Evans to Betsy

by Rhys Bowen

  Evan watched in admiration as Glynis’s skillful fingers tapped in information. The only time Emmy’s name appeared was in conjunction with Randy Wunderlich’s.

  “She’s a pretty good actress,” Evan said. “Pretending not to know him. Why did she come here, I wonder?”

  “Obvious,” Glynis said. “He married someone else, didn’t he? I can’t imagine she’d be Randy Wunderlich’s partner without being romantically involved with him. She expected him to marry her, but he was broke and he latched onto someone with money.”

  “He probably thought Lady Annabel had money, but she didn’t,” Evan said.

  “Even so, she had the property. Once the center got going, I’d imagine it would have been very lucrative—and safely far away from his former enemies.”

  “So you think Emmy came here to kill him because he ran out on her?” Evan asked.

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it? And it’s the most compelling motive we’ve had so far, especially if he left her behind in the States to face the music.”

  Evan nodded. “Do you want me to go and bring her in?”

  Glynis looked up at him. “Just make sure she doesn’t go anywhere in a hurry, while I alert the airlines, just in case she’s already done a bunk on us.”

  Betsy found it strange going to work at the Sacred Grove that day just as if nothing had happened. She wasn’t even sure she was still employed there now that Randy was gone and Emmy Court was planning to go too. When Lady Annabel passed her just as she was taking off her jacket in the staff cloakroom, she fully expected to be asked what she was doing there and to be sent packing. But Lady Annabel drifted by like a ghost and hardly seemed to notice her.

  All in all, Betsy hoped she could stay. For one thing the work was so easy and, for another, it was like living in a fantasy world, with all those fountains and pools and the beautiful view across the estuary. It was sad that Randy was gone, but she hoped that Rhiannon might be able to help her with her newfound psychic powers. Rhiannon had already told her that the ancient Druids were also seers. They had all kinds of ways of looking into the future. She often saw the future herself. It was just a question of harnessing the power of the universe. In a way Rhiannon scared Betsy. She was so intense, as if there were a fire burning inside her. But she was also being very kind at the moment, taking time to answer Betsy’s questions. “We’ll make a Druid of you yet,” she had said when they last spoke. “You’re going to be a great help to me at the coming ceremony. I’m relying on you.”

  Betsy helped clear away breakfast then went down to the meditation center to bring up any dirty crockery waiting to be washed. As she went in, she heard a low humming sound coming from the main meditation room and wondered what it could be, until the door opened and she saw that it was Bethan, with a vacuum cleaner.

  “Hello, Betsy,” Bethan called cheerily. “How are you then? I’ve been thinking about you, having that dreadful dream and seeing poor Randy lying there and then actually finding him just like you’d dreamed. It must have been a terrible shock for you.”

  “It was,” Betsy said. “I couldn’t stop shaking all day.”

  “Did you really dream the whole thing?” Bethan asked. “They’re saying he was murdered now. Did you see the murderer in your dream?”

  “No, just Randy lying there.”

  “Perhaps you’ll have another dream and see the murderer,” Bethan said excitedly.

  “I hope not. It was horrible.” Betsy hugged her arms to herself. “It’s funny, but it already seems as if it wasn’t real. I know it happened, but it’s like something I saw on TV, you know.”

  Bethan nodded. “It’s funny how life has gone back to normal, isn’t it? Lady Annabel is the only one who looks upset. She doesn’t seem herself at all, poor thing. She wasn’t even wearing makeup today and I’ve never seen her without her makeup on before. They say people can die of a broken heart, don’t they?”

  “She’s a bit old for a broken heart, isn’t she?” Betsy moved closer to Bethan as the latter maneuvered the heavy vacuum cleaner out of the room and into the passage. “I mean she’s got a grown-up son. Middle-aged people don’t die of broken hearts, surely?”

  “Oh, I think she was gaga for him.” Bethan moved closer to Betsy. “You should have heard her shouting and crying when she found out he’d been paying attention to another woman. ‘I trusted you and you let me down,’ she was yelling. I was up making the beds and I was embarrassed to be caught up there with them yelling outside the door. ‘I thought I was the only woman in your life,’ she said. ‘And now I find out about her.’ And now he’s gone. Funny old life, isn’t it?”

  Betsy nodded.

  Bethan coiled up the vacuum lead and started to wheel it down the hall. “You know, I never expected to find him dead, did you? When I heard he was missing, I thought to myself, well, here we go again.”

  “What do you mean?” Betsy asked.

  “Well, he was the second person who’s been missing here, isn’t it? And both Americans too. They say there’s been no sign of that American girl Rebecca since she left here. I often wonder what happened to her. I was just getting friendly with her, you know, when she went. And you know what was so strange? It was her coat. I often wondered about that coat, I mean—”

  A door opened on their left and Rhiannon appeared. “Will you girls stop gossiping and get back to work?” she snapped. “Bethan, put that thing away and get about your duties. Betsy, would you come into my office? I’m going to need you to help me prepare for the ceremony.”

  Betsy spent the next hour helping Rhiannon assemble a collection of objects she needed for the ceremony. They included robes and tools—a cauldron, a dagger, a pentacle, a large stone that Rhiannon said was sacred. “And now,” she said, “you are going to help me to build a very large basket.”

  It was noontime when Betsy was finally released, and she rushed up to do her job at the spa. She was supposed to have wiped down the walls of the sauna and steam room by now. The spa was scheduled to open again at twelve-thirty. She hoped she wouldn’t get in trouble for being late. Luckily she didn’t pass anybody as she went through the foyer with its lovely underwater murals. She gave the sauna a quick once-over, then she went into the steam room. That was a harder job. Mildew grew so easily in the hot damp conditions and Betsy had to stand on tiptoe on the tiled bench to reach the corners at the very top. She was on the bench with her back to the door when she thought she heard a noise outside. Immediately the steam came on in a great rush. That’s funny, Betsy thought. She was supposed to trip the switch to turn the system on when she had finished. The room filled quickly with hot steam so that by the time she picked up her cleaning materials and climbed down from the bench, the door was hardly visible.

  Betsy experienced a brief moment of panic and disorientation. Don’t be so daft, she thought to herself. People pay a lot of money to come in here and sit in this steam and you can’t wait to get out of it! She laughed at herself as she located the door and turned her shoulder to push it open.

  It wouldn’t move.

  Betsy put more effort into it and tried again. The door was stuck fast. She put down the cleaning rags and spray and tried with both hands. Behind her the steam kept on hissing as it poured out, filling the tiny room and raising the temperature. Betsy coughed. It was getting hard to breathe.

  Not to worry, she told herself. The steam was on a timer. It came on, then a thermostat shut it off after a few moments. She’d seen it working. Seconds ticked by but the steam didn’t go off. The room was now so full of steam that the glass panel in the door was the only real thing in the world. Betsy could feel sweat and steam running down her face into her eyes. She hammered on the door with both fists, realizing that nobody was likely to hear her. The spa wasn’t scheduled to open for another half hour and Bethan had obviously done her share of the work and gone by now.

  Half an hour. Could she hold out that long? The heat was overpowering. Betsy could feel the blood singing in her he
ad. She was starting to feel dizzy. Help! she tried to shout. Help! But every breath she took only resulted in a fit of coughing. With the last of her strength, she pounded on the door again.

  Suddenly the door was wrenched open. Bethan and Michael stood there, staring at her with frightened faces. “Betsy, what on earth were you doing in there?” Bethan demanded as a gasping, sobbing, red-faced Betsy staggered out.

  “I—I couldn’t get the door open,” Betsy said.

  “Oh, no.” Michael took her arm and led her to a chair in the foyer. “That damned door must be sticking again. Remember it stuck once before, Bethan? I thought the janitor had fixed it. I’ll get onto him again this afternoon.”

  “It was horrible,” Betsy said. “The steam came on and it wouldn’t go off. It just kept on coming. I would have passed out if you hadn’t heard me.”

  “Lucky I’d just gone to get Michael to show him a crack in one of the tiles,” Bethan said.

  Michael gave Betsy an encouraging smile. “I think you probably had a bit of a panic attack, don’t you? I know what it’s like when the steam comes on—it is rather frightening. But it only lasts a minute or two, honestly.”

  “It was much longer than that,” Betsy said. “The whole place was full of steam.”

  “It only seemed longer, I’m sure.” He put a hand on Betsy’s shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go and get some lunch. I’ll make sure the janitor fixes that door properly this afternoon. We don’t want any panic-stricken guests, do we?”

  Betsy allowed herself to be escorted up the steps between Michael and Bethan. Had she just panicked? she wondered. Had it not been as long as it seemed in there and would the steam have gone off by itself? She felt a bit of a fool.

  “Thanks for rescuing me, anyway,” she said. “Sorry if I was making such a fuss.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Evans, but she’s not here,” Mrs. Williams greeted Evan at the front door.

  “She’s left, you mean?” Evan’s heart lurched at the thought of arriving too late.

  “Oh, no. She just drove young Betsy to work at the center. She said she didn’t want to sit around doing nothing and she liked visiting the center.”

  “So she’s down there now?”

  “I expect so. She told me not to cook lunch for her, she’d be eating out, but she’d be back for dinner. I’m making her a steak-and-kidney pie tonight. You remember my pies, don’t you, Mr. Evans? I’m a dab hand with pastry, although I shouldn’t say it myself.”

  Evan did remember her pastry. Vividly. He could almost taste the thick brown gravy with tender morsels of steak and kidney buried in it and the light, flaky crust on top. He sighed. “I’d better go and look for Miss Court then.”

  But as he turned away from the front door, a car drew up and Emmy Court got out. Evan noticed a momentary flicker of alarm on her face before it became an expressionless mask again. “What do you want now?” she demanded.

  “I’ve been asked to bring you down to headquarters to ask you a few more questions, if you don’t mind.”

  “I do mind. I’ve already told you everything I know. I’ve already missed my flight home. Do you know what kind of penalty they charge to rewrite a ticket these days? I’m a student, you know, trying to live on a grant. I sure hope you guys are going to write some kind of letter to the airline for me.”

  “I’m sorry, miss. I’m just doing my job. It shouldn’t take long and the sooner we get things sorted out, the sooner you can go home, isn’t it?”

  Emmy glared at him, but she allowed herself to be shepherded to the squad car that Evan had borrowed from Sergeant Watkins.

  “It’s harassment, that’s what it is. I’m going to complain to the U.S. embassy.” Evan said nothing and Emmy remained silent all the way down the pass. When they reached the Caernarfon police station, Evan ushered Emmy 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 wou
ldn’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.”