The sound of padding feet startles me. It’s only Cat, who has returned through the kitchen door flap. I shouldn’t be so jumpy. According to the locksmith, my flat is now ‘more secure than the Bank of England’.

I think about doing a line, just for my nerves. But it’s too early. I put the phones and the pager in their requisite pockets, wheel out my bike, and put on my helmet. Finally, I go to grab my notebook. There isn’t much point taking it: these are off-the-record lunches. And it is bad manners to write at the table. Apart from anything else, 90 per cent of what Ringer tells me will be libellous and almost impossible to corroborate. But as soon as lunch ends, I’ll jot everything down anyway. Because that’s the job and I’ll feel uneasy if I don’t make a record. If he tells me anything explosive, I’ll excuse myself and nip to the loos to write it up, so that I don’t lose any important nuance.

Like everything else, the notebook has its place. I leave it on the bedside table every night, under the Filofax, next to the novelty People’s Republic of China coasters, each with its own iconic Mao image, to the right of the lamp. That’s odd . . . The notebook isn’t there.

This is bad. I don’t lose my notes, ever. I guard them with neurotic fastidious, obsessive care, and hoard them for years. At the FC there is an entire locked filing cabinet of these lined, A7-size notebooks that are filled with indecipherable shorthand scrawl, transcripts of conversations and jottings of off-the-record conversations.

The shadowy person standing over my bed returns to my imagination. He lurked while I was asleep, and pocketed the notebook from my bedside table. I feel sick. Maybe it’s the residue of last night’s alcohol. But the door, the notebook . . . Should I ring the police? They would think I am raving mad. I see sir. Someone broke into your house and all he took was a used notepad of the sort you can buy three for a pound from Woolworths. We’ll put our best people on to the hunt for the master criminals, don’t you worry. No. There’s no point alerting the authorities. To what would I be alerting them? To my emotional crisis?

Everything suddenly feels tainted, unclean. I walk fast to the kitchen, grab a roll of kitchen paper, fill a plastic tub with Dettol and water and then wipe handles and any surface that my real or imaginary adversary may have touched. Everything sterilised, I go to the bathroom, and scrub my hands with soap and water.