Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales

Author:Leigh Sales
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760144173
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

When I meet Graham Norris a few weeks later, he’s easier for me to ‘get’, because I have met many police officers over the years and his ‘type’ is more familiar to me. The first thing to note about this former homicide detective is that he’s off-the-charts likeable. Within about five minutes of meeting him, you think, I’d love to have a beer with this bloke. Graham is tall with a shaved head and a long, full grey beard that reminds me of a bushranger. He has a broad Australian accent, a straightforward way of speaking and a larrikin sense of humour. He tells me about his old boss in the force, the amusingly named – and, I might add, highly respected – Inspector Hans Rupp (Get it? A police officer named Hands Are Up.) Rupp kept showing up at daily briefings during a large-scale manhunt after a double homicide declaring, ‘I’m 100 per cent certain [the suspect] is dead, we just have to find the body,’ until one day, the suspect was sighted withdrawing cash at an ATM, and when Rupp arrived at that day’s briefing, he opened with, ‘I’m fairly certain the suspect is alive.’

Graham was a late starter in the police, joining the force in 1997 at the age of thirty-five after a career in sales. He had always wanted to be a policeman but his parents were opposed to such a dangerous job, so he’d taken a different path to keep them happy. Over time, though, he couldn’t let his dream go and so, thinking better late than never, he headed to the New South Wales Police Academy. His first assignment after graduation was general duties at the station in Mount Druitt, a fairly depressed area in Sydney’s south-west.

‘It was the happiest I’ve ever been,’ Graham says. ‘You never knew what was going to happen. Every day was a blank canvas. I loved the variety, the intensity, I really liked the physical aspect of it. It was good, it was a challenge.’

In 2004, he moved into the State Crime Command, where he specialised in child protection and sex crimes, and four years later he joined the homicide squad.

‘Often,’ he says, ‘there’s an intrigue with people and the police and what they do. I mean, there’s a thousand cop shows on telly, people are interested in it. And they always ask, “What’s the worst murder you’ve ever been to?” They’re all bad.’

‘When you went to homicide, did you have any fear about things like being around dead bodies and going to crime scenes and seeing foul stuff?’ I ask.

‘The only thing I was a bit apprehensive about was seeing the post-mortems, because at that time, I’d have to lie down if I was going to get a needle,’ Graham says (while I’m thinking, Wow, big call to move to homicide!). ‘You have to go to post-mortems in the cops and you can’t go, “I’m gonna spew,” or, “I can’t watch this.” It’s just a fact of life, you gotta do it.

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