Strike’s interview with Marlene Higson, Lula Landry’s biological mother, turns an elusive family history into a scene of concrete but incomplete testimony. In a grim Canning Town pub garden, Higson recounts what she knows about Lula’s father: an African student called Joe, whose surname and college she cannot supply. Her account gives Strike a fragment of Lula’s origins while revealing how little certainty that fragment can bear.

Arranging the interview

Strike sets the meeting for a Monday morning in Canning Town after a succession of reversals. Alison, John Bristow’s secretary, gives Robin Higson’s telephone number. Strike calls her himself; disappointed that the caller is not a journalist, Higson initially agrees to meet. She then calls the office to ask whether her travel expenses will be paid. When Robin says they will not, Higson cancels in high dudgeon. Strike secures a tentative agreement to meet at a local pub, only for an irritable voicemail to cancel that arrangement too.

He tries again with a calculated appeal to Higson’s appetite for publicity. Strike says that he believes the investigation is nearing its final phase and that its evidence will be given to the police, bringing another explosion of press attention. If Higson cannot help, he suggests, she might be better protected from the renewed inquiries. She immediately insists on her right to tell everything she knows, and agrees to meet in the beer garden of the Ordnance Arms. The exchange establishes an uneasy condition for the interview: Higson’s cooperation is secured not by a private appeal to maternal feeling, but by the prospect of being heard before the press descends again.

Canning Town and the meeting

Strike reaches Canning Town by train. The journey places the interview between contrasting London landscapes: Canary Wharf’s sleek buildings stand on the horizon, while the streets near the pub convey poverty and deprivation. The Ordnance Arms is a large, plain public house beside the English Pawnbroking Company. Its functional interior gives way to a bleak concrete backyard, with bins, a single wooden table, barbed wire on the high wall, and a plastic bag caught and rustling in it. A large block of flats rises beyond the wall, its balconies marked by signs of squalor.

Higson is waiting at the table in a white plastic chair, smoking. Strike first addresses her formally as Mrs. Higson; she tells him to call her Marlene. She looks him over with a slack smile and a knowing gaze. Her pink Lycra top, gray hoodie, leggings, flip-flops, gold rings, and hair gathered in a dirty scrunchie make the encounter materially specific, but the scene does not reduce her testimony to her appearance. The interview unfolds in a setting far removed from the wealthy Mayfair world associated with Lula, underlining the distance between the life Lula was adopted into and the circumstances of her birth mother.

What Higson says about Lula’s father

When Strike asks whether Lula had asked about her father, Higson says that she told her everything she knew. The father, she recalls, was an African student who lived upstairs from her on Barking Road with two other people. A betting shop now occupies the ground floor of the building. She remembers him as very good-looking and says he helped her with her shopping several times. In her account, their early acquaintance was restrained and almost formally respectful; she describes the pregnancy as following an invitation into her home offered as thanks for his help.

Higson says the student’s name was Joe. When Strike asks for his surname, she has none to give. Her conviction in the name may, Strike reflects, come from having repeated it so often that the story has become automatic. Asked whether the surname might have been Macdonald or Wilson, Higson rejects the suggestions as absurd. Strike concludes that she and the student never exchanged surnames. She says he was studying at a college but cannot identify which one, offering only the vague answer that it was a college. The father’s identity therefore remains an open question: Higson supplies a first name, a broad description, and a local address, but not the identifying details that could turn memory into a reliable trail.

Family, distance, and uncertainty

Higson’s account also conveys her interpretation of Lula’s interest in her origins. She says Lula was not interested in her anyway, because she already had a white brother and wanted a black family. Her remark presents Lula’s search as a wish to find kin who shared her racial background, though it is Higson’s judgment rather than an independently confirmed explanation of Lula’s motives. In the same conversation, Higson says she does not know where her two sons are now, and speaks bitterly about the past. Her account of family is thus shaped not only by what she remembers about Lula’s father, but by estrangement and uncertainty about her own children.

Asked whether Lula tried to find her father, Higson answers that she did, but dismisses the fact rather than explaining how the search proceeded. That brief confirmation matters because it establishes that the father was not merely a question Strike imposed on Lula’s story: according to Higson, Lula actively tried to locate him. Yet the interview does not disclose the result of that effort or identify the student. Strike leaves with a history whose central figure remains unnamed beyond Joe, and with the recognition that the gaps in Higson’s memory and knowledge limit what her testimony can establish.

Significance to the investigation

The interview adds an important line of inquiry to Strike’s investigation into Lula’s death. His earlier research had indicated that Lula was looking into her biological roots and had traced Higson. The possibility that Lula’s search had unsettled her adoptive family also bears on Strike’s attempt to understand John Bristow’s fixation on a black man near Lula. The interview does not prove that family discoveries caused the murder, or establish what Bristow believed; instead, it gives that line of suspicion a personal and social context without converting suspicion into fact.

The settings surrounding the interview sharpen the contrast between inherited privilege and uncertain origins. Strike has recently walked through the carefully maintained, high-Victorian houses of Kentigern Gardens, where number 18 has returned to the orderly appearance of its wealthy neighbors after the police tape and journalists have gone. He has also seen the shabby, institutional St. Elmo’s Hostel for the Homeless, set beside a concrete flyover. Against those earlier London interiors and streets, the pub garden is a precarious place for family history to surface: Higson has a story to tell, but neither money nor publicity can supply the missing surname or college. Her interview advances the search by confirming Lula’s effort to find her father while leaving the identity of that father unresolved.