The Stranger Diaries Read online

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you tell your students that story? The Stranger?’

  ‘No. Holland isn’t on the curriculum. It’s still all Of Mice and Men and Remains of the Day. I used to run a creative writing group for the GCSE students and sometimes I read them The Stranger.’

  ‘Must have given them nightmares.’

  ‘No, they loved it. Teenagers always love ghost stories.’

  ‘I do too.’ He grins at me, showing two gold teeth. ‘There’s a funny feeling about this place. I bet it’s haunted.’

  ‘There are a few stories. A woman was meant to have fallen from the top floor. Some people say it was Holland’s wife. Or his daughter. I’ve had students say that they’ve seen a woman in a white nightdress floating down the stairs. Or sometimes you can see a falling figure out of the corner of your eye. Apparently the bloodstain is still visible; it’s outside the head teacher’s study.’

  ‘Very appropriate.’

  ‘Oh, he’s the young and trendy type. Not Dickensian at all.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  Ted dunks his biscuit but it’s the wrong sort and half of it falls into his tea. ‘What’s the topic this morning?’ he says. ‘I left my timetable in the room yesterday.’

  ‘Creating memorable characters,’ I say. ‘Time and place in the afternoon. Then home. Excuse me, I’d better go and prepare.’

  I go up to the classroom to make sure everything is in place for the day but, when I get there, I just sit at the desk with my head in my hands. How the hell am I going to get through this day?

  I first met Ella when we interviewed for jobs at Talgarth High five years ago. We were greeted by Rick, who was trying to pretend that a third of the English department hadn’t resigned at the end of the Easter term, leaving him with a few short months to find two experienced English teachers. A little while ago I looked in my diary to find my first impressions of Rick but they were disappointingly banal. Tall, thin, rumpled-looking. Rick is the sort of person whose charms — such as they are — dawn on you gradually.

  ‘It’s a really vibrant department,’ he told us as he gave us the tour. ‘And the school’s great, very diverse, lots of energy.’

  By then we had worked out that there were two posts available and that we weren’t in competition. We exchanged a look. We both knew what ‘vibrant’ meant. The school was on the edge of anarchy. It had just received a ‘Requires Improvement’ rating from its latest inspection. The old head, Megan Williams, was still clinging on, but she was ousted two years later by Tony Sweetman, who had been helicoptered in from another school with only ten years’ teaching experience. The school is rated Good now.

  Afterwards Ella and I compared notes in the staffroom, a cheerless place in the New Building with passive-aggressive Post-its on the appliances — ’Please help empty the dishwasher. It can’t always be my turn!!’ We’d been left alone with coffee and a plate of biscuits while ‘the panel’ made their decision. We both knew that we’d be offered jobs. The prospect was made a lot less bleak by the woman sitting opposite me: long blonde hair, bony nose, not beautiful but extremely attractive. I learned later that Ella, a Jane Austen enthusiast, identified with Elizabeth Bennet. But, to me, she was always Emma.

  ‘Why do you want to come here?’ Ella had asked, stirring her tea with a pen.

  ‘I’ve just got divorced,’ I said. ‘I want to move out of London. I’ve got a ten-year-old daughter. I thought it might be nice for her to live in the countryside. And be near the sea.’

  The school was in West Sussex. Shoreham-by-sea was only fifteen minutes away, Chichester half an hour on a good day. Both Rick and Tony had made a lot of this. I was trying to focus on the drive through the lush countryside and not the art rooms with the broken windows and the cheerless quad where the plants had all been killed by the salt winds.

  ‘I’m escaping too,’ Ella had said. ‘I was teaching in Wales but I had an affair with my head of department. Not a good idea.’

  I remember being touched, and slightly shocked, that she had confided in me so early in our acquaintance.

  ‘I can’t imagine having an affair with that Rick,’ I said. ‘He looks like a scarecrow.’

  ‘If I only had a brain,’ Ella sang in a surprisingly good imitation of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.

  But she had a brain, and a good one, which is why she should have known about Rick. She should have listened to me.

  Too late for that now.

  In the morning, I talk to the students about The Stranger.

  ‘You often get archetypal characters in ghost stories,’ I say. ‘The innocent young man, the helper, the hinderer, the loathly lady.’

  ‘I know a few of those,’ says Ted with a slightly uncouth guffaw.

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ says Una. ‘What is a loathly lady?’ I recognise her as the type who makes heavy work of these things.

  ‘She’s a common character in gothic ghost stories,’ I say. ‘Think of The Woman in Black or Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre. She descends from legends like the one in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, where a beautiful woman becomes a hideous hag, or vice versa.’

  ‘I’ve definitely met her,’ says Ted.

  I’m not going to be diverted. We have enough about Ted’s love life over the last two days. ‘Of course,’ I say, ‘you have legends like the one in Keats’ Lamia where a snake actually turns into a woman.’

  ‘But there’s no snake woman in The Stranger,’ says Una.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘R.M. Holland tends to avoid women in his fiction altogether.’

  ‘But you said that his wife haunts this house,’ says Ted and I curse myself for our jolly chat over the biscuits.

  ‘Tell us,’ say several people. The more sensitive types shiver pleasurably but, with the autumn sun streaming in through the windows, it’s hard to believe in ghosts.

  ‘R.M. Holland married a woman called Alice Avery,’ I say. ‘They lived here, in this house, and Alice died, possibly from a fall down the stairs. Her ghost is meant to walk the place. You see her gliding along the corridors on the first floor or even floating down the stairs. Some people say that if you see her, it’s a sign that a death is imminent.’

  ‘Have you ever seen her?’ asks someone.

  ‘No,’ I say, turning to the whiteboard. ‘Now let’s do an exercise on creating characters. Imagine that you’re at a train station . . .’

  I glance surreptitiously at my watch. Only six hours to go.

  The day seems to go on for ever, for centuries, for millennia. But, at last, I’m saying goodbye to the students and promising to look out for their books in the Sunday Times culture section. I collect my papers and lock the classroom. Then I’m almost sprinting across the gravel towards my car. It’s five o’clock but it feels like midnight. There are only a few lights left on in the school and the wind is blowing through the trees. I can’t wait to get home, to have a glass of wine, to think about Ella and, most of all, to see Herbert.

  If you would have told me five years ago that I would become this dependent on a dog, I would have laughed. I was never one of those children who adored animals. I was brought up in North London, my parents were both academics and the only animal we owned was a cat called Medusa who was rudely uninterested in anyone but my mother. But, when I got divorced and moved to Sussex, I decided that Georgie needed a dog. A dog would be motivation to get out into the countryside, to go for walks and cut down on the hours spent staring at her phone. She could pour out her teenage angst into its uncomplaining canine ear. I’d benefit too, I thought vaguely; a dog would keep me fit and allow me to meet other dog-walkers. Much better than a book club where there was always the danger that someone would suggest The Girl on the Train.

  So we went to a rescue place and we chose Herbert. Or he chose us, because that’s how it works, isn’t it? I wanted a dog that was small enough to pick up in emergencies but
not so small that it somehow ceased to be a dog. Herbert’s origins are murky but the rescue place thought that he might be a cross between a cairn terrier and a poodle. He looked, in fact, just like an illustration in a child’s picture book. A white Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, a creature made by blobbing white paint on the page and adding legs.

  And, of course, it was me that fell in love with Herbert. Oh, Georgie loves him. She takes him for walks and endows him with all sorts of anthropomorphic emotions. ‘Herbert feels shy around other dogs. It’s because he’s an only child.’ But I’m the one who dotes on him, who tells him my troubles and lets him sleep on — and often in — my bed. I love him so much that sometimes, when I look at him, I’m quite surprised to see that he’s covered in hair.

  Andy, the owner of Doggy Day Care (I know, don’t judge me), is pleased to see me. He’s a genial man who loves a chat. But, at the first sight of Herbert, with his cheerful, understanding woolly face, I find myself wanting to cry. I gather him into my arms, pay Andy and almost run back to the car. I just want to get home with my animal familiar. I stop off at the shops to buy wine and chocolate biscuits, Herbert panting in my ear.

  I live in a town house, a terraced two up, two down with a black front door and wrought iron railings. It’s just that this row of town houses is in the middle of the countryside, sheltered by a chalk cliff at the back. They were built to house workers at a cement factory but that’s now derelict (sightless windows, rusting machinery, wind howling through the iron rooftops at night). The houses stay on though, pretty and gentrified, facing a meadow with grazing cows and resolutely ignoring the nightmare edifice behind them. We’re used to the house now; it’s quite convenient for school and not far from Steyning, where there are some nice cafes and a great bookshop. But once in a while I catch sight of the factory and all those gaping windows and think: why would anyone choose to live here?

  The slip-road leads only to the houses so it’s a surprise to see a car parked outside mine. Or is it? A feeling of foreboding has been following me all day. In fact, it’s with a dull sense of inevitability that I recognise the car. As I park and unload an excited Herbert, a woman gets out of the vehicle.

  ‘Hallo,’ she says, ‘are you Clare Cassidy? I’m DS Kaur. Can I come in for a moment?’

  Chapter 3

  DS Kaur is small with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. She’s probably ten years younger than me, around mid-thirties. She’s a slight, almost girlish, figure but somehow she exudes authority, the way some teachers do. Behind DS Kaur is a man, older than her, greying and loosely put together. He introduces himself as DS Neil Winston. A pair of them, just like on TV.

  Herbert tries to jump up on Kaur but I pull him away. After countless training sessions, he’s still determined to embarrass me.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘I like dogs.’

  She brushes herself down all the same. Actually Herbert’s part poodle so he doesn’t shed much but DS Kaur is not to know this. She’s wearing black trousers with a white shirt and a dark jacket. Plain clothes but anonymous enough to be a uniform. I’m certain that she and Winston are the two people I saw in the car park yesterday.

  ‘Come in,’ I say. We walk up the path and in through the shiny, urban front door. I pick up the post with one hand and direct my visitors towards the sitting room. Off the lead, Herbert rushes into the kitchen and starts barking at nothing.

  ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ I say to Kaur and Winston.

  ‘No, thank you,’ says Kaur just as Winston says, ‘White, two sugars.’

  The bottle in my carrier bag clanks incriminatingly when I put it down in the kitchen. I hope Kaur hasn’t heard. Already I know she’s the one to be reckoned with. I make the tea and put some biscuits on a plate. Then I head back to the sitting room with Herbert frisking at my heels.

  ‘We’re investigating the murder of Ella Elphick,’ says Kaur as I sit down. ‘I understand that you’ve been informed about this?’

  ‘Yes. Rick Lewis, my head of department, phoned me yesterday.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Kaur. ‘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.’

  ‘I thought . . .’ I stop.

  ‘What did you think?’ says Kaur.

  ‘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,’ says Kaur, ‘and we have reason to believe that this is the case here.’

  ‘Rick said Ella was stabbed . . .’

  ‘She was,’ says Kaur. ‘Multiple times.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  There’s a silence. Winston drinks his tea and Herbert whines softly.

  ‘So,’ Kaur gets out a notebook. ‘You taught with Ella at Talgarth High. Is that correct?’

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

  Kaur waits while I pull myself together.

  ‘I’m head of Key Stage 3. Ella’s head of Key Stage 4.’

  ‘Key Stage 3 is . . . ?’

  ‘Years 7 to 9. Eleven to fourteen-year-olds. Key Stage 4 is Years 10 and 11. The GCSE exam years. Roughly fourteen to sixteen-year-olds.’

  ‘So you must have worked pretty closely together?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a small department, only six people. We have weekly meetings and Ella and I worked together on schemes of work, tracking progress, targets, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Did you get on well?’ asks Kaur. She has no problem with the past tense but then she never knew Ella when she was in the present tense.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Did you socialise outside work?’

  Socialise. It’s an odd word and seems too organised for the kind of relationship we had: walks with Herbert, meals where we ate and drank slightly too much, long chats on Facebook Messenger about Strictly Come Dancing.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘When did you last see Ella?’

  ‘On Friday night. We went to the cinema then out for a meal.’

  ‘Just the two of you?’

  ‘With Debra Green. She teaches history at Talgarth High.’

  ‘What film did you see?’

  ‘The new Blade Runner,’ I say.

  ‘I want to see that,’ says DS Winston, speaking for almost the first time. ‘Was it any good?’

  ‘A bit long,’ I say, ‘not as good as the first film.’ I’d slept for most of the second half, could only remember Ryan Gosling walking very slowly through the snow, a single tear trickling down his face. I can hardly believe that we’re sitting here discussing a film while Ella is lying dead somewhere.

  ‘Did you hear from Ella on Sunday?’ asks Kaur.

  ‘No. I texted her before the Strictly results but didn’t get an answer.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘Seven-ish.’

  ‘Is that what you were doing all evening? Watching television?’

  ‘Some of the time. And I did some preparation for Monday. For the creative writing course.’

  ‘Were you on your own all evening?’

  ‘No, my daughter Georgia was with me.’

  ‘All evening?’

  ‘Yes. She was in her room for most of the time but she was in the house.’

  ‘And on Monday you were teaching a creative writing course? That’s at Talgarth High too, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. They run adult education courses during half-term.’

  ‘Where is your daughter now?’

  ‘She’s gone to visit her dad. I took her to the station on Monday morning. She’ll be back tomorrow.’ Simon’s driving her down, which is good. Except that I’ll have to see him. Which is b
ad.

  Kaur and Winston exchange glances. This must indicate a change in tone because Kaur leans back in my sagging armchair and says, ‘What sort of a woman was Ella?’

  It seems very important that I answer this question in the right way. Ella is the victim here, I don’t want her to end up being blamed for her own murder, in the way that women often are. DS Kaur might seem like the sort of person who would wear a ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirt but I don’t trust her. The question is inviting me to say that Ella had a sex life and so must, therefore, bear some responsibility for the fact that she has ended up dead. Stabbed. Multiple times. So I scroll through my memories of Ella; copying, replaying, deleting.

  ‘She was a lovely person,’ I say. ‘Very intelligent, a lot of fun. Everyone liked her.’

  Except someone obviously didn’t. I plough on, ‘Ella was a great teacher. The kids loved her. They’ll be devastated when they find out . . .’

  Kaur seems not to register this. ‘Did Ella have a boyfriend?’ she asks.

  I knew it. ‘Not that I know of,’ I say.

  ‘Any exes?’

  ‘In the past,’ I say carefully. ‘Nobody recent.’

  ‘Did she talk about any one in particular?’

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

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

  Later I’m going to have to force myself to look at Ella’s Facebook page. But not until I’ve had at least two glasses of wine.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  I think they are going to ask more, so am surprised when they start up, as synchronised as if responding to a secret signal.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Kaur. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ says Winston, on his way out. It sounds like a line from an American cop programme. Kaur, who stops to pat Herbert in a firm way that keeps him away from her trousers, says nothing.

  When they’ve gone I go into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of wine. As I do so, I notice the post that I scooped up earlier. There are a few official-looking letters in brown envelopes, which I ignore, and one that looks very different, with thick, creamy paper and an embossed stamp from St Jude’s College, Cambridge.