Strike's interview with Marlene Higson

Strike’s interview with Marlene Higson, Lula Landry’s biological mother, is a late-stage attempt to recover the family history behind Lula’s search for her birth father. Its central disclosure is partial rather than conclusive: Marlene confirms that Lula tried to trace him through college records, but cannot supply a dependable name or destination. The meeting also shows how difficult evidence-gathering can become when a witness’s interest in publicity, money, and old resentments competes with the detective’s need for reliable facts.

Arranging the interview

The interview was not secured in one call. Alison, John Bristow’s secretary, gave Robin Marlene’s number, and Strike contacted her directly. Marlene initially seemed willing to meet, though disappointed that the caller was not a journalist. She then phoned the office twice: first to ask whether her travel expenses would be paid, and then, after Robin declined, to cancel in indignation. Strike called again and arranged a tentative meeting at a local pub, only for Marlene to cancel once more by voicemail.

Strike finally changed the terms of the conversation by telling Marlene that his investigation was approaching its final phase. He said that he expected evidence to be presented to the police and publicity to flare up again; if she could not help, he suggested, she might be spared another round of press attention. Marlene immediately asserted her right to tell what she knew. The encounter was set for Monday morning in the beer garden of the Ordnance Arms in Canning Town. Strike’s warning succeeded because publicity, which had first made Marlene’s interest seem directed toward the press, also gave her a reason to insist on being heard.

The meeting in Canning Town

The setting places the conversation far from the polished world associated with Lula’s fame. Strike travels from Canning Town station, overlooked by Canary Wharf’s sleek towers, into a district he experiences as markedly poor and deprived. The Ordnance Arms is a utilitarian pub beside a pawnbroker; its beer garden is a concrete yard with bins, a solitary wooden table, barbed wire along the wall, and a plastic bag caught above it. Marlene waits there in a white plastic chair. Her appearance—bright rings, a pink top beneath a grey hoodie, and hair gathered in a worn scrunchie—is recorded in the scene without making her surroundings a substitute for her testimony.

When Strike addresses her formally as Mrs. Higson, she tells him to call her Marlene. The exchange begins with the practical informality of the meeting, but her account quickly turns defensive and resentful. She says she does not know where her two sons are and claims Lula was not interested in her anyway, interpreting the daughter’s search for a black family as evidence that she wanted a different kind of kinship. That assertion is Marlene’s view, not a fact independently established by the interview; it frames her testimony through her own grievance about the relationship.

What Marlene remembers about Lula’s father

Strike asks directly whether Lula had questioned her about her father. Marlene says that she told Lula everything she knew: the man had been an African student who lived upstairs from her on Barking Road, sharing the accommodation with two others. She remembers him as good-looking and says that he helped her with shopping. In her telling, their acquaintance initially proceeded with considerable propriety. She invited him in to thank him, offering tea, and then discovered that she was pregnant.

The recollection gives Lula’s search a concrete starting point, but it does not resolve the mystery. Marlene cannot establish where the student studied or where he later went, and presents his possible death or disappearance in Africa only as speculation. Asked whether Lula tried to find him, she answers that Lula looked through college records and thought she might have found the right institution, but could not locate him. Marlene is unsure whether she herself remembered his name correctly. She also recalls Lula repeatedly asking what he looked like and where he had studied, details that reveal the persistence of Lula’s curiosity more clearly than they establish the father’s identity.

Marlene’s description of the student’s appearance is entangled with her own bitterness. She recalls him as tall and thin and says Lula should be grateful to have inherited her ears rather than his, adding that different ears might have cost Lula her modelling career. The remark turns a practical question about family resemblance into a reminder of Lula’s public image, while exposing the contempt with which Marlene sometimes speaks of her daughter. Her account consequently supplies clues and emotional context together, but not a clean or wholly dependable family record.

Evidentiary value and narrative significance

The interview is one strand in Strike’s wider effort to test the official conclusion of suicide against statements, records, physical traces, and the movements of those present around Lula’s death. Strike’s disciplined method is made explicit elsewhere in his investigation: he values Derrick Wilson’s concise, observant testimony and continues to question witnesses meticulously rather than treating an apparently pointless line of inquiry as dispensable. In this context, Marlene’s uncertain memories are neither accepted as a complete explanation nor discarded simply because they are difficult to verify.

That distinction matters because the investigation repeatedly turns on the difference between what a witness personally knows and what the witness infers or wants to believe. Marlene can recount where the student lived, how she met him, and that Lula sought information through college records. She cannot confirm what became of him, and her speculation about danger in Africa does not fill that gap. Strike’s task is to preserve the usable details without mistaking conjecture or resentment for proof.

The scene also connects Lula’s private search for origins to the public pressures surrounding her life and death. Marlene’s repeated cancellations are partly shaped by expectations of money and press attention; Strike deliberately invokes the prospect of renewed coverage to secure the meeting. At the same time, the information he obtains concerns a question that publicity cannot answer: who Lula’s father was, and whether he could ever be found. The interview therefore advances the investigation by establishing the limits of what Marlene can testify to, while keeping Lula’s search for biological kinship distinct from the conclusions Strike must draw about her death.