Vashti

Vashti, a boutique with a clothing floor and an upstairs café and lifestyle area, is the setting for a short meeting between Lula Landry and Rochelle Onifade on the day before Lula’s death. Though the women parted after roughly fifteen minutes, an assistant’s account of what happened in a changing room supplies Cormoran Strike with two crucial leads: Lula was urgently asking someone to come to her flat, and she had brought a handwritten will into the shop to be witnessed. The boutique’s ordinary retail spaces thus become the scene of evidence that overturns the apparent story of Lula’s final day.

Setting and encounter

When Cormoran Strike takes Robin Ellacott to Vashti, his purpose is to learn what Lula and Rochelle did there. He knows they met for fifteen minutes and then separated, but, three months after the visit, he is unsure whether anyone at the shop will remember them. The boutique’s ground floor is devoted to clothes, with a café and lifestyle area upstairs; its customers and assistants form a contrasting, fashion-conscious setting for the private exchange Strike is trying to reconstruct.

Robin approaches an assistant while pretending to shop, asking to try on a sequined coat. The tactic gives her a reason to speak with the staff without presenting the visit as an investigation. An employee remembers Lula as a regular customer, someone seen at Vashti nearly every week, and says she was there the day before her death. More particularly, Lula and Rochelle went into one changing room together. The remembered location matters: it places their conversation in a small, screened space where a telephone call could be overheard by a nearby assistant but remain private from the rest of the shop.

Lula and Rochelle’s last meeting

Rochelle confirms to Strike that she met Lula at Vashti. Kieran Kolovas-Jones had driven Lula there to meet her, and the two women were supposed to have lunch. Instead, Lula was in a hurry and did not stay. Rochelle recalls that Lula tried on a long Alexander McQueen dress, while Strike asks whether the two went into a changing room together. Rochelle’s account also establishes that Lula seemed depressed during their meeting, though it does not explain why.

The haste and the mismatch between the planned lunch and the brief visit invite suspicion. Rochelle says Lula had come all the way to tell her she could not stay because she had to get home to see Ciara Porter. She also recognizes that, with a chauffeur-driven car, Lula could make a detour without extra expense. But the encounter left Rochelle to make her own way home, although Lula usually gave her a lift. Strike later emphasizes this imbalance: Lula had brought her penniless, homeless friend across town, taken her into a cubicle, and then left after fifteen minutes. Rochelle’s resentment at being left behind sits alongside the evidence that Lula did not come merely to socialize.

The overheard telephone call

At Vashti, Lula made a telephone call from a changing cubicle, asking someone to come to her flat in the early hours of the following morning. An assistant called Mel was in the next cubicle, separated from Lula by a curtain, and overheard the plea. She remembers Lula saying that she would probably not be home until one and urging the person to come anyway. The details show urgency and persistence, but Mel initially does not identify the person on the other end of the call.

Strike establishes that the call was made during Lula and Rochelle’s brief meeting. Rochelle acknowledges Lula’s low mood but offers no clear explanation for it; the overheard request supplies a different, more immediate indication of Lula’s state and plans. The telephone records later narrow the possible recipient: that afternoon Lula called only Evan Duffield and her uncle, Tony Landry. Together with the assistant’s recollection, this turns a seemingly unremarkable stop at a boutique into a verifiable lead about whom Lula expected at her flat that night.

The will and the investigation

The shop also becomes important because Lula arrived carrying a piece of blue paper, which had not been accounted for afterward. Strike links it to the missing handwritten will: he argues that Lula was writing the document in the car before she saw Rochelle, then took it into Vashti so Rochelle could witness it. This interpretation connects the paper, the changing-room meeting, and Lula’s reported intention to leave her possessions to her brother. It also gives the otherwise unexplained visit a purpose beyond telling Rochelle that lunch was off.

The will’s significance becomes clearer when Strike confronts John Bristow. He explains that Rochelle had been present when Lula called Jonah Agyeman and arranged to meet him, and that Rochelle witnessed the will leaving Lula’s estate to Jonah. Rochelle then approached John and tried to blackmail him, believing Jonah had caused Lula’s death. Thus the meeting at Vashti set information in motion that reached John before Strike understood its full force; the will both challenged John’s expectation of inheriting and exposed the danger of what Rochelle knew.

A place revisited

Vashti remains present in the investigation after the meeting itself is reconstructed. Robin had tried on and admired a green dress there. Later, as the case is reaching its conclusion, Cormoran Strike gives her that dress, recalling the boutique visit through an object rather than an account of the murder. The gift marks a change in their working circumstances: Strike tells Robin that work is now coming in and acknowledges how much she has contributed, as she prepares to begin a new position elsewhere.

The boutique therefore holds two very different kinds of memory. For the investigation, its changing room preserves the overheard request and the circumstances in which Lula’s will was witnessed. For Robin and Strike, the dress links their earlier visit to a later gesture of thanks. Vashti’s importance lies in this double function: a place where a brief, apparently inconsequential meeting left evidence that reshaped the case, and where a concrete object later carries the personal significance of the partnership that pursued it.