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phone into her jacket. ‘That’s four in total.’
    ‘Any IDs?’
    “They’re close to ID-ing one of them.’
    -How’d she come up to the surface? The freshest one?’
    ‘It was the cinderblock,’ she says. looks like the rope was
    tied around it, but those cinderblocks can have sharp edges. The block landed against another block down there, and it damaged
    the rope. It cut through it partly. Gas build-up in the body was enough to break it. Look, you really have to leave.’
    ‘I get the feeling I’m going to be hearing that a lot over the next few days.’
    “Then do yourself a favour and drop this thing, she says,
    before turning away and heading back into the morgue.

chapter six
    The elevator is chilly, as if it sucked in most of the cold air when the doors opened. Outside it’s only slightly warmer again. I think the sun could be melting the city into a pool of lava and I’d still feel this way after coming out of there.
    On the way to my car I take the dead woman’s diamond ring
    out of my pocket and begin to study it. There is an inscription on the inside, and I have to squint in the weak light of the car park to make it out. Rachel & David for ever. It reads like an adolescent inscription carved into a tree. The three stones are not diamonds, which could be why the ring was still by the woman’s hand and not sitting in some pawnshop gathering dust. They’re
    glass, cloudy-looking glass that for some reason seems to make the poignancy of what happened to her that much more awful.
    Somebody bought this for her; he couldn’t afford real diamonds, but she didn’t need real diamonds. Maybe they had a promise
    that when things got better, when the money started flowing
    from some plan he would one day hatch, he would buy for her
    any stone she wanted. The ring didn’t come from her wedding
    finger, it was from the other hand, but perhaps there were other promises too.
    If Tracey spotted the ring, then pretty soon she’s going to
    realise it’s gone. The question is what she’ll do about it. Call me?
    Or call somebody else about me? I should never have put her in that position.
    This time when I get back to my office I slip in behind my
    computer and boot it up, studying the ring while I’m waiting.
    If the ring had been expensive, or custom made, it might have
    been easy to track down. I surf into a Missing Persons secured site accessible only to the police and social workers and a handful of private investigators. It only takes a few minutes to come up with a list of missing Rachels. I set the parameters of the search to go back two years, figuring she was dead after Henry Martins was buried.
    I end up with two names, and one of them is from the same
    week Henry Martins died. The description could easily match the Rachel I was looking at half an hour ago.
    I print out Rachel Number One’s details. Nobody has seen
    Rachel Tyler, the nineteen-year-old reported missing by her
    parents, in two years. I don’t remember the case, and I guess
    that’s because she was one of many girls believed to have run
    away. The reality is people in this country go missing every single day. Sometimes they turn up: they’re broke and high and living in a single-room motel, having burned off all their cash in casinos betting on red instead of black. Sometimes they’re being pimped out, forced into prostitution to pay back money for gambling or drugs or as a form of self-abuse. Other times they’ve left their wife or husband for somebody with a bigger bank account or a bigger house or a younger body. Other times they don’t turn up at all.
    The photograph of Rachel was taken at a moment of sourness,
    either faked or real, and it sure beats seeing a happy and outgoing girl holding ice creams or diplomas or helping the sick and elderly.
    She would be twenty-one now if somebody hadn’t killed her, then jammed her into a coffin.
    I study the photograph. Her brown hair is darker than when
    I saw it less than an hour ago;