March 17

March 17 is the date a large photograph file was deleted from Lula Landry’s laptop, ten weeks after she died. What first looks like an incidental timestamp becomes evidence of later access to the computer: the files had only been conventionally deleted, and the police had returned the laptop before the removal occurred. The date helps turn a routine digital trace into a question about who knew the password and what they wanted concealed.

The date in the laptop’s records

A computer specialist examining the laptop found that a large photograph file had been deleted on March 17. The files had not been securely erased; ordinary deletion left material recoverable with specialist software. This distinction mattered because the timestamp recorded an act of removal without showing that the contents had been permanently destroyed.

When the date was discussed, March 17 was identified as St. Patrick’s Day. Strike immediately placed it in relation to Lula’s death: it was ten weeks later. That interval ruled out treating the deletion as part of the events of the night she fell. It instead marked a subsequent visit to the laptop, after the immediate police investigation.

Who could have deleted the file

Lula’s laptop had been returned by the police around early February, yet the photograph file was removed on March 17. When Strike raised the date with John Bristow, John was bewildered and said that nobody knew the password. Strike answered that the police had told John’s mother what it was, establishing that the password was not necessarily as secret as John’s response implied.

The computer specialist floated the possibility that the police had deleted the photographs. Strike rejected it. The combination of the March 17 timestamp, the laptop’s return before that date, and the known distribution of the password made the deletion evidence of access after the police had finished handling the computer, though the date alone did not identify the person responsible.

A clue in the reconstruction

The date belongs to the investigation’s broader effort to test what happened after Lula’s death against material traces rather than accepting appearances or statements at face value. In another strand of that reconstruction, Strike examined the Bestiguis’ changing accounts and could not establish their positions when Lula fell. He also retraced Derrick Wilson’s search through the flat; Wilson then remembered slipping backwards on water on the stairs, drops left by the roses John had carried to Lula’s door.

These clues work at different scales: March 17 fixes a later act to a precise calendar date, while the water drops connect a small physical residue to a route through the building. Together, they show how the inquiry treats apparently minor details as tests of a larger account. The laptop’s deletion date does not, by itself, disclose what the photographs showed or who removed them, but it makes the computer’s post-investigation history part of the case rather than a closed chapter.