Strike’s discovery that a large photograph file had been deleted from Lula Landry’s laptop ten weeks after her death turns a seemingly technical detail into a fresh investigative question. The recovered images are returned to view, but the person who removed them and the reason remain unresolved at this point: the computer yields evidence of an intervention, not an immediate explanation.

Discovery and Recovery

A computer technician named Spanner tells Strike that the laptop’s password was “Agyeman,” reset five days before Lula died. He also reports a separate finding: a large photo file had been deleted on March 17. The timing gives the discovery its force. The deletion did not occur as part of the immediate aftermath of Lula’s death; it happened ten weeks later, on St Patrick’s Day.

Spanner explains that deletion is not necessarily permanent. Recovery software can retrieve data that a user believes has been removed, and he has used it to restore the photographs. He hands Strike a memory stick containing the recovered file. He has not put the images back onto the laptop, leaving the original device as he found it and giving Strike a separate copy to examine.

The Date and the Unanswered Question

Strike repeats the date, March 17, and connects it to the interval since Lula’s death. Spanner proposes that the police may have deleted the file. Strike immediately rejects that possibility. His certainty narrows the question without answering it: if the police were not responsible, someone else removed the photographs, but the evidence available in this scene does not identify that person.

The episode distinguishes a recoverable digital trace from proof of a culprit or motive. The date and the restored file establish that material was removed after Lula died; neither fact, by itself, explains what the pictures show or why someone deleted them. The memory stick therefore carries both promise and uncertainty: it makes the images accessible while sharpening the mystery of who intervened in Lula’s computer.

Viewing the Photographs

After Spanner leaves, Strike hurries into the outer office, displaces Robin so he can use the computer, and explains how the file was recovered. He opens the memory stick’s contents while Robin watches. For a fraction of a second, she fears that the images may show evidence of abuse or other criminality, an expectation shaped by the cases in which she has heard of concealed photographs online.

The images do not immediately fulfil that fear. After several minutes, Strike voices the feeling Robin has not yet expressed aloud. The scene shifts the discovery from a bare fact about a hard drive into a moment of shared examination: the recovered file must be looked at before its significance can be judged. The evidence establishes the restoration and the reaction to the first images, but does not establish a complete account of their contents.

Significance in the Investigation

The deleted file belongs to a broader pattern in which Strike tests accounts against particulars that can be checked. Elsewhere, when reviewing the police file, he questions whether Tansy Bestigui’s account fixes the Bestiguis’ positions when Lula fell; the presence of cocaine and the few seconds after the fall matter because they complicate a seemingly settled version of events. At the Kentigern Gardens flat, he asks Derrick Wilson to retrace the search, and Wilson remembers slipping backwards on water on the stairs. These moments show the investigation treating small details as evidence whose meaning depends on sequence and circumstance.

The laptop discovery follows the same method, but its trace is digital and delayed. A file deleted on March 17, ten weeks after Lula’s death, cannot be folded into the night of the fall without further evidence. Strike’s rejection of the police as the source keeps the question open and gives the recovered photographs a place in his ongoing inquiry. The incident’s decisive consequence is not a solved case but a newly exposed gap between what the laptop once contained and what someone chose to remove.

The later reconstruction of Lula’s death gives physical traces a similarly exacting role. Strike explains that John Bristow took white roses from a vase in Flat Two, wiped their ends, and carried them upstairs to Lula’s flat; droplets of water from the roses remained on the stairs, where Wilson later slipped. That account does not identify who deleted the photographs, but it underscores the investigative logic shared by the digital discovery and the reconstructed route: small traces acquire weight through their timing, location, and relation to other evidence.