Sleeping Life: (A Wexford Case)

On a sultry August evening, the bloody body of a middle-aged woman is discovered beneath a hedge by a small boy. The woman turns out to be Rhoda Comfrey, but there's no apparent motive. Wexford's only hunch is that the clues to her murder must lie in her solitary London life. But her existence there becomes frustratingly impossible to trace.
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.