Free Murder on the Home Front by Molly Lefebure Page A

spot, this chapel, damaged by blast and fire. The cellar had previously lain buried under the fallen vestry, but this debris had been cleared by the demolition men, exposing the cellar to open air. A crazy little spiral iron staircase which once led from the chapel down to the vestry now clung airily to the charred chapel wall, its bottom step leading foolishly into space. The cellar contained nothing but the flagstone under which the body was found, and a rotten old wooden box in which the body may have been temporarily concealed.
    We spent about half an hour in the chapel that first visit. We returned the following Monday, along with Area Superintendent (now Deputy Commander) Rawlings, Chief Inspector Davis, and Detective Sergeant (now Chief Inspector) Dawes, as well as DDI Hatton and DI Keeling. Chief Inspector Davis had been in charge of the investigations which had taken place some fifteen months earlier, when Mrs. Dobkin was first reported missing by her sister, Miss Dubinski.
    Miss Dubinski had told the police that her sister was living apart from her husband, Harry Dobkin, and had constantly to press him for arrears in the maintenance money he paid her. On April 11, 1941, Mrs. Dobkin told her sister she was meeting Dobkin, presumably once again to ask him for arrears. After lunching with her mother and sister at their flat, Mrs. Dobkin went out—and was never again seen by them. But at 6:30 p.m. she was seen by a waitress in a café at Dalston, having tea with Dobkin. They left the café together; after that nobody ever saw her alive again.
    Next day, April 12, her handbag was found at Guildford post office. As it contained her identity card, ration book, and rent book, the loss would certainly have been a serious one for her, yet she never made any attempt to claim this handbag. The police view at the time was, and still is, that Dobkin planted the bag in the post office himself, as a false clue.
    At 5 p.m. that same day Miss Dubinski reported the disappearance of her sister to Commercial Road police station. She insisted her sister had come to some harm at the hands of Dobkin—who in the past had frequently treated her violently. Dobkin was interviewed by the CID on April 16. He made a statement describing the meeting with his wife on April 11. He said that after they left the café in Dalston his wife got on an eastbound bus and he hadn’t seen her since. He thought she had lost her memory and wandered off. He added that though his wife knew the Kennington Lane address where he fire-watched she had never visited him there.
    Four nights after Mrs. Dobkin disappeared, the night of April 15–16, a somewhat mysterious fire broke out in the cellar of the Baptist Chapel. There was no enemy action that night, so incendiary bombs were out of the question, and no inflammable material was known to have been kept in the cellar. Dobkin, the fire-watcher, said the fire started at 1:30 a.m., but he didn’t call the fire brigade. Neither did he put the fire out. At 3:23 a.m. a passing constable saw the fire and called the brigade. Dobkin was there, very flustered. The fire was fierce by that time and, although there can be no doubt Dobkin started it, it seemed to have become a much larger conflagration than he had intended. The brigade made no search of the premises when they had extinguished the fire. But at 5 a.m. the minister of the chapel, Mr. Burgess, arrived. He went down into the cellar, where the fire had obviously started. Dobkin had gone off duty, but the minister found in the cellar remains of a straw mattress—where certainly no straw mattress had ever been before. Moreover the mattress had been ripped open and straw taken from it and scattered in small heaps over the cellar floor. Mr. Burgess reported this to the fire brigade. At 2 p.m. he again visited the cellar. During the intervening period somebody else had been down there, the straw had been tidied up, and a garden fork left in the cellar. Now thoroughly