Lethal Profit by Alex Blackmore Page A

as she had left them. The chair was not exactly parallel to the small, scratched dressing table. Eva suffered from a mild obsessive compulsive disorder, which required straight lines, clear surfaces and shut doors – she would not have left the room like this. She turned on the laptop and searched for anything that might have incriminated her. But incriminating for what? And to whom? There was nothing on there other than a few old articles for the magazine and some drafts of boring emails about bills or rent. If someone had been through her things, who were they and what were they looking for?

    After several minutes of sitting on the bed, Eva began to move again. Methodically, she checked the latch on the one window in her room – locked – and on the small frosted glass opening in the bathroom – large and openable but barred from the outside. Gently she opened the door to her room and ran her fingers over the lock as she glanced down the shadowy hotel corridor. The metal felt smooth and unscarred. She looked more closely at the metal mechanism and gently moved the handle up and down. As she leaned in, she realised there were tiny, almost invisible scratches on the moveable part of the lock; the logical assumption would be that it had been forced. She closed the door again, locked it and took a long drink from a plastic bottle of water. There was a strong possibility that this was Leon’s handiwork. He had known she would be out with Valerie today and she hadn’t seen him at any point during the time she had spent with Jackson’s old flame. But there was no logical reason for him to break in here when he had already made contact. Years of watching conspiracy films made Eva stand up and begin running her hands over and under surfaces for bugs or listening devices of any sort. But of course she didn’t even know what she was looking for, and if that was the reason her room had been broken into then she doubted whoever had done it would make them so easy to find that an amateur could do it. This was a worrying development and one that made her feel even more vulnerable, as if she didn’t feel that enough already. She needed to do something.

    Eva flicked on the light on the bed side table and immediately her eyes fell on the sports bag that she had picked up from Jackson’s old place of work the day before. She hauled it up on the bed and pulled open the zip. Inside was a mass of papers. Eva sat back in surprise. She had not expected that. Presumably, whoever had broken into her room had already had a good old rifle through these documents, but it still might be worth her having a look. She started pulling out pages of documents, some photocopies, some heavily redacted and some made up purely of graphs and tables. They made very little sense to her at first glance, particularly because they seemed to be in no particular order and the subject matter different in almost every case. Frustrating. She paused for several seconds and then picked up the bag by one end and tipped the whole mass of papers out onto the bed. Then she began the time consuming process of sorting each paper into a relevant pile.
    It was 2am before Eva finished her mammoth sorting exercise. Now she was sitting on the bed thoughtfully, eating a strip of chocolate and staring at the achievement on the floor at her feet – twenty-five neat piles of paper. She finished the chocolate, wiped her fingers, picked up the pile nearest to her and began to sift through the papers once again. The theme for this pile had been ‘the Sudan’. All the documents related to that country, in particular an apparently fairly remote area in the vicinity of a town called Torit. There were ordnance survey maps, aerial photographs, a report entitled Spate Irrigation For Rural Growth and Poverty Alleviation by UNESCO, and several long, apparently unpublished, articles that looked at the health of the local population. The document that