Death on the A20

At noon on October 31 1946, the body of a 48-year-old woman, Dagmar Petrzywalski, was found by the side of the A20 in Kent. She had been strangled by Sidney Sinclair, a lorry driver from whom she had hitched a lift early that morning on the way to visit her sister.

In "Murder at Wrotham Hill" (Quercus, £18.99), Diana Souhami has reconstructed the murder, examined the lives (as well as the deaths) of Miss Petrzywalski, her killer, the investigating detective, Robert Fabian — the celebrated “Fabian of the Yard”— and the executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, and set them within the context of a country still scarred by the horrors of war.

Dagmar – a nervy spinster who, traumatised by the Blitz, had retired as a telephonist in London — used her meagre pension to buy a hut opposite her mother’s modest home, and subsisted by keeping chickens and growing vegetables.

Her death was completely senseless. Sinclair, aka Harold Hagger, a bigamist, black marketeer and recidivist with a long history of petty crime and violence, had picked her up with the expectation of sex. It seems he had no premeditated desire to kill but, when Dagmar —a virgin — screamed in fear, he strangled her with the man’s vest she had been using as a scarf. To the day of his execution, Sinclair stuck to his story that she had “offered to play about” with him and had been attempting to steal his wallet.