The Stranger Diaries

by Elly Griffiths

  Gary and I ran. We were mindless with fear. I think either of us would have abandoned the other to be murdered by the phantom. Our only thought was to get out of that place. We flew down the stairs and out through the main door. We ran all the way to the front gate where Pete was locking up.

  ‘Haven’t you kids got homes to go to?’

  His familiar, irritable voice brought us back to reality. We muttered a goodnight and walked to the bus stop. There was no one there but we still talked in whispers.

  ‘It was her,’ I said. ‘R.M. Holland’s wife. The woman in white. The one who threw herself down the staircase.’

  ‘It wasn’t a woman,’ said Gary. ‘I don’t know what the hell it was.’

  ‘That scream,’ I said. ‘Do you think anyone else heard it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gary, huddled and miserable in his anorak.

  ‘Seeing the white lady,’ I said. ‘It’s meant to mean someone’s about to die.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Gary.

  We stood there in silence. My bus came and I got on. We didn’t even kiss goodbye. We knew that our brief romance was over. Two days later we heard that Sue Black, a girl in the third year who had been ill for a while, had died from leukaemia. The school was febrile with sadness and curiosity and several people raised the legend of the white lady, but Gary and I never mentioned what we had seen.

  We never spoke about the ghost again. Until today.

  Chapter 28

  I opened one of Clare’s diaries at random.

  It’s not that I don’t love Simon. I do. It’s more that I want more. I love my job and I think I’m good at it. God knows I love Georgie (so sweet and loving right now). But while I love Simon, I notice that he now automatically comes second on the list. Is married love always a casualty of maternal love? But it’s not about me and Simon. It’s just that I thought I was going to do something with my life. Be someone . . .

  Jesus. I didn’t think I could stand much more of this. I looked at the date at the top of the page. 3/3/10. By my calculations Clare and Simon divorced two years later and Georgia — so sweet and loving — would have been eight. I decided to try something more recent.

  Monday 11th September 2017

  Rick is really getting on my nerves. It’s the second week of term and he still hasn’t properly sorted the timetables. Ella’s planning for the GCSEs is all over the place but he won’t say anything to her. Does he still have a crush on her? Probably. He keeps sighing and looking more rumpled and disconsolate than ever. His crush on me disappeared quickly enough. But then I told it to him straight, which Ella won’t. I wasn’t prepared to sleep with a married man. But that didn’t bother her.

  I’m sick of covering up for her at work. I should have had Ella’s job and Rick knows it.

  I got out my notebook and started making a timeline. In July Ella and Rick had slept together, by September Rick was obviously still mooning over her and Clare was resentful. I turned a couple of pages.

  Friday 15th September

  So happy to see the end of the week. Ella still hasn’t completed her GCSE predictions. I asked her when she was going to do it and she just laughed and said ‘You worry too much’. Then she said that she was going out with Bryony Hughes on Saturday. ‘Is it a coven meeting?’ I said, sounding pretty sour, I’m sure. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’re summoning the dead at Il Pappagallo in Chichester.’ ‘Hope it keeps fine for you,’ I said.

  Il Pappagallo was where Clare had met Henry Hamilton on Saturday night. I made a note of that too. I also started a list of names. Bryony Hughes??

  Why do people do this? Why do they pour out their hopes and fears, night after night, to an audience of no one? Clare had this habit of peppering her diary entries with what were clearly quotations. Why did she do that? Did she imagine that her diaries would be read out on Radio 4 one day? Sometimes she even takes the time to attribute the quotes, as if she were writing a sixth-form English essay. ‘Nothing in the world is hidden forever’ — Wilkie Collins, No Name. And why, when she was supposedly writing for herself, did she take so much care to craft her sentences? Is married love always a casualty of maternal love? Who the hell is she asking? And all that dialogue, in careful quotation marks. ‘Hope it keeps fine for you.’ It reads like a chick-lit novel, the sort you buy at the airport and regret before the cabin staff have finished their safety demonstration.

  I turned to the days before Ella Elphick’s murder.

  Friday 20th October

  Busy day at school, finishing up before half-term. I wished I hadn’t agreed to go out with Ella and Debra tonight but, in the end, I was glad I did. We saw Blade Runner 2049. I remember liking the first film but this was unbelievably boring. Mind you, my tolerance for films is limited these days. I slept through approximately two-thirds of it, waking to find Ryan Gosling walking very slowly through an aircraft hangar in the snow. Afterwards we went for a meal at The Royal Oak. At first Ella annoyed me by going on about The Rick Thing. Debra just encourages her — ’He’s obsessed with you’, etc., etc. I was starting to get really pissed off but, luckily, Ella seemed to sense this and steered the conversation onto safer topics — Strictly, school and whether Debra looks better with long or short hair. A good evening, all in all.

  Georgie was still out when I got in. She came in at about 11. Ty saw her to the door. He’s very polite, almost chivalrous, I’ll give him that. It’s just that he’s a man and she’s still a child, however glamorous she looks these days. Am I jealous of Georgie? Am I jealous of Ella? God, time to stop.

  There’s no entry for Saturday 21st or for Sunday 22nd, the day Ella was killed. But there are several pages for Monday 23rd, the handwriting scrawling and unsteady-looking.

  Monday 23rd October 2017

  Ella is dead. I didn’t believe it when Rick told me . . .

  Clare sounded genuinely shocked but, further down the page, when Rick says he’s sorry, she writes: ‘He’s sorry. Jesus.’ What did she mean? That Rick was to blame for Ella’s death? But if she’d suspected him surely she’d write in here, in her private journal? Clare also wrote that Rick had told her that Daisy had thought he was about to be arrested. Interesting. She must have picked up our suspicions.

  I kept going. I wanted to see what Clare had said about me.

  When I got back from work the police were waiting outside my house. I recognised their car. It was the one I’d seen in the car park at Talgarth yesterday. This made me nervous. There were two detectives, a man and a woman, just like in the films. The woman, DS Kaur, was Indian, short and not unattractive, but with a deliberately charmless manner, as if she were trying to trip me up.

  Ha ha. Deliberately charmless, I must tell Donna. And is it borderline racist that her first adjective (get me, Miss Cathcart) is ‘Indian’? ‘Not unattractive’. I’m furious to find myself not displeased with that, especially coming from someone as glamorous as Clare. But who the hell is she calling short? I’m not short; she’s too tall. But she had noticed our car, that day at Talgarth. And why was she nervous?

  Later on, she wrote:

  I keep thinking about the two detectives who came here, Kaur and Winston. They weren’t hostile exactly, but they weren’t friendly either. ‘Most murder victims are killed by people they know,’ said Kaur, ‘and we have reason to believe that this is the case here.’

  Who do they suspect?

  Who indeed?

  I skimmed through all the volumes, reading an extract here and there, but the mysterious handwriting appeared only twice. Once after Hythe. That was just one line: Hallo, Clare. You don’t know me. Then there was the longer note, written after Clare’s entry on 30th October.

  ‘Greetings from a sincere friend. I refer to the perusal (which I have just completed) of this interesting Diary.

  I looked at the writing. It was thin and slanting, almost as if it was in italics.
Slanting forwards, what was that supposed to mean? Bella, the handwriting expert, had said that it was ‘probably’ a man but I didn’t see how she could tell. It did look strangely old-fashioned, but maybe that was just the effect of the words.

  There are many hundred pages here. I can lay my hand on my heart and declare that every page has charmed, refreshed, delighted me.

  Admirable woman!

  Clare had said that this was where Wilkie Collins ended and the stranger began.

  But, Clare, not everyone appreciates you as I do. It breaks my heart to say so but there are people who are working against you. I have already disposed of one of these creatures. I will fall on the others like a ravening beast.

  Who were these people who were working against Clare? I read back through her entry for 30th October. My head was pounding now and Clare’s handwriting, far rounder and looser than that of the intruder, was beginning to swirl in an unpleasant way.

  30th October 2017

  Truly terrible day. Briefing in the morning and Rick tells me that I’m now head of KS4. What’s more, I have to produce the play. I loathe musicals and it felt wrong somehow, like trespassing on Ella’s territory. Climbing into her grave, that’s what they say, isn’t it? Rick has no idea. He’s just thinking about his precious department. I honestly think that I hate Rick at the moment. Ella has just died and he’s forcing me to take on all her work, without thinking of how it will affect me, her best friend. To think that he once professed to be in love with me. It makes me feel sick to think about it.

  Then, to add insult to injury, R asked me to stay behind and begged me not to tell the police about him and Ella. He said that Daisy was ‘very vulnerable at the moment’. The nerve of him. To blame it on his wife. I said I wouldn’t say anything. Not for Rick’s sake, or for Daisy’s, but for Ella’s. I know what the police are thinking. I knew from the moment Kaur asked whether Ella had a boyfriend. If they found out about Rick, he’d be suspect number one and she’d be the scarlet woman. Curley’s wife in her red dress. Ella is dead. Let what happened in Hythe die with her.

  Tony did assembly well. It was very moving, actually. The kids really did love Ella and she was a great teacher. Must remember that. But then, in first lesson, I was summoned to see the police officers who had taken up residence in T’s office. It was horrible. Much worse than before. They were asking questions about Hythe, about Ella and Rick. I didn’t give anything away but then they told me something absolutely horrible. A note had been found by Ella’s body. A note saying ‘Hell is empty’.

  The worst thing happened when I got home. I looked back through my old diaries to see what I’d written about Hythe. I honestly couldn’t remember what I’d said at the time and it was awful. So judgemental and mean. And then I saw, right at the bottom of the page, someone had written, ‘Hallo, Clare. You don’t know me.’

  Now I am really freaked out. Who the hell could have written in my diary? The note was right. Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

  Halloween tomorrow. God help us.

  I read this entry several times. The detail about Rick and his ‘vulnerable’ wife was interesting. Daisy Lewis had both a motive to dislike Ella and a grievance against Rick. We should really take her seriously as a suspect. Clare certainly takes the moral high ground where Ella is concerned but I didn’t really buy the feminist stuff about saving Ella’s reputation from the brutal sexist police officers. We had to ask about lovers because — as an intelligent woman like Clare should know — they were the people who were most likely to have committed the murder. I wonder whether Clare just didn’t want to talk about Hythe because she had been briefly tempted by Rick. I knew this from earlier diary entries. When Rick first made his pass, Clare wrote about the ‘primal need’ to have someone’s arms around her but now it made her feel sick to think of him.

  I still couldn’t quite get my head around the whole business of diary writing. Given that the worst thing had happened at the end of the day, why did Clare still recount events in chronological order? We had the briefing, assembly, her interview with us and then the mysterious writing. Surely that should have come first? One thing did strike me: if the new writer really was intending to purge the world of people who didn’t appreciate Clare, then Rick was the obvious next target.

  Who else had Clare slagged off in her diaries?

  Chapter 29

  I was back at Talgarth High in the morning. Tony Sweetman must have spoken to the governors because the school was closed with a notice on the gates. Dave Bannerman, caretaker and Sunday footballer, let me in.

  ‘They’re on the first floor,’ he said, meaning the CSI team. ‘Making a hell of a mess.’

  ‘Were all the classrooms on the first floor locked on Saturday night?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We don’t have keys to most of them. I just shut them so it looks secure.’

  When I got up to the first floor, CSI had found the room. It was next door to the one where we had interviewed Clare.

  ‘Not much blood,’ I said, looking round the room which, like most on this floor, was closer to an old-fashioned bedroom than a classroom. It had skirting boards and cornices, an elaborate ceiling rose and a small, cast-iron fireplace. Was it the room Gary and I had snogged in that night? If it wasn’t, it was very similar.

  ‘That’s because he wasn’t stabbed to death,’ said Colin Harris, the chief investigator. He loves a chance to put CID right but he’s not a bad bloke on the whole.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘I seem to remember a bloody great knife in his chest.’

  ‘That was just window dressing,’ said Colin. ‘The deceased was garrotted, strangled from behind, probably with a thin piece of wire. We think it happened here because there are some blood spatters, likely from when the knife was inserted soon after death. Not that many though. I think the killer must have laid down some plastic or a tarpaulin.’

  ‘They came prepared then. Anything else?’

  ‘We think he was sitting down when he was killed, but there’s no trace of the chair, which would have had blood on it. There are several splinters though. It looks as if the killer broke up the chair and took the pieces away with him.’

  I noticed he said ‘him’ and I must admit, the physical evidence — chair chopping, body carrying — did seem to point to a man.

  ‘Why would he do that?’ I said.

  ‘Search me,’ said Colin. ‘The mind of a murderer is a murky place.’

  That remark sounded as if he’d said it many times before.

  ‘Then what happened? He was taken up to the attic?’

  ‘Yes, traces of hair were found on the door frame, consistent with a body being carried. You’ll have my report later today.’ Colin was a man who liked to do things the right way.

  ‘Anything you can tell me now?’ Whereas I was someone who wanted to get on as quickly as possible.

  Colin sighed and pushed his glasses back with a gloved hand. ‘Looks as if the deceased was carried into the room and placed in the desk chair. The perpetrator wore gloves but we have some good blood-stained footprints. And,’ he knew this was what I wanted, ‘a note.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Hell is empty. Same as before. Note was inside a freezer bag. Placed on the desk. No prints, no blood.’

  I felt a surge of something that I called adrenalin but was really excitement. Here was possible evidence that the two murders had been committed by the same person.

  ‘Anything else significant?’ I asked.

  ‘Three candles on the desk and some plant material.’

  ‘Plant material?’

  ‘We’ve sent them to be analysed but they looked like herbs, leaves and dried petals, the sort of thing you’d find in a potpourri. Plus a black stone, like a shiny pebble. That was next to the candles.’

  A faint bell rang somewhere in my brain but I c
ouldn’t waste time trying to locate the sound. I had to get back to the station and tell Donna and Neil the latest.

  I ran down the main staircase and saw a man by the double doors, staring moodily into the distance. It was Tony Sweetman, wearing jeans, jumper and trainers. The trainers were expensive-looking, far too clean and white.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said.

  He jumped slightly. Under the newly replenished tan, Tony looked dreadful, hollow-eyed and almost tearful. Despite myself, I felt slightly sorry for him.

  ‘DS Kaur. I gather your experts are still at work.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Crime scene investigation takes a long time. They’re very thorough.’

  He shuddered. ‘I can’t bear to think of my school as a crime scene.’

  My school. But I could see why he was upset. Now, when someone Googled Talgarth High, they wouldn’t see ‘best ever GCSE results’, they’d see ‘man found murdered’.

  ‘I’ve just spoken to Daisy Lewis,’ he said. ‘She’sdevastated. They’re childless, you know. All they had was each other.’

  He said it in the way that parents often describe the child-free, pity matched with slight disapproval.

  ‘Have you any idea who could have done this?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, opening his eyes wide in a way that reminded me of Clare. ‘Rick was popular with everyone.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’ He bridled slightly at my tone. ‘He was an excellent teacher and department head.’

  ‘I’ve heard rumours of affairs with both Ella Elphick and Clare Cassidy,’ I said.

  Tony’s face went blank, as if a cloth had erased the previous day’s teaching on a whiteboard. ‘I never listen to those sort of rumours.’