Guy Somé

Guy Somé is a fashion designer, Lula Landry’s friend and professional collaborator, and a significant witness in Cormoran Strike’s investigation into her death. His relationship with Lula is defined by intimacy and creative partnership, but also by unresolved questions about what he knew and by sharply conflicting accounts of his influence over her. After her death, a campaign image featuring Lula in his designs made their connection a public controversy as well as a private one.

Identity and Background

Somé is introduced through the fashion business that surrounds Lula. Strike encounters his name in a posthumous advertising controversy: an image for Somé’s designs shows Lula and Ciara Porter posing in an alley, wearing large angel wings and accessorized with his wares. The image provokes criticism that Somé is exploiting Lula’s recent death. Others, including an online admirer writing as LulaMyInspirationForeva, defend it as a tribute Lula would have wanted. The same picture that turns Lula into an enduring public image therefore becomes a test of how much authority others can claim over her wishes.

Somé’s distinctive public style extends to his ready-to-wear label, whose clothing bears a gold GS logo, and to more expensive designer pieces. Strike sees the logo on a hooded jacket while browsing the website; Somé’s company, however, does not respond to requests for an interview about the death of what it calls its favorite model. When Strike eventually meets him, Somé appears in striking, carefully chosen clothes, including a fitted black T-shirt decorated with silver studs. His flamboyant presentation is part of his professional persona, but his conversation is also marked by bluntness and a readiness to needle his questioner.

Before becoming Guy Somé, he was Kevin Owusu. He says that he grew up in Hackney and changed his name after leaving home. Ciara later supplies a painful detail about that history: Somé’s father, a bus driver who had not attended college, beat him for sketching dresses. His chosen name and fashion career thus follow an early conflict between his creative ambitions and family rejection. Somé draws a parallel between his name change and Strike’s, though Strike rejects the comparison, explaining that he was never known by his father’s surname.

Friendship and Work with Lula

Lula and Somé’s relationship joins friendship to work. Her emails to him are cheerful and familiar, and one makes a specific request: she asks him to create a birthday gift for Rochelle Onifade, offering to pay for something nice. That request shows Lula using her position in the fashion world to help a friend, and Somé as someone she could approach casually on Rochelle’s behalf. It also complicates the idea that their closeness can be reduced to a slogan. An online admirer says Lula loved Somé like a brother, while the emails establish a more concrete pattern of affection and practical trust.

Somé gives Lula the nickname Cuckoo, which she sometimes uses in messages to him. He says that they also called John Bristow the Accountant, joking about John’s attention to Lula’s finances and his attempts to scrutinize what others earned. Their private nicknames disclose an irreverent bond and a shared perspective on John, whom Somé portrays as intrusive about money. In the interview, Somé responds to the possibility that Lula was killed with disbelief, using his familiar name for her as he discusses the case.

The friendship also had an explicit protective element. Somé tells Strike that he and Lula had made a pact: if either was seriously considering suicide, they would call the other. He believes Lula would have contacted him. His account matters because Lula had experienced mental-health problems and her death had been ruled a suicide, but the pact alone cannot establish what happened. It records Somé’s understanding of their bond and becomes a personal reason for him to reject the conclusion that she took her own life.

The Investigation and the Last Message

When Strike seeks help reaching useful witnesses, John Bristow agrees to try to contact Somé, reasoning that Somé adored Lula and ought to want to assist. Somé’s company has so far kept investigators at a distance. The contrast between the public image of devotion and the difficulty of securing an interview makes his cooperation an open question before Strike meets him.

Somé tells Strike that he was in Tokyo when Lula phoned on the Wednesday before her death. Because of the time difference, the call reached him at two in the morning while his phone was muted; he did not answer, but says that she left a message and did not sound suicidal. The message is important to his account of their pact, although his description of its tone remains his interpretation. It places a missed call and an unanswered message between the two friends in the days before Lula died, without by itself resolving what she intended or who was responsible for her death.

Somé says that he returned home on the night Lula died. Strike knows that Somé lived in Charles Street, Kensington, and that someone walking from there would have approached Kentigern Gardens from the opposite direction to the Alderbrook Road CCTV camera. This detail gives Somé’s whereabouts potential investigative relevance: the camera’s position would not necessarily capture every approach from his home. The police had accepted his statement that he went to bed after arriving, but the geographical point means that a lack of recorded appearance on that camera would not alone settle the question of his movements.

Conflicting Accounts and Significance

Evan Duffield offers the sharpest counterportrait of Somé. He alleges that Somé was possessive of Lula, disliked her working for other people, and reacted badly when she did not see him. Duffield further claims that Somé used her in his business, sought her help cheaply or for free, and encouraged her connection with Deeby Macc in a way that would serve Somé’s interests. These are Duffield’s accusations, voiced in the context of his hostility; they should not be mistaken for independently established facts. Their force in the narrative lies in the contrast with Somé’s own account of mutual loyalty and in the way professional collaboration could be understood either as friendship or exploitation.

Somé’s character is therefore presented through several imperfect frames: his own testimony, Lula’s affectionate emails, a fan’s idealized online tribute, the commercial image criticized after her death, and Duffield’s hostile claims. Each reveals something different without making any single account complete. The fashion photograph turns Lula into an emblem; the email restores the friend who could ask Somé to make Rochelle a birthday present; the missed call leaves their promised safeguard tragically untested. Somé remains both a close friend who says he expected Lula to reach out and a witness whose presence in the investigation cannot be assessed solely through his public devotion.