Free 0007464355 by Sam Baker Page A

it late at night in a road side café in Italy when she was covering riots and an election, came another. She was a teenager and her parents were out, Fran was at university, the house was Helen’s, and the list of things she was forbidden to do was pinned to the fridge with an Anchor Butter magnet.
    One of them stood beside her reading the list.
    Tom Bretton.
    She hadn’t thought about Tom much over the last few years. Now he was in her thoughts constantly. She could still remember Tom’s smile, ever so slightly lopsided, the way he made them a single piece of toast for breakfast, buttered it far more carefully than she would have bothered to and cut it neatly down the middle, while she made tea in two Greenpeace mugs they’d bought at a market stall the week before. Helen had done precisely what she’d been told not to do.
    Gone to bed with Tom.
    Nothing happened … Well, nothing beyond cuddling and the obvious. Nothing that would qualify as, having done it.
    Half a piece of toast each was their breakfast.
    Turning on the rusting electric fire Helen watched three bars glow fraudulently cheerful and wondered why it had taken her so long to remember. They’d broken up a few weeks later, just before exams. It was her choice. Looking back, she could remember the toast, Tom’s Stone Roses T-shirt, the first time she’d understood the meaning of the phrase ‘companionable silence’. But she couldn’t remember why she’d ended it other than some stupid row about her being late, as usual.
    As the fire heated up, the stink of burning dust took over and more dangerous memories flooded in. All Helen could see was that poisonous orange fog and the outline of a half-naked body curled away from her. Cracking the window open half an inch, she propped a book in the gap to stop it swinging shut, and felt damp and darkness flood in. Enough speculation. She needed to get online and find out for herself before the migraine made looking at a screen impossible.
    As if sensing her urgency her second-hand Mac took minutes to crawl to life. Sliding one of her dongles into its USB slot, Helen drummed her fingers on its metal casing as she waited for it to connect. When it did, she typed VPN into Google and it offered a list of cheap providers. She clicked on the link for the first and realised cheap wasn’t good enough. Cheap required PayPal or a credit card. She needed free. Five long minutes later, she’d found one.
    After what seemed an unnecessarily fiddly process of installing, quitting open apps and double-clicking, an icon appeared on her desktop. Two more clicks and Helen was logged into the web through a VPN connection. Anyone looking – and there was no reason to assume anyone would be – wouldn’t be able to see what she was looking at. Or, more importantly, where she was looking from. That was what Art had told her anyway, when she’d asked him why he bothered to file his copy from Iraq using one, instead of just sending it direct.
    In the next fifteen minutes she had set up two anonymous mail accounts. She knew it was perverse to use her sister’s old postcode as proof of a false identity; but Fran could just add it to years of perceived misdemeanours. And probably would if she found out. To check they worked, Helen typed test 1 and test 2 into the subject boxes and pressed send. Seconds later, two emails appeared in opposite inboxes. She punched the air in pride. Smiling in recognition at the brief glimmer of the old Helen. The Helen who could do anything she put her mind to.
    Pulling up Google Search, Helen steeled herself and began to type.
Apartment Fire Paris 3eme
    She hit return.
    Within seconds a page of French newsfeeds, each accompanied by a brief report, had filled the screen.
    She began to read, her progress painfully slow. Almost a year of living in Paris hadn’t given her much beyond conversational French, but Google Translate did the rest, albeit poorly. Most of the stories were more interested in the