Misinterpret murder as suicide

The mistaken classification of Lula Landry’s death as suicide drives the investigation’s central conflict: evidence that initially appears to confirm a familiar account is reinterpreted as Strike tests how it was gathered, what it can establish, and which voices the police chose to believe. The ambiguity is not merely a contest between two labels. It grows from Lula’s documented mental-health difficulties, Tansy Bestigui’s disputed account, and investigative assumptions that obscure both the circumstances of the fall and the small traces left at the scene.

Diagnosis and the Presumption of Suicide

Lula’s brother, John Bristow, describes a history that made suicide seem plausible to those investigating her death. After their father died, Lula was expelled from school for experimenting with drugs, ran away to London, and was found living rough with addicts. Her drug use intensified her mental-health difficulties; she absconded from treatment before being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and given medication. John says that, while taking her tablets, she was well, and that the autopsy confirmed she had been taking them at the time of her death. In his account, this history should not have settled the question of what happened to her.

The police and coroner, John argues, could not see past Lula’s history of poor mental health and concluded that she was depressed. He counters with her plans and apparent circumstances: he had seen her the morning before she died, when she seemed fine; she had signed a lucrative two-year contract, had work booked for months, and anticipated a shoot in Morocco. Strike does not treat those facts as proof against suicide. His experience has taught him that a person can appear engaged with future plans and still die by suicide; a recollection of a cheerful officer who later took his own life makes the point. The contrast leaves neither John’s optimism nor the authorities’ diagnosis sufficient to decide the case.

The novel also places mental-health language in the mouths of people with their own histories of illness. Rochelle Onifade says that Lula was depressed and compares her condition to her own, describing illness as something that can take a person over. The word she struggles to pronounce, “nillness,” briefly arrests Strike’s attention. His reflection connects the term to different experiences of decline, but does not make diagnosis a verdict about the manner of Lula’s death. The uncertainty matters: naming depression can supply a framework for understanding suffering, yet it can also make an apparent suicide seem settled before the circumstances have been adequately tested.

Testimony and the Soundproof Flat

Tansy Bestigui’s account offers the strongest apparent support for an assault. She told investigators that she heard an argument in the flat above, including Lula’s cry, “You’re too late,” and a man’s response, “You’re a fucking liar.” Eric Wardle later recounts that police doubted her because the building’s heavily insulated windows and doors made the flat seem effectively soundproof. To test her claim, they staged a shouting experiment: an officer shouted from Lula’s balcony while sober listeners in the Bestiguis’ flat tried to hear him, but they could not make out the words.

That test gives the police a concrete basis for rejecting Tansy’s story, but it does not establish every fact about what she heard or what she witnessed. Strike’s review of the file draws his attention to a line of cocaine on the side of the bath and, especially, to Tansy’s repeated insistence that Freddie Bestigui was asleep in bed when Lula fell. He remembers that she shielded her face while maintaining this point. Because the file contains no diagram of the Bestiguis’ apartment, Strike cannot establish their precise positions at the moment of the fall. He treats those positions as unresolved rather than accepting the police account as complete.

The difference is between discrediting one claimed sound and resolving the whole event. The police experiment addresses whether a person in the flat could hear a shout from the balcony under the tested conditions. Strike’s questions concern the apartment’s layout, the Bestiguis’ whereabouts, and the consistency of Tansy’s account. The first test narrows what the testimony can prove; it cannot, by itself, show that there was no argument or that the reported movements and positions have been fully established.

Reconstructing the Scene

Strike’s challenge to the suicide classification depends on retracing actions rather than relying on the broad conclusion in the file. He asks Derrick Wilson to show him, room by room, the route Wilson took during his first search of Lula’s flat. Wilson recalls entering, seeing open doors, and leaving them untouched. As they follow his account through the building, he stops on the stairs and remembers something he had forgotten: he slipped backwards where there were drops of water. The recovered detail changes the value of a seemingly ordinary mark. What had not been part of Wilson’s initial account becomes a clue to how events in the building may have unfolded.

The eventual reconstruction connects the water to John’s actions. Strike explains that John removed several white roses from a vase in Freddie’s flat, dried their stems imperfectly, and carried them upstairs. Drops fell onto the stairs, where Wilson later slipped. The flowers served as a means of approaching Lula’s door: she had been waiting for her long-lost brother, and, seeing the roses through the peephole, opened the door in expectation of him. In this account, the water is not incidental residue but a trace linking the movement between flats to the fatal encounter.

The importance of this reconstruction lies in its scale. A renewed inspection does not begin with a dramatic revelation; it begins with Wilson remembering a slip and noticing drops on a stair. Strike asks what order the rooms were searched in, where Wilson walked, and what physical detail might connect one location to another. The inference depends on a sequence of actions and opportunities that the original conclusion had not accounted for.

The Hidden Will and the Reversal of the Case

Strike’s interpretation of Lula’s movements before her death further challenges the suicide narrative. He identifies a meeting in a Notting Hill shop where Lula took Rochelle into a changing cubicle and used Rochelle’s phone to call someone, begging that person to come to her flat after one in the morning. A shop assistant overheard the call from the neighboring cubicle. Strike argues that Lula had arranged the phone in Rochelle’s name because she feared her own communications were being monitored and wanted a more secure way to speak privately. He recognizes that the call alone does not identify its recipient: it could have involved her uncle or Evan Duffield, or another person she did not want the press to know about.

The missing blue paper supplies a second, related line of reasoning. Strike asks why Lula had been writing in a car before meeting Rochelle and what became of the paper she took into Vashti. He rejects the suggestion that it was a shopping list and argues that Lula was writing a will, which she had Rochelle witness. This interpretation fits Lula’s statement to Ciara Porter that she intended to leave everything to John. Rather than evidence of a planned suicide, the writing and the urgent call suggest that Lula was arranging her affairs while attempting to reach someone she expected to visit.

The reversal is therefore cumulative. The call, the hidden phone, the absent blue paper, the changing-cubicle meeting, the roses, and the drops on the stairs do not each settle the question on their own. Read together, they challenge the assumption that Lula’s apparent mental-health history explains her death and support Strike’s conclusion that John was blackmailing Lula’s killer. Strike also connects the police’s failure to take Tansy seriously with Rochelle’s subsequent death: he tells Wardle that a fuller examination of Tansy’s truth might have saved Rochelle. The mistaken classification thus has consequences beyond the original investigation, turning an evidentiary error into a failure to recognize continuing danger.

Significance

The case exposes how an early conclusion can organize later evidence around itself. Lula’s diagnosis and past difficulties make suicide appear legible; once the police adopt that explanation, Tansy’s disputed testimony is treated as impossible, while questions about the Bestiguis’ positions and Wilson’s search receive less attention. Strike’s counter-method is to separate what a witness directly reports from what an experiment actually tests, then revisit the physical sequence and its unexplained details.

The novel does not make mental illness equivalent to suicidal intent, nor does it treat a person’s future plans as proof that suicide was impossible. Instead, the conflict shows the danger of letting either diagnosis or apparent optimism substitute for investigation. The decisive change comes when seemingly settled evidence is reopened: the sound test is distinguished from the entire event, a forgotten slip restores the significance of water on the stairs, and the missing paper is reconsidered as a will. What had looked like a straightforward suicide becomes a murder concealed by assumptions and exposed through patient reconstruction.