The Stranger Diaries

by Elly Griffiths

  ‘Let’s go to Talgarth now,’ I said. ‘On our way back. Just to have a look at the place.’

  Chapter 11

  We didn’t get to see Clare Cassidy until the second day. I toyed with the idea of turning up at her classroom just as she finished teaching, but then I decided that I’d like to see her in her home environment. However, I was surprised when we pulled up outside the house. I’d always wondered who would live in this row of houses, so close to the old cement works. Now I had my answer.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Neil. ‘I wouldn’t live here for a million pounds. You know what they say about this place?’

  ‘I’ve heard a few versions,’ I said.

  ‘It’s haunted. Did you hear about the child who fell in the cement? Apparently you can still hear her crying at night. And — ’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ I said. ‘It was similar at school. Everyone told the same ghost story, about a woman who fell down the stairs in the Old Building. A woman in white, floating along the corridors. She was meant to appear when someone died.’

  ‘Wonder if she appeared on Sunday night then.’

  ‘We can ask Clare,’ I said. ‘Here she is now.’

  I watched her approach. Black Renault Clio, very much what I’d expect her to drive. She parked behind us at the kerb and got out of the car. Just the sight of her annoyed me. She was wearing black jeans and a grey knitted top. Sounds basic but the trousers were tight and tucked into knee-high boots and the top was cashmere, the sort of drapey affair with an attached scarf that would look ludicrous on me but, I’m sorry to say, looked very good on Clare. She had a carrier bag in one hand and got a holdall ( Cath Kidston, I recognised it from the catalogue) out of the boot. Then she opened the passenger door. A small white dog jumped out, barking wildly.

  I’ve got nothing against dogs but I like them to look like dogs. My parents have a German Shepherd called Sultan. He’s meant to guard the shop but, in reality, he sleeps on their bed and gets treated like a son (and rather better than their daughter). It annoys me sometimes but at least Sultan is a beautiful creature, a prince among animals. This barking white furball was just an irrelevance.

  As I approached, the dog made a beeline for my black trousers. Clare pulled him away rather ineffectually. I introduced myself and asked if I could have a word. Clare gave me a sharp look before apologising for the still-salivating animal, which was apparently called Herbert.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, brushing my trousers down. ‘I like dogs.’

  The house was quite nice inside, the sitting room painted that fashionable colour between grey and blue, white bookshelves, wooden floors. I could see that Neil was impressed. Clare offered us tea. She had a low voice — not posh exactly, but very much what you’d hear on Radio 4 announcing some financial disaster. I could see that Neil was impressed with her too. He asked for tea with two sugars and Clare smiled patronisingly. Then she drifted away, but not before I’d heard her carrier bag clanking. Someone was planning to drink alone that evening.

  I could hear the dog barking from the kitchen. That’s the worst of small dogs, the constant background noise. When Sultan barks, you know it’s important. I looked at the photographs on the mantelpiece. Clare with a teenage girl, tall and thin like her but with long, dark hair. The teenager with Herbert. Herbert on his own. A flyer for a baroque music concert. A card from someone signing themselves R.

  ‘She’s coming back,’ said Neil.

  Clare put the tea and biscuits on a low wooden table. It reminded me of Ella’s house, of her single cup of herbal tea.

  ‘We’re investigating the murder of Ella Elphick,’ I said. ‘I understand that you’ve been informed about this?’

  She nodded, blinking slightly. She had huge eyes and used them to great effect. Perhaps I’m being unfair. Presumably she was upset. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Rick, my head of department, phoned me yesterday.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I know it must be an awful shock for you, but we want to talk to all of Ella’s friends and colleagues as soon as possible. We want to try to get a picture of her life so that we can work out who would have done this awful thing.’

  Clare’s eyelashes fluttered; she looked at Neil and then at me. ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘What did you think?’ I said, unhelpfully.

  ‘I thought — I assumed . . . that she was killed by a stranger. A random attack. A robbery gone wrong.’

  ‘Most murder victims are killed by people they know,’ I said, deliberately keeping my voice as matter-of-fact as possible, ‘and we have reason to believe that this is the case here.’

  I stopped to let this sink in. I wasn’t going to tell her about ‘Hell is empty’ yet, but I’d looked it up and knew it was from The Tempest, which was a GCSE text that year. Ella, Clare and Rick all taught GCSE English.

  Pulling out my notebook, I asked her if she taught with Ella.

  ‘Yes. We both teach English. Taught. Oh God.’

  She, at least, noticed the change in tense. She took a deep breath, calming herself. Herbert put a paw on her leg. It was quite sweet really.

  She explained that she was head of Key Stage 3 and Ella was head of Key Stage 4; there were six people in the English department and they all worked closely together. I asked her if she got on well with Ella. She said that she did and that they socialised outside work. She’d last seen Ella on Friday night when they went to the cinema and a meal with Debra Green, who taught history at Talgarth. I remembered Tony’s remark about the three musketeers. Clare seemed nervous, even answering these routine questions, so I let Neil butt in with some film chat to try to set up a rapport. After all, he was the one who had asked for a cup of tea. This, according to the psychologists, meant that they already had some sort of relationship.

  I asked if she’d heard from Ella on Sunday and she said that she’d texted about the Strictly results but didn’t get an answer. I loathe Strictly Come Dancing, all those intelligent, successful women putting on sequins and embracing their ‘girly side’. It makes me feel sick. I was willing to bet that Clare Cassidy had done ballet as a child. She looked just the type. She probably gave up when she got too tall.

  Clare claimed to be in all evening, watching television and preparing for her creative writing course. Her daughter, Georgia, was in the house but — in true teenage style — shut away in her room most of the time. Georgia was with her dad for a half-term visit, due back tomorrow. So Clare was divorced. I could have guessed as much from looking at the room. No man would put up with all those scented candles.

  She seemed much more relaxed now, leaning back in her chair, legs crossed at the ankle. I looked at Neil and tried for a conversational tone. ‘What sort of woman was Ella?’

  Clare seemed to pause for a long time before answering. She looked up and to the left. She uncrossed her legs and crossed them again, shifting slightly away from us. Herbert whined softly. A mobile phone buzzed somewhere in the background.

  ‘She was a lovely person,’ said Clare at last. ‘Very intelligent, a lot of fun. Everyone liked her. Ella was a great teacher. The kids loved her. They’ll be devastated when they find out . . .’

  ‘Did Ella have a boyfriend?’ I asked, before she had time to consider her answer.

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  An odd answer and, incidentally, the same reply given by Tony Sweetman. ‘Any exes?’ I said, once again trying for the chummy tone.

  ‘In the past. Nobody recent.’

  ‘Did she talk about any one in particular?’

  ‘She mentioned someone from her old school in Wales. Bradley Something.’

  I made a note. ‘And she never mentioned anyone bothering her? Stalking her on Facebook? That sort of thing?’

  ‘No,’ said Clare, looking at us rather defiantly.

  There was more that I wanted to ask Ms Cassidy, but first I wanted to look at Ella’s soc
ial media records. There was something there, I thought: Ella, Clare, Rick, Tony. Something was going on in my old school. Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  It was on the way back to the station that Neil made the remark about Clare looking like a model. He backtracked immediately but, as we drove through the endless series of roundabouts on the approach to Chichester, I reflected that he had a point. Surely it was unusual to have two such gorgeous women on the staff of a secondary school? Thinking back to my own days at Talgarth High, all the teachers had seemed ancient and dowdy in the extreme. Miss Cathcart had an incipient moustache and smelled of mingled sweat and talcum powder. Clare Cassidy had worn Jo Malone English Pear and Freesia — I’m very good at perfume.

  Could Clare Cassidy and Ella Elphick have incited the male staff to passion, or even to murder? I mentioned this thought to Neil.

  ‘Tony Sweetman and Rick Lewis are both married,’ he said, wincing as I overtook on the inside. We take turns with the driving and he’s much more cautious than me.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Do you really think one of her colleagues could have killed her? That was a brutal murder.’

  ‘Stabbing is passionate,’ I said. ‘Someone got up close to kill her. That argues strength of feeling. Not to mention they already had that neat little Shakespeare quote to hand.’

  ‘I never understood Shakespeare.’

  ‘That’s why you’re a copper,’ I said, though, to be honest, I had quite enjoyed some of the plays, even when taught by Miss Cathcart. Macbeth. Now there’s a good murder story.

  ‘And don’t forget,’ I said. ‘Ella had a relationship with a colleague before. Clare mentioned him just now.’ Her parents had told us about Bradley Jones yesterday. He was Ella’s head of department when she was teaching in Wales. Ella and Bradley had an affair which had, in Ella’s mother’s words, ‘ended badly’. We were going to see Jones tomorrow.

  ‘So Ella had an affair with Tony or Rick, Clare got jealous and stabbed her,’ said Neil. ‘Doesn’t stack up to me.’

  ‘Remember what Rick said? “Is it Clare?” Something is going on there.’

  ‘You just don’t like her,’ said Neil.

  ‘I don’t like or dislike her,’ I said. ‘I just think she’s hiding something.’

  Chapter 12

  We learned a lot more about Ella Elphick over the next few days. She was born in Surrey in 1977, educated at a girls’ grammar school, read English at Exeter, then travelled in the Far East and worked in Japan for a while. After five years abroad, she came home and did a teacher training course. She received glowing reports from her tutors and from her first work placement. Ella worked at a secondary school in Plymouth before moving to Cardiff as head of Key Stage 4 (‘a mistake’, said her mother). We didn’t have the CSI reports from the scene yet and the neighbours hadn’t been particularly helpful. They had heard raised voices on Sunday night (‘a man’s voice’, someone said, but they didn’t seem too sure) and no one had spotted a visitor approaching Ella’s cottage. There were CCTV cameras outside the church but between the hours of six and ten the footage was spectacularly dull: the vicar, a man walking his dog, two teenagers immersed in their phones.

  The post-mortem showed that Ella had died from stab wounds to the neck and chest. As I’d thought, the wounds on her hands had been inflicted after death.

  ‘The stigmata,’ said Donna. ‘Maybe our killer was a religious maniac. The note mentioned hell too.’

  ‘It was a quote,’ I said. ‘I think that’s the significance. A quote from a play that Ella taught at school.’

  ‘Do you really think that the killer could be linked to Talgarth?’ said Donna, with a sly glance at me. ‘Your alma mater?’

  ‘I don’t think a crap comprehensive can be an alma mater,’ I said. ‘It was just my old school. But . . . I don’t know, there’s something there. The head teacher, the head of department, even Clare Cassidy. They all seemed nervous, as if they were hiding something.’

  ‘Ella’s killer got up close,’ said Donna. ‘That implies that passion was involved. ‘

  That was true. The police sometimes talk about ‘distantiation’, the theory that it’s easier to shoot than stab because you can be distanced from your victim. Think of drone attacks. I’m sure the operators don’t feel like killers and yet they are. Ella’s killer had got near enough to stab her where it would do the most damage, which argued that they were cold and fearless. Or that Ella knew them well.

  On Wednesday we drove to Cardiff to see Bradley Jones, a good-looking but oddly ineffectual man who spent most of the interview telling us that Ella ‘came on to him’ and that she ‘made all of the running’. Not one expression of condolence or regret. Sadly Jones had an alibi for Sunday night. He had been watching his daughter, Sadie, in a ballet show. What is it with bloody dance? On Sunday night it seemed that everyone in the country was either dancing or watching other people dance. Regardless, it would have been impossible for Jones to have watched his daughter perform in Wales at eight o’clock and then travelled to Sussex to kill Ella before ten. Sadie had only been a baby when Jones had slept with Ella but this too was somehow her fault. ‘I was so tired from all those sleepless nights,’ he tried a man-to-man smile with Neil, ‘I just couldn’t resist.’ I’m pleased to say that Neil just stared at him stonily.

  ‘Scumbag,’ he said on the way home. ‘He didn’t even say that he was sorry that she was dead.’

  ‘Ella had bad taste in men,’ I said. ‘That may be significant.’

  Ella had left Cardiff for Talgarth High, where she was head of Key Stage 4 again. A sideways move but she had seemed happy there, according to her parents. Was Key Stage 4 better than Key Stage 3, I wondered. Was Clare Cassidy jealous that Ella had the better job? Maybe, but it was hard to imagine Clare stabbing her colleague to death over a few points on the pay scale. They were both well-liked, well-respected teachers, we knew that.

  At the end of the week we received Ella’s social media records. She was on Facebook as Ella Louise (presumably to stop students finding her profile page) and also on Twitter as @lizziebennett77. I had to explain that one to Neil. ‘She’s a character from Pride and Prejudice.’ He said that Kelly had seen the film. It was interesting that Ella saw herself as Elizabeth Bennett, feisty and attractive, refusing to marry the boring clergyman, holding out for Mr Darcy. For all that, her Twitter feed wasn’t very interesting — she mostly retweeted left-wing stuff and pictures of cats. Her Facebook records were more illuminating. They showed that she kept in touch with her old school friends Megan and Anna, that she messaged her mum every day and that she liked the Labour Party, John Lewis and videos of small animals behaving cutely. There was also a flurry of WhatsApp messages to Megan over the summer mentioning ‘what happened at Hythe’ and, once, ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hythe’. It seemed that Ella had done something she regretted whilst on a training course at Hythe (‘I wish it had never happened’) but that she hoped to keep it quiet (‘Thank God it’s the holidays now. C knows but she won’t tell’).

  ‘Clare Cassidy?’ said Neil, who was reading over my shoulder.

  ‘Maybe. Wonder who Doctor Jeykll was?’

  ‘Must have been someone at the school if they were on the same course. Rick Lewis?’

  We contacted Megan (a chiropodist living in Leeds) and she admitted that Ella had told her that she had slept with ‘someone from work’ and regretted it immediately afterwards. Frustratingly, Megan couldn’t come up with a name. A phone call to Tony Sweetman confirmed that four members of the English department had attended a course on ‘Journaling for Writing’ in Hythe at the end of the summer term. They were Rick Lewis, Ella Elphick, Clare Cassidy and Anoushka Palmer.

  We were going into the school on Monday to talk to staff and students but we decided to call
Rick into the station on Saturday. He seemed the most likely candidate to have had an affair with Ella, although — as Neil kept reminding me (with a hopeful leer) — ’we shouldn’t ignore the gay angle’. The Gay Angle sounded like a pub in Brighton and, while I was the last person to assume people were straight, Ella and Clare had been resolutely heterosexual up till now. It wasn’t impossible that they’d had a one-night stand in Hythe but I thought it was unlikely.

  We ushered Rick into Interview Room 1. Donna was watching through the two-way mirror. If Rick had looked nervous at his house, he looked really anxious now. He wasn’t bad-looking, though, tall and thin with horn-rimmed glasses that probably made him seem cleverer than he was. It wasn’t out of the question that Ella could have had an affair with him.

  At first Rick tried to impose his authority on the proceedings, rather as if we were an unruly Year 8 English class.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ he kept saying. ‘I’m a busy man.’

  ‘Just a few questions,’ said Neil soothingly. I was keeping quiet. I knew that Rick Lewis was wary of me and wanted to keep him on his toes.

  After we’d gone through the formalities, I said, ‘Tell us about Hythe, Rick.’

  He stared at me over his glasses. I could see one leg jiggling under the table. ‘What?’

  Don’t say ‘what’, say ‘pardon’, my mum would say, although somehow ‘pardon’ turns out to be unforgivably common.

  ‘We know something happened between you and Ella in Hythe,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you tell us about it in your own words, so we can get the record straight.’

  I pictured Donna on the other side of the window. Accuse, sympathise, offer alternatives. That’s what they tell you at police training school. I was probably doing it in the wrong order.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ said Rick. Jiggle, jiggle.

  We both waited.

  ‘It was a course at the end of term,’ said Rick. ‘Everyone let their hair down.’