Free Hidden by Derick Parsons, John Amy

much loot from her .
    Knowing that she should be checking to see what was missing but unabl e to face it just then, Kate dragged her favorite armchair upright and sank dejectedly into it.  She looked around at the devastation with rising fury and, for the first time in her life, wished that she smoked; a cigarette might have helped calm her jangling nerves and shaking hands.  No, on second thoughts perhaps it was just as well she didn’t smoke; if she had matches in her hand at that moment the temptation to simply torch the place and walk away might prove too strong.  And it wouldn’t have been any great loss; she had not yet lived there long enough for the flat to become truly a home to her, and after this she doubted it ever would.
    She shook her head slowly, in disgust and rage, but shed no more tears; they might not be there to see it but she still wouldn’t give the bastards the satisfaction of making her cry.

Chapter Six
     
     
     
     
     
           Kate woke up slowly and reluctantly, dragging herself from the depths of sleep only with an effort.  She lay and stared with unseeing eyes at the white ceiling above her head for two or three confused seconds, her mind a blank, until she realized that this was not her bed.  It wasn’t even her apartment, and that thought brought the full memory of the previous night’s events crashing into her mind, bringing her fully awake and causing her to sit up abruptly.
    Feeling as though she was suffering from the mother of all hangovers, she looked around at the Kelly’s blue-painted, sparsely furnished spare room as every detail of the previous night crawled through her mind with a clarity she could have lived without. So it had really happened then; it wasn’t all just a bad dream.  Shit.
    She slowly got out of the lumpy old double bed and looked at her watch; God Almighty, it was almost eleven o’clock!   It wasn’t like her to sleep in on a school day but then, she wasn’t burgled every night either.  Nor did she commonly have to sit up until almost seven in the morning trying to answer routine questions from clearly disinterested policemen.  Make that bored policemen, who clearly felt that they had more important things to do, and that chasing random burglars was a waste of time and effort.  The two Gardai who had eventually turned up, a good two hours after being called, hadn’t even pretended there was any hope of catching the perpetrators, or recovering her stuff.
    S he put on the same flimsy black dress she had been wearing the previous evening, thinking to herself; wha t stuff?  She hadn’t hung around her apartment to wait for the police, hadn’t even thought of changing her clothes, but instead had immediately accompanied Mr. Kelly upstairs to await them on neutral ground.  So she didn’t even know what was missing yet, apart from a couple of obvious absentees like her laptop and the DVD player.  And she wasn’t keen to go back down there and start finding out, even though she had agreed to ring the Garda Station in Blackrock before lunch with a list of the missing items.
    She opened the door and went out into the hall, where Lucy Kelly was just putting away the vacuum cleaner that had probably been the cause of her waking up.  Her neighbor was a heavy, gray-haired woman in her sixties who strongly favored tweeds and sensible shoes, with whom Kate had never got beyond the “nodding and smiling in the street” stage.  Until now, of course; being the victim of a crime like burglary could change your life in many unexpected ways.
    ‘Oh dear,’ fluttered Lucy when Kate appeared, h er faded brown eyes concerned, ‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’
    Kate managed a smile in spit e of her mood, ‘No, of course not.  It’s past time I was up anyway.  I have so much to do today.’
    ‘Of course.  But you’r e not doing anything until you’ve had a nice cup of tea and something to eat.  It’s like the old Royal Navy; they never sent men