1 Arlington Place is Guy Somé’s Islington townhouse and the setting for Cormoran Strike’s meeting with makeup artist Bryony Radford during a fashion shoot. The visit turns a referral into an interview: Somé makes the models available because he wants answers about Lula Landry’s death, and Bryony begins by recalling her own connection with Lula. The house’s imposing entrance and the quiet, arranged activity of its rooms place the investigation inside the fashion world Lula inhabited.

Setting and arrangement

Somé tells Strike that Bryony and Ciara Porter will be working for him on Wednesday at “1 Arlington Terrace in Islington,” and that they should be free to talk at about five. Strike accepts the invitation. The address is also rendered in the narrative as 1 Arlington Place; it is here that he arrives promptly at five o’clock, after eating lightly, drinking plenty of water, and taking painkillers.

The entrance establishes the townhouse’s scale and formality. A woman with short gray hair and black-framed glasses answers Strike’s second knock and lets him in reluctantly. She crosses a stone-floored hall dominated by a magnificent staircase with a wrought-iron banister, calling for Somé and announcing that someone named Strike has arrived. Rooms open off both sides of the hall, so the house functions at once as a residence-like interior and a workplace in which a shoot is under way.

The fashion shoot

In one room, a small group dressed mostly in black faces a powerful light source, their expressions lit by it. Somé soon appears in the hall wearing glasses, ripped, baggy jeans, and a white T-shirt bearing an eye that seems to weep glittering blood; its apparent drops prove to be red sequins. The theatrical image belongs to the same carefully managed visual environment as the shoot itself.

The working room is quiet and tightly focused. A makeup artist bends over a Black model, pressing a pad against the sides of her nose, while three models wait in position, still and expressionless. The photographer has two assistants, and the other people present—including Somé and the woman who admitted Strike—speak in low voices. The restraint gives the scene the quality of a set holding its arrangement until the next instruction.

Somé confers rapidly with the makeup artist, gesturing as she adjusts Ciara Porter’s long hair. Ciara remains patient and gives no sign that she registers the touch. Bryony withdraws into the shadows, asks Somé something, then looks toward Strike after he gives her an inaudible instruction. Their exchange redirects her from the shoot to the visitor, making the fashion setting the route by which the investigation reaches her.

Strike’s interview with Bryony

Strike and Bryony meet at the foot of the staircase. She whispers that they should go through to another room and leads him across the hall. This second space is somewhat smaller, with a large table laid out with buffet food and wheeled clothing racks crowded with sequined, ruffled, and feathered garments arranged by color. People in their twenties gather among the platters, talking quietly, picking at mozzarella and Parma ham, or using their phones. Some look Strike over as Bryony takes him into a small back room converted into a makeup station.

Bryony clears a little space on a cluttered makeup table, perches on it, and lets Strike take a chair and open his notebook. Before he can start asking questions, she says that she has been thinking constantly about the afternoon in question and that it was very sad. Her spontaneous response gives the interview an emotional starting point: the investigation’s inquiry into Lula’s death meets a witness who has already been turning the memory over.

Strike asks whether Bryony knew Lula well. Bryony says she did, explaining that she had done Lula’s makeup for a couple of shoots and for the Rainforest Benefit. She begins to describe how she told Lula that she could thread eyebrows, prompting Strike to ask what threading was. The brief exchange grounds their acquaintance in ordinary professional work and personal conversation, rather than in the public image surrounding Lula.

Investigative significance

The house is not merely a backdrop for the interview: Somé’s work there makes it possible. He first presents the shoot as a practical opportunity to speak with Bryony and Ciara, but makes clear that his offer is driven by his own desire to understand what happened. His insistence distinguishes the arrangement from a favor and ties the fashion workplace to the unresolved case.

The movement through 1 Arlington Place also shapes the encounter. Strike passes from the imposing hall and the illuminated shoot to the food-filled gathering room, then to a makeshift makeup station where Bryony can speak with him and his notebook. The sequence narrows a busy professional environment into a private interview. There, her account begins not with a theory about Lula’s death but with memories of shared work and a small detail of beauty practice, giving the investigation a concrete human point of entry.