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

ultimately be convicted over the attacks on Debenhams, could not have been caught at a worse moment. They were in the middle of assembling a fresh round of incendiary devices for another wave of attacks. They were wearing rubber gloves, to keep their fingerprints off the devices, and sitting around a table in the tiny, spartan room. Spread out in front of them on pages of the
Guardian
newspaper was the paraphernalia for making four more devices – dismantled alarm clocks, copper wire, bulbs, batteries and nail varnish. The soldering iron being used by the pair to make the devices was still hot.
    As Sheppard puts it: ‘There was a kick on the door at which point the door came swinging open very violently. At least four or five large suited men came through that door and we were caught red-handed.’ Lambert, however, was not with them. He seemed to have been the lucky member of the trio who had got away.
    Months later, Sheppard and Clarke were sat side by side again, this time in the dock at the Old Bailey, listening as the prosecution laid out their case against them. ‘They were in the process of what was clearly a well-practised method of constructing incendiary devices similar in every significant respect to those used at Harrow, Luton and Romford,’ Victor Temple, for the prosecution , told the court. He explained how, after arresting Sheppard and Clarke, detectives seized a black woollen mask, ‘ incriminating ’ ALF literature, press cuttings of the previous attacks on Debenhams, and ‘lists of butchers, fur shops etc’.
    Looking back, Sheppard says that the tip-off for the raid was so accurately timed that it ‘obviously came from Bob Lambert’. The police spy was one of the few people who knew that his friends Sheppard and Clarke would at that very moment be constructing more devices in the flat. But at the time, Sheppard never suspected Lambert. Indeed, for another quarter of a century, despite years languishing in jail trying to work out who the grass had been, Sheppard never once considered that his friend Bob Robinson had betrayed him.
    In part, that can be explained by Lambert’s deceptive skill when his friend was put behind bars: feigning empathy for his comrade and supporting him at every step. In a letter to another activist in March 1988, Lambert explained how he was desperate to ensure that enough supporters were visiting Sheppard, who was on remand. ‘I just had a feeling that no one would be visiting him on the Sunday and I was getting very frustrated,’ he wrote.
    Behind bars in Wandsworth jail, Sheppard felt grateful when Lambert visited him and gave him a gift – a book about philosophy . ‘I remember thinking, “Bob’s still there for me.” Actually he was the guy who put me there,’ says Sheppard. However, at the time, Sheppard and others had no reason to wonder why and how the third man in their cabal had got away. ‘For 24 years I have believed that my friend, what I thought was my friend Bob Robinson was on the run and had most likely gone to a different country and probably made a new life for himself,’ says Sheppard. ‘And I just thought – good for him, he was the lucky one that managed to get away.’
    In June 1988, Sheppard and Clarke were convicted of the arson attacks on all three Debenhams stores, which caused £9m damage. Sheppard was jailed for four years and four months, and Clarke for three and a half years. Judge Neil Denison told the pair: ‘I am not going to spend time pointing out to you what in my view are the errors of your ways for the very good reason you wouldn’t pay attention to what I’d say.’ Sheppard and Clarke already had a record of breaking the law in protest against animal cruelty. At the time of their arrests over the Debenhams attacks, Clarke had a conviction for damaging property during an anti-fur trade demonstration, while Sheppard had breached a suspended sentence for smashing a butcher’s window. In the 1990s, Sheppard spent another