And just tell me sort of how that process went and what happened after you published.

So when I first started speaking to Gareth, the thing that he wanted me to investigate really, I mean...

In a way, he came to me, he was sure about what happened.

But he...

So he wasn't asking me to investigate that, in a way.

What he was asking me to investigate was why he had found it so difficult to find justice.

Because this was a relationship he knew that all the boys knew about.

And there was another person who testified in defence of Sally Ann Bowen, and that was her husband.

Do you think that she changed once the war took hold?

I think she probably began changing before then.

There are several moments in the podcast where I spoke to people who worked in her office at her NGOs.

And I describe these two Syrias, um, which I saw for myself.

You know, I, I went out there in 2006, and I remember walking around Damascus, and it was just this wonderful, vibrant city with cafes and restaurants.

I remember walking past one of these intelligence, uh, agencies, and you would...

It just looked like an ordinary government office.

Tell me what you found and how Asma herself figures into that story.

It's very hard not to have heard a little bit about her.

Yeah, I think I think my perspective was completely different to Sarah's because I was coming to her as a Londoner.

She felt very close to me because she's the same age as me.

She grew up in London from in an immigrant household, just like I did.

Middle class girl, lots of things.

The opportunities that the West affords, you know, to grow up in freedom with a good education, to have ambition, all of those things.

My next door neighbour went to the same school as her.

It's such a fascinating question, isn't it?

Chloe, just before we sort of get into the impact, do you want to give me a sort of potted history of what the Caesar Files were? When did we first become aware of them? What are they, and how were they collected?

So when the war began in 2011, a guy who worked at a military forensics department in Damascus, his job was essentially helping to gather evidence for any potential trials to do with, uh, anything to do with connected to the military, basically.

He noticed that the photographs that were coming into his office had changed.

Previously, there might have been photographs of people who had died in car accidents or drowned or even suicides or anything like that.

Suddenly, he was looking at photographs coming in which were all quite similar.

They tended to be of men who seemed to have died after torture.

So they had burn marks on them.

Mm.

And what is the story that's brought you to the Paul Foot Award?

So what's brought me here is the true story of The True Story of The Salt Path.

So this is a memoir that was sold as unflinchingly honest by Penguin, written by a woman called Raynor Winn about her and her husband, who are beset by misfortune.

First, they lose their home after a close friend sort of tricks them out of it, and they have it repossessed, and then the very same week, they find out that the husband, Moth, is suffering from a terminal neurological disease.

And instead of being sort of absolutely devastated by this news, they take the quite extraordinary decision to walk the entire southwest coastal path of Britain, 630 miles, and the memoir is the story of this walk.

And along the way, somehow the effort of walking and of being in nature makes Moth better.

The, the symptoms of his disease reverse, and at the same time, Raynor discovers that her real home is with her husband and the love that they share.

What was the-Reaction from, uh, Rainer Wynn and, and Moth when the story was printed in, in regard to these, uh, the medical allegations in particular.

Yeah

... parents, they say she had access to their bank account because she was helping them book stuff online, and they were an elderly couple.

And one day they went to their bank, and there were tens of thousands of, of, of pounds missing.

And that when the grandmother approached her about it, she pretended to be kind of crazy, to...

She never answered any questions about it and never engaged about it.

We had a long conversation about this, and the grandparents are now dead, so Moth's parents have died, and, uh, we just collectively decided there wasn't any evidence to back this up.

And so I kind of, I shelved it.

Since my conversation with Chloe, the story has developed, so we reached back out to her for an update.

But the confession letter, the smoking gun, was typed, which made Chloe even more cautious.

I end up speaking to, in the end, four relatives on Sally Walker's side and four relatives on Tim Walker's side.

And some of these people are not that well connected with each other.

It's not reasonable to think that these people have coordinated their stories.

And the two sides of the family haven't seen each other in over 20 years, and they decide to come to London and meet each other for the first time.

In a wayImmaterial of whether or not that confession letter is true, and because it's typed and it's so convenient, a little part of me is like, "Nyeh." I have eight witnesses who all corroborate the story that's contained in that confession letter.

So in a way, whether or not the confession letter is true, those witnesses on their own were enough for me to publish.

But Rainer Wynn is still performing, still publishing, still beloved by many readers.

Not, not least from people with the same condition.

People with the same condition, and also neurologists who specialize in this very rare condition, claimed that they'd never seen anybody display the symptoms that he had, have the condition for as many years as he's had it, and be able to halt, let alone reverse the symptoms.

That was last summer.

Since then, I wrote an article in The Observer.

Since then, I have been in touch with Rayner Winn's family and Moth's families, and they have even more stuff to tell.

Four members of each family, um, have spoken to me, and the story that I have got is that, in fact, Rayner Winn and Moth were never destitute without anywhere to live.

They did lose their home, but they were then taken in by family, and they lived with Rayner Winn's niece for about eighteen months, during which they went on walking holidays, as people do.

Well, what you're suggesting here is that a work of fiction that she wrote is actually more accurate with regard to their shared history than the work of nonfiction that she claimed to have written.

Mm-hmm.

Raynor and Moth Winn are incredibly popular, incredibly successful.

Some people might wanna bring them down.

So you've gotta treat it with extreme caution.

And it took a while, but quite quickly, it became clear that they were not using their real names.

And usually when authors have pen names, you can find their real names somewhere, but Raynor Winn's real name, which is Sally Walker, isn't anywhere to be found.

And then I started digging around the house that they claim was repossessed and-... you know, old-fashioned, going to the land registry and looking at documents, that kind of thing.

Whose widow you spoke to.