Every Sunday the man in Rachel Fennick’s life came to her flat and cooked the Sunday lunch. This was probably more a business arrangement than a love affair, though. For Rachel, 41, had been on the game for 20 years, and the Sunday visitor, according to an official report, was “very well dressed for a man who had not worked for a year.”

He was almost certainly her pimp and was not thought to be the man who beat her and stabbed her to death with a long-bladed knife in her flat in Broadwick Street, Soho, London, on Sunday, September 26th, 1948. The killing of Rachel, who had 84 convictions for soliciting, theft and brothel keeping, was thought by some to be the work of a maniac; by others to be part of a wave of underworld killings which also claimed the lives of Russian Dora, Red Helen and Black Rita.