Guy Somé’s warehouse studio is a discreet fashion workspace on the north bank of the Thames, but it also serves as a gallery of images through which Cormoran Strike encounters Lula Landry’s public persona and hears a more intimate account of her concerns. The contrast between the studio’s controlled visual world and Somé’s recollections makes the visit significant to Strike’s investigation: Lula appears everywhere in photographs, yet the images cannot by themselves explain what she wanted or feared.

Setting and approach

On the morning of his appointment, Strike dressed with unusual care. He had studied Somé’s website, which advocated conspicuous fashion items such as degraded-leather chaps, metal-mesh ties, and black-brimmed headbands made from the tops of old bowlers. Rather than adopt the designer’s aesthetic, Strike chose the conventional dark-blue suit he had worn to Cipriani, a choice marked by faint defiance as he entered a world whose dress and codes were unfamiliar to him.

The studio occupied a disused nineteenth-century warehouse on the north bank of the Thames. The river glittered nearby, but the building offered little indication from outside of its present use, and the entrance was difficult to find. Strike eventually located an unmarked bell; the door opened electronically, admitting him into a stark, airy hallway kept chilly by air-conditioning. The combination of an obscure exterior and carefully controlled interior made the studio feel set apart from the ordinary street, even as its windows and photographs would later open the space onto the city and the fashion world.

The studio’s working world

A girl with tomato-red hair, dressed entirely in black and wearing numerous silver bangles, appeared after Strike heard jingling and clacking in the hallway. Her brief reaction to seeing him conveyed the reserve he met in Somé’s workplace. As Strike followed the designer through the premises, he passed an open workroom where a middle-aged woman was throwing gauzy gold fabric over a dummy. The brilliantly lit room was crowded with workbenches, fabric bolts, sketches, photographs, and notes. Elsewhere, a tiny blonde woman in an outfit Strike thought resembled a giant black tubular bandage crossed the corridor and gave him the same cold, blank stare as the red-haired assistant.

The encounter made Strike acutely aware of his own size and conventional appearance. He felt like a woolly mammoth trying to blend among capuchin monkeys: an outsider moving through a workplace whose fashion idiom he could observe but did not share. Somé, by contrast, moved with a dancer’s turn and beckoned him onward, guiding him up a spiral staircase made of steel and rubber to the office above.

Lula Landry in images

The upper office was a large white rectangular space, with floor-to-ceiling windows along one side looking across the Thames toward the south bank. Photographs covered the other walls. The most arresting was a twelve-foot enlargement of the infamous “Fallen Angels” image opposite Somé’s desk. It was not the familiar published photograph. In this version, Lula had thrown back her head laughing, her hair disarranged and her throat exposed; Ciara Porter looked up at her, with laughter beginning on her own face but arriving more slowly. As in the better-known image, attention fell first on Lula, while the altered moment showed a more spontaneous exchange between the two women.

Lula’s presence extended across the office. In one photograph she stood with a group of models wearing transparent shifts in rainbow colors; in another she appeared in profile, gold leaf on her lips and eyelids. The variety of images turned the office into an informal archive of her appearance and professional life. Strike’s attention moved from the polished photographs to the question they left unresolved: whether Lula had learned to arrange her face for the camera, or whether her feelings naturally showed through it. The studio could display her image repeatedly, but repetition did not settle the difference between performed expression and private feeling.

Somé’s account and the visit’s significance

Later in the conversation, Somé’s manner changed: his voice lost its slyness and sarcasm as he described Lula trying to connect with something real. He said that this had been a subject they talked about often and linked that search to her involvement with Rochelle. In his account, Lula imagined that without her beauty and the Bristows’ intervention she might have shared Rochelle’s circumstances; Somé characterized the Bristows’ adoption of Lula as having taken her in as a little plaything for Yvette. His recollection complicates the immaculate fashion images around him: the celebrated model was not only an object of visual attention, but someone preoccupied with the contingency of her own security and the lives of people less protected than herself.

Strike also asked Somé about a stalker. Somé described the man as mentally ill, said that he believed he and Lula were married or something similar, and reported that he had received a restraining order and compulsory psychiatric treatment. Strike then asked whether Somé knew where the man was. The exchange places the studio within the investigation rather than treating it merely as a fashionable backdrop: it is where Strike examines Lula’s image, gathers Somé’s memories, and pursues a possible line of inquiry about the threats surrounding her.

The space’s central contrast is between visibility and knowledge. Its walls make Lula difficult to escape visually, from the famous photograph to Somé’s less familiar laughing portrait, but the images remain partial records. The warehouse visit brings those public representations into contact with the designer’s testimony about Lula’s search for authenticity and his account of a man who imagined an intimacy with her. The studio thus becomes a place where Strike must look beyond the surface without assuming that a photograph—or any single recollection—can disclose the whole person.