Murder by Matchlight by Edith Caroline Rivett

Macdonald drove back over Westminster Bridge pondering on such facts as he had collected. There seemed little room for doubt that John Ward’s Identity Card had been acquired by the Irishman in some such manner as Macdonald had guessed. The man known to Alf Mason as John Ward of Dulverton Place had never been seen again after the bombing: neither had a man of that name asked for a new Identity Card at the office which issued these documents after the bombing. The man who had lived at Belfort Grove carried the Identity Card once issued to John Ward of Dulverton Place, and the man of Belfort Grove had been an Irishman in the opinion of those who had heard him speak. In addition was the fact that Stanley Claydon, in describing the telephone conversation which had caused him to go to Regent’s Park, had said that the man who telephoned had called himself Tim.

There was no proof at all that “Tim” who had been murdered in Regent’s Park was identical with Timothy O’Farrel whose identity disc had been found in a bombed shelter in South London—but there was a possibility that the two were identical. In any case, it seemed obvious that “Tim” had taken an opportunity of changing his identity by using another man’s Registration Card, and no man goes to the trouble of changing his name and concealing his original identity without a very good reason for doing so.