Police investigation and determination that Lula's death was suicide

The police investigation into Lula Landry’s death classified it as suicide within its first day, discounting Tansy Bestigui’s claim that she had heard a murder take place. That verdict was reinforced by tests on the Bestiguis’ supposedly open windows and by a search of Lula’s flat that found nothing unusual. Yet the confidence of the official account concealed an untested question: where exactly had Tansy and her husband Freddie been when Lula fell? When Cormoran Strike revisited the scene, he followed Derrick Wilson’s search route and recovered significance from a detail the original investigation had left behind: water on the stairs. The drops came from the white roses John Bristow used to draw Lula to her door, and the supposed suicide was revealed as murder.

The Official Account

The police arrived at the scene about twenty to twenty-five minutes after Wilson had left. Tansy was still hysterical, shaking and screaming that there was a murderer in the building. She said that she had got up around two in the morning to use the bathroom, heard shouting from two flats above, and seen Lula’s body fall past the window. Her account appeared to describe a witnessed confrontation, but it was not supported by the building itself.

The Bestiguis’ windows were triple-glazed, designed to keep out street noise as well as retain heat and air conditioning. Even with police cars and neighbors gathered below, the street could scarcely be heard inside. The police tested the claim directly: a man shouted from Lula’s balcony while officers listened from the first-floor flat, but they could not hear him. Tansy had insisted she heard Lula say that someone was too late and a man call her a liar; the test showed that such words could not have carried to her apartment as she described.

When confronted with the result, Tansy changed her explanation. She now said she had opened the windows to get some fresh air. But it was below freezing and snowing, and she was in her underwear. The police checked this revised account too. The windows were locked and bolted when they arrived, their latches bore no fresh fingerprints, and the cleaner had last dusted them the previous morning. The physical evidence contradicted Tansy’s claim that she had opened them, leading Eric Wardle to conclude that she was lying.

A Verdict Strengthened by the Press

Wardle later explained that investigators had considered, briefly, whether the quarter-hour Wilson was away from his post might have given a killer access to the building. They abandoned the possibility after deciding that Tansy was a publicity-seeking cocaine user, rather than a reliable witness. The secure flats, guarded entrance, gym and underground parking also made it difficult to imagine someone entering or leaving the pool area unseen. The police therefore treated the opportunity for an intruder as implausible.

The publicity surrounding Tansy’s claim helped harden the official story even as it drew attention to the case. She had been telling people that she was the sole witness to Lula’s murder, and the press gathered outside her home. Newspapers had already treated Evan Duffield as the likely culprit before the police returned to question her. Against that spectacle, the investigators’ failed sound test and fingerprint checks offered a concrete reason to dismiss her testimony. Wardle said the police had concluded within the first twenty-four hours that Lula’s death had to be suicide; forensic examination of the flat was then carried out because senior officers wanted the conclusion placed beyond reasonable doubt. The cleaner’s thorough dusting meant that that day’s fingerprints stood out clearly, but investigators found nothing unusual.

The Doubt in Strike’s Review

The case file did not persuade Strike that the police had answered every question. Reading the account of the Bestiguis’ flat, he noted the half-line of cocaine on the side of the bath and returned to the seconds after Tansy saw Lula fall. Tansy consistently maintained that Freddie had been in bed asleep at that moment. When Strike questioned her about it, she shielded her face by pretending to push her hair back. Her shifting account and that gesture did not establish where either spouse had been; to Strike, the precise positions of both Bestiguis when Lula fell remained unproven, despite the police view.

The contrast between the police’s categorical verdict and Strike’s narrower uncertainty matters. The investigation could disprove Tansy’s claim that she had heard the quarrel and could show that she had not opened the windows. It could not, on the evidence in the file, establish the Bestiguis’ locations at the moment of the fall. Discrediting a witness had been treated as closing off the murder theory; Strike’s review instead separated the false testimony from the still-unresolved physical sequence.

Reconstructing the Search

When Strike returned to Lula’s flat with Wilson, he asked him to demonstrate the order in which he had searched the rooms on the night of the death. Wilson began by describing how he had entered, seen doors open, and left them untouched. As they followed the route, he stopped on the stairs and recalled something he had forgotten: he had slipped backwards and landed hard. There had been water on the steps. Strike repeated the detail, turning an apparently minor accident in the search into a clue about what had happened before Wilson entered.

The explanation emerged when Strike confronted John Bristow. After the street had cleared, John put on Deeby Macc’s hoodie and took several white roses from a vase in the Bestiguis’ flat. He wiped their stems, though not completely, carried them into the hall, left the door ajar again, and climbed to Lula’s flat. The small drops of water left by the roses were the drops on which Wilson later slipped. In the investigation’s original account, Wilson’s fall was incidental; in the reconstructed sequence, it preserved the trace of a killer’s earlier passage.

Lula had been standing on her balcony with the windows wide open, watching and waiting for her estranged brother. Through the peephole, she saw the white roses and believed that her long-lost brother had somehow arrived without her seeing him approach. Excited, she opened the door. John was there. The roses were not decoration but bait: they transformed her expectation of a loving reunion into the means by which he gained entry and pushed her from the balcony.

The Reversal of the Verdict

The conclusion that Lula had died by suicide was not simply overturned by one new witness or a single forensic result. It unravelled as the details of the scene were placed in a different order: the disputed positions of the Bestiguis, Wilson’s search route, the forgotten slip, and the water left by the roses. Each changed the meaning of something the police had already seen. The official investigation was right to challenge Tansy’s story, but its confidence in that discrediting had helped leave the physical movements around the fall insufficiently examined.

The roses and the drops on the stairs expose the gap between an investigation that has disproved a witness and one that has reconstructed an event. Tansy’s false account did not make Lula’s death a suicide; it only obscured what the police still needed to establish. Strike’s return to the flat turned a forgotten bodily stumble into a path through the crime scene, and the final reconstruction showed how John used his sister’s hope of seeing him to bring her to the door. The case’s apparent certainty had rested on an incomplete reading of the evidence; the murder became legible when the small traces were made to tell a different story.