“No student of any kind registered under that name.”
“Well, I took a quarter off for this fieldwork, didn’t I? If you’d checked back …”
“Ah, but Sergeant Watkins did check old records. He found only one similar name. Mary Elizabeth Harcourt, who took a bachelor’s degree in psychology ten years ago. And a woman of the same name shows up in the records of the federal commission looking into Randal Wunderlich’s psychic hot line scandal. This Mary Elizabeth Harcourt was mentioned as Randal Wunderlich’s partner.”
There was utter silence except for the hiss and whir of the tape recorder and the rhythmic tick of the clock on the wall.
“Do you still maintain that you are Emmy Court, a student at the University of Pennsylvania?” Hughes asked. “I can always send to America for fingerprints.”
She turned to glare at him but said nothing.
“This might be a good point to have my sergeant read you your rights, Miss Harcourt, and to ask you whether you would like to have a lawyer present.”
Until now Emmy had been aggressive but composed. Now suddenly her face flushed. “Hey, wait a second. You don’t think I had anything to do with his death, do you? I loved him.”
“Of course you did,” Hughes went on smoothly. For once Evan was impressed. “But he married someone else, didn’t he? He left you behind in the States to face the music while he came to live in luxury in Wales. What more perfect motive for murder?”
“Bullshit,” Emmy said. “You British cops are really stupid, do you know that? If you really want to know the truth, we planned the whole thing, Randy and I.”
“Planned his death?”
“He wasn’t meant to die.” For the first time her voice had a desperate edge to it. “It was meant to be a stunt—a publicity stunt.”
“Go on,” Hughes said.
“Okay, this is what was supposed to happen. Randy was in deep shit at home. The feds were watching his every move. He decided to get out for a while. This Englishwoman had been calling his hot line and in talking to her he found out that she was a lady with a tide and a stately home. He’d always dreamed of opening a New Age center someday and he thought this woman was loaded. She was also looking for a new guy in her life. Randy’s great at that kind of thing. He can have any woman eating out of his hand in seconds. He told me what he was going to do and I agreed. He said it wouldn’t be more than a year, two years, max. So he married her and then he found that she wasn’t loaded at all. She had the house and all these debts. She hadn’t been quite honest with him, it seemed.”
That was poetic justice, Evan thought. Randy Wunderlich had been a little less than honest with her too.
“So now he’s stuck with this bloody great house and he’s just started work on the center but there’s no money to get it going properly. You need publicity to launch a project like that. So he decided we needed a crazy stunt to make headlines. If you want to know the truth, I thought it was a little too crazy, but once Randy gets an idea, it’s hard to stop him.”
“And what was this idea?” Hughes asked.
“He decided that he’d go missing and he’d make psychic contact with some complete stranger and she’d find him. Great story, huh? World-renowned psychic vanishes and is found through psychic message. The plan was supposed to work like this—he’d go down to meditate in a cave he’d found. He’d fall into a trance and only wake when it was dark. It would be hard to get out of the cave because the rocks were slippery by this time. He’d try and twist his ankle so badly that he couldn’t walk then he’d spend a miserable night in the cave, cut off by high water. In the morning his ankle would have swollen so that he couldn’t put any weight on it. So he’d have to sit it out and wait to be found—but he would send out psychic messages because he was getting desperate. One of them would be picked up by a young girl who would lead the search party to find him.”
“Wait a minute,” Evan interrupted, before he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be in the room. “How was he so sure that Betsy would get the message and find him?”
Emmy gave him a withering stare. “We picked the right girl.”
“You detected her strong psychic powers?” Evan asked.
“We detected gullible and suggestible. We’ve done enough psychic work to know how to plant an idea in someone’s mind. You know—hypnosis. While I was working with Betsy, I suggested to her that she would have a dream and I told her exactly what she was going to dream about. The only thing was—she went to the wrong cave. And he was there. And he was dead.”
She covered her face in her hands and lowered her head. A great heaving sob escaped from her. Hughes shut off the tape recorder.
Chapter 21
He certainly wasn’t going to be able to fall back to sleep until the storm was over, so he lay there, mulling over the events of the previous day. Emmy Court was being held in custody now, not having the funds to post bail. D.C.I. Hughes was satisfied that they’d got the right person, but Evan wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t sure what to make of her at all. Usually he was a pretty good judge of character but Emmy Court had got him stumped. Scheming. Manipulating. She showed no remorse about using Betsy so shamelessly. Apart from that one outbreak she had shown little emotion. Evan could easily imagine her dragging Randy Wunderlich to the sea cave and leaving him there to die if it suited her purposes. But then he though back to the night when they had found Randv’s body. All the way down to the Sacred Grove, Emmy had seemed keyed up, but excited, like a child setting out on an adventure. She had tried to persuade Betsy that she was going to the wrong cave and then there was the anguished outburst: “He can’t be dead!” Surely there was true shock and despair in that wail. Randy’s death had taken her by surprise. But it was no use expressing his doubts to D.C.I. Hughes at this stage. Hughes would want a better suspect before he’d let Emmy Court go.
The thunder crashed, louder than ever before. It went on and on, growing in intensity. It took a few moments for Evan to register that the noise wasn’t thunder, but someone banging on his door. He grabbed his dressing gown and ran downstairs.
Betsy was standing outside the front door, wearing her anorak and nightdress, exactly as she had that previous night. She stared at him with terrified eyes and then flung herself toward him.
“Betsy, what on earth is it?” Evan asked.
“I’m so scared and my dad’s passed out, as usual, and I’m so frightened that the murderer will come and get me.”
Evan took her inside and shut the door. “It’s all right. Calm down. You’re safe now.” He took the trembling girl into the kitchen and sat her down. “Look at you. You’re soaking wet.”
“I know. I didn’t want to stay in the house any longer,” she said. “I thought I could hear someone coming up the stairs so I just grabbed the first coat and ran.”
“Take that wet coat off. My cardigan is hanging on the hook in the hall,” he instructed. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.” He put the kettle on and Betsy came back, her hair still plastered to her forehead. She looked like a lost orphan in Evan’s oversized cardigan.