Lula repeatedly called Tony Landry and Evan Duffield on the day of his death

Lula Landry’s repeated calls to Evan Duffield and Tony Landry on the day she died form one of the clearest signs that the final hours were more unsettled than some witnesses’ accounts suggested. The call records establish the scale and timing of her attempts to reach them, but not what she wanted to say; that unanswered question gives the calls their investigative weight.

The pattern in the phone records

Lula had scarcely used her landline during the week before her death and had not used it at all on the preceding day. Her mobile told a different story. It recorded sixty-six calls on her last day: the first to Evan Duffield at 9:15 in the morning, followed twenty minutes later by a call to Ciara Porter. After several hours without a mobile call, Lula began repeatedly dialling two numbers at 1:21 p.m. One belonged to Duffield; the other was identified in the annotated records as Tony Landry’s. She alternated between them, paused for intervals of roughly twenty minutes, then resumed, apparently using redial.

The rhythm suggests persistence rather than a single attempt, but the records do not disclose the content of any conversation or establish what prompted the calls. Strike inferred that the concentrated series took place after Lula had returned to her flat with Bryony Radford and Ciara Porter. Neither woman’s statement mentioned the repeated phone calls, leaving a conspicuous omission between the documented activity and the accounts given by people who were with her.

Tony Landry’s missed calls

Tony Landry said that he had visited Yvette Bristow on the day before Lula died. He sat with her while she was groggy from painkillers, then left Lula with her mother because he knew how much Yvette preferred her daughter’s company. When Strike put the phone records to him, Tony flushed. He admitted that he had looked at his phone, recognized Lula’s name, and decided the call could wait. He did not answer or call her back, and said she left no message.

His account had first been that he had turned off the sound on his phone during a conference on international family law in Oxford and only later realized that Lula had called repeatedly. He said he had not returned the calls because they had stopped and he assumed she would be at a nightclub. In the interview, however, his admission that he had glanced at the phone and knowingly deferred the call made his non-response more specific: at least on that occasion, the missed connection was a choice, not simply an unnoticed ring.

Strike drew attention to the discrepancy between Tony’s recent visit and Lula’s subsequent persistence. If nothing important had passed between them at Yvette’s flat, he asked, why had Lula spent much of the afternoon trying to reach him? Tony answered by characterizing her as spoiled and prone to calling someone repeatedly on a flimsy pretext. His explanation supplied a possible account of the frequency, but it did not establish what Lula wanted or why she had also kept calling Duffield.

An unanswered question in the investigation

The calls connect two different parts of Lula’s final day: her attempt to reach Duffield, her former partner, and her repeated efforts to contact her uncle. They show that she was actively seeking contact after the visit to her mother, while the precise object of that effort remains unknown. Tony’s failure to answer left no conversation for the investigation to recover, and his dismissal of the calls did not resolve their purpose.

That uncertainty matters because the records are unusually concrete beside the incomplete recollections surrounding them. They provide a count, a first-call time, a later burst of repeated attempts, and two recipients; they do not provide motive. The gap between those facts and the witnesses’ accounts becomes part of the case Strike is reconstructing, rather than proof of any one explanation. The calls therefore preserve both an action and its unanswered consequence: Lula reached repeatedly toward two people, and neither the records nor the explanations presented here reveal what she was trying to tell them.