Elizabeth George - With No One As Witness

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Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley takes on the case of his career.
When it comes to spellbinding suspense and page-turning excitement, New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth George always delivers. As the Wall Street Journal raves, “Ms. George can do it all, with style to spare.”
In With No One as Witness, Elizabeth George has crafted an intricate, meticulously researched, and absorbing story sure to enthrall her readers. Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley is back, along with his long-time partner, the fiery Barbara Havers, and newly promoted Detective Sergeant Winston Nkata. They are on the hunt for a sinister killer.
When an adolescent boy’s nude body is found mutilated and artfully arranged on the top of a tomb, it takes no large leap for the police to recognize this as the work of a serial killer. This is the fourth victim in three months but the first to be white.
Hoping to avoid charges of institutionalized racism in its failure to pursue the earlier crimes to their conclusion, New Scotland Yard hands the case over to Lynley and his colleagues. The killer is a psychopath who does not intend to be stopped. Worse, a devastating tragedy within the police ranks causes them to fumble in their pursuit of him.

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The difficulty, of course, was in the not knowing, which arose from the not seeing. Helen could be seen-daily, hourly, moment by moment-lifeless in the hospital bed. The baby-their son, their amusingly named, for want of a permanent decision by his indecisive parents, Jasper Felix-could not. All they knew was all the specialist knew and what he knew was dependent upon what was common knowledge about the brain.

If Helen had no oxygen, the baby had no oxygen. They could hope for a miracle, but that was all.

Helen’s father had asked, “How likely is that ‘miracle’?”

The doctor shook his head. He was sympathetic. He seemed generous and good hearted. But he would not lie.

None of them looked at one another at first, once the specialist left them. All of them felt the burden, but only one of them experienced the weight of having to make a decision. Lynley was left with the knowledge that everything rested with him and upon him. They could love him-as they did and as he knew-but they could not move the cup from his hands to theirs.

Each one of them spoke to him before they left for the night, somehow knowing without being told that the moment for resolution had arrived. His mother remained longer than any of them, and she knelt before his chair and looked up into his face.

“Everything in our lives,” she said quietly, “leads up to everything else in our lives. So a moment in the present has a reference point, both in the past and in the future. I want you to know that you-as you are right now and as you ever will be-are fully enough for this moment, Tommy. One way or the other. Whatever it brings.”

“I’ve been wondering how I’m meant to know what to do,” he said. “I look at her face and I try to see on it what she’d want me to do. Then I ask myself if even that is a lie, if I’m merely telling myself that I’m looking at her and trying to see what she’d want me to do when all the time I’m just looking at her and looking at her because I can’t face the coming moment when I won’t be able to look at her at all. Because she’ll be gone. Not only gone in spirit but gone in flesh as well. Because right now, you see, even in this, she’s giving me a reason to keep going on. I’m prolonging that.”

His mother reached up and caressed his face. She said, “Of all my children, you were always the hardest on yourself. You were always looking for the right way to behave, so concerned you might make a mistake. But, darling, there are no mistakes. There are only our wishes, our actions, and the consequences that follow both. There are only events, how we cope with them, and what we learn from the coping.”

“That’s too easy,” he said.

“On the contrary. It’s monumentally difficult.”

She left him then and he went to Helen. He sat at her bedside. He knew that no matter how he disciplined his mind to this moment, the image of his wife as she was just now would fade with time, just as the image of her as she had been days ago would also fade, had indeed already begun to fade, until ultimately, there would be nothing of her left in his visual memory. If he wanted to see her, he’d be able to do so only in photographs. When he closed his eyes, however, he’d see nothing but the dark.

It was the dark that he feared. It was everything that represented the dark, which he could not face. And Helen was at the centre of it all. As was the not-Helen that would come about the instant he acted in the only way he knew his wife would have wanted.

She’d been telling him that from the first. Or was even that belief a lie?

He did not know. He lowered his forehead to the mattress and he prayed for a sign. He knew he was looking for something that would make the road an easier one for him to walk. But signs did not exist for that purpose. They served as guides, but they did not smooth the way.

Her hand was cool when he felt for it where it lay at her side. He closed his fingers round it and he summoned hers to move as they might have done had she only been what she looked, asleep. He pictured her eyelids fluttering open and he heard her murmured “Hullo, darling,” but when he raised his head, she was as before. Breathing because medical science had evolved to that extent. Dead because it had evolved no further.

They belonged together. The will of man might have wished it otherwise. The will of nature was not so vague. Helen would have understood that even if she had not phrased it that way. Let us go, Tommy would have been how she put it. At the heart of matters, she had always been the wisest and most practical of women.

When the door opened some time later, he was ready.

“It’s time,” he said.

He felt his heart swelling, as if it would be torn from his body. The monitors deadened. The ventilator hushed. The silence of parting swept into the room.

BY THE TIME Barbara and Nkata arrived back at New Scotland Yard, the news was in. The gun bore the boy’s prints on the barrel and on the grip, and ballistics showed the bullet to have come from the same pistol. They made their own report to John Stewart, who listened stone faced. He looked as if he believed his own presence in the Harrow Road station might have made a difference, shaking the name of the other perpetrator out of the kid. Sod all he knew, Barbara thought, and she told him what they’d learned from Fabia Bender about the boy and about Colossus.

At the end, she said, “I want to tell the superintendent, sir.” When Stewart’s expression suggested that he smelled something bad, she altered her declaration to, “I’d like to tell him, that is. He thinks Helen’s shooting has to do with this investigation, with that profile in The Source as the way the shooter found her. He needs to know…It’ll give him one less thing to think about, I expect.”

Stewart appeared to look at this from every angle before he finally agreed. But , he told her, she was to do the paperwork related to their call in Harrow Road, and she was to do that before setting off for St. Thomas’ Hospital.

It was past one in the morning, then, when she finally staggered down to her car. Then the blasted Mini choked on her, and she sat with her head on the steering wheel, willing the damn engine to turn over properly. In her head, she heard that same admonition from some mystical automotive dimension suggesting that she might want to get the car seen to before it conked out altogether. She muttered, “Tomorrow. All right? To mor row,” and hoped that promise was enough.

It was. The engine finally started.

At this time of night, the streets of London were virtually empty. No sane taxi driver was out, trying to get a fare in Westminster, and the buses ran far less frequently. An occasional car was passing by, but largely the streets were as vacant as the pavements where the homeless tucked themselves into doorways. So she made quick time to the hospital.

As she drove, she realised that he might not be there, that he might have gone home and tried to get some sleep, in which case she would not disturb him. But when she arrived and pulled into a drop-off point directly down from Lambeth Palace Road, she saw his Bentley at the far end of the carpark. He was with Helen, then, as she’d reckoned he would be.

She gave passing thought to the risk of shutting the Mini’s engine off after she’d finally got it going. But the risk was necessary because she wanted to be the one to tell Lynley about the boy. She felt a need to relieve at least some small portion of the guilt he was carrying round, so she turned the key in the ignition and waited for the Mini’s hiccupping to come to an end.

She grabbed up her shoulder bag and got out of the car. She was just about to walk towards the entrance when she saw him. He’d come out of hospital, and the look of him-how he walked and how he held his shoulders-told her how permanently altered he was. She hesitated, then. How to approach a dearly loved friend…How to approach him in such a time of devastation? At the end, she didn’t think she could. Because, after all, what difference did it actually make with his life now, as it was, in ruins?

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