Great City Police Department

The Metropolitan Police is the principal police organization involved in the initial investigation of Lula Landry’s death. Its officers gather statements, examine the flat and its forensic evidence, test a witness’s account, and compile a substantial case file. Yet the investigation’s conclusion—that Lula’s fall was a suicide—does not settle how the building could be entered during a brief gap in security, or establish where the Bestiguis were when she fell. The contrast between the force’s procedural work and the unresolved details gives Cormoran Strike a basis for reopening the case.

Investigation and initial conclusion

The police investigation addressed both the physical scene and the accounts of people connected to the final evening of Lula’s life. Eric Wardle tells Strike that officers tried to trace two men who appeared in connection with the case, but neither came forward after an appeal. A car alarm had gone off around the time they would have been passing or attempting to reach a Maserati. Wardle reasons that even if police had found them, their contribution might have amounted only to eyewitness accounts of Lula jumping. He also says that the forensic examination found no unexplained DNA in her flat and, in the police view, no sign that an unauthorized person had been inside.

The force also tested Tansy Bestigui’s assertion that she heard Lula fall. After the Bestiguis moved to a friend’s house to escape press attention, officers staged a practical test: one person shouted from Lula’s balcony while others listened from the first floor. Those listeners were sober and made an effort to hear, but could not make out the words. Wardle presents the experiment as proof that Tansy could not have heard what she claimed. It addresses audibility, however, rather than resolving what Tansy saw or where she and Freddie Bestigui were at the crucial moment.

Police response times are described as rapid: uniformed officers arrived in about eight minutes, while Wardle and Carver arrived in about twenty. The detail conveys an organized response after the emergency call, but speed did not guarantee that the initial interpretation was complete. The case could be efficiently attended to and still leave its central sequence uncertain.

Records and investigative materials

When Strike obtains the file from Scotland Yard, it arrives as a bulky package, which he reads while eating fish and chips and watching the evening news on a portable television. The thick folder brings together statements from people who saw Lula during her final evening; a report on DNA recovered from her flat; photocopied visitors’ book pages from 18 Kentigern Gardens; details of medication prescribed for her bipolar disorder; the autopsy report; medical records covering the previous year; mobile-phone and landline records; and a précis of findings from her laptop. A DVD is marked “CCTV 2 Runners.” The file makes the investigation’s breadth visible while giving Strike several kinds of evidence to compare rather than relying on one witness or one police conclusion.

That record does not remove the need to interpret. Reading the police account of events in the Bestiguis’ flat, Strike notes a line of cocaine beside the bath and focuses on the few seconds after Tansy saw Lula fall past the window. The file includes no map or diagram of the flat, making the precise positions of its occupants harder to establish. Strike is also troubled by the consistency of one element in Tansy’s changing stories: she maintains that Freddie was in bed asleep when Lula fell. He recalls that she shielded her face by pretending to push back her hair when he pressed her on the point. On that basis, he regards the Bestiguis’ locations at the time as unproven, despite the police view.

Access, procedure, and the building

The case turns in part on a short interval in which access to the building may have changed. Strike observes a keypad and a camera over the front door, noting that John Bristow had not mentioned the camera and that it might be new. He also questions Bristow’s focus on the fifteen minutes after Lula went inside, when the photographers had left and security guard Derrick Wilson had abandoned the desk because he was ill. The lobby had become briefly navigable, but the front door was not glass: someone outside could not simply see that Wilson had left his post. The security gap therefore raises a further question about how a person seeking entry could know when it existed.

The building’s monitoring arrangements are extensive but bounded. In the security room, four small black-and-white screens show the street outside the front door, an underground car park, the back garden, and the stationary lift. The garden camera looks over lawn, planting, and the high rear wall Strike had climbed. Two control panels operate communal alarms and doors to the pool and car park, while two telephones serve different connections: one reaches an outside line and the other only the three flats. These systems document and regulate parts of the building, but their several views do not amount to continuous, comprehensive knowledge of every route or person.

Police work also depends on the order in which a scene is searched and the limits of what its investigators observe. Strike asks Wilson to show him the sequence of his search through the rooms that night. During the account, Wilson unexpectedly remembers slipping backwards and sitting hard where there was water and drops. The remembered detail emerges through a reconstruction prompted by Strike, rather than through the original summary alone. It illustrates how revisiting a witness’s movements can recover circumstances that were not prominent in an earlier account.

Assessment and narrative significance

Strike’s assessment of Wilson’s testimony contrasts with the unsettled interpretation of the case. In his notes, Strike considers Wilson concise, precise, and observant, requiring few follow-up questions. He sees no need to use the methods he applies to confused or evasive witnesses, and thinks Wilson’s abilities are almost wasted on a trawl through Bristow’s paranoia. The observation distinguishes the quality of an individual account from the broader adequacy of the investigation: a credible witness can still be embedded in a mistaken overall theory.

The police file and its procedures thus function both as investigative work and as a record open to revision. The force has sought witnesses, tested audibility, examined forensic material, and assembled medical, digital, and access records. Strike’s challenge is not simply to dismiss those efforts, but to ask what their conclusions actually establish. The decisive reversal comes when he reconstructs John Bristow’s movements: Bristow removed several white roses from a vase in Flat Two, dried their ends, carried them out while leaving the door ajar again, and went upstairs to his sister’s flat. In this account, the flowers and the reopened door turn an apparently incidental object and movement into evidence of a staged route. The institutional conclusion of suicide gives way to a reconstruction in which the access problem and the scene’s details can be understood as parts of a concealed crime.