Nick Davies

Bob Easton was half asleep the first time he saw her. He was lying in the doorway of the Vaudeville Theatre on the Strand, well wrapped up in his sleeping bag and his blankets, and on an ordinary night he would probably have been fast asleep by now. But it was Friday, the worst night of the week on the streets, when you’re more likely than ever to get a kick in the ribs from some lager lover, so Bob Easton had one eye open for trouble, which is how he came to spot Sharon.

The little thief sits on the old park bench with his chin on his chest and his feet in the dust, wrapping a long blade of grass around the knuckles of his hand and trying to explain his dream. Do you know the thief’s dream? He wants to go to college.

She was a middle-class white woman with an elegant style and piles of blonde hair. Her husband was an insurance broker with a taste for the good things in life. They had two daughters, aged 14 and 9, and they lived together on the edge of a provincial city in a £250,000 house with two tall poplar trees and a brand new BMW parked in the drive. Often, in the evening, they would go off together to a restaurant or a club, picking up a fine time on his American Express Gold Card.

There is a point in most miscarriages of justice when a prosecutor becomes deliberately dishonest, hiding inconvenient facts, fabricating helpful ones in order to strengthen a bogus case. But miscarriages usually do not begin with dishonesty. More often, they are born of incompetence, a simple inability to find the real culprit.

Last summer, a couple of months before she died, Georgina Robinson had an odd conversation with her brother, Julian. They were driving home to their parents’ house together and they started talking about Georgina’s work, helping the mentally ill at a small specialist centre in Torbay in south Devon.

For most of her life, Natalie Pearman was a walking portrait of an ordinary girl. She lived with her four brothers and sisters and her cat called Lucy in a neat little council house on the edge of a peaceful village in Norfolk. She liked ballet and horses and watching Neighbours after tea, she was good at drawing and painting and she had the idea that when she grew up, she would like to go into the air force so that she could be independent and travel around the world.

The Big Issue is famous for rescuing homeless people. Two thousand men, women and runaway adolescents now sell the magazine on the streets where they sleep and earn themselves enough money to survive. But it ought to be famous for something else: the Big Issue is just about the last refuge of honest, angry, investigative journalism. And there’s a lesson in that.

Bob Johnson had never been in a prison before and yet as soon as he walked through the iron gates of C Wing, he felt the familiarity of it all: the sagging men with baggy eyes and their tired shuffle of a walk; the other men, with uniforms, calling them by their first names but never quite connecting; the overwhelming staleness of the place. He had seen it all before – on the locked wards of mental hospitals. And he didn’t like it.

Theobald Mathew died early one Sunday morning in July 1983, as he lay in his sister’s arms in his villa in Le Treyas on the French Riviera. He was only 44 and his death was sudden but he had written a detailed will and appointed his lawyer and his favourite brother, Tom, as executors to carry out his wishes. His body would be shipped to England for burial and his estate would be settled very simply. Not at all.

It was a rotten time, aggressive and cynical. The task force was back from the South Atlantic, the cruise missiles were coming into Greenham Common, they were shooting to kill in Belfast, they were banning unions at GCHQ and trampling down strikers in the coal fields. It was a time of ruthlessness in Government and of the crushing of enemies. And everywhere, there was the shadow of the secret state, arrogant and apparently ominipotent.