Donald Sinclair, former proprietor of the Hotel Gleneagles in Torquay, was the unwitting inspiration for Basil Fawlty – the irascible protagonist of the hugely-successful BBC comedy series Fawlty Towers. Before the Second World War rolled around, Sinclair was an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve – and, consequently, in 1939, he was called up for military service. His naval career was dramatic. Sinclair was first assigned to the HMS Salopian, a converted cargo liner that had been armed and converted into a warship. On the 13th of May 1941, the ship was attacked by a German U-boat and torpedoed four times. Despite the Salopian’s engines being knocked out, Sinclair and his shipmates fought on – engaging the enemy in a gun battle when the submarine surfaced. When the German submariners finally gave up the fight and retreated back to the depths, a fifth torpedo ripped through the Salopian, breaking her in half. Sinclair, clinging to the wreckage, was picked up by the HMS Impulsive the next morning. Two months later, Sinclair joined the crew of the infantry landing ship HMS Karanja – to take part in the impossibly butch-sounding military mission ‘Operation Ironclad’ – the British invasion of Vichy French-controlled Madagascar. Once again, Sinclair’s boat was taken out with him still on it – this time the engine room was hit by two bombs from a German Fokker, which caused it to blow up and sink. Finally, Sinclair served on the escort carrier HMS Trumpeter, assigned to take part in the slightly less cool-sounding ‘Operation Zipper’ – a mission to assist in the recapture of British Malaya. However, by the time they reached the Far East in July 1945, the war had all-but ended, and the mission was abandoned. During a period of extended leave in 1940, Sinclair had travelled back to the UK to marry Beatrice Ritchie – the daughter of an Aberdeenshire policeman, who worked as a fashion consultant and designer at a department store. To avoid the constant bombing of Glasgow, whose factories and shipyards made it a major enemy target, Beatrice came south to the more tranquil environs of Torquay, a popular tourist resort on the Devonshire coast, where she initially resided with an aunt.

The only thing anyone could agree upon was the bicycle. It was green. On a warm July evening in 1919, twenty-one-year-old Bella Wright set off along the quiet lanes of rural Leicestershire. She was seen smiling as she cycled beside a well-dressed stranger on an unusually coloured green bicycle. They chatted as they rode through the villages, attracting just enough attention for several witnesses to remember them. It was the last time Bella was seen alive. A farmer discovered her lying beside the ancient Roman road known as the Via Devana. At first glance, it appeared she had simply fallen from her bicycle. Then somebody noticed the tiny wound beneath her eye. Bella had been shot through the face with a revolver. One neat, devastating bullet. No weapon. No obvious motive. No witnesses to the moment she died. The stranger had vanished. For weeks, newspapers appealed for the mysterious cyclist to come forward. Nothing. Until police dredged a canal. There, beneath the murky water, they found a dismantled green bicycle. Nearby lay a revolver holster and ammunition. The bicycle belonged to Ronald Light, a former army officer and mathematics teacher who had quietly filed away its identifying numbers before throwing it into the canal. When questioned, Light lied. Then he changed his story. Finally, confronted with witness after witness, he admitted he had indeed spent the evening cycling with Bella. But he insisted he had left her alive. He denied pulling the trigger and, remarkably, no one could prove otherwise. His defence was conducted by the legendary barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall, who performed what many still regard as one of the greatest courtroom defences in British history. Hall did not have to prove his client innocent. He merely had to point to the holes in the prosecution’s case. Where was the motive? Why would a man murder a complete stranger in broad daylight? Could the shot have been an accident? A stray bullet? A tragic misadventure? The jury acquitted Ronald Light after little more than three hours.

Every English village has its mysteries. A phantom black dog on the lane. Strange lights over the woods. A face glimpsed at an upstairs window where nobody lives anymore. Woolaston, in the summer of 2019, got a mime artist in a morph suit. He appeared without warning at the village fête. Dressed head to toe in a black-and-white chequered bodysuit, he wandered among the stalls in complete silence. No introductions. No explanations. Merely a series of gestures, shrugs and theatrical flourishes. He communicated entirely through mime. Which, as every sensible person knows, is already suspicious. His proposition was simple. For the princely sum of one pound, villagers could attempt to guess his identity. The money, he claimed, would go towards the village hall. Children handed over pocket money. Pensioners contributed coins. Nobody knew who he was, but somehow everybody joined in. Then, having collected his takings, the mysterious figure climbed into a waiting car and vanished. Like a Victorian stage magician. Or a particularly economical supervillain. What followed was glorious. Local newspapers seized upon the story. Television crews arrived. Social media descended into collective detective work. CCTV images emerged. Posters appeared around the village. The unknown trickster seemed positively delighted by the attention, occasionally dropping new clues into the story while remaining stubbornly anonymous. The sums involved were tiny. The mystery was ridiculous. And yet an entire nation became briefly obsessed. Perhaps because the tale possessed all the ingredients of proper English folklore: a village fête, a masked stranger, a baffled community and a mystery so utterly trivial that it became irresistible. The morph-suited visitor eventually returned the money and the scandal quietly evaporated. But I rather like to imagine him still wandering the Gloucestershire lanes. Silent. Unidentified. Waiting for the next fête. (Though it’s true that most people online have identified the mystery man as the local publican based on their matching ‘flat bottoms’. Though, to me, that sounds like a bum rap!)

Imagine, if you will, a newspaper edited by a twelve-year-old boy with a taste for murder, shipwrecks, explosions, scantily clad sleepwalkers and public executions. Now imagine that it was one of the most popular publications in Britain. This was the Illustrated Police News. To call it a newspaper feels faintly misleading. It was closer to a fever dream printed on cheap paper. Every week it arrived packed with murder, mayhem and catastrophe. Husbands bludgeoning wives. Madmen leaping from rooftops. Trains hurtling towards disaster. Suicides. Executions. Drunken brawls. Exotic crimes from distant corners of the Empire. If somebody was stabbed, strangled, poisoned, crushed, drowned or decapitated, the Illustrated Police News wanted it on the front page. Preferably with an enormous illustration. And what illustrations they were. Victorian artists filled the pages with scenes of such glorious hysteria that reality scarcely seemed relevant. Blood sprayed theatrically across drawing rooms. Villains twirled moustaches. Respectable young women fainted with astonishing frequency. Even the most mundane crime was transformed into grand opera. By 1886 it had earned an extraordinary distinction. Readers of the Pall Mall Gazette voted it ‘the worst newspaper in England.’ Most publishers would have been mortified. The proprietor, George Purkiss, appeared almost delighted. When accused of corrupting the nation, he cheerfully admitted the paper was sensational, while insisting that apart from the sensationalism there was really nothing objectionable about it. There is something wonderfully Victorian about that defence. The paper occupied the strange territory between journalism and penny dreadful. It fed a public appetite for horror while pretending to warn against it. It condemned vice while luxuriating in every lurid detail. It was simultaneously moral lesson and guilty pleasure. The respectable classes hated it, naturally. Which is often the surest sign that everybody else was reading it.

Every generation seems to find its own Jack the Ripper suspect. The Victorian police had their theories. The twentieth century produced royal conspiracies, mad doctors and occult fantasists. More recently, however, attention has settled upon a figure who is at once less glamorous and more unsettling: Charles Allen Lechmere, the East End carman better known in the records of the Nichols inquest as Charles Cross. Of all the suspects advanced in modern Ripperology, Lechmere has become one of the most prominent. Not because there is proof against him, but because he occupies a unique and deeply uncomfortable position in the story. Unlike most Ripper suspects, he was not merely somewhere in Whitechapel at the time of the murders. He was standing beside the body of a victim. On the morning of the 31st of August 1888, Lechmere was walking to work through Buck’s Row when he encountered the body of Mary Ann Nichols. Another carman, Robert Paul, soon joined him. Together, they examined what they believed to be a drunken woman lying in the street before alerting a police constable. That is the accepted version of events. But what if Robert Paul had interrupted something far more sinister? The modern case against Lechmere begins with timing. Nichols had been killed only moments before she was discovered. Advocates of the theory suggest that Lechmere was not the discoverer of the body but the killer himself, caught in the final moments of the crime and forced to improvise when another pedestrian unexpectedly appeared. It is a chilling possibility, and one that instantly transforms a witness into a suspect. Then there is the curious matter of his name. At the inquest, he gave his name as Charles Cross, adopting the surname of his stepfather rather than his birth name of Lechmere. To supporters of the theory, this suggests deception. Why obscure one’s identity at all? Critics, however, point out that Cross was a name he had used elsewhere in life and that he also provided his correct address and employment details. If he was attempting to hide, he did a remarkably poor job of it.