Strike meets and interviews Rochelle Onifade

Strike meets and interviews Rochelle Onifade outside the psychiatric unit at St Thomas’s Hospital, seeking a witness whose account may illuminate Lula Landry’s last day. The encounter turns on a gap between what Rochelle says she remembers and what Strike suspects she knows: her testimony both complicates the accepted picture of Lula’s state of mind and raises the possibility that Lula had arranged to meet someone in the small hours before her death.

Finding Rochelle

Strike reaches the hospital shortly after ten and checks that the automatic double doors on Grantley Road are the only entrance. He takes up a position on a stone wall in the car park, about twenty yards away, where he can watch people entering and leaving. With little to go on beyond the likelihood that Rochelle is homeless and the knowledge that she is Black, he calls her name as women pass. Twice he gets the wrong person; each time, the interruption yields no lead.

Just after eleven, a short, stocky woman comes out with a distinctive side-to-side gait and wearing a conspicuous magenta fake-fur coat. Strike recognizes that he has not missed her going in. She stops and looks around, scowling as he approaches on his injured leg. He introduces himself as Cormoran Strike and asks to talk. Rochelle explains that she uses the Redbourne Street entrance and has come out this way because she was going to McDonald’s. The explanation points to the practical limits of Strike’s stakeout: he has found her by watching one exit, but her route through the hospital could easily have defeated that approach.

They sit at a window table in McDonald’s, where Strike buys coffee and large cookies. He keeps the exchange informal, avoiding a notebook because he thinks a more official manner could make Rochelle clam up or leave. The conversation depends on sustaining her willingness to talk, while Strike gradually tests the omissions in her account.

Lula’s state of mind

Rochelle says Lula was depressed, and presents depression as an illness that can take hold of a person. Her pronunciation catches Strike’s attention: she says “nillness,” a slip that prompts his private reflection on the different ways illness can shade into death. The moment links Rochelle’s experience of depression with the investigation’s wider struggle to distinguish a diagnosis from a sufficient explanation of what happened to Lula.

That account differs from John Bristow’s description of his sister. He tells Strike that Lula had been expelled from school after experimenting with drugs, had run away to London and lived rough with addicts, and had experienced worsening mental-health problems before being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and placed on medication. Bristow says the medication kept her well and that the autopsy showed she had been taking it when she died. He also rejects the suggestion that she was depressed: he says he saw her the morning before her death and found her fine, with her modeling career prospering and a lucrative contract under consideration. Strike does not treat a cheerful mood or an apparent future as proof that a person could not die by suicide. From his experience, someone may appear engaged with the future and still take their own life; a prior case he recalls involved a man who had been the life of his birthday party before dying that night. Rochelle’s statement therefore adds a conflicting account, not a definitive answer.

The police had already discounted another witness’s claim to have heard an argument at Lula’s flat. Eric Wardle explains that the windows were designed to keep out street noise and that an experiment, with a man shouting from Lula’s balcony, showed that people in the flat below could not hear him. Wardle also attributes the neighbor’s account to auditory hallucinations associated with cocaine use. Against that background, the interview shows how mental-health and drug histories can shape judgments about credibility: Rochelle’s depression matters to the conversation, but it does not by itself establish whether her memory is accurate or what caused Lula’s death.

The Vashti visit

Strike asks whether Lula was depressed when Rochelle saw her at Vashti the day before she died. Rochelle answers yes. He then presses a different detail: why had Lula driven all the way there only to say she could not stay for lunch? Rochelle first agrees that it was odd, then explains that having a driver made it easy for Lula to go wherever she wanted without extra cost. She says Lula was passing and had come to tell her she could not stay because she had to get home to see Ciara Porter.

The explanation gives the visit an ordinary practical rationale, but does not settle why Lula made it in person. Strike has been trying to establish whether the encounter concealed something worth reporting; Rochelle’s account instead emphasizes the freedom and convenience that came with Lula’s driver. Her answer also situates the visit among Lula’s relationships, placing Ciara in the immediate explanation for why Lula had to leave. The distinction between a mundane reason and a meaningful clue remains open rather than being resolved by the interview.

A possible meeting withheld

The questioning becomes more consequential when Strike asks whether Rochelle heard Lula trying to arrange to meet someone in the small hours. Rochelle says no. She avoids his eyes and swirls the dregs of her coffee around the paper cup. Strike points out the importance of the information and asks whether she had told the police; he is probing not only what she remembers, but whether she has previously kept it from investigators.

After Rochelle leaves McDonald’s, Strike watches her pass the window with her head down and brows knitted. He follows when he sees her at a pedestrian crossing, still conspicuous in the magenta coat and speaking into her pink jeweled Nokia. He catches the fragment of her conversation in which she is discussing who Lula had been arranging to meet that night. When Rochelle notices him behind her, she removes the phone from her ear and cuts off the call. The contrast between her denial at the table and the subject of the call makes her reluctance newly significant, though the fragment does not identify the person Lula may have planned to meet.

Strike tells Rochelle that he thinks she knows something she is not telling him. She glares at him. Rather than forcing an answer, he gives her another card with his mobile number and asks her to call if she decides she has something to say. The encounter ends without a full disclosure: Strike has not established who, if anyone, Lula intended to meet, but he has found a concrete reason to doubt that Rochelle’s first denial is the whole story.

Significance to the investigation

The interview brings together three unresolved questions: whether Lula was depressed before her death, how much weight to give witnesses whose accounts are entangled with illness or drug use, and whether she had made a late-night arrangement that the police never learned about. Rochelle confirms that she saw Lula at Vashti and says Lula was depressed, but she offers no clear explanation for the unusual visit. Her denial about the possible meeting is put under pressure by the call Strike overhears, yet the crucial identity remains undisclosed.

The scene thus shifts the investigation from a broad dispute over Lula’s mental state toward a specific gap in the timeline. It does not prove that Lula was murdered or that Rochelle knows the answer; it makes the missing arrangement a question that can no longer be treated as merely hypothetical. Strike’s restraint—keeping his notebook away, following rather than confronting her at the crossing, and leaving a number—preserves the possibility that Rochelle may later speak. The interview’s decisive result is not a solution but a sharpened suspicion, grounded in the difference between what Rochelle says and what she appears to be discussing.