The man showed up on time, outlined the changes in lighting he wanted, and after haggling briefly over price agreed to the terms and paid the electrician an advance of two pounds against the work to be done. Since the other had drawn only a rough sketch of the store, Field suggested that they return to the shop so the new tenant could point out exactly where he wanted some lights located.
The new storekeeper thought it was a good idea but after searching his pockets remarked that he had forgotten to bring along the keys. He told Field to wait for him and that he would be right back.
“I stood there waiting and waiting,” Field told Cornish, “and getting hungrier by the minute.” After standing in the station for more than an hour, the electrician finally gave up and went home. He never saw the man again.
The renting agent said the store had not been leased and the man who presented the note to Field was an imposter.
The electrician quickly endeared himself to police by proving to be a witness with a photographic mind. Instead of the usual vague description officials are accustomed to receiving, Field was able to furnish a detailed account of the caller. He placed his height as somewhat taller than Superintendent Cornish, at about 6 feet 1 inch, said he was slender and in his early thirties. The man had mentioned returning from a holiday and his face and hands were deeply tanned. He wore his hair short at the back and sides, and had a thin black moustache. One of his right upper teeth either had a large gold filling or was gold capped. The observant electrician also noticed that he was wearing an expensive gold wristwatch which he described as “wafer thin.” The man had been attired in sports clothes, wearing a jacket and matching plus four knickers in a biscuit-brown color. The expensive cloth had been rather distinctive, containing a repeated two-inch square pattern. The visitor also wore a brown tweed cap.
With this satisfying description of the probable killer relayed to all patrolmen in the city, Cornish turned to the task of identifying the victim. No matching description of the girl was found in the missing persons files and men were assigned to check the theatrical district and the Soho restaurants and nightclubs. Meanwhile, Field agreed to accompany officers through the West End area to see if he could spot the man to whom he had given the keys.
Cornish’s hunch about the girl being an habitué of night spots was quickly confirmed when bartenders in various places recognized her from the morgue photograph, but the investigators were puzzled because she seemed to be known by different names in different places. One of the men who had taken the girl out supplied an address in Chatham and detectives hurried there.
They were startled to find the girl alive, an almost exact double of the murdered blonde. She revealed that she was a friend of the victim and they frequently went about posing as each other, playing jokes on their admirers.
The murder victim was Nora Upchurch, a gay girl about town, who had left home several years before to live by herself in London. She had not written to her family in that time. While Nora had dates with many different men, her double said she had been “sweet” about a sailor and intended to marry him.
Questioning of some of her male admirers brought out a conflicting picture of the murdered girl. To some she was just another good-time girl whose world centered about the tawdry nightclubs. To others she was a quiet girl who enjoyed good music, quoted poetry, and read good literature. Cornish realized that as a girl of many moods she had attracted different kinds of men, making the task of finding her killer all the more difficult.
A roll of film was found in a camera in her room but when it was developed the pictures proved to be just snapshots of several girl friends taken on an outing. The missing pocketbook offered a possible lead and several of her closest girl friends were asked to examine the purses in her room to determine which one was gone. The girls then were taken on a trip through the wholesale district where they located an exact duplicate. Photographs of the model were distributed to newspapers with readers urged to notify Scotland Yard immediately if the missing purse was found.
Cornish had no difficulty in tracing Nora’s sailor boy friend. He became a red-hot suspect when he was found to be lying about his-movements prior to the murder. Although he claimed he had been at his base all that week, Navy records disclosed that he had received leave twice in a week to go to* London.
Confronted with this evidence the sailor soon poured out a story of how he had been torn by doubt as to the virtue of his intended bride. He had seen Nora on the Saturday before her murder, obtaining his first pass for this date. When he took her up to her room to say goodnight he was shocked when he saw a man’s umbrella there. Nora said she had borrowed it from the father of a friend when she had been caught in a sudden downpour.
The unhappy youth returned to his base but after stewing about the story of the umbrella for several days, he managed to wangle a two day pass. He returned to London and played detective for two days-attempting to follow his fiancé around without her knowledge. He lost track of her both nights and still did not know whether she was true to him when he had to return to quarters. He was able to present an unshakeable alibi for the night of the murder and he was released.
Field was still working with detectives, making nightly tours with them on the lookout for the tall man in plus fours. But it fell to the lot of a suburban patrolman to pick up a tall slender suspect wearing knickers. Though he had no moustache and no gold front tooth, his description did tally fairly closely with the one supplied by the electrician.
Scotland Yard was notified and Field, who was on tour with detectives, was ordered by radio to rush to the local station house. He was shown the plus fours the suspect had been wearing but said the brown was too light in color. But when the man himself was led into the room, Field walked right over to him and remarked, “Hello, I haven’t seen you since that night at the tubes.”
The prisoner denied ever having seen Field before. When the discrepancy of the gold tooth was pointed out, the electrician shrugged. “I thought I saw a gold tooth, but he certainly looks like the same man.”
Moving with traditional British caution, Superintendent Cornish ordered the suspect detained for further questioning but did not book him for murder.
The case appeared to be solved when several days later Cornish announced he would present evidence at a coroner’s inquest. Newsmen flocked to the hearing ready to write how Cornish of the Yard once again had woven a net around the suspect, but when the inquest opened they found the Superintendent had other ideas. He presented a parade of witnesses, all of whom definitely cleared the suspect in plus fours. As the hearing continued, the reporters suddenly realized that Cornish actually was demolishing the story told by Field and that he suspected the electrician really was the killer.
While Field had been busy riding around with detectives, Cornish was conducting a quiet but searching investigation into his background. He presented evidence that Field had been in debt for two pounds, the exact amount that the stranger in plus fours had supposedly handed over to him. Field could offer no signed agreement covering the work to be done nor could he supply the name of the man who had hired him.
The Superintendent marshaled other facts. Field was the last known person to have the keys to the vacant store. By his own story, he was in Piccadilly Circus about the time of the murder, and he came into possession of the two pounds at the same time Nora’s purse had disappeared. Although married, Field had the reputation of being a woman-chaser and he played the bright-light district, where he could have met Miss Upchurch.