Two hours later, the good people of St Matthew’s, the lovely 18th-century church 10 minutes’ walk away in Bethnal Green, were in a panic. Their beautiful and historic altar cross, installed in the church after it was bombed on the first day of the Blitz in 1940, was gone. There was no trace of further damage in the church, nor anything else stolen, so the Rev Kevin Scully emailed his parishioners for help. By 4.15pm a local blogger informed of the theft had seen Laurence’s image from Brick Lane and a parishioner sent it to the vicar.

“I said ‘That’s it’,” says Scully. “The crucifix is extraordinarily beautiful and very distinctive. I felt a mixture of awe and distress really.” As well as taking a copy to Bethnal Green police station, he emailed a copy to two journalists who sang in the church’s choir — the Times’s defence correspondent, Tom Coghlan, and me. “The good folk of St Matthew’s Bethnal Green may need the helping hand of the Standard,” Tom told me, thinking that a story in our pages might help to identify the man in the picture. I promised to put a story in Monday’s paper, but as it turned out, things moved faster.

The full article can be found here