Robin found out that Lula had requested Duffield to visit in Vashti

Robin Ellacott’s visit to Vashti uncovers a witness’s recollection that Lula Landry, the day before her death, had pleaded with Evan Duffield to come to her flat. The exchange does not establish who killed Lula or precisely when the conversation occurred, but it unsettles the easy assumption that Duffield’s absence from the fatal scene made his earlier contact with her immaterial. Robin’s performance as a shopper gives her access to a remembered conversation; the information she draws out is vivid, consequential, and still imperfectly verified.

The inquiry at Vashti

Cormoran Strike sends Robin into Vashti to ask what Lula and her friend Rochelle Onifade had been doing there on the day before Lula died. The two women had met in the boutique for about fifteen minutes and then parted. Strike is cautious about the prospect: three months have passed, and the assistants might have noticed nothing. The visit is worth attempting because even an incidental recollection could clarify Lula’s movements and company shortly before her death.

The inquiry takes place under cover of shopping. Robin and Strike present themselves as relatives looking for a coat for a fictional wife, and Robin lets the assistants believe that an expensive purchase is possible. Retrieving a sequined coat from a mannequin becomes an elaborate task: it has to be removed from the display and freed from its electronic tag, while Robin gathers more than ten thousand pounds’ worth of clothes and accessories to take into the changing room. Strike positions himself close enough to listen. The prolonged shopping performance is not a digression from the investigation but the means by which Robin gains time and the staff’s attention.

Robin’s willingness to play the role also matters to the scene. She has the assistants bring clothing into the changing area, models outfits, and allows the imagined purchase to gather credibility, despite being unable to afford even the cheapest belt. Strike recognizes that he is seeing the full range of her talents. The investigation depends not on an official interview but on Robin’s ability to sustain an ordinary social fiction until conversation turns toward Lula.

The overheard recollection

The opening comes when a pink-haired assistant remembers that Lula had been in the shop and remarks that the day was sad. She turns to Mel, a tattooed red-haired colleague, who appears reluctant to discuss what she overheard. The pink-haired assistant prompts her about Lula speaking to Duffield. Mel’s eventual account is more specific than a general recollection of seeing the famous couple: she says Lula was asking him to come round, and that she sounded desperate to see him.

Robin checks the crucial point by asking whether Duffield was at Lula’s flat when she died. Mel answers that he was not and had never gone there. In her view, this made what Lula had said earlier irrelevant. But Mel then recounts the substance of the appeal: Duffield had apparently said he had something on and did not want to see Lula; Lula answered that he could come later, that she would wait up, and that she would probably not be home until one. She asked him repeatedly to come. The conversation therefore suggests a woman trying to arrange a meeting, not a confirmed meeting or a visit that actually took place.

Mel adds that Lula had a friend with her in the changing cubicle, who heard the exchange and, Mel assumes, would have told the police. That detail connects the boutique recollection to Rochelle Onifade, the friend whose meeting with Lula had brought Robin and Strike to Vashti in the first place. It also marks a limit in Mel’s testimony: she describes what she believes the companion could have heard and done, rather than establishing that the police were told or what Rochelle would say.

What the discovery changes

The assistants’ recollection complicates the evidence about Duffield without proving that he was present at the flat. His police statement, reviewed elsewhere by Strike, says that he tried to stop Lula leaving Uzi by grabbing her upper arms, that she broke free and left, and that he followed later. He described wearing a wolf-head mask to avoid photographers, and the driver who took him from the club supported his account of going to Kentigern Gardens before moving on to d’ Arblay Street. The Vashti conversation adds an earlier, emotionally charged request for a later visit; it does not, on its own, overturn the account of where he went or show that Lula saw him again.

Mel’s certainty also exceeds the firm ground of her observation. She treats the request as unmistakably addressed to Duffield, and the pink-haired assistant’s memory reinforces that identification. Yet the scene gives Robin no independent confirmation of the call’s recipient beyond their recognition of the names and circumstances. Their recollection may be useful, but the confidence with which a famous person is recognized is not the same as a verified identification. The distinction between Lula’s words as remembered, the assistants’ interpretation, and the actual course of events remains central to the investigation.

That distinction suits the wider method of Strike’s inquiry. He does not accept the police conclusion merely because it is settled, and he tests accounts against physical circumstances and inconsistencies. Reviewing the Bestiguis’ statements, he remains troubled that Tansy repeatedly insisted her husband had been asleep when Lula fell, and he considers the couple’s precise positions in the flat unproven. Later, when Derrick Wilson retraces his search of Lula’s flat, he suddenly remembers slipping backward on the stairs where there were drops of water. In the final reconstruction, Strike links those drops to water left behind when John Bristow carried white roses upstairs. Against such material traces, the Vashti testimony is another clue to be weighed: it opens a line of inquiry rather than closing one.

A clue gathered through performance

The episode turns on the difference between obtaining a story and establishing a fact. Robin wins a recollection by creating a plausible shopping scene, while the staff’s talk is shaped by partial memory, assumptions about Duffield, and his celebrity. The assistants’ account makes Lula’s plea legible as evidence of her desire to see him, but not as proof that he came. Its value lies precisely in the question it reopens: what happened between Lula’s attempt to reach Duffield and her death?

The method also gives Robin an active role in the investigation. Strike sets the question, but Robin sustains the cover, draws the assistants into conversation, and tests Mel’s identification with a direct follow-up. The five-thousand-pound coat, the fictional relative, and the promised return with “Sandra” are instruments in that work. When Strike reserves the coat under the name Andrew Atkinson and leaves with Robin amid the staff’s good wishes, the ordinary commercial scene has furnished a potentially important lead—one that still has to be checked against other testimony and the physical evidence.