Our collective conscience knows the year 1939 as an impending march to war. As Hitler loomed and IRA bombings were carried out in Britain, the same year that Ian McKellen was born and Agatha Christie published 'And Then There Were None' and 'Murder Is Easy', there was also a real-life murderous plot unfolding in Ealing.

Ealing was not a hotbed of serious crime in the 1930s. As far as has been formally recorded, there were only three murders in the whole decade.

But in 1933, Hari Bhajan Dass arrived in Britain from India to study aeronautical engineering. The 21-year-old obtained his diploma in the minimum time allowed, an achievement to be sure, but one he gave less mind to once the pierce of cupid's arrow hit his heart in 1935.

For Hari, in what was apparently love at first sight, met Doris Landgraf. Two years his junior, Doris and Hari soon "lived" as Mr and Mrs Dass, with her parents believing they were married. 

Hari, also believing their living arrangements (the marital bed), made them betrothed, wanted to make their marriage official and so, in 1938, returned to India to ask his father's permission. From there, he wrote to Doris twice daily, with claims he worshipped the ground she stood on.

Little did he know that on the eve of his departure to India, Doris at a local dance on 2 July, 1938, had met one Herbert Finch. On Hari's return to Britain in January 1939, the horrifying truth that Herbert now held her affections was, by all accounts, a hard one for him to stomach.

Doris refused to see him, leaving Hari to insist on a meeting with Herbert, who was told in no uncertain terms should was to leave Hari and his wife alone.

Almost penniless and half starved, crying at night as he wrote pathetic letters to Doris, Hari was in a pitiful condition, driven to stop Doris from seeing Herbert with ever more desperate actions that ranged from buying a ring on credit to following the couple in his car as they drove along the Great West Road.

A month after Hari's return from India, desperate actions turned drastic, when he placed an advert in the West London Observer asking for 'a clever man, with car if possible, to act as a detective. One hour's work for a very clever person'.

Among the many responses Hari received, that from Caleb Green of 35 Mill Hill Road, Acton, would prove his downfall. The two men made contact on 22 April in a phone call that laid clear Caleb's brief.

Hari, concocting "a friend" (himself) whose wife (Doris) was having an affair with a mechanic (Herbert), Caleb heard how this "friend" (Hari) wanted the man killed. He suggested Caleb place a bomb in Herbert's garage, made clear he did not want Herbert shot, set a deadline for the murder of 4 May, and asked if Caleb had anyone he could trust to help with the operation.

When the two men met in person, 11am on April 30 at the Ealing Common traffic lights, a man called Percy Summers joined them as this anyone to trust for help with the operation. 

Ealing Common Junction in the 1930s

Caleb had met with Summers after his phone call with Hari to voice, one presumes, a concern or two he had with being hired as a paid assassin. 

"Is everything ready? Have you got the bomb?" Hari asked them. Green assured him it was made of nitroglycerine, which left no trace. Hari continued: "Will it go off? You hear of bombs that do not go off?" and repeated their target was not to be shot, "he must be bombed".

With a roughly sketched map to Herbert's address (Woodlands, Charville Lane, Hillingdon Heath) and further instructions for the murder to happen at night time (Summers suggested eight o'clock, but Hari said "Night time – eight o'clock is not night"), there was one final, important detail Hari insisted on: that nothing happen before Thursday, May 4, because his "friend" needed time to escape the country.

"There will be a big inquiry and it will be in all the papers," he told Caleb and Summers. "He will be questioned and his wife will suspect him, but if he is not here when it happens it will be all right. He will write to his wife and say 'As you will not come back to me I am going away'".

The three men arranged to meet again on Ealing Common, on 2 May, for Hari to pay half of the agreed £50 (two months' wages) ahead of the murder.

But at nine o'clock that night, when Hari was sitting in his car in Grange Road, it was Summers who drove up nearby, accompanied not by Caleb, but also two detective sergeants. 

Opening the passenger-side door of Hari's car, Summers said he was under arrest.

"Why?" Hari asked.

"You will be charged with trying to incite this man here – Green – to murder a man named Finch".

"I say it is all wrong", said Hari at Ealing Police Station, where he was officially charged.

Brought before Ealing Magistrates' Court and charged with soliciting, encouraging and endeavouring to make Caleb and Summers murder Herbert, Hari was denied bail and remanded into custody until his case went to the Old Bailey on 27 June.

Christmas Humphreys, son of well-known judge and Ealing resident Sir Travers Humphreys, led the case for the defence who entered a plea of not guilty.

He emphasised Hari was a hardworking man, very much in love with Doris, and that his father had fallen ill as a result of recent events.

"The girl does not want him?" the judge asked Humphreys, who replied: "I think she is more content with Mr Finch".

Hari was bound over for three years and would have to return to India, although he was last noted in 1947 as living in Nasmyth Road, Hammersmith, married to another woman.

The England & Wales Marriage Index records show Herbert E V Finch and Doris E Landgraf married and had a long life together.