The Wiltshire county police have revealed in separate statements last week that they were at the house of Sergei Skripal within minutes of his having fallen ill on a park bench in the centre of Salisbury last year, in the case which has damaged relations between Britain and Russia beyond foreseeable repair.
The speed of response was much faster than Wiltshire Police and Crime Commissioner Angus Macpherson has given reason for at the time; in the eleven months of his tweeting after the incident; or under direct questioning over several days of last week.
"We can confirm that police attended Christie Miller Road in Salisbury on the evening of 4 March 2018", Macpherson said through a spokesman, "as part of our early enquiries into the incident." That was not an answer to the question Macpherson was asked.
The new police evidence - an excerpt from the Wiltshire police incident response log and Macpherson's cover-up of the particulars -
contradicts the allegations the British government and police in London have made that the outside door-handle of the Skripal house had been sprayed by Russian assassins with a "military grade nerve agent" named by the British authorities as Novichok.
An unpublished Wiltshire police report indicates the likelihood that
British secret service surveillance of the Skripals was under way on March 4, during their movements around Salisbury on March 4, before their collapse,
and led to an anonymous call to the emergency services. That call was the first to report the incident to the police.
Secret service agents then appear to have been at the Skripal house, with a police guard, several hours before local detectives conducted a search of the interior,
telling the BBC later that the house "looked normal. There was nothing untoward."
Comment: From Whitaker's lips to Mueller's ear!