The keys rattled in the lock of the door that led into Nathan Hanes' apartment. One of Dunlin's employees, a sombre looking dwarf with a shock of red hair, opened the door for me and then stepped back. It was near silent in the upper parts of the building, along the hall from which some of the apartments used by the firm's accountants were located. All the tenants were downstairs now, working away industriously.

I nodded my thanks to the dwarf and stepped into the apartment, turning on the illuminance globe by the switch just inside the door as I did.

The apartments were not exactly large, the rooms that made them up being compact even with the minimal amounts of furniture in them. The entry room served as both a sitting room and a study for Hanes. A comfortable chair sat in one corner, with a small bookcase, reading table and lamp alongside it. Near to it was a small table that held a gramophone and a rack that contained a collection of records. There was also a desk in another part of the room, neat in appearance, with the papers upon it careful stacked into piles.

Above the desk, hanging from the wall with its soft green wallpaper, were a couple of framed photographs. One showed a man and a woman, the woman seated in a chair and the man standing behind her, looking all very prim and proper. My guess was that they were his parents. The other photograph was of a young boy and girl; Hanes and his sister no doubt.

That was the sum total of the furnishing in the room and even they made it feel rather crowded, with little room to move around in.

I first inspected the books on the shelf near the reading chair. They were for the most part classics, books by long dead authors, but there were others as well, including a number of plays, books of poetry and of course books on accounting. None of them were in the manner of the pulps that I read when I got the chance. Which wasn’t often.

Moving across to the desk, I flicked through the stacks of papers. They all related to his work, comprising of equations and also rows of numbers, all of which were well beyond my understanding. There was a reason I was an investigator and not an accountant. I have difficulty enough just balancing my own books. I wouldn't be able to get anything out of them to help me on this case.

I pulled open the drawers of the desk one by one, having a look through them. There were more ledgers inside, as well as papers, all relating to his work. In one, though, I did discover a bundle of letters, bound in red ribbon. Written across the front of the top letter was Nathan's name and address. It had been done in a woman's hand. I took out my notebook and flipped through it until I found the telephone number that Miss White had written down. A comparison of the writing of the number and the address on the letters was a match, or near enough to it. They were personal letters between the two.

For a moment I debated opening them, to read through them. Instead I returned them undisturbed. It would be wrong to pry into private matters of the heart that were of doubtful benefit to me, not until I had exhausted all other options in my investigation at least.

As I placed the letters back in the drawer, I found tucked away in the back of it a small velvet lined box. I pulled it out and opened it. What greeted my eyes was a silver ring set with a small diamond.

"So, you were planning to marry," I commented. I closed the ring box and returned it to the drawer. That did seem to rule out that he had disappeared on purpose. Well, for the most. It was still a possibility, but one that had diminished. He had bought a ring. He was committed.

Yet Miss White had said they were engaged already, so what was the ring doing there and not with her?

I closed the drawers of the desk. They had yielded nothing. All that remained in the room was the gramophone. It was a typical model of the type found in houses everywhere, cheap but reliable. I flicked through Hanes' collection of records, seeing what his tastes ran towards. It was, for the most, fairly modern, including most of those made by Stefan Rex. An inscription on the cover of one of them caught my eye and I took it out of the rack to read it.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Keep believing. Stefan R.

I carefully returned the record to the collection. A personal message from Stefan Rex himself. It may not have been written specifically for Hanes though. He struck me a collector and any one worth his salt would love to get their hands on a record signed by the artist. However, given the message I had received in the envelope from Mister White, I wasn't willing to bet against it. It appeared that there was some link between the two.

I made a few notes in my notepad, linking the two men, Hanes and Stefan Rex, together. It was an angle worth investigating later on.

Leaving the sitting room, I walked through a door opposite the entrance, into the small kitchen of the apartment, one that also doubled as a dining room. It was cramped with just the table and a pair of chairs in it. A quick look around the room, in the kitchen cupboards and the icebox, the stove and sink, found nothing of interest either. The food reflected a bachelor's life, much the same as could be found back at my place. It was plain, solid food, fairly basic in content but filling. Some of the food in the icebox was beginning to spoil, an indication that it had been a while since anyone had been in the apartment.

From the kitchen there were two more doors. One led into a tiny bathroom, the other into the bedroom. The bathroom had nothing going for it, beyond being not much larger than a cupboard. I could barely turn around in it. That left just the bedroom so I entered it.

The bedroom was slightly larger than the other rooms of the apartment. The bed that took up a large part of it was neatly made, the blankets pulled up, tucked in and smoothed down. Beside it was a bedside table, upon which sat a lamp, a half-filled glass of water, a closed book and a picture frame.

I took the picture fame off the bedside table and had a look at it. Hardly surprisingly, it contained a photograph of Miss White. In it she wore an outfit much as I had seen her in when she had come to visit me at the office. It was hard to tell where exactly the photograph had been taken. It looked like a theatre of some type, but which one I couldn't say. I slipped the photograph out of the frame and turned it over. There was an inscription on the back.

For my Nate. My love. B.W.

I flipped the photograph back over and looked at it again. A frown formed on my forehead. There was some aspect about the photograph that I couldn't quite put my finger on, an impression that I was missing something contained within it. I slipped the photograph into my pocket. I would study it later in detail and see if I could figure out what it was.

The book on the bedside table turned out to be, surprisingly, one of love poetry. The bookmark in it opened to a page on which was written a poem by the poet J. T. Greaves, one entitled Darkest Love. A brief perusal of it led me to considered it rather morbid and less a love poem than I would have first expected, being, as it was, about death from what I could tell. Not the type of reading material that I would have expected of Hanes, and especially not bedtime reading.

The clothes cupboard showed nothing out of the ordinary, just a collection of outfits that were variations of the same theme, plain but sturdy, with polished shoes lined up at the bottom of it. They were the clothes of a respectable, average man.

I returned back out to the sitting room. The visit hadn't seen anything truly out of the ordinary jump out at me, though it had given me a couple of others matters that I could look into further. It had also helped me shore up my opinion of the man, confirming the view given by others of him. A decent, hardworking man without any obvious vices. Not the type who went missing for no apparent reason.

Leaving the apartment, I made my way back down to the entrance lobby via the lift. Miss Dunlin had returned to her desk, and to her magazine.

"Miss Dunlin."

She looked up. "Any progress Mister Stone?" This time she didn't look annoyed by the intrusion.

"Early days, Miss Dunlin. Early Days. Your father mentioned that you met Miss White."

Once more the confusion surrounding Miss White's adopted name came into play. "Miss White?"

"Mister Hanes' lady friend."

A light of understanding appeared on her face. "Oh, Bethanie you mean. I spoke with her a couple of times when she came by to see Nathan."

"Do you know how they met?"

"Through a mutual friend, as I understand it. Nathan wasn't one to go out much, like most of the young men my father and Mister Khatur employ here. Maybe once a fortnight he would have an evening out. It was on one such occasion that they met. A number of the secretaries were disappointed by that, or so I heard. They rather had their eyes on him."

I raised a brow. "Really? Upset where they?"

"No, not as such. Not so much as to make his disappear. Everyone rather liked him."

"Well, thank you Miss Dunlin. You have been of great help."