Strike hires to re-investigate Lula's death

Strike’s renewed investigation of Lula Landry’s death begins with John Bristow’s commission but becomes a test of what the evidence can actually establish. Rather than accept the police account or a witness’s confident interpretation, Strike returns to the timeline, compares statements with physical arrangements, and follows small discrepancies through the building. The method eventually gives a trace as slight as water from cut flowers a decisive place in the reconstruction.

Commission and investigative purpose

On a Sunday, walking away from London’s commercial centre towards the River Thames, Strike phones his client, John Bristow. The work is not simply to repeat the inquest’s conclusion: Strike wants to pursue a witness whose possible knowledge Bristow dismisses. Lula had arranged to meet Rochelle Onifade at Vashti after seeing Bristow at his mother’s flat. Bristow points out that Tansy Bestigui said the voice she heard upstairs was male, and questions what Rochelle could know about the night Lula died. Strike distinguishes the purpose of his inquiry from suspicion: he is interested in Rochelle as a witness, not as a suspect.

That distinction is characteristic of the reinvestigation. Strike does not assume that a person’s relevance depends on the police already having treated them as a suspect, nor that a witness’s apparent distance from the fatal moment makes their account useless. The short meeting at Vashti matters because it took place on the day before Lula died and could reveal what Lula and Rochelle discussed or did together. Robin Ellacott accompanies Strike into the shop to find out what happened during their fifteen minutes there, while acknowledging that three months have passed and that the women may not have noticed anything significant.

Records, testimony and competing explanations

Strike seeks what he calls inside information from Eric Wardle, explaining that his client believes foul play occurred. Wardle’s immediate suspicion is that Strike has connected himself to a tabloid, but Strike is seeking investigative material, not publicity. The exchange sets the inquiry against the public story surrounding Lula’s death: information in the press is not a substitute for checking what the witnesses said and what the record supports.

After reading the police file, Strike focuses on the Bestiguis’ account of the fall. Tansy had cocaine in the flat, and her changing stories leave Strike uncertain about where she and Freddie Bestigui were at the crucial moment. She consistently insists that Freddie was asleep in bed when Lula fell. Strike remembers her shielding her face as he pressed her on this point; without a plan of the Bestiguis’ apartment, he cannot settle the question by testimony alone. The police account does not, in his view, prove the precise positions of either spouse when Lula went over the balcony.

The statements concerning Evan Duffield also require comparison rather than automatic acceptance. Duffield admits that he tried to stop Lula leaving Uzi by gripping her upper arms; she broke free, and he followed shortly afterward. His account of going to Kentigern Gardens and then continuing to d’ Arblay Street is supported by his driver, while other witnesses and a dealer provide additional alibi evidence. But the evidence has qualifications: the dealer may lie for Duffield, a witness downstairs could have been paid, and people who saw a man moving around London could identify only someone in a wolf mask. The file therefore contains support for Duffield’s account without making every part of it equally secure.

Reconstruction at the building

The crime scene must be reconstructed as a sequence of movements. In Wilson’s account, after discovering Lula’s body he ran inside, found the Bestiguis in the lobby, told them to call the police and watch the lift, then took the master key from the back room and went upstairs. He says that no one was on the stairwell when he unlocked Lula’s flat. Strike’s questions probe the interval between the fall and the discovery, and what Wilson did—and did not—take with him as he went back into the building.

Later, Strike asks Derrick Wilson to demonstrate the order in which he searched the rooms. The inquiry shifts from remembered narrative to movement through the actual space: Wilson indicates where he entered and where he looked. On the stairs, he suddenly recalls slipping backwards and landing hard. He points out drops of water; Strike repeats the detail, registering it as a physical trace that had not been part of Wilson’s earlier account. The reconstruction matters because a newly recovered detail can alter the interpretation of the route and the timing, not merely add colour to a witness statement.

CCTV and the unresolved figure

Strike also watches CCTV footage, following the recorded movements of a possible suspect rather than treating the images as self-explanatory. On Theobalds Road, a fast-walking individual appears strongly reminiscent of the person who had boarded a bus, though the white scarf is now gone. Strike thinks the man is consciously keeping his head bowed. The footage ends without identifying him, leaving Strike with a comparison and an inference rather than a conclusive identification.

After reviewing the footage and reading the police file, Strike calls Bristow to request another meeting and calls Wilson to arrange a visit to 18 Kentigern Gardens. These calls show the investigation advancing by returning to people and places with more focused questions. The CCTV does not close the case; it gives Strike grounds to ask what the image, the statements and the building’s layout may reveal when considered together.

The trace that joins the route

The investigation’s eventual explanation makes the drops on the stairs legible as part of a larger chain. Strike explains that John Bristow took white roses from the vase in Flat Two, wiped their ends but did not dry them completely, then carried them out, left the door ajar and climbed the stairs to Lula’s flat. The few drops of water left behind were what Wilson later slipped on. A detail that first surfaced unexpectedly in Wilson’s reconstruction thus connects the stairway to the movements Strike attributes to Bristow.

The roses also explain how the approach to Lula could be disguised. She had been waiting on the balcony, watching for her long-lost brother, while the open windows meant that she could see the street. Seeing white roses through the peephole, she believed the expected visitor had somehow arrived without her noticing him outside and opened the door in excitement. Strike’s reconstruction turns the flowers from decoration into both an invitation and a means of access. The renewed investigation’s significance lies in that change of scale: an official account and scattered statements become a testable sequence of locations, actions and traces, with a few drops of water linking the building’s physical evidence to the concealed route to Lula’s door.