her dead bones, slack/hacking her voice mail,
deleting messages , so


insatiable their appetite for
the dark marrow of parents' grief.


but,

no one could have conceived
that, in the death of
a 13 year-old schoolgirl from Surrey,

lay the seeds of the fate


of an emporer.