The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 34

OBSERVER SUNDAY 25 SEPTEMBER 1988 34 In IB WffiM but that night was out dining with clients in central London. He returned to his flat just after 10.30 to be met by his flatmate, who told him that the police had been and were now wanting to see him at Fulham police station. Road and in the opposite direction from her office? Johnstone, by now taking command in Fulham police station, immediately gave orders that the car be foren-sically examined and photographed at first light. In the meantime, another policeman would be posted at the car throughout the night and one would be waiting too at the Sturgis office in Fulham Road, just in case Susannah turned up for work in the morning. Johnstone left to visit Shorrolds Road and Stevenage Road for himself and asked the uniformed branch to start house-to-house inquiries near where the car was found.

The two detectives with Lamplugh, hearing news of the find on their car radio, raced to Stevenage Road. Other police cars had reached the scene first. They were clustered around Susannah's car as they had come to a halt, the urgent jargon of radio operators blasting through open police car doors, the flashing blue lights on the roofs dramatically iUuminating the pavement around them. Lamplugh Continued from page 33 that something had gone very-wrong. He would go to tie police himself to report that one of his staff called Susannah Lamplugh 5ft 6ins tall, of medium build and with blonde-streaked hair, wearing a peach blouse, black jacket and grey skirt, two rings and low-cut stiletto-heeled shoes had simply disappeared.

Mrs Lamplugh's first reaction was to phone her husband Paul, who worked for the Law Society in Chancery Lane. But he had already left for home. She tried Richard, Susannah's brother, who was a year older and who ran a fish farm in Hertfordshire. But she could not get through: a combination of nerves and dyslexia, which had dogged all her children too, meant that she could not get the numbers right as she dialled: her fingers would not do what her brain wanted them to do. Her two other daughters were away in New Zealand, but she finally contacted Doug Williams, an old schoolmate of Richard and a member of Susannah's social set.

Then Gurdon rang back: alas, there was still nothing at all to report. An hour later, Paul Lamplugh began the daily commuter's evening trudge from Mortlake station he had followed for 17 years: down from the station, across Upper Richmond Road, then home to suburbia in East Sheen Avenue. He had long since known his wife was prone to dramatisation, but as soon as he saw her he realised that something serious had happened: 'We've got a she told him as he entered the front door. 'Suzy hasn't come back from He went white with shock and from that moment realised that something terrible had happened even fearing at some level that his eldest daughter was already dead. But he knew he had to be serious, calm, and rational: not to panic, to work out what needed to be done.

Gurdon, meanwhile, had been phoning Charing Cross and St Stephen's hospitals: no Susannah Lamplugh had been admitted after any accident. He went to Fulham police station to report the situation, but there was such a long queue he abandoned the idea and went to a house-showing appointment. Life had to go on. When he returned to the office he tried ringing Susannah's flat, for she had lived away from her parents' home for six years. But there was no reply.

He returned to Shorrolds Road: still nothing. Exactly 'six hours after Susannah left the Sturgis PC Duncan Parker answered the phone at Fulham police station: 'Can I help At the other end was a breathless Gurdon. Within 10 dlers with their alsatians started methodically searching the gutters, the river bank, the towpath, a nearby luxury block of flats and garages in the area around Stevenage Road. It was dark and they could see little, but there was no time like the present for such work: it was beginning to rain, and rain could wash away vital evidence. Paul Lamplugh, meanwhile, arrived back in East Sheen to discover his wife watching television, still desperately focusing her mind on something.

She felt a great urge to do something too. It was now 12.30 in the morning, but she decided there was no choice but to take the matter into her own hands. She would find Susannah herself. Her husband loaded their two dogs an ageing black cocker spaniel called Snoopy and a golden retriever, Leo into the car, and they set off once again back across the Thames towards Stevenage Road. They soon saw Susannah's car, now guarded by a lone uniformed constable, and decided to walk along an opening from Stevenage Road that went down to the Thames.

The dogs, they hoped, might be able to pick up Susannah's scent. In the early hours of the morning it was eerily quiet down by the river; the tide was half out, and it was now drizzling. The Lam-plughs walked up and down the towpath, convincing themselves that their daughter must be close, possibly imprisoned in one of die scores of lock-up garages. They peered into back gardens, opened shed doors, the trusty family pets by their side aware only that something they could not comprehend was happening. In desperation Diana Lamplugh started to shout for Susannah: 'Suzy.

Suzy. Her voice carried over the empty and silent Thames, amplified by the still night air. But there was no answer. The commotion by the river's edge, meanwhile, had caught the- attention of the police engaged in their methodical search and Detective Inspector Johnstone came over to the Lamplughs and introduced himself. The Lamplugh dogs, he told them' politely, were hampering the professional police dogs in their search and confusing scent patterns.

He felt it would be better for all concerned if they went home and got some sleep. They found that prospect difficult: their adrenalin was flowing and they felt, in Diana Lamplugh's words, as though they were 'on fire'. But reluctantly they agreed to return home, where Paul had his nightly whisky and Diana her vodka and lime. For, the detectives, there, was to be no sleep that night. By the time Diana and Paul Lamplugh fell into a surprisingly sound sleep back in East Sheen, more than 500 police man hours had already been devoted to a fruitless search for.

their daughter. The mystery about what had happened to Susannah Lamplugh after she left her office at 12.40 that Monday lunchtime was deepening by the hour. Andrew Stephen 1988. NEXT SUNDAY: Life with the Putney Set inn? duty outside. Two files Mis-per Report FF584154 and PNC No 139534C were formally opened.

The next step was to contact a senior CID officer at home, so that he could take charge of what was already becoming a major investigation. That night, Detective Inspector Johnstone happened to be the officer on call for emergencies. In less than a week Johnstone, married with three young daughters, would be 37. He had been 17 years in the police and was currently involved in the investigation into the murder of an elderly lady named Florence Tisdale who had been raped and strangled the previous Wednesday, the day the rest of the world was watching the marriage of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in Westminster Abbey. nhe phone rang at nine that evening in John-.

stone surrey nome. 'Go to her home address Johnstone ordered. 'Whatever you do, get in He had to rule out the possibility that Susannah was at her flat in bed with a lover, oblivious to all the mayhem around her or that she had simply gone home feeling wretched with influenza and had forgotten to tell anyone. Neither seemed likely, but both had happened in other cases and so had to be eliminated as possibilities. said Johnstone, 'go back to Shorrolds Road, too.

Get uniformed to organise a street grid search for the To Johnstone, all the circumstances already added up -to something sinister. It did not sound right, an apparently normal and well-adjusted girl who went out at lunchtime without even her handbag and never returned. 'Missing persons' files are classified by police as either 'active' or 'non-active', but this was definitely an 'active' case one in which there were 'circumstances which must dictate suspicion'. He decided to return to London immediately, getting in his red Talbot Solara and speeding up the A217 towards Fulham police station. Back in East Sheen, Paul Lamplugh downed a whisky and ate some food, intentionally keeping to a cool routine.

He phoned the local Putney police, who to his irritation did not seem to share his urgent view of the matter. So he got in the MG sports car outside a two-seater 1972 GT model he had recently given his wife and set off for Fulham police station. He left his wife sitting in their front living room, numb with shock but they realised that someone had to stay at home in case Susannah tried to phone. She might be held prisoner somewhere and need help desperately and theirs would probably be the first number she would try. He drove over Putney bridge and north across the Thames, already going over in his mind about what fate could possibly have befallen his daughter.

Perhaps it was all some terrible misunderstanding. He joined another queue TABLE WATER TALK NUMBERS "The average globe artichoke? said Mark, "has a water content of 36. The average human being has a water content of 66. "Which throws a new light on its rela tive value and ours," he continued, looking gloomily at the tanned, healthy bodies around the swimming pool. I Jane poured her- self a glass of Volvic mineral water from trie blue plastic bottle.

"Artichokes don't drink Volvic," she said. "It is naturally filtered through alternate layers of fine porous rocks and the hardest volcanic stone. Andesite, for example, and Basalt. Which makes it un usually pure, even for mineral water, and remarkably low in mineral content. Gonventually pure." "That only said Mark, unwilling tp be comforted, "that they have more substance but we are a better class of water." back shelf; in the map rack in the driver's door, a purse.

But by this time they had also noticed a fourth clue, and possibly the most significant. The driver's seat was pushed back from its forward position, the one any woman of Susannah's height and build would use. To the detectives the implication was all too clear: a man had driven Susannah Lamplugh's car to Stevenage Road. The frustration, though, was growing for Paul Lamplugh. He was still waiting lamely in the police car, not allowed to come too close to his daughter's car lest he impede vital evidence.

Already, his daughter and her belongings had become public property, and he was just a bystander even though, just 24 hours before, he and his wife had bidden farewell to Susannah when she drove from their house in this same car. She had been to see. her parents for an evening and among the last words she had said to them were: 'Life is for living, you As she left she had remembered an interview her father was due to have in. a week's time for another post at the Law Society and wished him luck. Then she was gone.

She had been alive, life was routine, ordinary but in a matter of hours there had been one of those awful transformations that come with sudden, unexpected trauma. He felt strangely dulled as he watched the police go about their work, reporting on their car radios, conferring about evidence. Didn't they realise this was his daughter they were talking about? The police him Fulham police station, where Mark Gurdon and Adam Lee-good a 27-year-old re-insurance broker, and Susannah's current boyfriend were also waiting. Leegood was the first man to be brought in for questioning; it is one of the more distasteful tasks for police in such a situation to have to interrogate first those close to the presumed victim, even though they may be more shocked and upset than anyone. But nine out of 10 murders are committed by people known to the victim, and so for that reason alone Leegood automatically became the first suspect.

It turned out he lived in a flat in Clapham, at Fulham police station didn't they realise this was serious? but soon found the policemen on the desk were taking the case extremely seriously. The two detectives who had been to Shorrolds Road had just received Johnstone's first order, and asked Lamplugh to go with them to Susannah's 70,000 top-floor, two-bedroom flat in Putney, back south across the river. There, in time-honoured police fashion, one of them broke open the door with his shoulder. It was now dusk. The flat was completely empty and there was no sign of either Susannah or her flat mate, Nick Bryant, a 25-year-old advertising executive.

The detectives quickly searched for any obvious messages that might have given some hint where, if anywhere, Susannah was planning to go that lunchtime. They looked for numbers on the board by the phone, but with no success. There was just a feeling of humdrum normality; in her bedroom lay a half-finished dress, with an incomplete sleeve beside the sewing-ma- I I I The hunt begins: chine her mother had lent her not long before. By this time Bryant had still not returned home, so the detectives secured the flat as best they could and drove off with Paul Lamplugh, vainly scouring the west London streets for any sign of official missing person number FF584154. They had been in the car for only minutes when they heard crackling over the radio the first significant news of the evening.

Moments before lO o'clock, PC Christopher Dol-lery, nearing the endr of hist 2.30-10.00 late shift, reported from his patrol car that he had found Susannah's vehicle. Johnstone's grid search had paid off. The Fiesta was parked facing north on the eastern side of Stevenage Road, a nondescript residential road about half a mile long, which motorists had used as a short cut to by-pass the busy Fulham Palace Road before barriers were erected to prevent them from doing so. But already detectives were faced with the first mystery of the case: why was Susannah Lamplugh's car parked in a road leading nowhere, a good mile from the house she should have been visiting in Shorrolds MM 1 ish. mm? i vtv TO TCI Police and dog-handlers search open ground.

was mere untu 3.30 a.m., being gently but firmly interrogated in a bare interview room. Could he account for his movements during the day? If he had lunch with anyone, what were their names? Did he have colleagues who could vouch for his presence in his office during the day? What business meetings did he have? What was his relationship with Susannah? Had he had any recent disagreements with her? Had he, in fact, anything to do with her disappearance? Patiently he recounted his day. That afternoon he had tried to phone Susannah at Sturgis at 4.45, and left a message. He had last spoken to her on the phone at 10.15 the previous evening after she returned to her flat from seeing her parents and was due to go to a party with her the next night. He had known her for 11 months, but had been her lover for only three.

He was a member of the so-called 'Putney Set' and like Susannah was an enthusiastic windsurfer. He had a good relationship with her and had no idea what could have happened. Nothing was amiss when they had spoken on the phone the previous evening. Business contacts, friends, were all duly noted down by police: all would be thoroughly checked, though no one had any reason to suppose Leegood was anything other than innocent. It would nevertheless take a lot of work, and 11 statements from others, before he could be positively and formally eliminated from the inquiry into Susannah's disappearance.

With all this urgent activity going on around him, Paul Lamplugh was becoming frustrated inside Fulham police station. He had been sitting uselessly in a bleak interview room for what seemed to him an eternity, apparently having only an unimportant walk-on role in something that was central to his life. He was especially fond of his eldest daughter and, as with his other children, night after night had helped her overcome her dyslexia by coaching her successfully through her. Perhaps there: could still be Ka rational explanation for what had happened and all would be well But he was only a nuisance here, he decided, and there was depressingly little news. It was time to go back to his wife, vainly waiting in East Sheen for the call that might be from Susannah.

Detective Inspector Johnstone had himself questioned Leegood, but was now shuttling between Shorrolds Road and Stevenage Road. The first priority was to organise a 'walking street search' in the area where the Fiesta was found. Ten police constables, two sergeants, Johnstone himself, and three CID dog-han attendant evils cannot serve as a positive model for this Polish opposition, struggling courageously for a free, just, decent and prosperous I am sure you will agree that your 'right to shorten letters' cannot justify the distortion by ommision of an attempt at reasoned argument on an important political topic. Christopher Bauer-Czarnomti, London W4. Any advance? I was intrigued to read in Peter Hillmore's column last week about the advance I was supposed to be about to get for my proposed biography of Harold Wilson.

Presumably, as a conscientious journalist, Hillmore checked the figure with the remarkably generous publisher in question before printing it. I would be most grateful if he could tell me who it is, so that I can get in touch. I imagine that the cheque is stuck in the post. Ben Pimlott, London Nl minutes established police procedures slipped smoothly into gear. Details were entered into the computerised police dispatch' system.

A description of the car Susannah used, and which she had presumably driven to her appointment a white Ford Fiesta owned by Sturgis, registration number 396 GAN was flashed to all cars, motorbikes and police men on the beat in the area. Two plainclothes detectives were immediately sent to 'enter and search' 37 Shorrolds Road. Nothing of apparent relevance was found, but a constable was posted on guard Letters was made to stay in the detectives' car while they assessed the scene. First, they soon decided, it seemed likely the car had been parked in a hurry: it was slightly askew from the pavement and was overlapping the entrance to a garage by about 18 inches. Second, the handbrake was off.

Third, the driver's door was unlocked but the passenger's locked, suggesting immediately that only one person had driven the car to that place. etectives could make only a cursory examination of the car, because they had to be careful not to impede the work of the forensic scientists due to arrive at dawn. They could not afford to spoil any possible fingerprints, or remove hairs or fibres possibly even invisible to the naked eye. But in the meantime they had to establish there was no crucial evidence that could lead them immediately to Susannah. Gingerly, they opened a door and lifted the luggage flap at the back to make sure nothing was concealed in the car boot.

What they could see clearly was Susannah's straw hat on the Shadow box: Ivor Thatcher threat to Solidarity As the editing of my original letter -to you (last week) eliminated about 80 per cent of its contents, including all my arguments against the Thatcher-Walesa meeting leaving little more than a few phrases that are merely demagogic when torn from their context allow me to restate these arguments as briefly as I can. I think that a meeting between Mrs Thatcher and Lech Walesa could be damaging to the Solidarity union, and little more than a 'cynical, anti-Communist publicity stunt' on the part of Mrs Thatcher, because of her well-known and oft-demonstrated hostility to militant trade unions, even when their militancy is objectively justified (as is certainly the case in Poland). In support of this opinion, I quoted the 'Peterborough' column in the Daily Telegraph (10 September), which, inter alia, cited a 'highly-placed source' Chelsea Bridge House. Queenstown Road. London SW84NN.

01-627 0700 Why the Munich myth must be dispelled Angel of Doncaster wins our 25 picture prize. How exam grades are awarded The chief examiner of NEA English Literature, Philip O'Hear, (Letters, 11 September), writes: 'The only criterion used to award grades is the quality of the work of the candidates By contrast, Section 10 (B) of the NEA English Literature Syllabus states: 'For example, if it is found that more than half of the candidates assessed as should be awarded grade all candidates at that centre assessed as will be awarded grade B. Exactly the same procedure applies when it is found necessary to lower candidates' grades'. This is an unequivocal indication that some grades are awarded to candidates on the strength (or weakness) of other candidates' work. C.

G.Johnson, North Shields. Home births I am writing to reply to Che suggestion by Annabel Ferriman that homebirths may be stopped because GPs won't pay higher insurance premiums (News, last week). Has she not heard of midwives who are the people who actually do the deliveries at home? In Bloomsbury Health Authority in London, only five GPs in two practices are prepared to cover for home births and so 70-plus deliveries a year are undertaken by community and independent midwives supported only by the Emergency Obstetric Unit. A midwife is legally compelled to care for any woman who calls her in labour. She has no option to refuse even if a mother with high-risk labour does not agree to go to hospital.

GP insurance is a minor issue in this debate. Ros Stroud, London N7. The Observer welcomes letters for publication. Please write early as the final selection is made on Thursday morning. The Editor reserves the right to shorten letters unless readers specify that their correspondence must be published in full or not at all.

SIR In his monstrously misleading article as your guest Political Diarist (last week), Robert Harris follows the now embedded myth mat what was at stake at Munich was whether we should fight for the Czechs. In fact, Chamberlain's concern was, above all, to prevent the Czechs from fighting for themselves, and the French from honouring their solemn treaty obligation to go to their aid should Germany attack. Munich was only the final scenario of a policy which the British Government had -been following more or less consciously since it came to power in 1935. The 'wets' in the Foreign Office were not those who opposed appeasement, as Robert Harris seems to think, but those who concealed, or perhaps honestly did not recognise, the true war aims of German policy and the iniquity of the Nazi regime. The Czechoslovak Government realised this from the start and with greater foresight than ourselves immediately started to fortify its frontier, build up its army and air force, augment its massive armament industry and tried to develop the only international security system which would have prevented the German General Staff from allowing Hitler to fight a war on two fronts the Franco-Czech-Russian alliance.

Throughout the pre-war period, we not only refused to have anything to do with this but allowed Hitler to 'enter his back yard' in the Rhineland, thus depriving France of this demilitarised safety zone on her frontiers, and positively encouraged him to look for German expansion in Central Europe. Neither Austria nor the Sudeten-land had ever formed part of Germany before. What appalled Chamberlain was not the weakness of Czechoslovakia, but its strength, and the dreadful fear that if the Czechs defended themselves, we and the French would be drawn in. The Berchtesgaden-Godesberg mwripfls were con cerned not with preventing Hitler from invading Czechoslovakia but making sure that the Czechs would neither defend their fortifications nor use their army and air force. At 2 a.m.

on 22 September 1938, the British and French Ministers aroused President Benes from his sleep to tell him that if war broke out, not only would neither we nor the French intervene but on the contrary would hold the Czechs responsible for any. catastrophe which followed. Benes surrendered. The German armies marched in, took possession of the tanks, the planes, the guns, the armament factories and turned them against us and the French on the Western Front, defeating the French and expelling us from Europe less than two years later. 'A triumph for all that was best and most enlightened in British life'.

Shiela Grant Duff, Observer correspondent in Prague 1936-37, Castletownshend, Co. Cork. I doubt if Robert Harris's assessment of 'Munich' (Political Diary, last week) is entirely correct but he is certainly right about one thing: many of those that (in retrospect) were violently anti-Munich 'at the time' were, in fact, very pleased at the time! I myself, a member of the Labour Party, was bitterly opposed to Chamberlain and the policy of appeasement but I can still remember experiencing a great gush of relief! The case of the Daily Worker is interesting. A leading article began by saying that, at least, everyone would be pleased that the streets of London, Paris, Berlin and Prague, were not, that morning, running with blood, but a day or two later, it apologised. Denis Pethebridge, Banbury.

Noel Annan reviews Munich books, page 45. reporting that Mrs Thatcher 'sees Solidarity's more violent and rebellious moments as reminiscent of the worst excesses of British trade unions in the 1970s. My original letter continued: 'Lech Walesa, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership of Solidarity in its struggle for human, civil, and labour rights, and still a central figure in Poland's political life, certainly does not need a meeting with Mrs Thatcher, of all people, to enhance his status. 'Perhaps Mrs should be made aware that the majority of the democratic opposition in Poland supports a social democratic programme of political, economic and social reforms and is unlikely to be sympathetic to the ultra-rightist ideology (its strident anti-Communism notwithstanding) which she champions; and that Thatcherite Britain with its industrial decline, high levels of unemployment and poverty, homeles-sness, crime, its widespread dereliction in the under-funded public sector and all the other Pf. I'om the Ckkvie spring.