Cocaine use

Tansy Bestigui’s cocaine use shapes how the police and others interpret her account of the night Lula Landry died. It gives investigators grounds to doubt her claim that she heard a man arguing with Lula, but the conflicting evidence also leaves open the distinction between an unreliable witness and a witness whose every observation can be dismissed. The drug is therefore more than a detail about Tansy’s private life: it becomes part of the contest over what the investigation is prepared to believe.

Use and Evidence

The police found cocaine in the Bestiguis’ flat after Lula’s death. Their file recorded half a line on the marble edge of the bath and a small plastic bag concealed in a box of Tampax in the cabinet above the sink. Tansy later acknowledged that she had used some during dinner and said the drug was found in the bathroom. She attributed taking it to boredom during the evening, but denied that it had made her imagine the voice she said she heard upstairs.

Eric Wardle described the investigators’ reconstruction of the alleged argument. Because the flats’ windows were understood to be soundproof, police tested whether a person shouting from Lula’s balcony could be heard in the Bestiguis’ flat. The Bestiguis had left their home after the death, and officers used that opportunity to stage the test: a man shouted from the balcony while sober people inside the first-floor flat tried to listen. The police concluded that they could not have heard him. This experiment supported their view that Tansy’s account of the argument was false, though it tested the acoustics rather than establishing what she had or had not heard on the night.

The Disputed Account

Tansy initially maintained that she heard an argument just before Lula fell. As Wardle recounted it, she attributed words to Lula and a man, and insisted that she had heard them despite the police test. Her account then changed: she said that she had opened a sitting-room window for air, which could have altered the conditions under which sound reached her. The police checked this explanation against the physical evidence. The windows were locked and bolted when officers arrived, and investigators found no fingerprints on the latches; the cleaner had washed them the previous morning and had not returned. The police therefore rejected Tansy’s claim that she had opened a window.

Tansy also told Strike that she had used cocaine earlier in the evening and that investigators found it in the bathroom. She insisted that a man had been present and had killed Lula, while admitting she did not know how he had left the building. Her certainty about the presence of a man thus stood alongside gaps in her account and the drug use the police cited against her credibility. The evidence supports neither treating her claim as established simply because she repeated it nor treating cocaine use alone as proof that she imagined the entire episode.

Investigation and Credibility

The case against Tansy’s testimony had a public dimension as well as a forensic one. According to Wardle, while police were testing her account, she was telling people that she was the sole witness to Lula’s murder. The press gathered around her home, and newspapers had already publicly treated Evan Duffield as a suspect. Tansy’s cocaine use consequently became entangled with the attention she received: it helped investigators explain her account as hallucination, while the intense publicity gave her claim a prominence that the police believed it did not merit.

Strike’s review of the file did not simply replace the police’s conclusion with Tansy’s version. He noted that cocaine had been found in the bathroom, and considered the sequence of events after Tansy might have seen Lula fall past the window. But he was also struck by Tansy’s repeated insistence that Freddie had been asleep in bed when Lula fell. Remembering that she had shielded her face when questioned about the point, Strike concluded that the Bestiguis’ precise locations at the moment of the fall had not been proven. His reservation concerns what the evidence leaves unresolved; it does not establish that Tansy’s cocaine use made her account true.

Ongoing Habit and Narrative Significance

Freddie Bestigui told police that he knew his wife habitually used cocaine, although he had not known she had a supply in the flat on the night Lula died. He also said that her drug habit had placed great strain on their marriage. This account makes her use more than an isolated incident during one dinner: it was an ongoing part of the couple’s domestic circumstances, even as the available evidence distinguishes Freddie’s general knowledge from his awareness of the drugs in the flat that night.

The novel places this evidence beside other judgments formed from personal histories. John Bristow argues that the police and coroner saw Lula chiefly through her history of poor mental health; Tansy, meanwhile, is treated as a witness whose cocaine use undermines her report. In both cases, a known condition risks becoming a shortcut that decides what someone’s account can mean. Tansy’s cocaine use matters because it is concrete evidence relevant to her reliability, but the investigation’s own tests and unresolved questions prevent that evidence from answering, by itself, what happened in the flat.