The Stranger Diaries

by Elly Griffiths

  Against: No link to Simon and, has an alibi. [Clare confirmed he was at the rehearsal.] Could he really have planned the murders and written in Clare’s diary?

  3.Tony Sweetman

  For: Twat. [I couldn’t see this standing up in court, unfortunately.]

  Against: Alibi for Ella. Out of the country for Rick. No link to Simon.

  4.Another member of the English department — Vera, Alan or Anoushka.

  For: May have resented both Ella and Rick. Knowledge of The Tempest.

  Against: All have alibis. We have handwriting samples and none of them match the notes found at the scenes. No links to Simon.

  5.Bryony Hughes

  For: Knew Ella and Rick. Known to have quarrelled with Ella. Weird.

  Against: Doesn’t seem to have known Rick well. Did not know Simon at all. No real motive. Not strong enough?

  6.Stranger

  For: Unknown DNA at factory (but we don’t have DNA samples from all suspects).

  Against: Motive? Also, how did they write in the diaries? And — who the hell is it?

  That seemed to sum things up. I groaned out loud and one of the homeless people asked me if I was OK.

  We saw Clare and Georgia onto the train. It was quite awkward, actually. We weren’t on hugging terms but a handshake seemed too formal. I ended up patting Clare on the shoulder and just waving at Georgia. I was most effusive with Herbert, ruffling his fur and telling him to keep out of trouble. Neil, of course, hugged all three of them. Then he and I drove back to Sussex.

  ‘At least they’ll be safe in Scotland,’ said Neil. ‘I looked up Ullapool and it’s miles from anywhere.’

  ‘So did I,’ I said. ‘It looked like Balamory.’

  ‘What’s that?’ This is what comes of having nieces and nephews. Lily is too young to have watched the CBBC classic.

  It was Friday night and the M23 was busy. Where were all these people going, I wondered? They can’t all be headed to Brighton for a dirty weekend. Do people even have dirty weekends anymore? As we passed the old Brighton gates, I said, ‘I’m going to stay at Clare’s.’

  ‘What?’ Neil was driving at exactly seventy-five miles per hour but, at this, he sped up slightly.

  ‘I’m going to stay at Clare’s tonight. If someone’s getting into her house to write in her diary, I want to be there to meet them.’ I’d brought pyjamas, toothbrush, toothpaste and a change of underwear with me to London. They were packed into my work bag.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ said Neil.

  ‘Clare gave me the keys,’ I said, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘You can drop me off. I don’t want my car outside the house.’

  ‘Harbinder,’ said Neil, ‘you can’t do this. It’s dangerous. Donna would never let you.’

  ‘That’s why I’m not going to tell her,’ I said.

  Chapter 41

  I had my own way in the end, as I knew I would. Neil dropped me off outside Clare’s house. It was nearly eleven and the street lamps were off. There was no moon. The factory and the chalk cliffs were just shapes in the darkness.

  ‘I’ll be round to collect you at eight a.m. sharp,’ said Neil.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I can get the bus into work.’

  ‘I’m coming to collect you,’ he said firmly. ‘Ring me if anything happens tonight. I’ll have my phone by the bed.’

  I let myself into the house. It felt odd being there without Clare. I sat in her blue-grey sitting room in the dark and tried to imagine what it was like to be her, sitting there with my scented candles and my classic nineteenth-century novel, tucking my long legs under me on the sofa, repairing my nail varnish, wondering whether to sleep with my Cambridge professor lover. I looked at my phone. Two messages from my mother. I’d told my parents that I was staying in London for the night. ‘At a hotel?’ said Mum. ‘I love hotels.’ She has probably stayed in a hotel twice in her life, once on her honeymoon. The first text was asking me to bring back ‘some of those little bottles of shampoo.’ The second told me not to because Dad says it’s petty theft. Because he’s kept a shop all his life, Dad is obsessed with stealing. Maybe that’s why I joined the police. I texted back that the toiletries are not that nice anyway.

  I played a few games of Panda Pop then went into the kitchen. The fridge whirred gently and the skylight was navy blue. I didn’t want to turn on the tasteful spotlights — if someone was watching the house, I wanted them to think that it was unoccupied — but there was enough light for me to make myself a cup of tea. Orange and bergamot. It tasted like perfume.

  I went upstairs in the dark. In Clare’s bedroom I turned on the bedside light, which was dim enough not to show much. The room was everything I would have expected: French colonial bed, white-painted wooden furniture, chair patterned in blue and white fabric, a modern print in blues and browns, a bookcase with paperbacks — including titles she wouldn’t want on display downstairs (Georgette Heyer and Jilly Cooper) — and a white fluffy rug that looked rather like Herbert. I snooped about a bit. There was ibuprofen and Gaviscon in her bedside cabinet. No birth control pills. Maybe she was through the menopause. No sleeping pills or anti-depressants either. A silver frame on the bookcase showed a diptych of Georgia and Herbert. Clothes were neatly arranged in the wardrobe. Not that many of them. I could already tell that Clare was the sort who prized quality over quantity. Black, grey and white with the occasional red or pink jacket. Jumpers and tops folded into drawers that smelled of lavender. Some surprisingly sexy underwear. Some letters signed ‘Your loving Granny’, saved with a conch shell and some dried flowers. Nothing from her parents. The whole room smelled of her. Jo Malone English Pear and Freesia.

  There were only two rooms and a bathroom upstairs. I went into Georgia’s room next, which was actually the biggest, with a window looking out onto the road. I used my phone torch rather than turning on the light. Black-and-white Harry Potter duvet, a pink ‘accent’ wall, lots of photos of G and her friends, a bookcase (I was willing to bet that there was a bookcase in every room, including the bathroom), a collection of miniature animals, nail varnish, make-up, some candles and potpourri. This last made me stop. What sort of schoolgirl has potpourri in her bedroom? I sniffed some; it had lost most of its fragrance. Was it the same sort that had been found in R.M. Holland’s study? I sat at Georgia’s desk. There would be no excuse not to do your homework with a set-up like this: pens in a special metal container, anglepoise lamp, highlighters and Post-its in every shade. There was also a pinboard with a school timetable and a jumble of postcards, photos and inspiring pictures of poodles. Two books were on the desk. One was York’s Notes on the Tempest, the other was a collection of ghost stories. A page in this last had been marked with a leaf. I opened it. The Stranger by R.M. Holland.

  ‘If you’ll permit me,’ said the Stranger, ‘I’d like to tell you a story . . .’

  Georgia had taken her laptop with her (I’d seen her put it in her backpack) but I rifled through some of the loose papers in the painted box she used as an in-tray. Photocopied worksheets from school (‘The History of Medicine’, ‘The Respiration Equation’), some study notes with words highlighted and . . . what was this?

  . . . my first murder was the easiest. Just a chance encounter, a knife sliding through butter, two bodies moving in the dark. How quickly they fell, how easy it was. The second required planning. I could no longer rely on random victims. This time I would kill closer to home, I would fall on the unwary like a ravening beast. I would wait, I would bide my time. No one seeing my innocent outward façade would ever guess what lay beneath. And then the victim presented herself to me. She was just a girl, someone at school. A friend, I suppose. Her name was Eva Smith. Did Eva mark herself out in some way? Did she have an unwitting sign on her forehead saying ‘victim’? No, she was ordinary in every way. I sat next to her in maths and watched her doodling little hearts on her graph paper. Hearts and f
lowers, sometimes merging together. Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades. What were the odds, I wanted to ask her, that the girl sitting next to you, sometimes lending you a protractor or offering a cheery word over the difficulty of the equations, would one day plunge a knife into your carotid artery, killing you instantly?

  Jesus. There were a couple of pages like this. No author or note but they were clearly printed from a website. Its address was at the bottom of the page. MySecretDiary.com. I got out my phone and found the site. You had to log in but that only took seconds. I gave the false name I always use, Jenna Barclay. Password: Jennbar17. I don’t know why but this always strikes me as the perfect white, Anglo-Saxon name. Jenna would have been one of the popular girls at school, the ones who ignored me but went out with Kush: blonde hair, fluffy pencil case, always wearing her boyfriend’s football top with the sleeves pulled down over her hands. Not a girl who would have a victim sign on her forehead. And now Jenna was on the secret diary website. Turns out it wasn’t all that secret, after all.

  It was like reading a hundred teenage diaries at once. The outpourings scrolled down the side of the screen. Doesn’t understand me . . . hate myself in the mirror . . . his fingers turn me to jelly . . . why am I so . . . why can’t I . . . why is everyone . . . I typed in an entry for ‘Jenna’.

  I’m so cute and blonde. Everyone loves me. I’m a Barbie girl in a Barbie world. I’m so perfect, I’ve never had a day’s self-doubt in my life. Why should I? All the girls in the magazines look just like me. Hey, hey, hey. I didn’t think my offering was about to win the Booker prize in a hurry. It looked like I could keep it private or share it with everyone. I searched the shared entries for the word ‘butter’ and after skimming through much anorexic soul-searching, I found it: Just a chance encounter, a knife sliding through butter . . . It was a long short story — or short novel — posted by someone called Mariana. Was Mariana Georgia? If so, she knew how to write one hell of a horrible story. A sick fantasy about killing someone in her maths class. But Georgia, I remembered, didn’t like maths. She didn’t like probability. What was the probability of a normal, well-balanced girl writing something like this? The detail about the carotid artery, for instance. Ella Elphick had been killed by stab wounds to the neck. The maths girl was called Eva. That wasn’t a million miles away from Ella. And ‘the ravening beast’, the so-called unknown, unpublished novel by R.M. Holland. Had Georgia somehow known about that?

  I looked in Georgia’s desk drawers and, underneath the worksheets and the letters about school trips that she had forgotten to give Clare, I found some more pages of the novel or journal, or whatever it was. I put them in one of Georgia’s many colour-coded plastic files. And, right at the bottom of the pile, I found something else. A picture of Ella Elphick. I recognised it as a print-out from her Facebook page. But that wasn’t the most significant thing about the picture.

  The most significant thing was that it was stained with blood.

  There was no point ringing Neil. In the morning I’d take the photograph into the lab to be analysed. I remembered what Georgia had said, when I told her about the DNA on the bedding at the factory. ‘Have you found a match?’ I didn’t have Georgia’s DNA but I had her fingerprints. I could cross-check them with the fingerprints found at the scene of Rick Lewis’ murder, on the candles and on the black stone. I went downstairs and found some freezer bags. I put the blood-stained photo in one and some of the potpourri in the other.

  Did I really think Georgia could have murdered Ella or Rick? I didn’t know but I wasn’t ruling anything out. She had alibis for both of them. She was at home with her mother when Ella was killed and in London with Simon when Rick was murdered. And, even if I did think her capable of attacking her dad in the dark, she had been at school watching a rehearsal when Simon was stabbed.

  But Georgia could have written in Clare’s diary. She could have added the quotation from The Woman in White, a book she must often have seen around the house. I thought of the girl, tall and already beautiful, the way she’d looked in the chapel on the day of Ella’s funeral: cool and collected, not at all hysterical like the other pupils. I remembered that Georgia had not wanted to go into the factory on the day that we’d found Herbert there. Why not? And why was she writing about killing people, about stabbing them, a knife sliding through butter?

  I went back into Clare’s room and put the freezer bags into my briefcase. I didn’t feel like getting undressed but I did my teeth and got into bed fully clothed. I plugged my phone into the charger and put it under my pillow, despite my mum saying this will give me a brain tumour. I hadn’t pulled the curtains and, dark though it was, I could see the factory, its sinister bulk against the night sky. I thought of the night when Gary and I had seen the white lady and the scream that had echoed through Holland House. I half-expected to be woken by some similar horror but the house was silent and, after a while, I fell into a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 42

  When Neil came to collect me I was waiting by the door. I had already rung the lab and asked them to cross-reference the fingerprints found in the study with Georgia’s on file.

  In the car I explained my findings to Neil. He’d thoughtfully provided coffee and croissants but I ate carefully because he’s obsessive about keeping his car tidy.

  ‘I don’t buy it,’ he said. ‘Georgia’s just a kid.’

  ‘She’s fifteen,’ I said. ‘And she’s highly intelligent.’ She’s Clare’s daughter, I added in my head.

  ‘But do you really think she was mixed up with the murders?’ Neil’s voice started to rise and he almost, but not quite, exceeded the speed limit on the Chichester road.

  ‘She’s written a graphic account of a murder,’ I said. ‘A stabbing. She had a picture of Ella that was stained with blood. And she’s friends with Patrick O’Leary. I saw them together at Ella’s funeral. It could be some teen black magic thing.’

  ‘Black magic?’ The speedometer hovered at fifty-five.

  ‘There were the candles and the herbs,’ I said. ‘Ella’s sitting room had candles, too, but I just thought that she was that type of woman. Clare’s house is full of them. It’s like a bloody Catholic church.’

  ‘But like you said, those sort of women always have candles. Kelly’s the same. Tealights and little bowls of scented crap everywhere.’

  ‘Sounds delightful.’

  ‘It’s a woman thing.’

  ‘I don’t have candles everywhere.’

  ‘Yeah, but you’re different.’ He didn’t have to explain further. I lived at home, I was Indian and I was gay. A triple whammy.

  ‘I think we should see Bryony Hughes again,’ I said. ‘She knows Georgia and Patrick. They go to her creative writing class. And there was a Bryony in Georgia’s story. A “wise woman”, apparently. Plus, Clare said that she was a white witch.’

  ‘A white witch? Surely you don’t believe in that crap?’

  ‘I don’t believe in it,’ I said patiently. ‘The question is whether other people do.’

  Donna was also not convinced by the story but she agreed to us interviewing Bryony. I left the photo and the potpourri with the lab and we drove to the sixth-form college. It was Saturday so the college was officially closed but I’d checked and was told that Miss Hughes was in. There were actually quite a few people wandering around; there was a football match going on and musical rehearsals of some kind, judging from the discords coming from the ground floor. Miss Hughes met us in the English office. She said that she had been catching up on her marking, and, once again, there was a pile of essays on her desk. A dedicated teacher and one who obviously had a great influence over her pupils. Was it possible that she might also incite them to murder?

  Nothing could have been more gracious than the way she received us.

  ‘Sergeant Kaur. How delightful to see you again. And . . .’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Neil Winston.’ Neil wa
s almost standing to attention. Women like Bryony Hughes unnerved him.

  ‘We’d like to ask you a few questions about Georgia Newton,’ I said. ‘She’s one of your creative writing group, isn’t she? Your small, select group. With . . .’ I looked at my notes. ‘Patrick O’Leary, Natasha White and Venetia Sherbourne. Are they all pupils at Talgarth High?’

  ‘Venetia goes to St Faith’s, I believe.’

  ‘Have you heard of a website called MySecretDiary?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a creative writing forum.’

  ‘Have you seen these stories before?’ I pushed the print-outs across the table. Bryony read them with a slight smile. The Shakespeare quotes shouted at us from the walls. It will have blood they say; blood will have blood. Nothing will come of nothing. Hell is empty.

  Bryony put the pages neatly in line before answering us. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s Georgia’s work. Quite remarkable writing, some of it.’

  ‘Remarkable writing?’ I said. ‘It’s about killing someone.’

  ‘So is Macbeth,’ she said, ‘and I’m sure you wouldn’t deny that is remarkable writing, Sergeant.’

  ‘It’s Detective Sergeant,’ I said. ‘And I’m investigating a double murder. So, if a schoolgirl who knew both of the victims is writing about violent death, I’m interested. I’m surprised you didn’t make the link yourself. Do you know the name Eva Smith?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bryony Hughes.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She is a character in the play An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestly. However, strictly speaking, Eva doesn’t appear in the play. It is one of Georgia’s set texts for GCSE.’

  ‘So you are pretty sure that Georgia wrote this?’

  ‘Yes. It has many of her stylistic tics. And the medical detail. Georgia is a fan of Grey’s Anatomy, if I remember. It’s an American television series,’ she added kindly, seeing our faces.