At close to 6pm on 24th December 1942, as families all over Cornwall were preparing for an austere wartime Christmas, a 33-year-old dock labourer came out of his cottage and made his way through the blacked out streets of Falmouth until he reached a tobacconist, not 200 yards from his home. An hour and a half later the tobacconist was found bludgeoned to death on the floor of his shop. This was to trigger one of the fastest murder investigations in history.