Free Eden by Dorothy Johnston Page A

the back door. My office window was securely locked, and didn’t look as though it had been forced, the living room and kitchen windows the same. But the flyscreen on my bedroom window had been taken out and crookedly replaced. The paint work at one corner of the frame was chipped, as though someone had used a chisel to lever their way in.
    I splashed cold water on my face, and sat on the edge of the bath for a few moments, thinking that the intruder must be somebody who knew my habits, had watched me driving off that evening, and knew that Fred was harmless, no sort of guard dog. What if he’d left the house just as I was arriving? What if he’d heard me pulling up, was still out there, deciding to come back and take by force what he hadn’t been able to find?
    I knelt on the concrete in front of Fred’s kennel and felt around the inside of the roof. The disk was still there. Back in my office, I began to gather paper into piles, trying to recreate the intruder’s movements. In my mind, he’d already firmed into a ‘he’, and not a random male either, but one with sculpted silver hair. This break-in and the attempted electronic one could hardly be coincidental. Perhaps Ken Dollimore had lost his temper when he hadn’t been able to find what he’d come for, and had trashed my office out of spite.
    The filing cabinet had been emptied first. Folders from it were buried under the papers from my desk. Books had been flung at the walls. Pages had come loose, and some had broken spines. I examined book covers, holding them carefully by the corners, to see if they had marks, possibly even a footprint. The ground outside my bedroom window was still soaked from the storm. Still, a footprint was too much to hope for.
    I waded through the mess and switched on the only computer in the office, since Ivan had taken his laptop with him to Moscow and I had taken mine with me to Gail’s. Our old machine didn’t seem to be damaged, but an infuriating red flag was flashing again in the top left-hand corner. The hacker had been back to try again at closer quarters. But was it the same person? Would someone who thought they could steal my files from a safe distance have broken into my house and lost his temper, or did the loss of temper suggest a different personality, a different kind of character?
    My palms were sweating. I felt sick, but I made myself keep looking. Nothing seemed to have been altered or deleted.
    Fred had learnt all he could from the new smells. He looked at me and wagged his tail, as if to say he was quite happy with this late night activity, but a snack to accompany it would be nice.
    â€˜Useless dog,’ I told him.
    He wagged his tail again, uncertainly this time. I bent to pat him, and exhaustion hit me. Even if I lay in bed without being able to sleep, bed was where I needed to be.
    But first, I phoned Ivan. Luckily, I caught him at his sister’s flat, though he told me he was just on his way out. He asked questions, made sympathetic noises, told me to go to the police, but his words and voice sounded impossibly remote.
    I asked to speak to Katya, but she was on a shopping expedition with her aunt.
    I heated some milk, though the night was very warm, and poured some into Fred’s bowl as a treat. I stirred a large spoonful of honey into mine and drank it sitting on a kitchen chair with my bare feet scrunched into his fur, realising, with another spike of fear, that I’d have to keep my bedroom window closed.
    In spite of thinking I wasn’t going to be able to, I slept for a few hours, and woke as the sun began to heat my room at six.
    I lay watching a path of light, and thought again about the break-in. Much of the work that Ivan and I were hired to do involved following payments from one company or government department to another. Often we were asked to track, through a maze of numbers, the relationships between suspect individuals and institutions,