This Does Not Constitute An Interview

"I've been to the Old Bailey before, you know?"

This got my attention. I looked at the man who I had just arrested for raping a girl.

We'd found her lying on the pavement. He had done what he wanted with her then thrown her out of a third floor window. I had arrested him some distance away.

His clothes had been carefully folded away into brown paper bags with POLICE EVIDENCE stamped across them. His hands, his mouth, and even his penis had been swabbed for telltale DNA. He had been weighed and measured, filed and stamped. He was wearing a paper suit now.

He didn't seem to mind.

"Have you?" I enquired.

We were having quite a good conversation. The Village demanded answers about this citizen's conduct but I wasn't permitted to put those questions to him. Not without a tape recorder and a solicitor present. So instead we spoke of the following:


The Village had won the Ashes.

He didn't believe me. "We never win anything," he asserted.

"Do you get on with your parents?" he asked.

I didn't want to give anything away. I get on fine with them, thank you very much, but divulging anything personal seemed dangerous. Like wading in contaminated water.

"About average," I said.

"You're lucky," he told me, "I had to go down on my Mum."


The subject quickly changed to whether you could join the Village police if you had a criminal record. Apparently he had ambitions.

"It depends," I told him.

I didn't mention that being charged with kidnap, rape, assault occassioning actual bodily harm, and making threats to murder was something that might cause problems at the job interview.


"Do you know why I'm behaving myself?" He had sat where I had told him to, once I'd removed those pesky handcuffs. He hadn't tried to rape anyone in the last twenty minutes. I suppose that counts as behaving.

"Why?" I asked.

"'Cos I know what you guys are like. Police brutality."

I shook my head. It was ridiculous.

I would soon have to go away and write eleven pages of notes in order to justify why I had arrested him. I had started them already. If I'd punched him in the face it would have been fifteen pages. Hitting him with my baton - you're talking twenty pages. It just wasn't worth the effort.

"Whatever we did in my gaffe, no-one got raped."

The next time someone tells me that the art of conversation is dead, I'm going to recommend they sit in a police custody suite with a misogynistic psychopath. I was Rembrandt, Van Gogh... I was Constable.

"Yeah," he said. "I've been to the Old Bailey three times. I've never gone down. Won't go down this time either. Those slags are too scared to say anything. Plus," he said, "I'm smarter than you lot. My solicitor will get me off."

"I don't appreciate you using that kind of language," I challenged. "Do you want to be further arrested?" It was an empty threat. It meant more writing.

Excluding the House of Lords, the Old Bailey is the highest court in the land. Judges perch loftily amid thunderclouds on thrones that are carved from the bones of convicts, and upholstered in the skin of the guilty. The hallowed courtrooms attract the most focussed and forensic prosecutors; modern day crusaders with lion's hearts. Police officers and criminals alike shudder at the thought of being sent there.

But not this man. He was cool with it. He had won three times.

Some police officers never find themselves in the witness box at the Old Bailey. For others it might happen perhaps once in a career. It was dreaded.

"All these tests," he moaned, "taking wipes of my cock, it isn't fair. I hope she's going through the same thing." He grinned like a shark.

The time came. I put the prisoner into his cell. There were two things he didn't know.

Whilst we had been talking, he had said something. He had been cautioned. He didn't have to say anything.

He had said "Whatever we did in my gaffe, no-one got raped."

It was recorded. The custody suite was fully wired up. I had written it down. He had just admitted to being in the flat. He had admitted to being at the scene of the crime.

The second thing he didn't know was this: He wasn't the only one who had won at the Old Bailey.

You get a tie pin.