Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, Mrs Keppel and her daughter, Natalie Barnard and Romaine Brooks …. Diana Souhami has proved herself a peerless author of dual biographies, lives entwined, empathies shared.
Her latest book, Murder at Wrotham Hill, tells of two lives, but their conjunction was fleeting and fatal: it probably took seconds for Sidney Sinclair to murder Dagmar Petrzywalski, strangling her with a darned man’s vest that she was wearing as a scarf, on a dank October dawn on the grass verge of the A20 in Kent in 1947.
Sinclair was a middle-aged, recidivist, bigamist lorry driver. Petrzywaski was also middle-aged, a bespectacled reclusive virgin who had worked for 25 years as a ‘hello girl’ on a telephone switchboard, but had recently taken early retirement after she had been bombed out of her London flat in the Blitz and suffered a breakdown.
Each, in their tragic way, seemed the personification of postwar Britain — though not the ‘Face of the Future’ of Attlee’s Labour government, with the National Health Service and better educational opportunities.
Sinclair’s and Petrzywalski’s Britain was one of austerity and sharp-dealing. There were acute shortages of everything, including fuel, and food and clothes were still rationed. Much of London and other big cities lay in ruins; there was a universal air of shabbiness and 1946-7 would be the coldest winter for over 100 years, with snow and ice covering the country from December to March.
The British were exhausted by the continuing dreariness and privations of the peace after six gruelling years of war. But for con-men and spivs there were opportunities to turn a quick buck, selling on siphoned petrol, stolen goods and forged ration books. Sidney Sinclair’s wallet was bulging with pound notes as a result of such deals the morning he offered a lift in his lorry to Petrzywalski who was hitchhiking to London en route to visiting her brother in Woking.
Souhami evokes these drab, joyless years with painful brilliance, so that one can almost feel the shabby poverty and smell the foggy, coal-dust-filled air. She plots the lives of the murderer and his victim with chilling precision, recreating the meticulous search for the killer led by the legendary Fabian of the Yard, and reports the trial at which Sinclair vainly insisted that the timid former
telephonist propositioned him, promising to ‘play around with him’ for money, attempting to steal his wallet.
But Souhami has a larger purpose. She is not just recounting a true crime story; her book is also a disquisition on death and retribution in a violent world. Probably around 70 million people, both military and civilians, were killed in the second world war. Albert Pierrepoint, the executioner who hanged Sidney Sinclair at Wandsworth prison on 18 March 1947, was at the time also travelling to and from Germany where between December 1945 and October 1948 he hanged 226 Nazi war criminals, despatching 16 on a single hectic day in November 1947.
His victims were concentration camp functionaries, and justice for both them and Sidney Sinclair, after due process of law, was death, administered in the name of the state. Yet after his retirement, Pierrepoint wrote in his memoirs: ‘Executions solve nothing and are only an antiquated relic for a primitive desire for revenge.’
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