The Stranger Diaries

by Elly Griffiths

  I pointed to an iron staircase, like a fire escape, at the back.

  ‘You stay here,’ I said. ‘I’ll go up.’

  ‘No,’ said Clare. ‘Herbert doesn’t know you. He’ll want to see me.’

  So we all climbed the staircase, our footsteps echoing horribly in the cavernous space. I thought of R.M. Holland’s study at the school. The killer carrying Rick’s body up the spiral staircase. Whoever it was must have been strong. I was out of breath just from this climb and I’m pretty fit.

  The barking was loud and constant now. We all moved towards the sound, which was coming from a room at the far end of the landing. The metal door looked very shut but it opened easily when I turned the handle. And there he was.

  ‘Herbert!’ Clare was sobbing. ‘My baby.’

  She was on her knees cuddling him and Georgia was beside her. Herbert was wagging his tail and snuffling with joy but there was a bandage around his leg and he clearly couldn’t put that foot down.

  I looked around the tiny room, mentally committing its contents to memory.

  Item 1: sleeping bag

  Item 2: camping stove

  Item 3: battery-operated lantern

  Item 4: tarpaulin on the floor

  Item 5: battered copy of The Tempest

  Chapter 32

  Clare and Georgia took Herbert to the vet. He’d cut his foot but someone had cleaned it and wrapped it in a bandage. I called the station and waited for backup and CSI. I wanted DNA and fingerprints from every item in the room. It was obvious to me that someone had been living in the old factory for a while. The room had a small window that looked directly onto the row of cottages, with Clare’s at the end. I thought of the lights that I’d seen in the building that night. A candle had been lit on the window ledge, even though there was a flashlight. Was this where the killer had been sitting, watching Clare and lighting candles?

  When I got back to the station, Donna was torn between bawling me out for going into the factory without back-up and excitement at the thought of a lead.

  ‘If the DNA matches any from the crime scenes, we’ve got a suspect. They might even be in the database. Good work, Harbinder. But never do anything like that again.’

  ‘Why would they take the dog, though?’ Neil didn’t like it that I’d been right about Herbert.

  ‘Maybe he was a sort of hostage,’ said Donna. ‘Poor little fellow.’ She liked dogs and owned a large spaniel. Out of control, like her kids.

  ‘If it’s the diary writer,’ I said, ‘he clearly wants to help Clare. Maybe that’s why he looked after Herbert. His paw was neatly bandaged.’

  ‘Why not give him back to her then?’ said Neil.

  ‘Maybe he was waiting until dark.’

  It was getting dark outside now, at only three o’clock. One of those winter days when it feels as if those old men with placards are right and the end of the world is on its way.

  ‘We’ve got the other members of the English department coming in,’ said Neil. ‘Do you want to interview them with me?’

  ‘We need to ask them about The Stranger,’ I said.

  ‘What? Oh, that book Clare’s obsessed with.’

  ‘I think someone else is obsessed with it too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Donna.

  ‘In the book, two men are killed in an old house. One is stabbed and he had marks on his hands, like the stigmata.’

  ‘Like Ella,’ said Neil.

  ‘Exactly. And the second man was garrotted. Like Rick Lewis.’

  ‘Are you really suggesting that the killer is re-enacting some obscure Victorian short story?’ said Donna, searching in her desk drawer for something to eat.

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ I said. ‘But there was a quote from the book at both scenes. I think that’s a pretty significant link.’

  ‘I thought you said it was from Shakespeare,’ said Neil, sounding aggrieved.

  ‘It’s from Shakespeare and from The Stranger. Don’t you remember Clare telling us that?’

  ‘She was talking about all sorts of books. What about the one where the bloke writes in the diary?’

  ‘The Woman in White,’ I said. ‘Another starter for ten for the English teachers.’

  The University Challenge reference was wasted on Neil.

  We interviewed Vera Prentice, Alan Smith and Anoushka Palmer. All of them had alibis for Rick. Vera had been watching television at home with her mother. This amazed me because Vera seemed about a hundred years old — but she turned out to be ‘only’ sixty, and her mother was in her eighties. Alan had been at home with his wife and grown-up daughter, watching a French film on Netflix. No Strictly for them. Alan clearly saw himself as an intellectual as well as an old-school socialist. He said that Tony was ‘trying to turn Talgarth into an academy.’ ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Neil asked me afterwards. ‘Academy sounds posher than school.’ ‘Exactly,’ I said.

  Both Vera and Alan had read The Stranger ‘years ago’ but neither of them taught it. ‘It’s typical white, middle-class male stuff,’ said Alan. ‘The only women in it are servants.’ I didn’t remember the servants, which told me that Alan recalled the text better than he pretended.

  Anoushka Palmer was last. I was interested in her particularly because she’d been on the training course at Hythe. She was young and pretty, mixed-race, with long hair in a complicated plait.

  ‘Rick was so kind to me,’ she kept saying. I bet he was.

  Anoushka had been out with her boyfriend on Saturday night and had ‘stayed over at his’. She gave us his address. His name was Sam Isaacs and he was a teacher at the sixth-form college.

  ‘Do you teach The Tempest?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’ She looked surprised. ‘I have a couple of GCSE classes.’

  ‘What about The Stranger by R.M. Holland?’

  ‘No. I’ve never even read it. I know I should because of the school’s connection but I’m not really a fan of Victorian fiction.’

  I’m not a great reader but I found it quite shocking that an English teacher would say something like that.

  Before she left, I asked Anoushka if the name Bryony Hughes meant anything to her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She teaches English at the sixth-form college. Sam knows her quite well.’

  ‘She was a friend of Ella’s too, wasn’t she?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but most of the English teachers round here know each other. We’re always meeting at training courses and things like that.’

  This rang a bell. ‘Was Bryony Hughes on the Hythe course?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anoushka. ‘Yes, she was. And come to think of it, I did see her with Ella a few times.’

  ‘But she doesn’t teach any kids at your Talgarth? Patrick O’Leary, say?’

  ‘No, unless she does some private tutoring. Lots of teachers do and you can’t tutor kids in your own school. But I wouldn’t think Patrick was the type for a private tutor.’

  I didn’t think so either.

  ‘She runs a creative writing evening course,’ said Anoushka. ‘I’ve heard it’s really good but, again, not quite Patrick’s thing.’

  So both Clare and Bryony Hughes taught creative writing. I always thought it seemed a weird thing to teach. Either you can write or you can’t. But maybe there was a link there. I thanked Anoushka and she left in a flurry of scarves and bags, Neil holding the door open like a butler.

  By the time I’d written up my notes, it was six o’clock and I decided to call it a day. With any luck we’d get the crime scene report tomorrow and the investigation could move forward. Talgarth High would open again but the Old Building would remain closed. I wondered how Tony felt about abandoning his grand head teacher’s office. I suspected that he’d be happy never to see Holland House again; he was probably already filling out job applications for September.

  O
n an impulse, on the way home, I called in on Clare. This time I got a very warm welcome. Herbert was ensconced on the sofa like a king, his foot professionally bandaged and tempting snacks within reach. Georgia was in her room.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ said Clare. ‘Or a glass of wine? It’s after six.’

  ‘A glass of wine would be nice,’ I said. ‘As I’m off-duty.’

  Clare poured us both a large glass of red wine and I sat on the sofa stroking Herbert.

  ‘He doesn’t seem too bad,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Clare. ‘The vet said he’d probably cut his foot on some glass but it’s not too deep and it had been cleaned. I mean . . . he . . . someone had cleaned it. And put that bandage on it.’

  We were hopeful that there would be prints on the bandage. I said, ‘You’ve no idea who it could have been?’

  Clare shook her head. She was still in the slightly torn pink cardigan and had her fluffy slippers on. Somehow, she still managed to look glamorous.

  ‘I’ve seen lights in the factory sometimes,’ she said. ‘But I always thought I was imagining it. I told myself I’d been reading The Stranger too much. You remember the bit where the candles shine in the window of the old house?’

  ‘I remember,’ I said. I didn’t add that I had reread the short story that day.

  ‘I cover it on my creative writing course,’ Clare was saying, ‘and one of the things I always teach is that, in the ghost story tradition, things happen in threes. Remember you mentioned the “we waited and we waited and we waited” bit in The Stranger? Well, I went to the attic study and I saw the dummy in the chair. That was the first time. Then I went there with Henry and I saw . . . we saw Rick. That was the second time. I keep thinking, what will happen the third time?’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that in real life,’ I said. ‘Things aren’t that neat. You can drive yourself mad looking for patterns.’

  ‘There are other things too,’ she said. ‘I talk about the totemic animal. How animals in books can be used to raise tension. Sometimes authors kill them because they want a death and can’t face killing a human. They can play a vital role in the plot. Well, that was Herbert today.’

  ‘But he’s not dead. Thank God.’ I was playing with Herbert’s ears. Then I said, ‘The dog in The Stranger . . .’

  ‘Is called Herbert,’ said Clare.

  ‘Did you name your dog after him?’

  ‘In a way,’ said Clare, taking a swig of wine. ‘But also it just seemed to suit him.’

  I looked at the dog, who was now just a circle of white wool, nose hidden under tail. To me he looked more like a Ferdy or a Dougal. Herbert was too dignified for him.

  ‘He’s not just a dog,’ I said. ‘He’s my animal familiar, my soul in dog form.’

  Clare stared at me for a minute, mouth slightly open. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘You’re quoting from my diary. That’s horrible.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And I did feel slightly guilty.

  ‘You write that sort of thing,’ she said, ‘but you never expect anyone to read it.’

  ‘Why do you keep a diary then?’ I said. ‘What’s the point of it?’

  Clare held her wine up to the light and squinted at it. There were thick white candles on the table and they smelled wonderful. Jo Malone, like Clare’s scent.

  ‘It’s to make sense of things,’ she said, at last. ‘Nothing’s as bad if you put it in writing. It helps you to take control, order things. Find a pattern, like you said. When I was at my happiest, or when I was having most fun, at university, I didn’t write at all. I started again when my marriage began to go wrong. It’s a form of therapy, I suppose. There’s a strange comfort in looking back at your worst times and realising that you got through them.’

  ‘But you never intended to show it to anyone else?’

  She didn’t answer straight away. She drained her glass, filled it up again and offered some to me. I had to say no because I was driving.

  ‘When I was working in London,’ she said, ‘my head of department was a man called Lucca. He wasn’t conventionally attractive but he was very clever and charming and a lot of women liked him. He kept a diary and he used to write it at work, I think to stop his wife finding it. Anyway, there was a woman there, a newly qualified teacher, who had a crush on Lucca and, one night, she broke into the school to read his diaries. She was desperate to see what he’d written about her.’

  ‘What had he written about her?’

  Clare laughed. ‘That’s the irony. Nothing. He hadn’t mentioned her at all. Lucca told me that himself. The caretaker caught the woman breaking in and she had to leave the school. I mean, she was obviously unbalanced. But actually, that’s not the real irony. Do you know what the real irony is?’

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling some response was required.

  ‘The real irony was that after that, he had to write about her.’

  I wondered why Clare had told me this story. There were obvious similarities to Clare’s own behaviour. She wrote her diary at work, she’d broken into the school. Well, technically she had a key but it was still pretty unbalanced, if you ask me. Was Clare saying that the person who wrote in her diary was just hoping to find themselves mentioned in future entries? It all made my head swim. Though that could have been the wine. I remembered that there was something else I wanted to ask Clare.

  ‘Tell me about Bryony Hughes,’ I said.

  ‘Bryony Hughes?’ She had been sitting curled up in her chair with her legs tucked under her but now she sat up straighter and put her feet on the floor.

  ‘You mention her in your diary. Ella was going out with her and you said it was a coven meeting.’

  ‘You’ve got a good memory.’

  ‘For some things. Yes.’ I was good at remembering things people had said. That was useful for work. But I’m useless at other things: birthdays, appointments, my computer password.

  ‘Why did you say that it was a coven meeting?’

  Clare laughed but it didn’t come out right. ‘There have always been rumours about Bryony. That she’s a white witch, stuff like that. She looks the part — long, grey hair, lots of silver jewellery. And she keeps making these gnomic statements. “You have a golden aura”. You know the sort of thing.’

  I had no idea what ‘gnomic’ meant and I wasn’t going to ask.

  ‘And Ella was friends with her?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clare, but there was hesitation in her voice. She ran her finger around the rim of her wine glass.

  ‘Were they close?’

  ‘Yes.’ Another pause. ‘But I think they fell out shortly before Ella died.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘No. Ella could be like that with her friends. Bosom pals one minute and then, the next, something would happen and she would drop them.’

  There was definitely some bitterness here. I remembered the diaries. I still wasn’t sure whether Clare had been jealous of Ella for sleeping with Rick or Rick for taking Ella away from her.

  ‘Why are you interested in Bryony?’ said Clare.

  ‘Her name’s come up a couple of times,’ I said. ‘That’s all. It’s not important.’ I looked at my watch. ‘I should go.’

  ‘I’m going to make some pasta for me and Georgie,’ said Clare. ‘Blot up the alcohol. Do you want to stay and have some?’ Herbert sat up and wagged his tail. He obviously understood the word ‘pasta’.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘But I should be getting home. My mum always cooks a feast in the evenings.’

  ‘Do you live at home?’ said Clare.

  ‘Yes.’ In a funny way, I felt I owed her this much. After all, I’d read her diaries. ‘I’m a thirty-five-year-old woman who lives at home with her parents. You can judge me now.’

  ‘I’m not judging,’ said Clare. ‘I’m envious, if an
ything. I can’t stand my parents for two days at Christmas, let alone every night.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘They’re good company, on the whole. However, I think my mum still hopes I’ll find a nice man though.’

  ‘Well, that’s easier said than done,’ said Clare.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said. ‘But I’m gay so it’s not really an issue.’

  I really don’t know why I told her. I may have read her diaries, but that didn’t mean I had to tell her my deepest secrets in return. Not that it’s something I hide; I’m not ashamed of it or anything. I’m out at work and to my friends. Not to my parents, of course. It’s just, I like to keep some things private and Clare was, after all, a person of interest in our inquiry. She’s not a friend.

  ‘Oh, are you?’ she said. Not shocked, not embarrassed, not that interested. Just right, really.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, I’d better go before my mother sends out a search party’. I got up, brushing my clothes down.

  ‘He’s part poodle,’ said Clare. ‘He doesn’t shed.’

  I was dubious, but to be fair, there weren’t dog hairs all over the place.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said. ‘Scott and Bailey are still outside if you need them.’

  She laughed. ‘I think of them as Cagney and Lacey. Showing my age. No, I’m OK. Do you think he’ll come back, whoever was living in the factory?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, ‘but we’re keeping a watch on it, just in case. You should really think of moving to a safer place. I suppose there’s no chance you could go and stay with a friend for a bit? Or with your parents?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Tony rang me today. It’s going to be a nightmare at school. I’m acting head of department apparently. I need to stay until the end of term. Anyway, I wouldn’t go to my parents. In an emergency I’d go to my grandmother. She lives in Scotland. Near Inverness.’

  ‘Sounds nice and remote,’ I said. ‘Bye, Clare. Thanks for the wine. Keep your door locked.’