John Bristow’s commission to Cormoran Strike to investigate Lula Landry’s death begins as a challenge to the police conclusion that she died by suicide and develops into a reconstruction of the crime from statements, records, and minute physical traces. The inquiry’s decisive method is to test testimony against place and sequence: a witness’s account is not enough when the movements it describes can be checked against the layout of the flats, the route through the building, and what was left behind.

Commission and Initial Inquiry

Strike tells Eric Wardle that his client suspects foul play and asks for inside information about Lula, rather than the newspaper accounts already available to the public. Wardle responds warily, suspecting that Strike may be connected to a tabloid, but the exchange establishes the investigation’s central problem: the public version of the death is not sufficient for a client seeking a different explanation. Strike approaches John Bristow for access to information and intends to question him further after reviewing the police material.

The inquiry meets resistance as well as formal cooperation. Robin Ellacott reports that Evan Duffield’s agent will not take calls or arrange an interview, despite being told that Strike is not a journalist. Staff in Guy Somé’s office are similarly unhelpful. Strike decides to try to reach Duffield through Bristow, showing how the commission initially depends on persuading people around the case to provide access as much as on examining official evidence.

Eric Wardle supplies a substantial police file. It arrives at Strike’s office in a bulky package from Scotland Yard while he eats fish and chips and watches the evening news. The gray folder contains statements from people who saw Lula during her final evening, DNA findings from her flat, security visitors’ book pages from 18 Kentigern Gardens, details of her bipolar-disorder medication, the autopsy report, medical records, landline and mobile records, and a summary of the findings on her laptop. A DVD labeled “CCTV 2 Runners” accompanies the papers. Strike cannot play it because the DVD drive on his secondhand computer does not work, so he sets the disc aside and begins with the documents.

Testing Testimony Against the Scene

The police account of events in the Bestiguis’ flat draws Strike’s attention to two details: cocaine on the side of the bath and Tansy Bestigui’s account of what she saw after Lula fell past the window. Tansy consistently maintains that her husband was asleep in bed when Lula fell, but her shifting stories make Strike uncertain about the Bestiguis’ exact positions at that moment. He also remembers Tansy shielding her face as he pressed her on the question. Because the file contains no diagram of their apartment, the physical layout remains an unanswered question; Strike does not treat the police view or the witness statements as conclusive.

The other accounts are likewise treated as claims to be checked, not settled facts. Duffield admits grabbing Lula by the upper arms when she tried to leave Uzi, then says that she broke free and that he followed shortly afterward. His statement explains that he wore a wolf-head mask to avoid photographers. His driver confirms taking him to Kentigern Gardens and then to d’Arblay Street, where the driver dropped him off. Other witnesses say they saw Duffield on the streets, but Strike notes that they could identify only a man in a wolf mask. A woman’s claim that she saw Duffield climbing the stairs to his dealer’s and the dealer’s own supporting account are also open to question in light of Wardle’s view that the dealer would lie for him. The investigation therefore distinguishes between a report that sounds consistent and an observation that actually identifies its subject.

After watching the CCTV, Strike calls Bristow and leaves a message saying that he has seen the footage and read the police file, and that he wants to ask further questions. He also asks Derrick Wilson to let him view the inside of 18 Kentigern Gardens. The request moves the inquiry from paper records toward a physical reconstruction: if the accounts describe actions in particular rooms and on particular stairs, the building itself can help test whether those actions fit.

Reconstructing the Search and the Trace

At the flat, Strike asks Wilson to demonstrate the order in which he searched it on the night Lula died. The request makes Wilson retrace his route rather than merely repeat a prepared account. As Wilson recalls hearing the Bestiguis shouting in the distance, he stops on the stairs and remembers that he slipped backward and landed hard. There were drops of water on the steps. The recovered memory matters because it supplies a specific location and physical trace that can be compared with the events Strike is reconstructing.

Wilson’s earlier account also establishes the urgency and sequence of his response. After returning inside, he found both Bestiguis in the lobby: Freddie was trying to get Tansy back upstairs for clothes, while she was still crying. Wilson told them to call the police and watch the lift in case somebody tried to leave that way. He took the master key from the back room and ran upstairs; he says the stairwell was empty before he unlocked Lula’s flat. Strike interrupts to ask whether Wilson thought to take anything to defend himself if he believed someone inside had just killed a woman. The pause that follows leaves the question hanging, and the account open to further scrutiny rather than automatic acceptance.

The water droplets acquire their fuller significance when Strike later explains the reconstructed sequence to John Bristow. Bristow, Strike says, took white roses from a vase in Flat Two, wiped their ends dry, carried them out while leaving the door ajar, and climbed the stairs to Lula’s flat. Drops of water fell from the roses onto the stairs, where Wilson later slipped. The small trace thus links an object carried from one flat to another with a point on Wilson’s remembered route. Strike’s account also connects the roses to the entrance: Lula had been watching and waiting on her balcony for her long-lost brother, and, when she looked through the peephole and saw the flowers, she opened the door in excitement. The apparent gift functions as part of the reconstructed approach, not an incidental decoration.

Significance of the Commission

The investigation proceeds by narrowing the gap between narrative and verification. The police file gives Strike a mass of material, but the mere presence of medical records, witness statements, or CCTV does not settle what happened. He compares accounts, notes where identification is weak, seeks the apartment’s layout, and asks a witness to reproduce his search path. Each step makes space, timing, and trace part of the same evidentiary problem.

The commission also changes the meaning of details that could otherwise seem negligible. Drops of water on stairs become evidence of a route; roses become a means of gaining entry; and a witness’s forgotten slip becomes a point of contact between recollection and the physical scene. By reconstructing how the trace was made and where it was found, Strike challenges the assumption that Lula’s death can be understood solely through the initial police interpretation. The inquiry’s force lies not in accepting a dramatic accusation at face value, but in showing how concrete details can test—and overturn—the story people first tell about a death.