The Politician Read online

  The

  Politician

  ALSO BY TIM SULLIVAN

  The Dentist

  The Cyclist

  The Patient

  The

  Politician

  TIM

  A DS CROSS THRILLER

  SULLIVAN

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2022 by Head of Zeus Ltd,

  part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Tim Sullivan, 2022

  The moral right of Tim Sullivan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781801107778

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781801107785

  ISBN (E): 9781801107815

  Cover design: Ben Prior

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  For Derek Granger

  Mentor and friend

  Virtute et Industria

  Contents

  Also by Tim Sullivan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  1

  A cup or mug for drinking tea wasn’t even a question for DS George Cross. A cup. Obviously. Bone china, preferably. It maintained the temperature of the tea perfectly, and the thinness of the rim meant that the drinker’s lips weren’t forced too far apart, enabling them to sip rather than gulp. A sip opens the palate to the complexities of the leaf. A gulp does not. The thin cup also gave the tea maximum exposure over the mouth’s tastebuds, giving the drinker a more complete experience.

  He was thinking this as he stood outside Peggy Frampton’s bedroom, looking at her dead body. An objective observer might have found the sight of Cross dressed head to toe in a white paper forensic suit, delicately sipping his tea, strange, if not disrespectful in the circumstances. But he and his partner DS Josie Ottey had accepted the offer of refreshment from Peggy’s neighbour, Joanne, as they waited for the forensic team to arrive. They had been invited in together with the deceased’s distraught, and slightly hysterical, cleaning lady Marina, who had discovered her employer’s body. The house itself was now a crime scene and Cross had been quick to usher everyone outside. He had accepted the offer of tea, unusual for him, as he had quickly ascertained that the neighbour took her tea seriously. She not only used leaves but was going to serve it in bone china.

  Detective Sergeant George Cross didn’t look much like a policeman underneath the forensic suit. He was in his early forties, balding and of medium height. This is why he generally had to produce his warrant card more often than his colleagues to prove his identity. Members of the public frequently didn’t believe the eccentric man in front of them was a DS from the Avon and Somerset police. With his fluorescent bicycle clips permanently attached to his ankles, drab raincoat with shirt and tie just visible under a V-neck sweater, he looked more like a downtrodden door-to-door salesman from the 1960s than a murder detective.

  He had come back to the murder scene, now that forensics had arrived. He felt there wasn’t much to gain from talking to the cleaner at this point. She had found the body. That was all she had to offer currently, and he would talk to her more about her employer and family later.

  ‘DS Cross?’ Cross turned to see a tall, unfamiliar young man in a white forensics suit walking up the stairs. ‘I’m Michael Swift, forensic scientist, or crime scene investigator – whichever you prefer.’

  Cross was taken aback by the man’s height. ‘Well, which is it?’ he said, ignoring the proffered hand, which seemed to come down out of the sky towards him.

  ‘Both, as it happens. Primarily forensic scientist but also CSI as I like to get out of the lab occasionally. Well, that’s slightly inaccurate as this is my first crime scene. Julia’s in court.’

  ‘You’re late. The rest of your team is already here.’

  ‘Late how?’

  ‘By not being on time,’ Cross informed him.

  ‘I came here as soon as I was assigned,’ said the bemused young man.

  ‘How tall are you?’ Cross asked, ignoring his answer.

  ‘Six foot eight. How tall are you?’

  ‘Five foot ten.’

  ‘Good, well I’m glad we got that out of the way. Where’s the body?’

  ‘In there.’

  Cross then watched him work. He was thorough and methodical, giving the scene considered attention. Trying to ascertain where it had things to say. After half an hour Swift reappeared at the bedroom door.

  ‘Has anyone been in the bedroom this morning?’ he asked.

  ‘The cleaner who discovered the body.’

  ‘And where is she now?’

  ‘Next door.’

  ‘Anyone else been in?’

  ‘Just DS Ottey to confirm the victim was deceased.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Obviously not. It’s a crime scene with a deep pile carpet, which we didn’t want to disturb,’ added Cross.

  ‘Excellent,’ replied Swift. ‘Could you take me to the cleaning lady?’

  Cross was about to object, when he realised that he wasn’t actually doing anything at that precise moment, so didn’t really have a valid reason to say no.

  ‘Were you here yesterday?’ Swift asked Marina.

  ‘I come every day.’

  ‘Did you vacuum the bedroom?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was anyone in the house?’

  ‘No, Mr Frampton is in London. Mrs Frampton had left and was going to be late. She had a big day.’

  ‘Great.
Are those the shoes you were wearing when you discovered Mrs Frampton?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Marina nervously.

  ‘Could I take a photograph of the soles?’ he asked, then immediately noticed she was apprehensive. ‘It’s just so I can exclude them from the other prints on the carpet.’ She took off her shoes and gave them to him. He photographed them with his large camera which had a white circle around the lens. It emitted a blinding flash when he took a picture. What happened next told Cross a lot about the young man. Instead of just giving her back the shoes, Swift knelt down and put them back on Marina’s feet. He then left. Ottey looked at Cross.

  ‘How tall do you think he is?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s six foot eight,’ he replied authoritatively.

  ‘Oh, you didn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ask.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Was that the first thing you asked?’

  ‘No, the second,’ he said, as if proud of the fact that he had avoided that mistake. ‘My first question was to ask why he was late.’

  *

  Swift had detected a lot of foot traffic on the bedroom carpet and was being very careful not to disturb it. On first glance this looked like a burglary gone wrong. The point of entry was crude. A pane of glass in the back door which led directly into the kitchen had been smashed. The key had been left in the door by the homeowner, making entry easy. The intruder was then disturbed, hit out at the owner of the house and killed her, possibly unintentionally. The chest of drawers and the wardrobes had been disturbed. Things would undoubtedly be missing. First impressions of a crime scene often proved to be correct, but just as often didn’t. So, he tried to view the room objectively, putting his first assumption aside. He walked around the edge of the room, then closed the curtains. He positioned a light close to the floor, and switched it on. The footsteps were immediately more visible. A pattern all over the room. He began to photograph them systematically.

  Cross decided to look at the other upstairs rooms. There were four other bedrooms. Two of them appeared to be spare rooms. The other two, young people’s bedrooms. A daughter and a son, Cross inferred from various photographs and posters. Children who had left home some time ago, he deduced from a calendar on a wall and an old-model Mac desktop computer in the other. Cross looked out of the bedroom window. It had an enviable view of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The house was at the top of a hill that ran parallel to the gorge. Victorian homes descended the hill in an orderly, genteel manner, wrought-iron railings adorning their balconies.

  When Cross returned to the door of the master bedroom, Swift had moved into the bathroom. He looked up at Cross. With his long angular face he could have been the love child of Will Self and Pete Townsend from The Who.

  ‘Please don’t come in,’ he said.

  ‘I have no intention of doing so, until you’re finished,’ Cross replied.

  ‘I didn’t mean to be rude, it’s just that you’ve lost one of your shoe coverings.’ Cross looked down at the offending shoe protruding from his white suit.

  ‘So I have,’ he replied, determining at the same time that there was no more for him to do there. He would analyse the young man’s findings later. He did note, however, that there was no aspirated blood on the carpet next to the victim’s mouth, which probably meant that death was fairly instantaneous. Swift threw him another pair of fresh shoe coverings. He put one on the offending shoe.

  He would always see the deceased’s body in situ if possible, and this he’d done. He hadn’t come to any conclusions at this point. He never did. Cross was driven by evidence and facts, not impressions and assumptions. This way of working was partly down to his being on the spectrum but also because he had seen other detectives, as he was growing up in the force, waste huge amounts of time pursuing hunches and assumptions that, in the end, proved to be fruitless. This, in turn, led to him having an extraordinarily high success rate of conversion – arrest to conviction.

  ‘Cause of death probably blunt-force trauma to the head. But I haven’t come across a murder weapon yet,’ Swift said.

  ‘Are you also a forensic pathologist?’ Cross asked.

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Then perhaps you should keep your observations within the parameters of your field. There is a collection of glass paperweights on the table over there organised in a symmetrical pattern. One of them is missing.’

  ‘Good call,’ said Swift enthusiastically. ‘There are two sets of footprints. One barefoot, presumably the victim’s. The other individual looks like he was wearing shoe coverings.’

  ‘He?’ Cross asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure. Unless it was a woman with enormously large feet,’ Swift replied.

  Cross turned to leave as Ottey appeared. She looked at Swift who was now processing the bathroom, taking swabs from the sink.

  ‘What makes you think the intruder went into the bathroom?’ she asked.

  ‘What makes you think he didn’t?’ came the reply.

  ‘Not much to steal in there, I would’ve thought. Anyway, she ran a bath which tells you the burglar can’t have been in there,’ Ottey went on.

  ‘Do we know that she turned the bath taps off?’ Swift asked.

  ‘We do not,’ she replied.

  ‘So my first point would be that if she didn’t, then he must’ve done as the bath didn’t cause a flood. My second would be: how do we know he didn’t use the bathroom?’

  ‘Forty-nine per cent of burglars use a lavatory in the premises they are burgling,’ said Cross, joining in.

  ‘So nature doesn’t call for fifty-one per cent of them,’ countered Ottey.

  ‘Not entirely true,’ replied Swift before Cross finished for him.

  ‘Fourteen per cent defecate on the bed. Often mistaken as a deliberately antagonistic gesture, but more often than not done out of sheer fear, panic in an attempt to make no noise and for ease of wiping.’

  Ottey grimaced.

  ‘What Mr Swift is trying to say is that we don’t as yet know whether our burglar is one of the remaining thirty-seven per cent who have full control of their bowels,’ said Cross.

  ‘You two are a marriage made in heaven,’ said Ottey.

  ‘Firstly, as you are well aware, I am heterosexual, though I cannot of course speak for him.’

  ‘Michael,’ said Swift.

  ‘And as I have no belief in heaven, the likelihood of his and my partnering anywhere seems minimal, if not impossible,’ replied Cross who seemed to be staring at the victim’s face. He hadn’t actually taken what she’d said literally, he was simply quibbling with her use of the expression. Ottey wanted to make a pithy rejoinder as this was her first encounter with Swift. She didn’t want to be left on the back foot. Swift obviously sensed this too and waited for it. But it wasn’t forthcoming.

  ‘I look forward to your report,’ she finally said. The look between them silently acknowledged that her parting shot was not really up to snuff. She decided to leave before making herself look even more ridiculous. Cross took out his phone and took a photograph of Peggy’s head. After examining the photograph, particularly the area of carpet in front of her mouth, he left the room. Swift, meanwhile, examined the bathroom taps more carefully. There were prints. Likely to be the victim’s, but he immediately set about retrieving them.

  2

  Marina Rodriguez was a diminutive woman in her mid-fifties. Originally from Spain, she had dark brown eyes and thick black hair tied back tightly in a ponytail. She had worked for the Frampton family for decades – since she’d first come to England. She was a family friend and had even been on holiday with them when the children were small. The way she talked about them you could be forgiven for thinking that she had no family of her own, but she did; a husband and three boys. When Cross and Ottey finally sat down to talk with her, she had progressed from hysterical, blood-draining shock to the kind of numb state imposed on the body by the brain – as if it were taking charge of the
situation. She was still shaking, though.

  ‘How many children do the Framptons have?’ Ottey began.

  ‘Two,’ she replied. ‘Justin and Sasha.’

  ‘How old?’ Ottey went on.

  ‘Justin is thirty-two, Sasha twenty-nine,’ Marina replied.

  ‘Do they still live locally?’

  ‘Justin does, Sasha lives in Cheltenham.’

  ‘And what do they do?’

  ‘Justin is an entrepreneur. Sasha is a GP.’

  ‘Does Justin work for a company?’

  Cross noticed the slightest of hesitations on Marina’s part.

  ‘He’s in antiques.’

  ‘What about Mr and Mrs Frampton? What do they do?’ Ottey asked.

  ‘Peggy is an influencer now and a writer. She used to be the mayor a few years ago. He is a lawyer,’ she replied. Cross noted the use of Peggy’s first name and the pronoun for the husband. Mayor? He thought the name had sounded familiar.

  ‘The Peggy Frampton?’ asked Ottey.

  ‘Yes,’ Marina replied quietly. Was Ottey referring to her being well-known for being a past mayor, or a social media influencer? Cross looked at his partner for further explanation, but she didn’t oblige.

  ‘Where is the husband at the moment?’ Ottey asked.

  ‘On his way back from London. He was on a big case up there.’

  ‘He’s a barrister?’ said Ottey.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you see Mrs Frampton yesterday?’

  ‘Yes, I make her tea every morning.’

  ‘How was she?’ Ottey continued.

  ‘Fine. I’m not sure why, but yesterday was a big day for her,’ Marina continued. Her accent still held onto its Spanish roots, but some Bristol intonations and inflections had worked their way in.

  ‘She was the Mayor of Bristol who had lately become something of an online phenom,’ Ottey explained to Cross. He sighed at her linguistic truncation. ‘She blogged about personal problems. Like an online agony aunt. She had millions of followers.’

  ‘Three and a half million on Instagram alone. Five million across all platforms,’ Marina informed them.