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So far, so good
It looked very much as if Lambert was guilty. And it would have been easy to have charged him with robbery, even if it was unlikely that the assault charge that the victim was pressing for wouldn’t stick. However, there were one or two things that made Anna Davenport cautious about rushing to charge him.
The first thing was Gavin. I think I’ve told you before that PC Gavin Hughes rather specialised in getting to know the rough sleepers that hung around his patch. He’d come across Lambert before and he reckoned that pinching a woman’s wallet while she was lying helpless on the ground was out of character for him – especially considering that, at the time, he appeared to have been unusually sober. Lambert had been in trouble with the police on numerous occasions, but always as a result of drink and never in relation to assault or pickpocketing. In Gavin’s opinion, Lambert might not have been above picking up a purse that he found lying around and stealing the cash from it, but he would not have rummaged through Ms Rowland’s bag looking for valuables to steal.
Poor Gavin! I think he could see years of patient work building up trust with the homeless community going up in smoke over this one arrest – particularly if it turned out that we’d got it wrong.
The other spanner in the works was the forensic evidence – or rather the lack of it. As you’d expect, the purse was smothered with fingermarks, so it wasn’t easy to pick out any of them clearly. The team manged to identify some as belonging to Ms Rowland and they were pretty clear that there were some marks that weren’t hers. But there were none that could be matched to Lambert’s fingerprints. So the only link we had between Lambert and the purse was the location that it was found. In other words, we were assuming that the object that he threw away into the bushes while he was fleeing the scene was the purse that the girls, Katherine and Aimee, found a few minutes later. You might well think that he would hardly have bothered lying about throwing something away if it wasn’t the stolen purse, but we knew that the defence counsel would be able to come up with any number of reasons why Lambert might not have wanted to admit to what it was.
Anna instigated a fingertip search of the area around Lambert’s flight path. She wanted to be able to confirm in court that every effort had been made to check his story that he had thrown something else, other than the purse, away as he ran. She also wanted to be able to cast doubt on any future claim that he made as to what it really was that he threw away.
Meanwhile, another witness came forward, with a different version of events that changed things completely.
Dr Anastasia Mortlake was a retired Zoology don from Lady Margaret Hall, which is one of the five Women’s colleges from the days before they all became co-educational. It’s situated at the top end of the University Parks and there’s a passage through from the parks to Norham Gardens, which is the road that leads to the main entrance of the college. When she retired, Dr Mortlake moved out of her college rooms and into a flat in one of the old Victorian houses in Fyfield Road, which leads off Norham Gardens on the opposite side from the alleyway from the parks. She suffered from arthritis, but was otherwise very fit for her eighty-four years. She was in the habit of taking a walk in the parks each morning and whenever the weather was suitable she would take her lunch with her and eat it sitting on one of the benches there. She had not got involved in the incident between Michael Lambert and Joanne Rowland, but when she saw the reports in the Oxford Times she contacted the police station and asked to be permitted to give a statement about what she has seen.
When you see the statement, which she insisted on writing herself, you will see shy we had to take it seriously, even though it was not consistent with what the other witnesses had told us. Dr Mortlake had specialised in studying animal behaviour and had been acclaimed for her work on social interaction of South American primates. So she was trained in observing animals in the wild and in recording her observations.