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12 Conclusion
And what, I hear to asking, was it that Lambert threw into the bushes? What we found, after hours of patient searching, was a small plastic wallet containing cannabis resin. As soon as we identified the contents, we had out suspicions that this could be what we were looking for. Examination of the outside of the wallet revealed several fingermarks which we managed to match up to Lambert’s prints. We were still no further forward as far as find out who took Ms Rowland’s purse (and presumably removed her thirty pounds in notes before discarding it in the bushes) but we did have enough evidence to charge Lambert with possession of an illegal substance.
Reviewing the witness statements again, we came to the conclusion that what must have happened was that one of the onlookers who rushed to Ms Rowland’s aid – probably the helpful person who handed her bag to her when she was sitting on the bench after her fall – helped himself to the purse and made off with it. Probably he was among those who chased after Lambert when the alarm was raised that the purse had gone missing and he managed to extract the money while nobody was looking – all eyes were on Lambert, after all. Then, when he heard that Lambert had thrown something in the bushes, he took the opportunity of getting rid of the incriminating purse in a location that would implicate the most likely suspect – probably while pretending to join in the search for the missing item. Finally, he walked away without being noticed, which would have been easy to do since everyone was concentrating on hunting for the purse.
In the end, we let Lambert off with a police caution for possessing cannabis. The quantity was small and almost certainly for his own use. PC Hughes was confident that he was no more than a very minor offender and keen to give him the benefit of the doubt. He had already suffered the indignity of being arrested and held overnight in a police cell, which was rather a poor reward for having been the first to offer assistance to Ms Rowland.
We checked and re-checked the fingermarks on the purse against the police database, but we could not find a match. In the end, we called Ms Rowland in to tell her that we were unable to identify who had taken her purse and stolen her thirty pounds. She was very indignant and insisted that it must have been Lambert. I pointed out that he had no time to take the money from the purse and if he had done so, someone would have been bound to see him. She then reverted to saying that she did not think that there had been any money in the purse.
‘In that case,’ Anna said, very reasonably, ‘you haven’t lost anything, so I would try to put the whole incident behind you, if I were you.’
‘But he assaulted me! Aren’t you going to charge him with that?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I explained as patiently as I could. ‘He says that he was trying to help you up.’
‘And you believe him?’ she sounded incredulous.
‘In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we have no choice.’ I told her. ‘We have to treat him as innocent until he is proved guilty.’
She left eventually, still clearly very dissatisfied. I wasn’t very pleased with the situation myself. Not because I thought that Lambert was guilty, but because we hadn’t been able to find out who had really taken Ms Rowland’s purse – and because Ms Rowland and most of the witnesses would all go on believing that they knew exactly who had done it and that the police had let them down by failing to prosecute.