‘No. I begged her to, obviously. We turned up on Christmas morning and she opened the door with the latch on and said she had an upset stomach. I had to be restrained. You should have heard the abuse I was yelling through the gap in the door. And me seven months pregnant. He was probably sleeping it off, but it made me feel better. She begged me to go, but that night she rang and said she had a plan. She was going to leave him, but first she wanted to separate their bank accounts and make sure she’d somewhere to go. I offered to put her up – we’d just bought a three-bed house – but she point-blank refused. Said she wouldn’t, not with the baby coming. She was going to leave him on Valentine’s Day. That’s what she said.’

‘So, when she went missing that February, you assumed she’d followed through,’ the inspector said. They’d been sitting here talking all this time and Barbara still hadn’t acknowledged that her sister was dead. She was using the past tense, sure, but only because she hadn’t seen her sister in so long.

‘Tell me this,’ he continued. ‘Didn’t you think it was odd that she left and didn’t contact you? With you having a baby and everything? It sounds like you were very close.’

Barbara nodded and frowned.

‘All through January, any time we talked, she kept telling me she had everything nearly ready so she could leave him. She wouldn’t tell me where she was going to go, though. It was like she was afraid if she told me he might get it out of me. I was concerned for her, but I didn’t push for information as much as I should have. I got pre-eclampsia at the end of my pregnancy and I was distracted.

‘When she left, well, time went on and I heard nothing from her, but I told myself that she was probably too afraid to come home. I mean, it took eighteen months to leave him after the violence started.’

‘I’m sure you had a lot on your mind, with a new baby to mind,’ Tom said. Barbara’s eyes were wet with tears. The reality of what had happened was starting to sink in and it was being followed at a pace by guilt.

‘Yes, I did. And I told myself that maybe it was because of the baby that she didn’t want to stay and risk having Steve hanging around. I thought maybe he had threatened me or something.’

The inspector took a deep breath. The situation was so tragic. Barbara’s sister hadn’t got away. She hadn’t been avoiding her family. She’d been taken and murdered and nobody had even missed her.

‘This Steve Moore. Is he still around?’

She shook her head.