A Face in the Crowd by Lynda La Plante

fundamental question: Is it possible to expect justice in this country if you are a person of color? ”
    Excluding Kernan and Tennison on the platform and DCs Rosper and Lillie at the back of the hall, the verdict was unanimous.
    Afterwards, pencils sharpened, notepads at the ready, Rosper and Lillie manned two desks in the entrance hall. They felt like a couple of lepers. The crowd had streamed out, most not bothering to give them a second glance, one or two openly sniggering and dropping heavy hints about the officers’ parentage.
    Lillie was doodling clock faces when the man in the leather hat plunked himself down in the seat opposite and leaned his elbows on the desk. He was chewing the stub of an unlit cigar, and seemed to have a sunny disposition, judging by his permanent grin that revealed two gold front teeth.
    “I don’t like the police,” he began cheerfully.
    Lillie nodded. “Thank you.”
    “But I’ll tell you this, you should talk to the guy that Nola mentioned.” He removed the cigar stub, leaving the glinting grin intact. “White guy about fifty. Worked as a builder.”
    Lillie dutifully jotted this down. “Can you tell me his name, sir?”
    “We argued about parkin’ space, you know. Then in the mornin’ all my car is covered in brake fluid.”
    “I see.”
    “Don’t worry, I got me own back.”
    Lillie waited. “Go on, then, tell me.”
    The man in the leather hat started wheezing. “I pissed in his petrol tank.” He let out a bellow of laughter, thumping the desk.
    Lillie smiled, still waiting.
    The man chewed on the dead stub, eyes roaming about. “Dave Hardy? Harley? Somethin’ like that. You talk to him.”
    Lillie wrote it down.
    When Tennison returned from seeing Kernan off, the haul was meager. Lillie gave her what little information he had, though Rosper thought he might have gotten a lead.
    “Word is that a family lived in Number seventeen called Allen. One or two people reckon they might have owned Number fifteen as well.” He tore off the sheet and handed it to her. “Point is, Esme Allen still runs a West Indian take-out nearby.”
    Tennison looked at the address he’d jotted down, then at her watch. She was starting to see double. “Give it another half an hour here, then call it a day.”
    As far as she was concerned, DCI Jane Tennison was about to call it a day, a night, and a day.
    She let herself into the empty flat and trailed through to the bedroom, carrying the small suitcase she’d had with her on the course. Dumping it on a chair, she switched on the bedside lamp, kicked off her shoes, and lay down on top of the pink duvet, fully-clothed. The instant her eyelids closed she was fast asleep, arms by her sides, snoring softly.
    The hand-lettered sign in the window read “Esme’s Take-Away Fast Food.” The cafe was in the middle of a row of small shops which served the local West Indian community, cardboard boxes and wooden trays of exotic foodstuffs—breadfruit, mooli, okra, and yams—laid out on the pavement.
    Tennison lingered outside the open door. It was a few minutes after nine thirty, the sky hazy overhead with the sun doing its best to break through. She was warm inside her Burberry raincoat, beginning to wish she’d put on something lighter, though it had looked like rain when she left the flat. Her hair, hastily dried after a shower while she wolfed down two pieces of toast, was still damp at the roots.
    Inside the cafe, behind the high counter, Esme Allen was chatting with a middle-aged woman with silvery hair coiled into a neat bun. Esme was a tall, graceful black woman, somewhere in her early forties, Tennison judged, noting the faint traces of gray in her curly, cropped hair. She wore a long plastic apron over a red sweater, the elegant curve of her neck accented by a pair of dangling earrings that swung as she chattered away.
    “Me small son study for his school exam, you know, an’ me daughter Sarah, she study law at the