Murder at Wrotham Hill by Diana Souhami: review Souhami slots in details of forebears - those of both the victim and the killer. She also presents us with portraits of the then famous forensic scientist Dr Keith Simpson, and the equally famous executioner Albert Pierrepoint. All the time the reader tries to assemble these elements into orderly patterns but Souhami's narrative is too clever to allow any neatness. Whereas Dagmar might have been described as a gentle eccentric who embraced extreme austerity, her killer Sidney Sinclair - or Harold Hagger, as he was really called, for he had many identities - was a determined recidivist. A thief, a bigamist, an army deserter, a man incapable of accepting any authority. Once, when under arrest some years beforehand, and handcuffed on a train, he smashed a lavatory window and hurled himself on to the tracks. Yet you still wonder how he crossed into murder. There are no simple explanations. It is the cruel and bewildering randomness of his story - and of his victim's - that haunts the imagination. Right up until the day he was hanged, Hagger lied about what happened in that lorry, insisting that "Miss Peters" had offered to "play about with him" for money and that his strangulation of her was accidental. He was not a psychopath. He knew right from wrong. So what made him persist, all the way to the gallows, with this pathetic - and to her family, intensely distressing - lie that Dagmar was an opportunist prostitute? A lie that illustrated the gulf between his sordid world and the innocent life of his victim. But he is not the only chilling element in this story. There is the smooth and clever detective, Fabian of the Yard, who was the subject of a popular Fifties docudrama series on television - his real-life cases were portrayed, with Fabian played by an actor, and the real detective coming on for the prologue. This now seems a weirdly uncomfortable idea. Souhami's hypnotic narrative grips throughout. It is commonly held that murders tell us something about the societies in which they took place. But this post-war case does something else too. Both killer and victim stood at an angle to society, and the strangeness of their stories resonates deeply in another way, leading one to meditate on ideas of malevolent fate and evil. Murder at Wrotham Hill by Diana Souhami 306pp, Quercus, t £16.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books