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‘I swore that I’d get my revenge.’
     
    Esther Ricks was a short, dark-haired, roly-poly woman in a plain dress that failed to conceal her spreading contours. She lived in a small terraced house off Oxford Street. When he called there that morning, Peter Skillen put her age at around forty and could see that she must have been an attractive woman when younger and slimmer. As soon as she heard that he’d been asked to investigate the disappearance of her sister, she was so pathetically grateful that she clutched his arm.
    ‘Oh, do please find her, sir. Anne is very precious to me.’
    ‘I’m sure that she is, Mrs Ricks.’
    ‘We lost both of our parents and have no other family beyond each other. When Anne’s husband died, we pressed her to come and live with us but she’s very independent. She preferred to rent a room elsewhere. Anne said that she didn’t want to impose on us. The truth of it is that she’d have felt too confined here.’
    ‘Describe her for me,’ said Peter, easing her gently away.
    Given the invitation, Esther seized it with both hands, talking lovingly and at length about her younger sister. What emerged was a portrait of a hard-working woman in her thirties, turned out by the landlord on the death of her husband and forced to fend for herself. Though the menial job at the Home Office did not pay well, it gave Anne Horner an enormous sense of pride to be working, albeit in a lowly capacity, for the government. Dedicated to her role, she had never missed a day or been anything other than thorough in her duties. To the outsider, hers might seem a strange and very limited existence but it was – her sister argued – the one she chose and liked.
    ‘That’s why it’s so
unusual
, Mr Skillen,’ she said. ‘Only something very serious could keep my sister away.’
    ‘You say that she was in excellent health.’
    ‘Yes, Anne was hardly ever ill. As a child, I was the family invalid, always catching some disease or other. Besides,’ she went on, ‘if she’d been sick or injured, she’d have sent word to the Home Office that she was unable to get there. Instead of that, she simply didn’t report for work.’
    ‘Did she have any special friends she may have visited?’
    ‘No, no,’ replied Esther, ‘Anne kept herself to herself. She’s always been a very private person.’
    ‘What about enemies?’ asked Peter.
    ‘Anne didn’t have any, Mr Skillen.’
    ‘How can you be so certain?’
    ‘She would have told me.’
    ‘Yet, according to you, the pair of you met infrequently. Your sister had a life that was quite separate from yours and it might contain all sorts of things and people about which you know little.’
    ‘If she’d fallen out with someone,’ Esther insisted, ‘I’d have sensed it. If you’re very close to someone, you don’t need to see them every day to know how they’re faring.’
    ‘That’s true,’ conceded Peter, thinking of his brother.
    ‘Anne just doesn’t make enemies. She’s such a friendly person.’
    ‘Someone may have taken advantage of that friendliness.’
    ‘Heaven forbid!’
    Peter did his best to reassure her that her sister would be found but she remained in a state of quivering apprehension. While touched that the Home Office had procured the services of a detective to search for its humblest employee, Esther had persuaded herself that a terrible fate had befallen her sister. Something else worried her.
    ‘If you do find Anne alive and well …’
    ‘I’m confident of doing so, Mrs Ricks,’ he told her.
    ‘Will they take her job away from her?’
    ‘Why on earth should they do that?’
    ‘She’s let them down, Mr Skillen.’
    ‘That may be through no fault of hers. Mrs Horner will have been impeded in some way. The Home Office will surely take that into account.’
    ‘How long will it take you to find her?’
    ‘I can’t put an exact time on it,’ he said, cautiously. ‘What I can promise is that I’ll give the search