By Martin HickmanSeven boxes of Rebekah’s Brooks’s notebooks were couriered urgently to News International days after media reports that the News of the World had hacked Milly Dowler’s phone, the Old Bailey heard today.Four days after the reports the paper had targeted the schoolgirl, on 8 July 2011 Cheryl Carter, assistant to NI chief executive Rebekah Brooks, requested the removal of seven boxes of notes from its archives.Archivist Nick Mays wrote down the request as “Pls return Rebekah’s notebooks”.Giving evidence, he told the phone hacking trial that the boxes would ordinarily have been delivered the next day, or in this case the following Monday because the request had been made on a Friday.However he said that after speaking to Ms Carter by phone that day - a day after James Murdoch had announced the closure of the NoTW and a day before the paper rolled off the presses for the last time - the request had been given “a greater degree of urgency”.As a result, the notebooks were delivered almost straight away by a specialist delivery company from NI’s archives at the Crown Records Management Facility in Enfield, north London, to its headquarters at Thomas More Square, Wapping.The archive had logged the notes as: “All notebooks from Rebekah Brooks (nee Wade). 1995 - 2007.”They had been deposited there since September 2009 when Mrs Brooks, who edited the News of the World between 2000 and 2003 and the Sun between 2003 and 2009, became chief executive of News International.The jury has previously been told that they have never been found.Mrs Brooks and Ms Carter are jointly accused of conspiring to pervert the course of justice by removing the notebooks.Mrs Brooks - along with her husband Charlie and Mark Hanna, News International’s head of security - is also charged with a second count of conspiring to pervert the course of justice revolving around the hiding of laptop computers.On the first day the trial returned after the Christmas break, the jury was given a timeline on the first count - the removal of the notebooks.According to emails found on Ms Carter’s BlackBerry by police, she had made a series of attempts to contact Mr Mays on Friday 8 July.In the first at 8.50am, Ms Carter, who wrote a beauty column for the Sun called “Ask Cheryl”, wrote: “Hi Nick. Can u give me an urgent call please. thanks.” She tried again at 8.58am, asking Mr Mays: “Hi Nick can you call me asap.” However both emails bounced back because she had misspelled Mr Mays’s surname.Eventually Ms Carter conveyed the request to Mr Mays by phone and the order for the removal of the boxes was logged at 11.48am.Mr Mays wrote down what Ms Carter had said: “Charlie’s cheque is in. Pls return Rebekah’s notebooks.”Within minutes, the delivery had been upgraded from routine to urgent and the notebooks were delivered to Wapping at 1.36pm that Friday and signed for by Ms Carter.Mr Mays wrote that Ms Carter had later told him that the notebooks were hers or that of Mrs Brooks’s second assistant, Deborah Keegan.Trevor Burke, QC, for Ms Carter, suggested that it was he rather than Ms Carter who had specified initially that her request had been for “Rebekah’s notebooks” - and that the notes being recovered were Ms Carter’s or Ms Keegan’s.Mr Burke said: “What I am trying to suggest to you is ‘Pls return Rebekah’s notebooks” would not be the words Cheryl Carter used.”Mr Mays, who is still employed by News International, replied: “I would have written down what she said to me.”All defendants deny the charges. The trial is expected to last for a further two months.In a short passage of the hearing, Mark Bryant-Heron, prosecuting, asked Mr Mays about the reference to “Charlie’s cheque” in his note recording Ms Carter’s request for the notebooks.Mr Mays said that Mrs Brook’s husband had purchased some News International silver which had been used in the company dining room at its old headquarters and been deemed surplus to requirements with the move to Thomas More Square.The trial heard that Mr Mays had been forced to chase up the cheque, emailing Ms Carter on 25 June 2011: “I was wondering whether you have received the cheque from Charlie for the silver yet.”On 4 July 2011, Ms Carter emailed a News International archivist, Eamon Dyas, offering the cheque. but the court heard that he had been retired for some time and his email address was by then defunct.