“You stay here and don’t touch anything,” Corinne
told Daisy.
Daisy had no intention of going anywhere, except
back out the front door, as soon as possible.
“We should go.
This is a police matter.”
“I need to check a few things first so that I can
report it to Harry and the police.”
“Then be careful.”
Moving to and standing in the middle of the main
office, she did a slow three-sixty degree turn, taking it in. Odd that the settee looked like it had been
slept on. Was it possible this was where
Harry was living?
She made a mental note and moved on.
The next question forming in her mind was, did the
break-in have anything to do with the Jones cases?
Perhaps she could ask Sykes whether he thought the
break-in might be connected. Certainly,
his arrival would be fortuitous in the fact she could report the break-in if it
had not already been, not there was much he could do about it after the
fact. She doubted the perpetrators would
have left anything incriminating behind like fingerprints.
It was then she realized how little she knew about what
had happened to her brother after he left home.
It couldn't have been easy because his father had cut off his allowance,
and to top it off, neither her parents nor her brothers mentioned him or seemed
to care what happened to him.
She went into his office, also a mess, but in a
different way, and sat behind the desk.
Comfortable chair. Like any other
curious person, she started looking in the drawers, most left open by whoever
had searched the office and mostly the contents had been left untouched or
placed carefully on the desktop. Except
for the bottom two, which had been pulled out and left upside down under the
window.
She gave the papers and files on the desk a cursory
look but they just seemed to be case notes written on legal paper in his spidery
scrawl.
She started with the most bottom drawers and moved
up. There was nothing of any interest
except for one where there was an unopened bottle of single malt and two
glasses. She put all three items on the
desk in case she needed a drink later.
Then a thought occurred to her. She had watched those insufferable movies
with him and remembered one where the PI had taped a file to the underside of
the desk above the top drawer.
She pulled out the drawer on the left-hand side and
felt under the desktop.
Nothing.
She felt a little dispirited but moved to the other
side, removing the top drawer then feeling under the desktop.
Still nothing.
Nor was there anything taped to the underside of any
drawer in the desk.
But, casting a glance behind her, she noticed a
fragment of paper taped to the underside of one of the drawers.
There had been a piece of paper taped to the underside of that drawer, but it was now gone.
The intruder hadn’t gone unrewarded.
© Charles Heath 2016-2018
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