January 7

January 7 is the day before Lula Landry’s death and a key investigative date in Cormoran Strike’s reconstruction of events. A legal conference in Oxford that Tony Landry attended gives Strike a specific lead to check; separately, evidence places Lula with Rochelle Onifade that day, making January 7 part of the chain of events that preceded the fatal fall.

The Oxford conference

Strike asks Robin Ellacott to find out about an international family-law conference held in Oxford on January 7, with particular attention to whether Tony Landry was there. Robin follows up by calling the Law Society and learns that he attended. She obtained the confirmation by pretending to be someone Tony had met at the conference who had misplaced his card. The result answers Strike’s specific question, though his muted response leaves Robin dissatisfied and the exchange ends in mutual coolness.

The day before Lula’s death

January 7 also matters because it was the day Lula met Rochelle in a Notting Hill shop. Strike later states that the meeting lasted fifteen minutes and that Lula took Rochelle into a changing cubicle, where she made a telephone call asking someone to meet her at her flat in the early hours of the following morning. A shop assistant, Mel, was in the neighboring cubicle and overheard the call through the curtain. The report gives the inquiry a witness to Lula’s urgent plans on the eve of her death, while leaving the recipient’s identity to be established from the evidence.

The date in the investigation

The conference lead and the shop encounter illustrate how Strike’s inquiry proceeds by testing particulars rather than accepting the police conclusion. The Oxford attendance is a verifiable fact that Robin establishes independently; the shop account is a witness report that Strike later uses to challenge an assumption about whom Lula might have called. Together, these strands make January 7 more than a calendar marker: it is the last full day before the fall, and a point at which the investigation can connect people, movements, and a planned meeting to the events of the next night.