Elizabeth George, With No One As Witness
Harper Torch, 2005
Silent Parting
"Will you let me take you home now?"
"Yes. You can take me home."
Havers and Lynley
Fans of the Inspector Lynley series have seen Elizabeth George's ability to tell a good tale build up over her first few books, wane to mediocrity with For the Sake of Elena and Playing for the Ashes (though the latter contains arguably the most hilarious love scene in crime fiction!), and soar to a peak with Deception on His Mind and In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner. But after the wholly regrettable A Place of Hiding, she reverts to her more conventional formula woven around the unlikely but endearing pairing of Lynley and Havers.
In what is perhaps the final book of the series, in With No One As Witness the aristocratic Tommy Lynley and his working-class partner Barbara Havers face one of the most challenging cases of their respective careers, and deal with personal and professional upheavals that change their lives.
Someone with a particularly sick bent of mind is loose on the streets of London, murdering adolescent boys. But the police only twig that a serial killer is at work when the fourth body is found. The reason: the fourth victim is white, while the earlier kids were black or mixed-race. This puts the Metropolitan Police in a sticky situation, and are under pressure to apprehend the perpetrator before the media catches on to the institutionalized racism rampant in the force.
Acting Superintendent Thomas Lynley—the eighth earl of Asherton, who turned his back on his land and his title to pursue a "commoner's" career—is given charge of the case. Working with him is Barbara Havers, struggling to get her career out of the murk. Having being demoted to constable after a (wholly justified) extreme kind of insubordination in In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner, the detective has to come to terms with having to see her colleague Winston Nkata being chosen for promotion above her.
But even before the case gets under way it becomes clear to Lynley's team that Assistant Commissioner David Hillier is more concerned about averting a public relations disaster. Not only does he use Sergeant Nkata as the visible face of the investigation—Nkata being a black man with a history of gang violence who managed to turn his life around to become a respectable cop—by making him face the media, he brings in a profiler to help the investigation without Lynley's consent.
However, the crimes escalate despite the over a dozen detectives and some uniformed constables working overtime, and Lynley, Havers, Nkata and the rest are led a merry chase over the bylanes of London, pursuing obscure clues, suspects and witnesses. Elizabeth George brings us face to face with the "seamy underside of London as well as the depths of evil within some human souls", as the Winston-Salem Journal puts it. With the case receiving wide media coverage, Hillier finally does the unthinkable. He agrees to having a journalist embedded to the investigation team. What is worse is that it ends up being a tabloid reporter, who starts off by wanting to profile the main investigators.
Meanwhile, Havers is having to deal with her deteriorating relationship with perhaps the only friends she has outside of work—her neighbours Taymullah Azhar and his young daughter Hadiyyah. Her mother's failing health is also a concern. Working on her first serial killer case and keen to have her rank restored, Havers, in her inimitable fashion, makes quite a few errors in the tact department, despite repeated warnings from Lynley, who is doing his best to get her reinstated. Even though it is ultimately Havers' courage and instincts that bring the case to a close, it comes at a cost and a realization that brings the book to a rather sombre end.
With Lynley at his wit's—and sometimes his temper's—end at Hillier's political machinations, and unable to protect his minions in the way his former boss Malcolm Webberly used to, he begins to question himself and his ability to do his job. With impending fatherhood preying on his mind, especially given the age of the victims, he confides, rather out of character:
"I'm losing the will to keep doing this, Havers."....
"It doesn't make you less of a cop," she said, "just because you've become more of a human being."
"It's the marriage thing.... It's the fatherhood business.... It makes me feel too exposed. I see how fleeting life can be.... And... Barbara, here's what I never expected to feel.... That I can't bear it. And that dragging someone by his bollocks to justice isn't going to change that for me any longer."
(p.429)
Little does he know how horrifyingly prophetic his words are as the case builds up to an explosive close. In No One As Witness Elizabeth George has taken some brave permanent decisions about a number of much-loved characters, and left question marks on others. Clearly, she intends this to bring the curtain down on this much-loved pairing of Lynley and Havers, though, who knows, she might do a Patricia Cornwell (who actually killed a major character and then brought him back to life!) in time.
Certainly not her best book, With No One As Witness is still a gripping enough detective novel. Some of the explanations were a tad unbelieveable, given the coincidence involved. Especially after hearing a number of times how there are no coincidences in police work! An American herself, George seems comfortable in her chosen setting of present-day London. She has never shied away from showing the seamier side of human personality, and in this book we meet some of the worst specimens.
First-time readers of the series might find the details of the characters' lives too overwhelming to grip. Some of the developments in certain relationships seemed unconvincing. And sadly, parts of the narration and conversation left one wanting more. Throughout the book one gets the feeling that George could have perhaps told a much more lucid tale. One is not exactly sure what the author wants us to infer all the time. Whether that is intentional or a result of over-idiomatic writing is perhaps a matter of opinion, but it seems George has fallen into a trap a number of successful authors get sucked into—loving the flow of their own words so much that they don't know when to put a lid on it.
Almost 800 pages in the paperback edition, it is certainly a massive volume, though the pace of the book is quite decent. That said, a number of side-plots seemed superfluous—namely, Nkata's relentless pursuit of Yasmin Edwards and his assumption that her young son "needs a man" is quite idiotic, and the detailed insight into the politics of the Colossus centre and its director Ulrike Ellis was plain tedious.
Of course, no fan of Lynley and Havers should give this one a miss. As for anyone who is not familiar with them, it would be disaster to read this book before reading the others!
RATING: 7/10