The Lula Landry inquest concluded that Lula Landry had died by suicide, a finding supported by the police, the pathologist, and the coroner. Its authority is central to the investigation that follows, but the evidence available to Cormoran Strike gradually exposes a gap between the verdict’s apparent certainty and what could actually be established about the night of Lula’s death.

Background and verdict

Lula’s history made suicide a plausible explanation to investigators and family members. As a child and teenager she had experienced drug use and serious mental-health difficulties; she was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with medication. John Bristow told Strike that the autopsy showed she had been taking her prescribed tablets, and argued that her career prospects and apparent good spirits on the morning before her death contradicted suicide. Strike did not accept that reasoning as decisive: a person’s interest in the future, or a positive mood earlier in the day, could not by itself rule out suicide.

The inquest’s conclusion therefore rested amid competing interpretations of the same life. John described a young woman whose condition was controlled and whose prospects were bright; the police and coroner accepted a view of Lula as depressed and vulnerable. Her diagnosis was relevant evidence, but Strike recognized the danger of allowing a history of mental illness to settle the question in advance.

Disputed testimony

John also pointed to Tansy Bestigui, who maintained that she had heard Lula arguing with a man shortly before the fall. The police discounted the claim because Tansy had used cocaine. Eric Wardle later told Strike that investigators had tested whether a person in the Bestiguis’ flat could hear someone shouting from Lula’s balcony. In their reconstruction, sober listeners on the first floor could not make out the words, even when trying to listen. Tansy then said that she had opened the windows, a detail that altered the conditions under which her account had first been assessed.

The dispute was not simply whether Tansy had heard an argument, but whether the investigators had adequately established what she could hear from where she had been. Strike’s review of the police file made that uncertainty concrete. Tansy repeatedly maintained that Freddie Bestigui had been asleep when Lula fell, yet she had shielded her face when Strike pressed her on the point. A line of cocaine was recorded on the side of the bath, and the file did not include a diagram of the Bestiguis’ flat. Strike concluded that the precise positions of both Tansy and Freddie at the moment of the fall were not proven.

The file and the reconstructed scene

The police materials supplied Strike with a detailed basis for reassessing the verdict: statements from people who saw Lula on her final evening, DNA findings from her flat, the visitors’ book at 18 Kentigern Gardens, her medication details, the autopsy and medical records, telephone records, and a summary of the contents of her laptop. A DVD marked “CCTV 2 Runners” accompanied the file. Rather than treating the verdict as an endpoint, Strike compared its supporting materials and timings, tracking where witness accounts met the physical details of the building.

Derrick Wilson, the building’s security guard, had gone upstairs with a master key after seeing the Bestiguis in the lobby and telling them to contact the police. Later, when Strike asked Wilson to retrace the search, Wilson remembered slipping backward on the stairs where there were drops of water. That small detail acquired significance when Strike reconstructed the route taken by the intruder: John had removed white roses from a vase in another flat, wiped them, and carried them upstairs. A few drops from the flowers remained, providing a physical link between the staged approach with the roses and Wilson’s fall.

Strike also challenged the assumptions surrounding the visitors and witnesses without treating suspicion as proof. The file recorded Evan Duffield’s account of leaving Uzi after an argument with Lula, following her, and later going to Kentigern Gardens; other statements supported parts of his movements, though some witnesses had seen only a man wearing a wolf mask. The records allowed Strike to test accounts against one another rather than accept either the public speculation about Duffield or the official conclusion as self-validating.

Aftermath and significance

The verdict did not end public argument. A week after it was returned, controversy followed the use of a photograph of Lula and Ciara Porter in a Guy Somé advertising image. Admirers and critics disagreed over whether the image honored Lula’s work or exploited her death, while online speculation gathered unanswered questions about her movements, clothes, and the runners seen near the building. This media dispute formed a second afterlife for the inquest: Lula’s death was repeatedly interpreted through competing stories, often before the evidence had been tested.

John’s conviction that Lula had been murdered brought the inquest’s conclusion back into question. When Strike told the police that his client suspected foul play, Wardle’s expression hardened; other relatives continued to regard suicide as the settled truth and considered John’s refusal to accept it unhealthy. Yet the eventual challenge to the verdict does not depend on simply reversing a judgment with another assertion. It comes through reconsidering testimony, access, position, and minute physical traces. The inquest is thus both the official explanation of Lula’s death and the evidentiary starting point from which Strike exposes how an apparently complete account can leave crucial circumstances unresolved.