Strike on-site inspection of Lula's death apartment

Strike’s inspection of the building where Lula Landry died is a practical reconstruction of the crime rather than a simple return to the scene. Walking the streets and examining the entrances with Robin, he tests the apparent impossibility of an outsider reaching the flat, considers who could already have been inside, and later asks Derrick Wilson to retrace his search. The investigation’s decisive shift comes when a few drops of water, initially easy to overlook, acquire a precise place in the route to Lula’s door.

The streets and the building

Strike and Robin begin at Alderbrook Road, where cameras mounted on a pole face in opposite directions along a busy street of shops, bars, cafés, and traffic. Strike points out that this was where the figure later called Bristow’s Runner appeared on film, twelve minutes after Lula fell. Bellamy Road, leading toward the residential heart of Mayfair, offers a quicker route from Kentigern Gardens; night buses and the prospect of a taxi make it a plausible approach, though Strike notes that a taxi would be an imprudent choice after a murder. The camera footage therefore supplies a timed sighting and a route to examine, not proof by itself of who the Runner was or what that person had done.

As they continue into Kentigern Gardens, the surroundings change from public thoroughfare to a quiet, controlled enclave. The Victorian houses are tall, well maintained, and fronted by balconies and imposing entrances. Number 18, Lula’s former home, has returned to an unremarkable place in the row after the police tape and journalists have gone. Its top-floor balcony is about forty feet above the ground; the balconies are shallow, leaving little space between the railings and the windows. Strike’s attention to height is forensic: a fall from there would be extremely dangerous, but the height alone does not establish that death was inevitable.

The entrance appears difficult to penetrate. Strike notices a keypad and a camera above the door, neither of which Bristow had mentioned. The number of safeguards, including photographers outside on the night, makes a successful unplanned entry and exit seem implausible. But the building’s protections do not settle whether someone could get in: a security desk sometimes opened the door for visitors, while the keypad was available when staff were away from the desk. Wilson explains that residents were normally admitted through the camera and desk rather than using the code themselves. The access system thus depended on both technology and the routines of the people operating it.

Testing routes and opportunity

At the front of number 18, Strike distinguishes between two different possibilities. A killer arriving from outside and escaping past the photographers, keypad, security guard, and inner door would need a carefully prepared plan. That degree of planning does not sit easily with a sudden shove during an argument. The possibility that the killer was already inside, by contrast, removes the need for a conspicuous escape: a resident, the guard, or someone concealed in the building could return to an expected location. Strike’s reasoning shifts the investigation away from an abstract question of motive and toward opportunity and movement through the building.

The missing interval in Bristow’s account becomes central. He fixates on the fifteen minutes after Lula entered, when the photographers had left and Wilson had abandoned the desk because he was ill. The lobby was briefly easier to cross, but an outsider would still have needed to know the guard had gone and to pass the front door. Strike questions how an outsider could have known that the lobby was temporarily unobserved; Robin adds that such a person would also need the keypad code. Strike counters that a code could become widely known if security staff did not change it regularly. Neither observation proves that an outsider used the gap. Together, however, they show why the apparent security of the entrance cannot substitute for a reconstruction of how the doors were actually managed.

The pair then walk to Serf’s Way, a narrow, well-lit alley running behind the houses. Its smooth, high walls offer few places to hide, and its electrically operated garage doors protect access to the residents’ underground parking. Strike climbs a wall to look over the rear gardens and the shadowed basement stairwells. From the ground, the rear of the building does not offer an easy way up: he judges that a climber would need ladders or assistance, as well as strong ropes. The inspection rules out no route absolutely, but it gives the investigators concrete obstacles to weigh against any theory of entry from outside. When Strike drops back to the ground, Robin notices his discomfort; he dismisses her concern rather than interrupting the examination.

A later guided inspection expands the route map below street level. Wilson shows Strike and Robin a door leading from the building’s gym toward the pool and car park. A narrow marble staircase reaches the underground garage, where Wilson opens the car-park door with two keys, a Chubb and a Yale. The space extends along the length of the street, with separate inner doors connecting it to the houses and garage doors close to number 18. From there, movement between the houses offers possibilities that are invisible from the public street. Yet the car park is not an unobserved passage: cameras point from regular positions along its upper walls, feeding footage to monitors. The layout presents both opportunities for hidden movement and a substantial surveillance question—whether the cameras were watched, and what their recordings could establish.

Revising the first account

Strike’s attention to possible suspects is shaped by the same focus on position and access. The Bestiguis’ flat is close to Lula’s, and either resident could have moved through the building without needing to make an unexplained exit to the street. The evidence in the police account does not resolve their precise locations: there was cocaine in the bathroom, and Tansy Bestigui’s accounts shifted, although she consistently maintained that Freddie Bestigui was asleep in bed when Lula fell. Strike also remembers Tansy shielding her face when he pressed her on the point. He therefore treats the Bestiguis’ positions at the moment of the fall as unproven rather than accepting the police view as conclusive. This uncertainty is not itself an accusation; it is a reason to test the account against the flat’s layout and the sequence of events.

Wilson’s original response inside number 18 also becomes part of the reconstruction. He tells Strike that he took the master key from the back room and ran upstairs; there was no one on the stairwell when he went up, and he unlocked Lula’s flat. Strike asks whether Wilson took anything with him for protection, given that he believed someone might be inside after a woman had fallen. The question exposes a gap between Wilson’s fear of a possible intruder and the actions he recalls taking. It also keeps the focus on what Wilson directly did and saw, rather than treating his account as a complete explanation of the scene.

During their later walk through the flat, Strike asks Wilson to show the order in which he searched the rooms that night. Wilson starts with the first room, recalls that the doors were open, and says he did not touch them. On the stairs, he suddenly remembers slipping backward and landing hard. He points out drops of water. The abrupt recovery of this detail changes the status of the staircase: it is no longer merely part of Wilson’s route but a place where a small, unexplained trace may connect the search to an earlier action in the flat.

The water trail and the reconstruction

The later account of the murder explains the drops. John Bristow took several white roses from a vase in Flat Two, dried their ends imperfectly, and carried them out with the door left ajar before going upstairs to Lula’s flat. Drops of water from the roses remained on the stairs, and Wilson later slipped on them. In the reconstructed sequence, the flowers serve as part of Bristow’s approach to his sister: seeing white roses through the peephole, Lula opened the door, believing that her long-lost brother had arrived. A seemingly incidental mark on the stairs thus links Wilson’s recalled fall to the planted flowers and helps expose how Bristow reached the flat.

The inspection’s significance lies in its method as much as in its findings. Strike does not accept the security arrangements as proof that nobody could enter, nor does he treat the camera sighting of the Runner as a complete account of the crime. He compares the busy street with the guarded entrance, the service routines with the keypad, the rear wall with the underground garage, and remembered witness statements with physical traces. Each route and obstacle narrows what is plausible, while the drops of water turn the building’s ordinary surfaces into evidence. What had seemed to be a protected residence with an impossible entry becomes a place whose routines, passages, and tiny remnants can be reconstructed into a path to Lula’s door.