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over to Oscar Bream.”
    He gestured Tennison forward to another bench. Here, laid out on separate sheets of blotter, were a number of smaller, tarnished items. They didn’t look like much to Tennison, though Gold seemed quite pleased. “But we have found several coins! The most recent of which is 1986.”
    Tennison frowned at him. “So?”
    “Have you got any change in your pocket?”
    Jones fished out a handful and Gold plucked out a five-pence piece, which he held up with a conjurer’s flourish. “There. 1991. Which proves that you were walking around above ground until at least that year.”
    “Thank God for that,” Jones muttered, pulling a face for Tennison’s benefit behind the young scientist’s back.
    Gold was holding up a scabby piece of coiled leather, covered in green mildew. Evidently his prize specimen, from the way he was beaming. “Perhaps most promising so far—the belt that secured her hands behind her back. Distinctive buckle.”
    Distinctive, Tennison thought, but not all that rare, having seen the design before: a Red Indian chief with full-feathered headdress, in profile, cast in silvery metal that was now dulled and pitted.
    “Could have belonged to her, I suppose,” Gold conjectured.
    Tennison nodded slowly, tugging her earlobe. “Or the killer,” she said.
    As the front door opened, Ken Lillie switched on his best smile, showing his warrant card to the middle-aged black woman in a floral print pinafore and fluffy pink slippers.
    “Good morning, madam. DC Lillie, local C.I.D. We’re investigating a suspicious death in the—”
    He jerked his head around, distracted by one hell of a commotion coming from two doors along. He could hear a man’s voice, yelling, and then a woman’s, screaming blue murder. “Excuse me . . .” Lillie muttered, retreating fast down the path. He caught sight of Frank Burkin dragging a black teenager through the garden gate into the street. Behind the pair, a woman in a brightly patterned head scarf—the boy’s mother, Lillie judged—was beating her fists at Burkin’s broad back, screaming at him to leave the lad alone.
    People from neighboring houses were running into the street, shouting and shaking their fists as Burkin wrestled the black kid into the back of the Ford Sierra. Lillie ran up, waving both hands in an attempt to placate what had already the makings of an ugly mob. As he reached the spot, the Sierra’s doors slammed and the car sped off with a squeal of tires, leaving Lillie to confront a sea of angry black faces and the distraught mother, tears streaming down her cheeks.
    Tennison sent DC Jones off to get her a mug of decent coffee instead of the pig swill from the machine, and returned to the Incident Room to help Haskons collate whatever information was to be had. She was suffering the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal acutely, and desperately trying to concentrate while ignoring the craving itch at the back of her throat.
    “What have we got on the property developer?” she asked, leaning over Haskon’s shoulder.
    “Has since gone bankrupt and disappeared off the face of the earth, boss . . .”
    Mike Kernan pushed open the swing door and stuck his head in. “Jane. A word.”
    Tennison glanced around. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
    “My office,” Kernan barked. “Now.”
    Tennison exchanged a look with Haskons, tugged her jacket straight, and went through the door, catching it on the second swing. Haskons’s doom-laden voice floated after her. “Kernan the Barbarian . . .”
    Cigarette in hand, the Super was pacing his office, shoulders hunched, thunderclouds gathering overhead. He said, “Burkin has just arrested a young black lad for possession.”
    Tennison leaned against the door, eyes closed. “Oh God.”
    Kernan jabbed the air. “He’s doing his bloody house-to-house, there’s the smell of pot, and he barges in. Pulls the lad out by the scruff of the neck.”
    “I don’t believe it . . .”
    “So