The murder of Lula Landry is the crime that Cormoran Strike’s investigation must reconstruct from conflicting accounts and small, initially disconnected clues. John Bristow, Lula’s adoptive brother, killed her after she told him that she had made a will in favor of her biological half-brother, Lieutenant Jonah Agyeman. The concealed will transformed the apparent question of who would inherit Lula’s estate into the decisive motive for the crime, while the staged movements through the building help explain why the original investigation failed to establish what happened.

Background and Motive

Lula’s intentions in the hours before her death were not captured by a single, consistent account. Her makeup artist remembered her as cheerful and excited about Deeby Macc’s expected arrival; Ciara Porter, who had also spent the afternoon with her, said Lula had seemed low and anxious and had refused to explain what was troubling her. Porter also recalled that Lula had spoken of leaving “everything” to her brother. The comment sounded like a possible reference to John, but it did not name its beneficiary in the account available to Strike, leaving the clue open to a consequential misreading.

John’s explanation of why Lula would not have left her entire estate to him was framed around their mother. He argued that making him the sole beneficiary would have explicitly excluded her and caused deep hurt, while the money itself mattered less because their father had already provided for her. That reasoning made Lula’s will seem unlikely to name John, but it also revealed how inheritance could carry a message about family belonging as well as financial value. When Strike asked whether their mother had made a will, John appeared startled.

The concealed will named not John but Lieutenant Jonah Agyeman of the Royal Engineers, Lula’s previously unknown half-brother. Strike eventually found the pale-blue handwritten paper folded beneath the stiff base board inside Lula’s white handbag, tucked under its removable lining. When he told John that Lula had left her entire estate to Jonah, John could not immediately speak and asked who Jonah was. The discovery supplied the crucial link between the earlier, ambiguous remark about “everything” and the confrontation that Strike reconstructed as the murder’s immediate cause.

Reconstruction of the Murder

Strike’s account places John’s actions in the apartment building after the street had emptied. John borrowed Deeby Macc’s hoodie, took several white roses from a vase in Flat Two, dried their stems, and carried them upstairs to Lula’s flat. He left Flat Two’s door ajar. At Lula’s door, the flowers served as a misleading sign: she had been waiting for her long-lost brother and, seeing the roses through the peephole, opened the door in excitement without realizing that the visitor had entered the building unseen.

Strike reconstructed the attack as a confrontation over money and family recognition. He argued that John accused Lula of depriving him of money, while Lula told him that he would receive nothing, even if he killed her. During their struggle, she said she had another brother, that he was on his way, and that she had already made a will in his favor. John dismissed her claim and threw her from the balcony. The will was therefore not merely a document found after her death: in Strike’s reconstruction, its new beneficiary was revealed during the argument and sharpened the dispute immediately before Lula was killed.

The flowers became part of John’s attempted cover-up. Strike believed John dropped them at Lula’s door, went back for them, ran downstairs, and returned them to their vase in Flat Two. The arrangement was imperfect, and the vase was later broken accidentally by a police officer, but the roses’ movement between the flats offered a trace of an otherwise hidden visit. John then reset the alarm, left the flat, and descended the stairs while the Bestiguis argued in their own apartment. He escaped into heavy snow wearing the borrowed hoodie and gloves.

John’s escape overlapped with the movements of another man, producing a misleading visual coincidence. At the end of the street, John saw a second figure running away from the corner after seeing Lula fall; the two men did not know one another. They were both caught on CCTV as they ran past the camera and down Halliwell Street, where there were no more cameras. Strike’s reconstruction distinguishes their separate purposes: John was fleeing the murder, while the other runner was escaping the sight of his sister’s death. The shared footage had the potential to confuse the two movements rather than identify their relationship.

Evidence and Competing Accounts

The path through the building mattered because the surviving evidence did not initially prove where everyone had been at the moment Lula fell. Strike reviewed Tansy Bestigui’s shifting accounts and noted that she consistently placed her husband, Freddie, in bed and asleep. He remained unconvinced that the precise positions of both Bestiguis had been established, despite the police view. Tansy’s testimony and the apartment layout left questions about what could have been seen and when; the available police file did not include a map or diagram of their flat.

Derrick Wilson’s statements offered another route into the night’s sequence. Asked to demonstrate how he had searched Lula’s flat, Wilson walked Strike and Robin through the rooms and stairs in the order he remembered. On the stairway, he stopped and recalled that he had slipped backwards on water, a detail he had forgotten. Strike repeated the observation, recognizing its importance in light of the drops left by the roses. Wilson’s recollection did not identify their source on its own, but it gave a physical consequence to the flowers’ passage between the flats and helped test the reconstructed route.

Wilson’s account of the immediate response also clarifies the sequence after the fall. He said that he ran inside and found both Bestiguis in the lobby, with Freddie trying to get Tansy upstairs while she was still crying. Wilson told them to call the police and watch the lift in case someone tried to leave that way. He then took the master key from the back room and went upstairs; no one was on the stairwell when he unlocked Lula’s flat. These observations establish the timing and access available during the search, while leaving Strike to compare them with the escape route he later attributed to John.

Consequences and Significance

The murder’s immediate consequence was the apparent collapse of a family inheritance into a question of identity. John had presented the prospect of being Lula’s sole beneficiary as implausible because of the hurt it would cause their mother; the will instead excluded him in favor of Jonah, a brother whose existence had not formed part of John’s account. That contrast helps explain why the document was both evidence and motive: it named the person Lula chose, while challenging John’s claim on her family and her estate.

The reconstructed murder also gives meaning to clues that initially seemed peripheral: the white roses, their altered arrangement, water on the stairs, the reset alarm, the borrowed hoodie, and the overlapping CCTV images. Each detail bears on a different part of the sequence—entry, movement, concealment, or escape—and none alone establishes the whole crime. Their force comes from the way they can be tested against witness accounts and the building’s layout. The discovery of the will completes that physical reconstruction with a personal and financial explanation: John killed Lula after she told him that the estate he expected to claim would go to Jonah instead.