“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.
In the middle of that night, a storm broke over Llanfair. The thunder echoed, alarmingly loud, in the narrow confines of the pass. Lightning illuminated the mountaintops before more clouds rushed in to hide them again. Evan had woken in the still-unfamiliar room at the first rumble of thunder and had lain there, unable to sleep, counting the pauses between each flash and the following crash. Not more than a second or two. The storm was almost overhead and moving closer. Rain started drumming on the roof, almost drowning out the thunder. He was glad he wasn’t out in this one. A real drencher.
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.
She came to stand beside him, holding out her hands to the flame under the kettle. “I’m chilled right through,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
“So tell me what happened,” Evan said. “What frightened you?”
“I had another dream,” Betsy said. “Only this one wasn’t clear like the other one. It was just that I knew someone was after me. It was someone in a cloak and hood and I couldn’t see the face but I knew it was the real murderer. Then I woke up and the storm was horrible and I thought I heard noises outside my door. I was so sure it was the murderer come to get me.”
Evan patted her shoulder awkwardly. “You just had a bad dream. Nobody’s after you.”
“But look what happened last time I had a bad dream. It all came true!”
Evan poured the boiling water into the pot. “Betsy, there’s something you should know. It might stop you from worrying like this—” He paused, wondering how to phrase what he was going to say. “Betsy, all that rubbish about psychic ability, that’s all it was—rubbish. The police are holding Emmy Court right now. It seems she planned a hoax with Randy Wunderlich. They worked together at this psychic hot line in America, you know. He was going to disappear and some unknown person was going to find him through a psychic connection. They picked you. They set you up. You didn’t have a psychic dream. You were hypnotized. Emmy Court put those images into your head.”
Betsy was staring at him, a bewildered look on her face. “You mean I’m not psychic at all? I don’t have powers?”
“I’m afraid not,” Evan said.
“You really mean I’m not psychic after all? They only pretended I had powers?”
Evan nodded. “It was a cruel trick to play.”
“But why did they do it?”
“Publicity, that’s all. They wanted to generate publicity for the Sacred Grove because it wasn’t going very well. They thought this kind of thing would capture the media’s attention.”
“That is so unfair.” Betsy’s voice cracked. “How could she do that? I thought she liked me. And I was so excited about my powers. I really believed I was special at last.”
“Look on the bright side of this,” Evan said. “The murderer has nothing to fear from you. You won’t be seeing
