A Sleeping Life

With no clues as to the murdered woman's identity, all Wexford has to go on is his imagination.

The body found under the hedge was that of a middle-aged woman, biggish and gaunt. The grey eyes were wide and staring, and in them, Detective Chief Inspector Wexford thought he saw a sardonic gleam, a glare, even in death, of scorn. But that must have been his imagination, and his imagination was almost all he had to go on.

The woman was a stranger. Her handbag held little more than three keys on a ring and forty-two pounds in a new wallet. There was nothing to give him her address, her occupation or even her identity — let alone any clues that might lead to her killer. The woman was dead but, as Wexford knew only too well, death by murder is, in a way, not an ending but a beginning.