Lula Landry fell to her death in Kentigern Gardens

Lula Landry’s fall at Kentigern Gardens is the central death under investigation in this part of the novel: officially treated as suicide, it remains shadowed by uncertain testimony and details that do not settle what happened in the moments before she hit the road. The distinction between what witnesses said and what the evidence could establish becomes central to Cormoran Strike’s scrutiny of the case.

The night of the fall

According to multiple accounts, Lula left Uzi shortly before Evan Duffield, her boyfriend. Duffield was wearing a wolf’s-head mask, a detail Strike regarded as possible deliberate showmanship. The police accepted that Duffield had not been involved in what followed at Kentigern Gardens, although his account of the rest of the night drew speculation online.

Tansy Bestigui said she got up around two in the morning to use the bathroom, heard shouting from two flats above, and saw Lula fall past the window. When Eric Wardle and Carver arrived at the scene, about twenty to twenty-five minutes after Lula had hit the road, they found Tansy in an extremely distressed state, saying there was a murderer in the building. Her claim became an important challenge to the suicide verdict, but the setting complicated it: the Bestiguis’ windows were designed to keep outside noise from entering, and the police and neighbors below were scarcely audible from inside the flat.

Physical evidence and changing accounts

The autopsy concluded that Lula died on impact with the road. It recorded bruising to her upper arms and established that she had fallen wearing only one shoe. Photographs of her body also confirmed a discrepancy that online speculation had highlighted: she was wearing a sequined top and trousers, not the dress seen in photographs of her entering the building. The evidence therefore established that she had changed clothes after returning from the nightclub, without explaining why.

Tansy’s statements changed. Her first account described going from the bedroom to the bathroom; a later version added that she had opened the sitting-room window. She consistently maintained that her husband, Freddie Bestigui, had been asleep in bed when Lula fell. Freddie likewise told police that he had been asleep, woken by his wife’s screams, and seen her run past him in her underwear. The police found half a line of cocaine on the bath’s marble rim and a small bag of cocaine hidden in a box of Tampax in the bathroom cabinet. Freddie acknowledged that he knew Tansy habitually used cocaine, though he said he had not known she had any in the flat that night; her drug use had put considerable strain on their marriage.

The unresolved moment

Strike’s reading of the file did not make Tansy’s account more conclusive. He noted both the cocaine and the brief interval after she said she had seen Lula fall past the window. The police folder contained no map or diagram of the Bestiguis’ flat, leaving the precise positions of Tansy and Freddie difficult to assess. Strike also remembered Tansy shielding her face by pretending to push back her hair when he pressed her about Freddie’s location. Despite the police view of her testimony, he concluded that the couple’s whereabouts at the moment of Lula’s fall were not proven.

The case thus turns on a gap between a verdict and a fully established sequence of events. The autopsy fixes the fatal outcome, and Lula’s clothing change revises the picture of her final hours, but neither resolves the Bestiguis’ positions or confirms Tansy’s account. Strike’s attention to those uncertainties keeps the fall open to investigation rather than allowing the official conclusion to stand as a complete explanation.