Read Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes for Free Online

office a small lamp illuminated the desk at which the night man sat, writing away. The rest of the room was in darkness.
    He looked up as I came in. ‘What d’you want?’ he asked. An aggressive and unwelcoming greeting was quite normal from most of this department, especially to a probationer, the lowest form of life in a Police station.
    ‘Can you give me a lift with this file please? I could do with a bit of advice.’
    ‘Not now, I’m interviewing,’ came the gruff reply.
    ‘Interviewing who?
    ‘This bloke – he’s done loads of burglaries and I want to get them all cleared up.’
    ‘I bloody haven’t,’ came a muffled voice, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness outside the pool of light on the desk I saw a man standing next to it. I looked closer and saw he had a metal wastepaper bin on his head.
    ‘You’ve done them and you’ll cough to them,’ said the detective, and as he did so he picked up his truncheon from the desk and hit the waste bin with a loud ‘clang’.
    ‘I’ll come back later when you’re less busy,’ I said. This was dangerous territory, and something which I felt I had better leave alone, given my lack of experience and insecurity in the job.
    In those days it was wise as a member of uniform staff to keep away from the CID office unless you really had to go there. I never came across the ‘upturned bin’ interview technique again – it was obviously that detective’s own speciality. However in those low-technology days there was a more widely used interview ‘skill’ involving a photocopier, a piece of machinery of which few prisoners had any great knowledge. A sheet of paper would have the word ‘LIAR’ written on it in bold capitals, and be placed under the copier lid. Two wires would be secreted round the back of the machine, out of sight of the interviewee, and the other ends of the wires secured round his thumbs before the questioning began. The photocopier, it was explained, was a lie detector. Every reply that didn’t fit with the interviewers’ suspicions was duly checked by pressing the big button on the machine. The machine would oblige by producing a piece of paper with the word ‘LIAR’ on it, and the interview would progress, usually downhill, from there.

Three
    The very one-sided partnership with my first Tutor ended unexpectedly after only a few weeks, when he managed to wangle a move onto some ‘secret squirrel squad’ in Headquarters. I never fully understood what his new post involved other than walking round HQ in a sharp suit, sitting in the canteen drinking tea with other men in suits, and pouring scorn on anyone in a uniform, but at least I was rid of him. To celebrate his departure I spontaneously bought a hamster on my way home and called it Arthur, for no particular reason.
    My joy at losing Alex was however tempered by finding out who was to replace him.
    George Upton.
    George had only lately returned to uniform duty having left the CID under a cloud. Something to do with a large number of crime reports being found in his locker. Apparently the problem wasn’t that they were in his locker, it was the fact that they were found.
    He had a reputation as an extremely direct, no-nonsense man with an outrageous sense of humour and a laugh like noneI have heard before or since – impossible to describe accurately, but probably best imagined as a donkey’s bray crossed with a chainsaw cutting through concrete. I soon realised he was a very different man to Alex, and any misgivings about his ability vanished rapidly. He had a fundamental and permanent effect on my professional ‘education’ and I soon realised I was under the wing of a true professional.
    Almost a law unto himself, George was a legend within the town as the scourge of the wrongdoer and champion of the oppressed. It sounds clichéd, but if you wanted an example of the term ‘larger than life’, George was it. Without saying anything about Alex, it was rapidly evident