The Prisoners

Two characters that I picked up one after the other early this Sunday morning had something in common. One had been a prisoner and the other was wishing that he had been one as well. The first I picked up from outside Barrow police station, where he had been a guest in the cells for the night, you can always tell when they come out carrying a plastic bag with their belt,shoelaces and lighter in and holding a charge sheet. He told me a tale of being caught urinating in the street, which usually just involves a fixed penalty fine, but he had made the stupid mistake of making racial remarks to a black police officer. His feet didn't touch the ground he was in the van and then locked in a cell within minutes, and as he realised when sober they were right to do so, racial abuse won't and shouldn't be tolerated. The second guy had woken up in a strange bed with an even stranger women, and what made it worse was the thirty missed calls from his wife on his mobile. He was frantic and during the ten miles or so we spent driving to his doom he tried alibis out on me to see if they would be believable. His first was that he had spent the night in the cells, and he looked at me strangely when I said "no you haven't got a plastic bag" but we dismissed that one when I said that maybe his wife had rung the police station looking for him already. The story's got more and more crazy as we got closer to his inquisition, and included being locked in pub toilets, and knocking himself unconscious for the night. I won't reveal the winning pack of lies, just in case his wife reads this.