Chapter 34: A Messy Apartment

As it happened she was wrong. It took me longer than I thought to finish up. The traffic was lousy. I was feeling guilty about how late it had got. It was almost nine o'clock.

When I got back to the flat the front door was ajar. "Naughty Tricia," I thought, "anyone could get in." It didn't take me a moment to realise that someone had, I hadn't seen anything as bad since Tricia trashed the bedroom during our practice burglary. It looked a similarly messy job, done to impress. Well I was impressed. What was worse Tricia wasn't there.

Something told me that calling the police wasn't a great idea but even so I was pretty wary about looking around. It didn't take too long to work out what had happened. You didn't need a degree in forensic science to work it out.

It looked like whoever had made this mess had snatched Tricia when she arrived and had hung onto her waiting for me to turn up. Then they'd got bored or worried and gone, taking her with them. One of the dining chairs had been dragged into the bedroom. There was the remains of duct tape strips around the bottom of each of the front legs of the chair, she'd obviously been taped to the chair at some point, one of her shoes lay beneath it. A screwed up wad of cloth and some strips of tape were the remains of a gag that I guessed had been changed before they took her away. A spent hypodermic lay in the rubbish from the upended waste basket. A heap of tissues soaked in blood suggested that someone hadn't had it too easy. I liked to think it was whoever had snatched her. The core of a roll of duck tape under the chair suggested that in spite of that they'd got their own way. Her handbag had been upended on the bed, its contents spread around.

I phoned Harry. "I need some help, I said as calmly as I could. "Can you get over here?"

To say that Harry wasn't happy when he saw the shambles would be putting it mildly. Certainly his exclamations as he rummaged through the muddle left me feeling sympathetic towards anyone that he linked to the events. He was even less amused when he heard about Cora and the events in Kushtia. "So you fucking knew you were at risk? And you let Tricia walk in here without warning her?"

"Well, I'd only just told Clegg about it and..."

"Fucking great. One of my team is sitting fuck knows fucking where and all because you hadn't got round to cosying up with her and letting her know just what you'd been fucking about at in the mountains."

"Harry, it's not like that."

"In just what fucking way do you think it's not fucking like that?"

"Harry, it's not going to help us, is it? I'm as keen as you are to see her back."

He seemed to calm down a bit. "Yeah, well, OK sure. Look, who knew you were in Kushtia?"

"I dunno, a few people around the business. I hadn't made a secret about it around here. I've been trying to let people know how well this stuff has been going you know. Nobody outside the business apart from the Kushtians, though, as far as I know."

"So how did this Cora know to turn up to meet you in Kolin?"