Strike and Robin Ellacott’s inspection of the Kentigern Gardens flats becomes a reconstruction of Derrick Wilson’s hurried search on the night Lula Landry died. Rather than relying on Wilson’s statement as a fixed account, Strike has him retrace his movements in the building. The exercise brings back a forgotten trace on the stairs: drops of water left by white roses carried from another flat. That small physical detail connects Wilson’s fall to John Bristow’s concealed route to his sister’s door, transforming an uncertain search into a clue to the murder.

The building and its security

The inspection begins in the imposing lobby of number 18 Kentigern Gardens. Its heavy, black-painted entrance opens onto marble, a mahogany security desk, mirrored walls and burnished-gold lift doors. Deep-pink lilies stand in tall vases beneath a crystal chandelier. The polished, carefully controlled space recalls the description of the flats as resembling a five-star hotel, but its appearance also matters practically: the lobby is a place of monitored entrances and guarded access, not simply a backdrop to the crime.

Wilson takes Strike and Robin into the small off-duty guards’ room, where a wall-mounted box holds the master keys. From behind the desk he shows them four black-and-white monitor screens: the camera over the front entrance gives a restricted view of the street; others show the underground car park, the enclosed rear garden and the stationary lift. Control panels operate communal alarms and the doors to the pool and car park, while two telephones serve different connections. This arrangement gives the building several points of access and observation, but the surveillance is partial: the screens do not amount to a complete record of everyone’s movements.

Reconstructing Wilson’s search

The investigation returns to Wilson’s first response after Lula’s fall. He says he ran back inside and found both Tansy and Freddie Bestigui in the lobby: Freddie was trying to get his wife back upstairs and into clothes, while Tansy was still crying. Wilson told them to call the police and watch the lift in case the person responsible tried to leave that way. He then took the master key from the back room and ran upstairs. He found no one on the stairwell and used the key to open Lula’s flat. Strike’s account of the file had already drawn attention to the fact that Wilson entered without taking anything to defend himself, despite believing that a killer might still be inside.

When Strike later asks Wilson to show the order in which he searched the flat, Wilson begins by describing his entry and the open doors. Strike’s questions are deliberately plain and specific, directing attention to what Wilson touched, saw, heard and felt at each stage rather than inviting a general retelling. Robin notices the change in Wilson as the questions proceed: he starts to perform his memories instead of merely describing them.

Wilson leans into the rooms as he says he did on the night of the search. At the bedroom he slows, then demonstrates how he looked under the bed, dropping to his knees. Strike’s prompting helps him remember a dress crumpled beneath his legs. Wilson continues to the bathroom, showing how he turned to look behind the door, then hurries back to the flat’s entrance. The reconstruction gives physical shape to a search that had previously survived as a compressed police account; its value lies in details that a witness had not thought significant enough to preserve in words.

The forgotten trace on the stairs

Wilson leaves the flat and presses the lift button, as he had after completing his search. On the stairs he recalls hearing the Bestiguis yelling from a distance. As he turns the corner, he stops abruptly and remembers falling backwards, landing hard on the steps. There had been water there: drops on the stairs. He is startled by the memory and repeats that he had forgotten it. Strike confirms the detail, then recognizes that it resolves something that had been bothering him. The renewed recollection changes the meaning of Wilson’s fall from a simple accident into evidence about what had happened before his search.

The clue’s significance becomes clear when Strike later reconstructs John Bristow’s movements. After the press and other people had left the street, John put on Deeby Macc’s hoodie and took several white roses from their vase in Flat Two. He wiped their ends, though not completely dry, left the flat’s door ajar, and climbed the stairs to Lula’s flat. The water left by the roses made the drops on the stairs where Wilson slipped. Thus a small, overlooked residue links the security guard’s remembered fall to John’s concealed approach.

Evidentiary significance

The inspection tests testimony against layout, movement and physical traces. Strike had already been troubled by gaps in the accounts surrounding Lula’s death, including the uncertain positions of Tansy and Freddie Bestigui when Lula fell. The building’s screens provide only circumscribed views, and the police file contains no diagram of the Bestiguis’ flat; neither a witness’s confident account nor the existence of cameras settles every question. Rewalking Wilson’s route instead produces a clue through the interaction of memory and place.

Wilson’s recovered memory is particularly consequential because it was absent from his police account: he had not reported the water because he had forgotten it. The detail does not emerge from a new object being found during the inspection, but from a witness physically reenacting his route under careful questioning. The method turns a movement remembered as shock and confusion into an evidentiary sequence: John carries the roses upstairs, drops water on the steps, Wilson later slips there, and the unexplained fall becomes intelligible. The scene shows how the investigation advances not by treating testimony as complete, but by returning to the setting and asking a witness to inhabit the sequence again.