IT’S been quite a week. Last week, I wrote about the reaction to our exclusive revelation that Gwent chief constable Carmel Napier was to retire with immediate effect.

I suggested then that her departure raised more questions than it answered, not least about the working relationship between Mrs Napier and the recently-elected police and crime commissioner for Gwent, Ian Johnston.

While I was more than aware there were all sorts of rumours about the pair’s professional relationship – or rather the lack of it – little did I know as I wrote my column last week that just five days later, we would be publishing the real reasons for Mrs Napier’s departure.

On Monday morning, a brown envelope (leaked documents always arrive in brown envelopes) appeared on my desk, addressed to me.

Inside it were five photocopied pieces of paper that were to set the news agenda in Wales for the next 48 hours.

The documents were a set of notes – a script, if you like – for Mr Johnston to read out to Mrs Napier at a meeting on May 23.

The notes set out how Mr Johnston told the chief constable that he wanted her to retire within a month. She had ten days to agree to go. If she did not, the PCC said he would “start the process of removing you”.

It was pretty brutal stuff and I knew we had a huge story on our hands.

I do not know the source of the leak.

I’ve got a good idea where it came from, but I am not certain.

What I did know on Monday was that we had to put in place the usual journalistic and legal checks and balances before running the story on Tuesday.

Most importantly, we had to establish whether the documents were genuine. I was able to do this via my own contacts and sources.

Then we had to take advice from our lawyers.

The notes were from a private meeting between an employee and an employer – would we be justified in publishing them?

The answer to that, as I expected, was an unequivocal ‘yes’. The public interest in a PCC effectively forcing a chief constable to retire far outweighed any concerns over breach of privacy.

Then we had to go to both parties for comments, to give them both the right of reply. That also risked one or both of the parties seeking their own legal advice and, potentially, taking out an injunction to prevent us publishing.

We thought the documents had only been leaked to us, but we weren’t sure. We thought no other part of the Welsh media had a sniff of the story, but we weren’t sure.

So the final decision for me was when to publish – and the choice was whether to go online immediately or wait until Tuesday morning and break the story online and in print simultaneously.

The former ensured we got the story out first, but would alert every other part of the Welsh media. The latter ensured every other part of the media would be chasing our story after our print edition was out, but risked us being scooped if someone else had the story.

I decided to wait until Tuesday and then had a sleepless night on Monday, hoping it was the right decision. It was.

And then?

And then, as I’d expected, our story became the story across the rest of the Welsh media.

Scoops like this do not come around that often.

Sometimes, they take weeks of preparatory work to secure.

Sometimes, like this week, they fall into your lap.

But they are one of the reasons why I became a journalist almost 30 years ago.

Any journalist will tell you there is nothing like the feeling of having a great story that you know no-one else has.

It’s the thrill of knowing something that the rest of the world doesn’t.

And stories like this highlight why a free and unfettered Press is so important.