Wilson left his post and found Lula dead

Wilson’s account of the minutes surrounding Lula Landry’s fatal fall links an ordinary bodily emergency to the discovery of a death and a rapidly developing crime scene. He says he was away from his security post for about fifteen minutes, heard a distant bang while in the bathroom, and then heard Tansy Bestigui screaming that Lula had been pushed from her balcony by a man in her flat. Wilson found Lula face down in the snow, searched her apartment, and found it empty. His recollection supplies a sequence of immediate observations, but does not establish who was in the flat or how that person left.

The last sighting

Before leaving the lobby, Wilson saw Lula arrive through the front entrance. She had snow in her hair, was shivering in a skimpy dress, and complained about the photographers waiting outside. Wilson explained that she sometimes avoided the paparazzi by entering through the underground car park when her driver Kieran Kolovas-Jones was with her: she had given him a remote for the electric doors, but another driver, Mick, did not have one, so Lula had to use the front entrance. Her arrival thus placed her in view of the photographers and the security desk, rather than taking her through the garage.

Lula asked whether the photographers would stay all night. Wilson told her they were still waiting for Deeby Macc, who was late. He remembered that Lula looked angry, not merely displeased, before she entered the lift and went up to her flat. The exchange establishes her irritation at the press presence, but does not explain what she did after reaching the apartment or identify anyone who might have joined her.

Wilson’s absence and the alarm

Wilson said he went into the back room because he urgently needed the bathroom. He believed he had caught the same stomach illness that had kept a colleague, Robson, off sick. He was still in the bathroom when he heard a loud bang in the distance; only afterward did he understand it as the sound of Lula’s body falling. The account places his absence at roughly fifteen minutes, while making clear that the specific cause was an acute illness rather than a deliberate decision to leave the desk.

The bang was followed by crying that grew louder as it came down the stairs. Wilson pulled up his trousers and ran into the lobby, where he found Tansy Bestigui shaking and screaming in her underwear. She told him Lula was dead and that a man in Lula’s flat had pushed her from the balcony. This is Tansy’s immediate claim as Wilson recounts it, not something he says he witnessed: he was in the bathroom during the fall and first learned of the alleged assailant from her.

The body and the search

Wilson ran out through the front door and found Lula lying face down in the middle of the road, in the snow. He described her head as badly crushed and her neck as broken. The shock of the scene is also conveyed through Cormoran Strike’s response during the later interview: the remembered smell of the fatal injuries returns to him as a familiar, unmistakable sensory impression. The account moves from Wilson’s hurried discovery to Strike’s embodied recollection, making the physical fact of the death impossible to reduce to the competing claims about how it happened.

Wilson returned to the building. Both Tansy and Freddie Bestigui were in the lobby; Freddie was trying to get his wife back upstairs and into clothes while she continued to cry. Wilson told them to call the police and to watch the lift in case the man he suspected tried to leave that way. He then took the master key from the back room and ran upstairs. He says he found no one on the stairwell before unlocking Lula’s flat.

Inside, Wilson searched every room and even opened the wardrobes, but found nobody. The lounge windows stood wide open, despite the freezing night. He says he did not close them or touch anything, preserving the scene as he found it. When he pressed the lift button, its doors opened immediately: the lift remained at Lula’s floor, and it was empty. These observations confirmed that the apartment was vacant when he searched it, but did not answer how its previous occupant had got away.

Suspicion, evidence, and uncertainty

Wilson later explained that he had suspected a man who knew the entry code, whom he believed had come upstairs while he was in the bathroom and been admitted by Lula. He had heard the pair rowing before and remembered hearing the man angry; on that basis, he thought the man had pushed her. His suspicion therefore preceded his search, while the evidence he describes from inside the flat—the open windows, the empty rooms, and the empty lift—left the suspected person’s departure unexplained. The account distinguishes Wilson’s inference from what he directly saw.

After checking the flat, Wilson ran downstairs. Passing the Bestiguis’ door, he could hear Tansy still crying and Freddie still shouting at her. He did not know whether they had called the police. He retrieved his mobile phone from the security desk and went back outside to Lula, unwilling to leave her lying alone; he intended to call for help from the street. Before he could dial, he heard a siren, and the police arrived quickly. The sequence ends with Wilson back beside the body, while the means of escape and the identity of the person in the flat remain unresolved in his account.