The woman's body lay between a silver Escort and a dark-blue Lancia. Concealed by a shroud of dirty brown velvet, it looked like a heap of rags. In the desolate subterranean Barringdean Shopping Centre, Reg Wexford had been too preoccupied to notice anything out of the ordinary, just the time and a red car driving past him too fast. Burden called him home at with the grim news later that evening. The woman had been attacked from behind, perhaps with a thin length of cord wire. Before Inspector Wexford can delve deeper into the curious homicide, he, too, faces death. And Burden, for a while conducting the investigation without the help of his chief s instinctive analytical genius, will blunder down a number of blind alleys  ...