The new script was so preposterous that only appeal court judges of the old school could have fallen for it. The forensic scientists were persuaded to rewrite their evidence – and were caught red-handed in open court. The long list of charges against the Balcombe Street men was edited to omit any reference to Guildford and Woolwich, even though they were prepared to admit responsibility and indeed able to describe what they had done in such detail that it wasn’t possible to pretend that they hadn’t been involved. Instead the authorities resorted to a cover-up. At this point alarm bells ought to have rung. They immediately owned up to the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. In December 1975, four members of an IRA unit that had terrorised London for months were captured in what became known as the siege of Balcombe Street. No sooner had they been convicted than the case against them began to unravel. They lived dissolute lives – in a squat in Kilburn, drinking, gambling, taking drugs and occasionally shoplifting. Armstrong, Conlon and Richardson were unlikely IRA bombers. The teenager, Carole Richardson, was Armstrong’s girlfriend. Like many others of their generation, they had fled to London to escape the Troubles and in search of work. The men – Patrick Armstrong, Gerry Conlon and Paul Hill – came from the Falls Road area of Belfast. The forensic scientists were persuaded to rewrite their evidence – and were caught red-handed in open court They received some of the longest sentences in British criminal history. Protests that the confessions had been extracted by violence and intimidation were brushed aside likewise the evidence of alibi witnesses. Their confessions – unrecorded and unwitnessed – were the only evidence against them. They would become known as the Guildford Four. Three months after the bombings, three young Irishmen and a 17-year-old English girl were arrested and after several days in the custody of the Surrey police they confessed to responsibility for the bombings. In so doing the bombers lit a long fuse that ultimately detonated under the entire British criminal justice system. A month later another bomb was thrown through the window of a public house in Woolwich, killing two and injuring 28 others. In October 1974 the IRA detonated bombs in two public houses in Guildford, killing five people (four of them soldiers) and injuring 65 others.