Excerpt from The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I suppose I should go downstairs and get a coffee while I still can. As I get up I look out of the window. It's getting dark and the trees are blowing in a sudden squall of wind. Leaves gust across the car park and, following their progress, I see what I should have noticed earlier: a strange car with two people sitting inside it. There's nothing particularly odd about this. This is a school, after all, despite it being half-term. Visitors are not entirely unexpected. They could even be staff members, coming in to prepare their classrooms and complete their planning for next week. But there's something about the car, and the people inside it, that makes me feel uneasy. It's an unremarkable grey vehicle — I'm useless at cars but Simon would know the make — something solid and workmanlike, the sort of thing a mini-cab driver would use. But why are its occupants just sitting there? I can't see their faces but they are both dressed in dark clothes and look, like the car itself, somehow both prosaic and menacing.

It's almost as if I am expecting a summons of some kind, so I'm not really surprised when my phone buzzes. I see it's Rick Lewis, my head of department.

'Clare,' he says, 'I've got some terrible news.'

Clare's Diary

Monday 23rd October 2017

Ella is dead. I didn't believe it when Rick told me. And, as the words began to sink in, I thought: a car crash, an accident, even an overdose of some kind. But when Rick said 'murdered', it was as if he was talking a different language.

'Murdered?' I repeated the word stupidly.

'The police said that someone broke into her house last night,' said Rick. 'They turned up on my doorstep this morning. Daisy thought I was about to be arrested.'

I still couldn't put the pieces together. Ella. My friend. My colleague. My ally in the English department. Murdered. Rick said that Tony already knew. He was going to write to all the parents tonight.

'It'll be in the papers,' said Rick. 'Thank God it's half-term.'

I'd thought the same thing. Thank God it's half-term, thank God Georgie's with Simon. But then I felt guilty. Rick must have realised that he'd got the tone wrong because he said, 'I'm sorry, Clare', as if he meant it.

He's sorry. Jesus.

And then I had to go back to my class and teach them about ghost stories. It wasn't one of my best teaching sessions. But The Stranger always does its bit, especially as it was dark by the time I'd finished. Una actually screamed at the end. I set them a writing task for the last hour: 'write about receiving bad news'. I looked at their bent heads as they scribbled their masterpieces ('The telegram arrived at half-past two ...') and thought: if only they knew. As soon as I got home, I rang Debra. She'd been out with the family and hadn't heard. She cried, said she didn't believe it, etc., etc. To think that the three of us had only been together on Friday night. Rick said that Ella was killed some time on Sunday. I remember I'd texted her about the Strictly results and hadn't had an answer. Was she already dead by then?

It wasn't so bad when I was teaching or talking to Debra, but now I'm alone, I feel such a sense of ... well, dread ... that I'm almost rigid with fear.

I'm sitting here with my diary on the bed and I don't want to turn the light off. Where is Ella? Have they taken her body away? Have her parents had to identify her? Rick didn't give me any of these details and, right now, they seem incredibly important.

I just can't believe that I'll never see her again.

Excerpted from The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths. Copyright © 2019 by Elly Griffiths. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.