Sapphire

On a Sunday, the murdered body of a young redheaded Jane Doe is discovered among the brush on Hampstead Heath, in an obvious act of hate, as she was stabbed several times in the heart before her body was dumped in the heath. Going on a hunch from the minimal evidence on hand, the lead police investigators, Superintendent Bob Hazard and Inspector Phil Learoyd, discover that she is twenty-one-year-old Sapphire Robbins, a student at the Music Conservatory. What they learn from her student friends, including her obviously grief-stricken boyfriend and unofficial fiance, David Harris, a working-class architecture student who was planning on going away to school in Rome on scholarship soon, is that she was a generally well-liked proverbial good girl. As Hazard and Learoyd start to look into Sapphire's life, they discover that she was keeping several secrets which may have been factors in her murder, and, although the secrets are all associated, it is the one that becomes evident upon the arrival of her Birmingham-based physician brother that may be the biggest individual factor. It becomes clear that several people in that known life and that secret life could have had motive, including David and his family, he living with his parents, his father Ted Harris a gilder and sign maker, and his married sister, Mildred Farr, her merchant marine husband away at sea. The investigation becomes one highlighting the problem of prejudice that permeates British society in general.