Free A. N. T. I. D. O. T. E. by Malorie Blackman

frowned. ‘If you want. But I warn you now, the police took away most of his personal belongings early this morning. It happened before any of us arrived. A volunteer let them take away your uncle’s stuff without a warrant.’ His tone of voice showed only too clearly what he thought of the volunteer’s actions. It didn’t take a genius to imagine the full and frank discussion that followed when Ian had arrived at work and found out what had happened.
    He stood up and led the way over to a cluttered desk in a corner of the open plan. I sat down in Uncle’s chair and had a look around. A PC screen, keyboard and a printer dominated most of the space on the desk. Any remaining space was filled with papers and files and folders. There was a photo of Uncle, Mum and me pinned to the wall as well as a huge, poster-sized calendar of the whole year. Red dots and gold stickers and green strips were scattered all over the calendar. I looked closer. There was a red dot over my birthday of August 30th and another one over Mum’s birthday of February 8th. I didn’t recognize the other red ‘dotted’ dates. I looked from the PC to the calendar and wondered why Uncle Robert would bother with a calendar when there was bound to be a proper scheduler on his PC. Mum used to say that Uncle Robert was like a big kid. He had to have every new software product going – games, word processors, spreadsheets, databases, schedulers, you name it, he had it.
    ‘Can I switch on the PC?’ I asked Ian.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Uncle Robert wrote a game for me and I’m finding it difficult to get started with it. I thought there might be some clues on his machine.’ I said the first thing that came into my head. Then I realized something else. I hadn’t actually had the chance to play with Uncle’s game yet. With everything that had been going on recently, it had completely slipped my mind.
    ‘Go on, then. If you think it will help,’ Ian said sceptically.
    I switched on the PC processor. The screen and the loudspeakers came on automatically, unlike on Mum’s machine where you have to switch on every peripheral individually. Within moments, there was a message on the screen:
    SYSTEM DISK FAILURE: NO BOOT SECTOR FOUND – BOOT FROM CD-ROM ?
    I gasped, as did Ian and Nosh. First Mum’s machine. Now Uncle Robert’s had been wiped too. That had to be more than just a coincidence.
    ‘Those blundering police!’ Ian fumed. ‘Look what they’ve done. They were messing about on Robert’s machine and now they’ve lost all his data.’
    I looked up at Ian. Some gut instinct told me that someone had been messing about on Uncle Robert’s machine, but it hadn’t been the police …
    ‘Ian, I think you’d better get over here,’ Rohan called out from across the office.
    ‘What is it?’ Ian yelled back.
    ‘We’re on the telly,’ Rohan replied.
    ‘Good or bad?’
    ‘Bad.’
    Ian turned and practically ran across the open plan. Nosh followed him. I got up but lagged behind a bit. After a quick glance around, I opened up Uncle’s top drawer. Papers and more papers. The second drawer was even worse. Closing the drawers, I pulled open the pen tray at the top of the desk but it didn't pull out all the way. Something was stopping it from opening properly. I squatted down to peer beneath the pen tray. Taped underneath and towards the back of it was a CD in a plastic wallet. There was no way to see it if you didn’t stoop down and check out the underside of the tray. I instantly knew what was on the disk. It was a back-up of all the data that had been on Uncle’s PC. The only question was, how old was the back-up? When I removed the CD, I saw that there was also a piece of paper in the wallet. Putting the disk into my pocket, I then nosed the piece of paper. It was Uncle’s e-mail address and password. I put that in my pocket too before closing the pen tray.
    Thank goodness Uncle Robert was so PC conscientious. He was always reminding me never to do