On my Ubuntu 9.10 desktop, I have the trash applet in my Gnome taskbar and it says I have 2 items in trash if I hover my mouse over it.

If I open the trash, there's nothing there. If I select the "empty deleted items folder" option it has no effect.

There is nothing in ~/.local/share/Trash/(files|info|expunged)

I'm guessing that something has been deleted on an external or other mounted drive that has since been removed without emptying the trash properly, but I can't see how to clear the trash so that it appears to be empty. Googling just sends me to endless pointers to ~/.local/share/Trash and/or the trash-cli package, neither of which have helped.