Some stories arrive with one big bang.

They kick down the door with a cache of leaked documents or an explosive whistleblower.

Others start smaller. Like ripples on water, they begin at one point, their circles spreading

outwards and outwards as they grow. This is one of those stories. And it starts with a body.

I'm Mayf McClendigan and this is the tip-off,

the podcast where we take you behind the scenes of some of the UK's best investigative journalism.

On today's show, we explore how a year of reporting revealed the huge scale of homelessness

in just one borough of London.

My name's Emma Yule and I'm an investigations journalist for Archand Newspapers.

And one of the papers I work for is the Hattney Gazette.

Emma Yule is busy.

She writes for 10 newspapers across London and tries to balance covering breaking news with longer investigations.

But last year, she stumbled upon a story that would come to take weeks and then months of her time.

It starts on a late summer's day. Emma had just filed her last story when the phone rang.

The lady who called me was Italian and she had a little bit of an accent but actually very

articulate. The woman on the end of the phone told Emma she lived in a homeless hostel just

down the road in Hackney, a borough in the north of London, and one of the patches Emma covered.

The woman was calling because a body had been found

in the block of flats. And she just started telling me about this death in the hostel and it's

quite emotional really about what had happened. A man had died in one of the rooms, but a body had only

been found days later. One of the things that people were so concerned about was that this poor man's body had been really smelling in the hostel.

As well as news of the death,

...