Steph stood before the filing cabinet and asked herself if this was one of her better ideas. Suddenly it seemed way too risky. Her heart was pumping harder than it needed to and her fingertips tingled with adrenalin. It had been a long time since she had picked a lock and she wondered if she would remember how. It had been a regular challenge when she worked at the paper with Adam Baxter. Their colleague, Amelia, had been notorious in the office for her penchant for chocolate biscuits and her unwillingness to share them with anybody. So much so that she had taken to bringing in a family-sized box of biscuits and keeping them in her desk drawer. Whenever she was away from her desk, Adam or Steph always dared one another to go and pinch a biscuit without Amelia knowing. What had started off as a small joke had snowballed. One biscuit had become two, two had become three, and not just on the odd occasion Amelia left her desk, but every time. In the end, Amelia had cottoned on to the biscuit theft and had started locking her desk drawer. The challenge to pick the lock was set and soon both Adam and Steph had become experts at getting into the desk drawer.

Steph was now relying on her lock-picking skills to gain access to the filing cabinet in the office of Conmere House.

It was three o’clock in the morning and if she was caught now she’d have absolutely no excuse for being up and about, let alone in the office. Steph held the pen-light she had between her teeth, the small beam directed at the lock. Using a bent paperclip and the clip from a tiepin, bent at a right angle, she jostled with the lock. It was only a case of lining up all the pins inside the lock and then using the tiepin as a lever to turn the lock. She heard the familiar click and the drawer was open.

Steph let out a breath, pleased she hadn’t lost her touch. She pulled the drawer open and began fanning through the files. She was looking for anything to do with North Meadow or minutes from the meetings of the board of directors.

She found the minutes folder first but there was only one sheet of paper which looked like a cross-reference list – one column with a date, another with the item and the final column where they were located. Most of the minutes were held on a digital file, according to the sheet. Steph scanned down to around the date that Elizabeth had written in her notebook. As was normal, the minutes had been saved as a digital copy, but for this particular meeting there were appendices, with the word ‘SAFE’ in the filing column.