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

about a ‘big crisis’ in the ALF; there was talk of an infiltrator in their midst whowas providing police with detailed information about the group’s activities. Lambert said he feared he would be arrested and charged with some kind of conspiracy, meaning a jail term as long as 10 years.
    Lambert was considered something of an expert when it came to smoking out informants. A few times before he had made accusations about other ALF campaigners, accusing them of facilitating police. He had even written a guide for animal rights activists to work out how to spot infiltrators. Now he was telling friends that he believed their clandestine group had been so successfully penetrated that the law was closing in around them.
    In 1988, the SDS pulled off a clever ruse to convince Lambert’s friends that his anxieties were justified. By then Karen had moved into a flat in a high-rise block on the Nightingale Estate in Hackney with two of Lambert’s friends.
    Early one morning, detectives raided the flat, letting slip that they were ‘looking for Bob’. He was not there, and neither was Karen, but the news quickly filtered out that Special Branch were hunting for Lambert. The fake raid was, according to one former Special Branch officer, ‘done for maximum effect’ to add credibility to Lambert’s cover story. It was a trick the Special Branch was to orchestrate on other occasions.
    Over the last few months of 1988, Lambert and Karen discussed what to do. It appeared obvious that Lambert had to make himself scarce for a few years. Karen said she wanted to join him on the run, but he insisted he would have to go alone. He said that she should not waste her life as a fugitive, constantly looking over her shoulder. He said she deserved better: the rewarding career and family that she wanted so badly. Karen remembers her boyfriend saying: ‘I am not good enough for you.’
    Lambert abandoned his flat and stayed for a couple of weeks in what he called a ‘safe house’ with one of Karen’s friends. Sheremembers meeting him once. ‘There was still a lot of electricity between us,’ she says.
    In December 1988, Lambert and Karen spent a week alone together in another friend’s house in Dorset to say goodbye. ‘I was heartbroken,’ she says. ‘Even when he left, I could not imagine that it had finished because we loved each other so much. I wanted to go on the run with him. I was prepared to do that for him.’ Lambert’s apparent sacrifice in not taking Karen with him made her admire him even more. He said he was going to Spain. In early 1989, Karen received a long letter from Lambert postmarked Valencia, saying he was not coming back but raising the possibility that she could join him out there. It was the cruellest of false hopes, but Lambert knew it would make his disappearance seem more genuine.
    Earlier he had been having similar discussions with Charlotte. On one visit to her flat, he entered his son’s bedroom, leaned over his cot and told him that he loved him, whispering goodbye. ‘He said he had to “go on the run” to Spain, owing to him being involved in the firebombing at the Debenhams store in Harrow,’ Charlotte recalls. ‘He promised he would never abandon his son and said that as soon as it was safe I could bring our baby to Spain to see him.’
    Lambert knew that was never going to happen. Charlotte too received a letter from Lambert from Spain. It was the last she, or her son or Karen ever heard from Bob Robinson. He was gone.
    *
    Life for Charlotte as a single mum was never easy. With Lambert suddenly out of contact, she felt emotionally bruised and vulnerable . Later, she began a relationship with another man and married him. Her new husband treated his stepson as his biological son and to some degree was like a substitute father in Lambert’s absence. For a few years they had a happy family life. But just fiveyears into the marriage, Charlotte’s husband tragically died. She was grief-stricken,