1994
Finally, in February 1994, after more than four years’ wait, I was able to get into an Explosive Detection Dog Handler’s course at the School of Military Engineering.
I’d come a fair way since joining the army as a seventeen-year-old. Jane and I had married in 1992, and while I’d been waiting to go on the handler’s course, I’d already done my two promotion courses to become a corporal and had been promoted to lance corporal. The other five students on the dog handler’s course were all sappers.
If I had wanted to pursue higher rank in the army, I wouldn’t have gone on the dog handler’s course. At the time there was only one sergeant dog handler’s position in the Australian Army, so, until he retired or died, there was no prospect of me even going higher than being a corporal, which was the next rung on the promotion ladder. All up, there were probably less than 20 military dog handlers in Australia at the time. However, rather than lessening, my determination to work with explosive sniffer dogs had grown stronger over the years I’d been around them as a field engineer and in the hand-search role.
The corporal instructor on the dog handler’s course was Mark Wilczynski, who had been a lance corporal dog handler when I was in the airborne troop. When I was working on hand searches, I’d always be asking Mark questions about his job, and whether he’d let me work as the number-two on his team, so I knew him well by the time the course started. I’d also got to know another dog handler, Sean Reason, who had let me work with him and his dog. As it turned out, Mark was the one who would recruit me to work in Afghanistan many years later.
Because there were only a few of us on the course, and it was a tight-knit unit once you qualified, the instructors wanted to make sure they would get the most out of their dogs and the soldiers who would work with them. I didn’t know it at the time, but even though he already knew me, Mark had called my troop commander to ask what sort of bloke I was. He did this with all the students on the course so that he could make sure he assigned the right dog to the right man. Dogs, like humans, have very different personalities, and Mark had a good feel for what type of dogs would fit best with different types of humans.
I was assigned a German shepherd cross named Ziggy, who was so laid-back and friendly he was like Scooby-Doo. Some dogs work at a hundred miles an hour and need little encouragement, but Ziggy was the opposite, as I soon learned. He needed a handler who would give him 100 per cent attention to make sure he worked well and to keep him motivated. Ziggy wasn’t a dog that, where work was involved, could be turned on and off. His need to be worked intensively all the time pushed me to develop my dog handling skills to the limit, right from the start. We really had to work as a team. I hope that Mark gave me Ziggy to ensure that I’d get the most out of the course, having been busting a gut for so many years to get on it, and because he knew I liked to be active. Either that, or he was screwing with me.
The course lasted three months. Every morning, the students had to walk all the dogs in the kennels, rather than just the ones assigned to us. We also had to clean the kennels, which, like most things in the army, were subject to regular inspections. If the kennels weren’t clean enough, we’d be told to do them all over again. We’d take it in turns either to walk the dogs or clean the kennels.
Ziggy taught me a lot. In the Australian Army at that time, we were trained to work our dogs off-lead. That is, once we were in an area that needed to be searched, we would unclip our dog’s leash and let them roam free, so that they get on with the job. The advantage for the handler, of course, is that if anything goes wrong and the dog trips a booby trap or a mine, there is less risk of injury or death for the handler. In my experience, the dogs also enjoy working this way, as opposed to working at the end of a long lead. They can get into tight places a lot more easily, and show more expression through their actions when they find something than they can if they’re working on a lead. For the handler, working a dog off-lead requires a lot of training and practice. You’re controlling the dog in many different ways, through your voice, body language (including hand signals), and through where and how you position yourself.
The dogs in the kennels were a mix of breeds. Many of them, like Ziggy, were shepherds, as this had once been the breed of choice. However, the army had started going for mongrels and crossbreeds with a high retrieval drive, rather than for pure breeds. Explosive detection dogs aren’t cross-trained as attack or guard dogs, so the aggressive qualities that shepherds are known for really aren’t necessary. Some of the older shepherds were being retired – sent to people’s homes to be pets – and the army was looking for the right qualities in its dogs, more than at bloodlines.
The army didn’t breed dogs or buy them from breeders. The K9 supervisors would instead keep an eye out in the local newspapers for people advertising that they were looking for a home for a dog, or sometimes people would contact us and offer to donate a dog. The supervisors would go around to the person’s house, assess the dog there, and if it looked like it would be suitable, the dog would be brought to the School of Military Engineering for further assessment.
The first thing the supervisors looked for was whether the dog was a fanatical retriever – an animal with a high search-and-hunt drive. It didn’t matter how big or small the dog was, as long as it showed it was crazy about running after a ball or a stick, or some other toy, and bringing it back. If you’ve ever had a dog like that, you know what I mean. It’s the one with the wet, slobbery tennis ball in its mouth all the time – the one that you hope your house guests won’t start playing with, because you know that he will never stop once he starts searching and retrieving.
Generally, the army would look for dogs that were about twelve-months-old, so that they weren’t wasting time rearing puppies but the animals were still young enough to be trained properly. We also wanted dogs that weren’t too highly strung. Again, the army was finding that cross-bred mongrels tended to have this quality. As the dogs would be working off-lead, they also needed to be reasonably obedient, so that they would respond to a handler’s commands, and not go chasing or biting any bystanders who happened to be in the search area. The other good thing about mongrels was that they tended to get on better with each other in the kennels. Having too many cranky old alpha-male shepherds living side by side, testing each other out, led to aggression between the dogs.
Once I was assigned Ziggy, I was given time to get to know him. I took him for long walks around the School of Military Engineering, past the classrooms and training areas, and along the banks of the Georges River, which backs on to the base. I learned how to groom him properly, and to care for him in barracks and in the field. I’d give him a fingertip massage, running my hands through his coat to check for ticks and fleas, sores and external parasites such as ringworm. Unless he got filthy doing something during training, I’d only wash Ziggy once a month, which was standard procedure in the army. If you wash a dog too often, its coat loses the nutrients and natural oils that keep it in top condition.
All the other dogs assigned to us on the course were already trained and experienced in detecting explosives. It was us humans who were learning the ropes. Our training covered how to search different areas, from open spaces to buildings. We were taught how to search in teams, and how to work to established patterns, so that we didn’t miss anything. We’d train in public venues, such as the 12,000-seat Sydney Entertainment Centre, which is a huge building; we’d have to learn how to break it up into zones that we could cover one at a time.
In the Australian Army, the dogs had been trained to respond to praise, rather than to food rewards. The New South Wales Police, where I would work later, fed their dogs when they did the right thing, but a soldier in the field can’t carry unlimited amounts of snacks for his dogs. Our police had learned their food-reward training from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in the United States. Training methods can also depend on the dogs themselves, as some breeds respond better than others to food. The police tend to use labradors, and they love food.
Another point of difference in the Australian Army compared with other organisations using dogs was that our dogs were trained to give an active response when they detected the explosives. They were encouraged to show a change in behaviour – to, for example, bark, or wag their tail when they found what they were looking for – and the handler had to learn to recognise his dog’s change in behaviour. This was a signal to their handler that they had found something. In the case of the police, and the companies I’ve served with in Afghanistan, the dogs are trained to give a passive response – that is, when they first find something, they sit and stare at the source of the explosive odour. Ziggy, my dog, would change his behaviour by standing and staring. Sometimes you’ve just got to accept that your dog has its special way of doing things, and work with it.
As well as indoor venues, such as the Entertainment Centre, we trained in open spaces, such as Warwick Farm Racecourse; on long stretches of road; and on the ferries on Sydney Harbour. Man and dog – but particularly man – were being tested all the time during the course. In open areas, especially along roads, we had to keep our dogs motivated all the time, as there were few obvious places for them to look and fewer objects to get their attention. They needed to keep searching and we needed to stay focused as well.
After graduating from the dog handler’s course, I was posted back to my old unit at Holsworthy, which was now called 1 Combat Engineer Regiment (1 CER).
There was an odd situation for a while, as the senior dog handler in the unit was a sapper – the engineers’ equivalent of a private – and I was a lance corporal, even though I was a junior dog handler. Eventually, the sapper in charge left and I became the commander of the dog element. Although I had a superior rank, it was a lot of responsibility for me to be given, because there were other handlers with more experience than me.
Still, we all got on well together and I really enjoyed getting stuck into being an explosive detection dog handler. I’d waited long enough to do it. At the time, the New South Wales Police didn’t have a bomb dog capability, so the army dog handlers, based at Holsworthy, were the only ones qualified to use dogs to search for explosives. We would get called out whenever there was a bomb threat, and the police would sometimes call on us to help them in proactive operations.
On one occasion, we took part in simultaneous searches of three outlaw bikie gangs’ premises around Sydney. We went into one of the clubhouses, which had a fully stocked bar inside. I let my dog off its leash and off it went, sniffing around the clubhouse. When it got behind the bar, it started indicating, by changing its behaviour and staying focused on one area, that it had found something.
‘We’ve already searched behind there. There’s nothing of interest,’ one of the cops said.
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘the dog’s interested, so maybe you’d better have another look, mate.’
The police went behind the bar, got down on their knees, and started scratching around and lifting up the floor covering. Underneath, they found a hidden safe, buried in the floor. There was nothing in it, but I suspected there must have been some ammunition, or maybe even explosives of some kind, stored in there at one point. The dog wouldn’t have indicated it for nothing.
We searched venues both when the Pope and former US President Bill Clinton visited Australia. For big jobs, the army sometimes brought in the Brisbane-based army dog team to work with us. For some reason, the Queensland handlers thought their shit didn’t stink and would brag about how they were the best in the country. Whatever, I thought.
Pope John Paul II was going to visit the Maritime Museum in Sydney, so we were searching it prior to his arrival. I was on one of the lower levels of the underground car park, working my dog off-lead. Two levels above me was one of the teams from Queensland.
‘Milo!’ I heard someone call. ‘Milo? MILO!’
I looked around and saw a border collie, Milo, one of the Queensland dogs, bounding down the car park ramp. It ran past me and stopped to greet my dog, disturbing its search pattern in the process. Running down the ramp, out of breath, was one of the army’s ‘ace’ dog handlers from Brisbane, who had completely lost the plot, and his dog.
‘Real’ searches, however, were the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, my day followed a set routine of letting Ziggy out of his kennel; exercising him; cleaning his kennel; doing some training with him; accounting for, and packing away, the explosive training aids we’d been using; and taking Ziggy back to his home for the night.
As much as I loved my job, and working with Ziggy, the army was starting to get me down. Life in the army in peacetime involves a high degree of bullshit.
In the absence of a real threat, you go on exercise after exercise, and nothing ever seems to change. Things that are exciting to you as a young soldier, such as living out in the bush, shooting, and playing at war, lose their attraction as you get older. You start asking yourself, when you’re sitting in a hole in the ground and it’s pissing down rain, what the fuck am I doing here, wasting my life away?
To a certain extent, I don’t think the Australian Army really knew how to use dogs, except as support to the civil authorities in searches prior to the arrival of some dignitary. Our dogs weren’t trained in attacking, or as trackers, so there wasn’t very much for the dogs or their handlers to do when the combat engineer regiment packed up and went out into the bush on an exercise. Our dogs were more at home working in the city, searching buildings or roads, than in the rainforests and scrub of northern Australia. Usually what would happen was one of the handlers would stay and look after all the dogs, and the rest of us would go and help the other field engineers build a bridge or do whatever else had to be done. It was a bit of waste even having the dogs there. It was different once the army started to become operational again, in East Timor and, later, in Afghanistan. There, the dogs and handlers had a real job to do, looking for explosives and improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
Having waited more than four years to do the explosive detection dog handler’s course, twelve months after I’d passed, I was ready to pack it all in. This wasn’t because of the job itself, it was just being in the army, and probably due to the particular phase of life I was in. I had a young wife at home, and would be away for six weeks at a time, several times a year, on boring field exercises.
I started thinking that I’d get out of the army and learn a trade, so that I’d have something else to fall back on, later in life. I went to see Mark and my troop commander, and told them how I was feeling. They tried to talk me out of leaving, but by this stage I’d made up my mind, and I put in my papers seeking a discharge.
There was one more exercise I had to attend, in Darwin, before I could go. Just before we were due to leave, I went to the kennels one morning and, as usual, walked down to the kennels to greet Ziggy. When I got there, he was lying down.
‘Hello, boy.’ Ziggy just lay there. ‘Ziggy? Get up, boy.’ He didn’t move.
I grabbed hold of the diamond mesh fence surrounding the kennels and shook it. The other dogs started barking and carrying on. ‘Ziggy!’ I shouted again. He still lay motionless. I opened the gate and ran inside but, as soon as I knelt and touched him, I knew it was too late and he was dead. Still, it took me a few seconds truly to realise what had happened. When I did, I was devastated and the tears streamed down my face.
‘No!’ I yelled. He was a perfectly healthy dog and I couldn’t understand how this had happened. My shock turned to anger. When they saw my face, my mates in the handlers’ building asked me what was wrong and I told them. I smashed my fist into one of the freestanding partition walls in the office.
I walked back outside and let myself into Ziggy’s kennel again, and sat beside his lifeless form. I still couldn’t really believe he was dead. As I stroked his head, I thought of the months we’d spent together on the training course, and all the time working as a team since then. Ziggy had been like my best friend. I spent more time with him than I did at home; than with anyone else I knew. We shared every working hour. We were mates. And now he was gone.
The officer commanding, a major, and the troop commander, a lieutenant, heard what had happened and came down to the kennels. They found me there, still sitting with Ziggy, patting him and crying. They were very supportive and, after a time, they walked with me out of the kennels. I went to the car park and just sat there, my head in my hands, still trying to come to terms with the fact that my friend was dead.
Everyone else in the squadron was really helpful, as they knew how much Ziggy meant to me, and gave me time to grieve. A good friend of mine, Pottsy, who worked as a dog handler before transferring back into the squadron as a field engineer, organised a funeral for Ziggy. Pottsy had actually trained Ziggy from when he was a young dog, so was close to him too. The pair of us went to the vet to fetch his body, after an autopsy was done.
‘Ziggy died from something called gastric torsion,’ the vet told us. ‘It’s not uncommon in medium-to-large dogs. If the dog has a full stomach and then jumps suddenly, its whole stomach can swing around and twist. The entrance and exit to the stomach are then closed off, and gas can’t escape. It might have only taken an hour or so for Ziggy to die.’
‘But he was fine when I left him,’ I said, still having trouble coming to terms with my loss.
‘It’s not your fault. Gastric torsion can happen to perfectly healthy dogs. Was Ziggy ever agitated in his kennel?’
I thought about this for a few moments. ‘Ziggy was living next to a bitch and there was another male dog on the other side of her. Ziggy and the other male would sometimes snarl and bark at each other.’
The vet nodded. ‘Maybe Ziggy and the other dog were jumping up on the wire of their enclosures and trying to antagonise each other, and that’s when Ziggy twisted his stomach.’
Putting the pieces together was little consolation, but it was a valuable lesson about one of the possible risks of keeping dogs the way that we did. The vet said we could take Ziggy, and Pottsy and I found some shovels and dug a hole for him out the front of the dog section kennels.
It was raining the day we buried Ziggy. The dog handlers belonged to 1 CER’s Specialist Troop and everyone from the troop was there, including the troop commander who’d found me, distraught, in the kennel. Ziggy was as much a part of the troop as any of the soldiers in the unit, and they all wanted to pay their respects.
Pottsy broke ranks and positioned himself in front of the assembled troop. ‘Thanks for coming along,’ he began. ‘Ziggy was a boisterous dog, as I’m sure you all know, and one of a kind. He was the happiest dog a lot of us had seen in quite a while, and a little eccentric, maybe. He loved what he did, and was very committed. He will be sorely missed by all.’
Pottsy was sniffling a little as he then took his place with the others. I wiped the rain from my face and moved in front of the troop. I’d rather face bullets than talk before a crowd, but I needed to now. It was hard, and I can’t really remember what I said.
It’s difficult to explain how much time, love and other emotions you invest in a working relationship like the one I had with Ziggy. The fact that he’d died so suddenly, and not peacefully in old age, just seemed to make his death worse and so much harder to deal with. How can words convey what you feel for a mate who’s been taken from you?
I pulled my discharge papers, because I didn’t want to leave the army on such a sad note. I told the troop commander I’d hang in for at least another twelve months.
As I didn’t have a dog, there was no point in me going on the exercise, so, instead, I went back to the School of Military Engineering for six weeks and was re-teamed with a new dog, whose name was K-Lee. She was a cross between a Rottweiler and a border collie. She was tough as nails and smart as well. With the other handlers and the rest of the troop being away, I had time to get to know K-Lee, and walking, playing and training with her helped ease the pain of Ziggy’s death.
After everyone was back from the exercise, the army dog handlers took part in an open day at Victoria Barracks at Paddington in Sydney. We put on a display of search techniques, and manned a static display for visitors who wanted to look at the dogs and learn more about what we did. There were members of the New South Wales Police on duty as well, and I got talking to one of the coppers. With the Olympics only a few years away, the police were developing their own explosive detection dog capability.
When I was a kid, I’d been interested in joining the police, but had been put off it because I’d thought that I’d have to have my Higher School Certificate, and as I’d left school in Year Eleven, I’d believed I’d automatically be ruled out. The cop I was talking to at the open day suggested I take a closer look at the application criteria, to see if I could get in because of my army experience.
I did as he suggested, and found that if I’d made it to the rank of full corporal in the army, I’d be deemed experienced enough to apply for entry to the police. I was still a lance corporal – with one stripe instead of the corporal’s two – although I had passed all the necessary courses to be promoted. As being a dog handler in the army was such a small, specialised trade, there were no full corporal positions available to me at that time. I talked to the officer commanding my squadron and he agreed to write a letter certifying that I was qualified to be a two-striper and that the only thing stopping my promotion was the lack of vacancies in that rank. In fact, he went a step further, saying that as the head of the local dog handling detachment, I had a lot more responsibility than did most of the section commanders employed elsewhere in the engineer regiment.
I left the army in October 1996 and was accepted for training at the New South Wales Police Academy, at Goulburn in the New South Wales Southern Highlands. The course started the following February.
The academy was a lot more relaxed than Kapooka was, though there was a shit-load more study to do than in the army. Being at the academy was a good experience, but I found it hard, mostly because of all the theory work. We studied law and analysed case studies. We’d be given a scenario, and then have to work out how a person would be charged and under which legislation. We had to do exams and write essays. I hate writing essays and, worse still, we’d have to give class presentations.
The walls of my room at the academy were plastered with bits of paper and cardboard with crib notes all over them. If I’d stuck anything on a wall at Kapooka, I probably would have been shot. I was paying for tutors to help me after hours but, even so, I only scraped through many of the theory subjects as I found writing essays difficult.
Jane and I had two little boys, Corey and Lachie, by this time. They were all living at her parents’ place and I’d get there at weekends, making the relatively quick drive from Goulburn to the south coast. I also did a couple of weeks’ work experience at Dapto Police Station during the course, which was good fun and, fortunately, was close to home.
Six months after I’d walked through the gates, I finally graduated from the academy. I was made a probationary constable and sent to Sutherland Police Station in Sydney’s southern suburbs. The study hadn’t finished, as probationary constables still had to sit exams for two years, but at least we were also doing the job of policing. With life becoming more stable, Jane and I started building a house at Albion Park, on the south coast. This was about an hour’s drive to Sutherland, but I would carpool with some other police officers who lived near me.
There was a lot happening with Lebanese gangs in south- western Sydney at the time, and I was seconded to Bankstown Police Station, in the heart of one of the city’s strongest Muslim areas, for three months. Generally, I found the parents and families of the gang members, and the older people in the Lebanese community, to be really hard-working, upstanding people, but some of the teenagers were a handful. Many had no respect for the law, or for much else, and had fallen in with the gangs. As gang members do, they’d hunt in a pack, but I found that when you dealt with them one-on-one, you broke down that pack mentality and their confidence, and then they weren’t so brave.
What I liked about life in the police force was that, unlike being in the army, it was always different. You never knew where you’d be going or what you’d be doing next. You could be dealing with a minor traffic accident in a car park one minute, and the next thing you know, you’re facing down an enraged man in a violent domestic dispute.
When I got to Sutherland, I was assigned to work with a top bloke, a highly experienced police sergeant named Steve Winder. Everyone in the station was respectful and wary of Steve because he had a real no-nonsense reputation. He was switched on, intelligent and hard as, knew his law inside and out, and had seen and done it all. Steve was English, but he’d been in the New South Wales Police for 25 or 30 years. At nearly 50, he was a lot older than me, but more than held his own in the gym and out on the street. He was always on the go and I had my arse hanging out all the time, just trying to keep up with him. It wasn’t unusual for Steve and me to make three arrests a night, whereas other officers might do three in a week. The other young police thought I’d got the rough end of the stick in being lumped with this guy, but Steve and I clicked from the first day. I learned a hell of a lot just watching him – the way he interacted with people, paid attention to everything going on around him, and simply got on with the job of policing. He taught me how to interview people; what questions to ask to get them talking. I nicknamed him Pop.
Sergeant Winder, and a mate of mine, Nunny, and I were sent to serve an apprehended violence order on a guy in Kirrawee, near Sutherland. He’d been involved in a domestic with his estranged partner and the apprehended violence order against him was to ensure that he kept away from her. We’d received intel from the wife that he was a gun nut who had firearms stashed around his house.
We parked the car and, as we approached the house, started putting on our bullet-proof vests and doing up the Velcro fastenings on the side. At the back of the house was a granny flat, where another bloke was living; he came to the front fence to meet us and tell us that the owner was inside.
What we didn’t know was that the man we’d come to serve the apprehended violence order on had also been watching our arrival. The granny flat lodger let us into the house and led the three of us as we moved cautiously down the hallway. We called out to let the owner know we were in there, and asked him to show himself.
The lodger paused in the hallway. At the end of it was an open door through which he could see a wardrobe mirror. ‘There he is, there he is! He’s under the bed.’
We flattened ourselves against the wall. As we edged closer, we could see on top of the dressing table a speed loader for a pistol, and it was empty. That probably meant the guy had just loaded a revolver with six bullets.
‘Come on out, now,’ Pop said to him.
The man refused to budge and, if he was armed, there was no way we were just going to charge on into his bedroom and drag him out from under his bed. We were about to declare the incident a siege and call for the tactical response group, when he said he was coming out.
He slithered out, and I pinned him on the ground and cuffed him. He admitted that he was armed and that when he’d seen the three of us walking up the road, he’d considered opening up on us and going out in a blaze of glory. When I slid underneath the bed, I found a .357 Magnum, a big-arse Dirty Harry gun, which he’d, indeed, loaded as we were approaching. Later, we found rifles throughout his house and a couple more, along with 2000 rounds of ammunition, in the boot of his car. We took him to the cells at Sutherland and he was back out on the street in less than a week.
On another occasion, Poppy Winder and I had to go to the home of a man with psychiatric problems and schedule him, which was basically an order that said he had to be assessed by a mental health team. When we arrived at his block of flats and found his place on the second floor, a piece of paper covered with gibberish was pinned to the front door.
Sergeant Winder knocked. ‘Police; open up, please.’
‘I’m not coming out,’ a voice yelled back at us. ‘I’ve tipped petrol all over myself and if you come in, I’m going to set fire to myself!’
Steve called for backup and when the other officers arrived, told them to keep the guy occupied, by talking to him through the door, while Pop and I would go around the back, and try to get in through a window. As the crazy man was two floors up, he wouldn’t be expecting us. It was a typically ballsy plan from the hard-as-nails old cop.
We left the other police, ambulance crews and the fire brigade, who had also arrived by this time, and went downstairs and around to the rear of the block, and climbed a fire ladder. Steve prided himself on his appearance, and his uniform was always immaculate and his boots spit polished. As we climbed in through the flat’s open kitchen window, Steve first with me following, he cursed, softly. He’d scuffed the toe cap of his polished boot and was bent over in the kitchen, rubbing it with his thumb.
‘What are you doing, Pop?’
‘Fixing my boot. Why don’t you go sort this bloke out, Shane?’ With that, he continued wiping the toe of his shoe.
I couldn’t believe it.
I smelled petrol fumes and when I walked out of the kitchen into the lounge room, there was the mad dude, wet with fuel, wideeyed and holding a cigarette lighter. I put my hands up to calm him, but once he saw me, he gave up straightaway.
Maybe Steve, with his years of experience, could read the situation accurately and knew the guy wasn’t going to kill himself. Or maybe it came down to his sense of humour, if that’s what it was. His stopping casually to clean his boot while a crazy man was standing there soaking in petrol was designed to ensure I was calm when I approached the man. Steve had given me a chance to take charge and prove myself.
Knowing that Steve had a sense of humour, though, I did my best to mess with him at every opportunity. When he wasn’t looking, I’d get his hat, and turn his prized cap badge upside down. This was the perfect way to take the piss out of someone who was a stickler for detail and cared so much about his personal presentation. Someone would always notice, eventually.
One day, I was driving around Sutherland on patrol with Nunny and we found an old toilet bowl on the side of the road; probably left out there by someone who’d been renovating their bathroom. We pulled over and, making sure no-one was watching, loaded it in the back of the patrol car. When we got back to the station, I asked Steve if I could borrow the keys to his car, as I needed to get the breathalyser out. He tossed them to me, and my mate and I went and moved the toilet from our vehicle to the back seat of Steve’s, wrapping a seatbelt around the commode to keep it in place. When poor old Steve went back out on patrol, he was pulling people over, meeting and talking to them, never noticing the toilet sitting behind him.