Read Online Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police by Paul Lewis, Rob Evans - Free Book Online Page A

Bob Robinson. ‘I thought he had a high moral code,’ she says.
    Very quickly they were spending most of their free time together, attending concerts and spending long, lazy weekends at home. Karen was aware that Lambert had a young son froma previous relationship and he occasionally brought him along when he saw her. But on the whole he came across as a free spirit with a politically rebellious streak. Lambert confided in Karen that he was deeply involved in campaigning for animal rights and even admitted he was part of the ALF. Karen in contrast had little interest in political activism. ‘He was always asking me to go to meetings. He introduced me to lots of activists. I did not realise what the ALF was,’ she says. At the time Karen was working as an administrative assistant at the state-owned Central Electricity Generating Board. She kept quiet about her job as she feared Lambert’s activist friends would take against her because the CEGB was running nuclear power stations.
    Karen had less idealistic hopes for the future. She wanted to develop her career and settle down to a family life, ideally with Lambert. The SDS man gave every impression that life together was a possibility.
    After more than a year together, Karen felt their relationship was moving forward. She had made it clear that she wanted to start a family with Lambert and he appeared to feel the same way. He had been to see her parents three times. But when Karen eventually broached the question of conceiving children head on, Lambert surprised her by saying that he was not interested. She wrote in her diary that it had been a ‘black day’. ‘I remember crying a lot that day,’ she says. ‘I was just so shocked.’
    The couple were spending most of their time together at her house in east London, which she shared with seven others. Lambert lived in what she remembers as a grotty flat above a barber’s in Graham Road, Hackney. ‘He had a single man’s room with a shared kitchen,’ she says. It was almost completely empty. ‘He claimed to be not interested in possessions,’ Karen says. It was the same line Lambert had used on Charlotte when she had visited his threadbare Highgate flat a few years earlier.
    There was a time during the summer months of 1987 when Lambert was maintaining a complex web of deception involving women. He spent at least one day of the week with his wife and two children in the suburbs. The rest of the week was either spent with Karen or Charlotte, whom he was still sleeping with. Charlotte was desperate to rekindle her relationship with the father of her son. Lambert would often come around to her flat with a ‘takeaway and a bottle of wine’, a code they developed for a night of romance.
    Lambert must have known he was toying with Charlotte’s emotions, giving her false hope. There was no chance of a reconciliation . He knew that Bob Robinson was soon going to have to vanish for good. His duplicity was becoming more intricate. Lambert made sure that Karen and Charlotte never met each other and told both women different stories. He told Karen that his son was the result of a brief fling with a woman who had tricked him into having a baby by claiming she was taking the contraceptive pill when she was not. Whenever he picked up his son from Charlotte, he made sure that Karen stayed in the van, parked around the corner.
    There was a reason for Lambert to maintain ties with both women: they would be useful when he was manufacturing the end of his deployment. Every SDS officer needed a plausible excuse to drop everything and disappear – and it was important that there were people close enough to them to vouch for their vanishing act.
    Following the arrests of Geoff Sheppard and Andrew Clarke over the Debenhams attacks, Lambert began to arrange his departure. He told Karen, Charlotte and other friends that he could be next in line to be arrested and he believed that Special Branch were hot on his trail. He told Karen