Chapter 16
‘Doesthe name Harrison Cummings mean anything to you, Sergeant Poe?’ Chief Superintendent Stewart asked.
Poe frowned. The name seemed familiar but he couldn’t recollect why.
‘No?’ Stewart continued. ‘He’s the Tory Member of Parliament for Sheffield East.’
Nowhe remembered. The Right Honourable Harrison Cummings had been a junior minister in the Department for International Trade who had been caught taking taxpayer-funded junkets all over the world. He’d declared them as fact-finding missions, laying the groundwork for future trade deals. In fact, he’d been on corporate-sponsored big-game trophy hunts.
The matter had come to light when his daughter had stumbled across some photographs in a hidden cloud folder. Cummings had posed with animals he’d shot from a concealed hide – lions, giraffes, elephants, even the incredibly endangered Sumatran rhino. Disgusted with her father, she shared them with a journalist.
Instead of immediately splashing them all over the front pages, the reporter assigned to the case held off. She sensed there was more to the story than just another MP getting caught with his snout in the trough. So she dug in, did some old-fashioned investigative journalism.
And uncovered the biggest parliamentary scandal of the year.
Harrison Cummings hadn’t just been spending public funds on expensive and morally repugnant trophy hunts, he had been accepting junkets from lobbyists all over the world. They would take him on expensive trips and in return he’d petition his own government to introduce legislation. The investigative reporter uncovered a papertrail that showed Cummings had lobbied for British police to routinely carry firearms, a policy that American arms manufacturers believed would expose the UK to less punitive gun laws. He’d been gifted a rose gold Breitling Chronomat, a watch worth fifty-thousand pounds, for his troubles. After he’d been bought by big tobacco, he had pushed hard for the plain packaging law on cigarettes to be overturned. Courtside seats for the New York Knicks and the Chicago Bulls at Madison Square Garden, courtesy of big pharma, persuaded him it was time to re-examine the price the NHS paid for American drugs.
In a sting operation, the mic’d up reporter, who’d been posing as a representative from a fracking company, had asked what his constituents would say when they found out carcinogenic chemicals would leach into the groundwater. He’d responded by saying, ‘Fuck those northern bastards.’
When the newspaper printed its story the country went berserk. Cummings had the whip withdrawn. He was stripped of his position in the Department for International Trade. Unbelievably, he refused to stand down as an MP. And, because he hadn’t broken any laws, a special election couldn’t be triggered.
Poe didn’t need a calculator to do this sum.
‘There’s been another death threat, hasn’t there?’