into one of the interview rooms.
“Would you like a cup of tea or coffee while I tell them you’re here?” Evan asked as Emmy sat defiantly with her arms folded across her chest.
“Your British tea is disgusting and your coffee is even worse. I haven’t had one decent cup of coffee since I got here. Mrs. Williams’s idea is to put a spoonful of instant in a cup and then fill it up with hot milk. Don’t you people have a clue about anything?”
At that moment D.C.I. Hughes came into the room, followed by Watkins, who had clearly just arrived. Watkins was still wearing his wet raincoat and there were droplets of rain on his sandy hair. He grinned at Evan.
“Thank you, Constable,” Hughes said, waving him away. Evan retreated, but only as far as the door. Hughes took the only other chair in the room, leaving Watkins standing also.
“I take it you don’t mind if our conversation is recorded?” Hughes leaned across the table to turn on the portable recorder. “For your protection as well as ours.”
Emmy shrugged. “Do what you like. I’ve already told you what I know. You’re just wasting your time as well as mine.”
“Not quite all you know, I think,” Hughes said. He spoke into the machine. “Detective Chief Inspector Hughes, interviewing Emmy Court, Monday, April twenty-ninth. Now let’s go back to square one, shall we, Miss Court? Would you mind repeating your full name for us?”
“I told you. It’s Emmy Court.”
“And you are a student?”
“I told you. A doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania.”
“Now that’s odd, isn’t it?” Hughes looked across to Sergeant Watkins. “I understand, Sergeant, that your search of the records at the University of Pennsylvania came up with no doctoral candidate by the name of Emmy Court.”
“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.”
“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.”
