How I Lost You

by Jenny Blackhurst

  When we go out to the front of the building, Jennifer is the first person we see. She stands out amongst the students mainly because she’s a good twenty years older than them, but also because of the way she looks, the way she’s dressed. Her boot-cut jeans and plain black shoes aren’t exactly dowdy, but they’re a far cry from the black skinny jeans and suede ankle boots worn by the girls dotted around campus. Despite the fact that it’s really not that cold, she wears a clunky green parka that might be fashionable on some but she manages to make it look, well, plain. Her frizzy hair, the color of dishwater, is untouched by the straighteners used by half of the universe, me included when I can be bothered. She is holding her cigarette between her lips, fumbling in her bag with one hand and balancing a Styrofoam cup of steaming liquid in the other. When she looks up and sees us, an angry look crosses a face free of makeup.

  “I’ll call security,” she threatens as we reach her. I glance around but don’t see anyone in uniform. I reach into my pocket and hold out the trusty lighter I’ve carried around since I started needing cigarettes again. She hesitates, then takes it.

  “Hear us out first, then if you still want us to leave, you won’t need security,” Nick promises. She shakes her head.

  “No way,” she replies firmly. “I had enough of your kind when it happened. Spinning your vile lies about Beth. You people make me sick.”

  “I’m not a journalist,” I say quickly. “I’m Mark Webster’s ex-wife.”

  Her bushy eyebrows lift in shock.

  “Sit down,” she says at last, and gestures to the wall next to her. Relief floods through me: for a second I’d thought she was going to start shouting for security anyway.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want to know what happened to Beth,” I tell her honestly, gesturing for the lighter and pulling out my own cigarettes. “What really happened, not what everyone said happened. I want to know, I need to know if Mark was involved.”

  “You want me to tell you Mark Webster wasn’t involved,” she states flatly. “Well, I can’t. And if you’re not here to hear some hard truths, you’d better take yourself back to wherever you came from.”

  “I am. Well . . .” I falter and look at Nick. “I’m not sure I’m ready, but I need to hear the truth. You were Beth’s best friend; I need to know your side of things.”

  “Why now?” she asks bitterly, and takes a long drag on her cigarette, savoring the taste of the smoke. She finally blows it out and continues. “Why does it matter to you after all this time?”

  I’m trying to be honest, but I don’t want to tell this woman everything. I don’t trust her.

  “Mark never told me about Bethany during our marriage,” I reply. “I only found out about her when I stumbled across some photographs of the two of them.” It’s almost true.

  “So you came to Trevelyan to look for an ex-girlfriend of your ex-husband, even though you knew nothing about her murder? Why would you give a fuck who she was?” She tilts her head to one side and lifts her eyebrows again. They’re thick and unruly; they’ve obviously never seen a pair of tweezers. Or hedge clippers. She’s not stupid, she knows I’m not telling her the whole story.

  “I wanted to know why Mark never mentioned her,” I only half lie. “It seemed strange that he would tell me about other former girlfriends but not this one. I know my ex-husband; I was suspicious and intrigued. I wish now I’d stayed away but I can’t ignore what I found out.”

  “So what do you want from me?” Her voice is softening; I think I’m winning her over. Well, she hasn’t called security yet, so that’s a bonus.

  “It’s like Susan said,” Nick chips in. She looks almost surprised, like she’d forgotten he was there. “We just want the truth.”

  “And you are?”

  I wonder if he’s going to be as honest as I have been.

  “I’m a journalist,” I’m surprised to hear him admit. “But I’m not here for a story. Even if I wanted one, my boss would never let me stir up this much mud. I’m here as Susan’s friend.”

  I know better than to push her, but I’m not sure I can wait much longer. I’m about to say something when she begins to speak.

  “You’re right about Beth being my best friend at uni,” she says quietly. “But she was more than that. She was like part of me. It was as though we’d known each other our whole lives. She was so amazing, and when I was with her I was a different person. She brought out the best in everyone around her; you couldn’t be down when Beth was around.” She smiles fondly, memories lighting up her face. “I felt so special that she’d chosen me. She could have been friends with the most popular, most affluent girls at Trevelyan, but she chose to spend her time with plain, square me. Purely and simply I worshipped her.

  “In the middle of our first year, the Hill College Theatre Company put on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As expected, Beth played Hermia. She was amazing, everyone in the audience was hanging on her every word. On the last night Mark and his friends came to watch the play. Afterwards we all met in the student bar.” Her face knits itself into a scowl. It’s clear she loved Beth Connors and my ex-husband was a very unwelcome intrusion.

  “Was that the first time they met?” Nick asks, gently trying to prompt her to carry on. She completely ignores him; right now she’s in another place, a crowded, smoky student bar twenty-two years ago.

  “Everyone was still in costume.” She smiles at the memory. “It was the last night and no one wanted the run to end. David Thompson, from the props department, went mad the next day: the university had rented the costumes from the Shakespeare Company, and Oberon—I can’t remember his real name, isn’t that funny?—got beer all over his tights. Lucas almost shit a brick when he found out.”

  “What part did you play?” I ask.

  She looks up like she’s only just remembered we’re here. “I wasn’t in the play,” she replies, still looking bitter at the memory after all these years. “My face was more suited to backstage.”

  Always in the shadows, I think. On the outside looking in while her beautiful friend was the center of attention. It’s how I used to feel when Mark was around; he was the one people wanted to talk to, to be around. I’m no Bethany Connors. I’ve always been more like the woman sitting next to me, ordinary, nothing special. Not for the first time I wonder what Mark saw in me; if I was just a way of forgetting someone else.

  “I didn’t care,” she lies, as though she can read my thoughts. “I enjoyed Beth’s success. She had this amazing way of making me feel like her triumphs were mine too. She made everyone feel like that, that’s why people loved her so much. We were all so wrapped up in her happiness. That old saying, ‘Boys wanted to be with her, girls wanted to be her,’ that was Beth to a T. That night she was just radiant. Every boy in the bar wanted to be near her, but the minute Mark walked over, they didn’t stand a chance.”

  I understand that completely. Mark always had a way of making everyone else around him cease to exist. When he talked to you, you felt like the most special person in the room. It isn’t just his looks; he has a confidence that sucks you towards him and makes you never want to be pushed out of his bubble. And outside Mark’s bubble is a cold place indeed.

  “I remember it so clearly. He walked over to her and said, ‘What happened? Didn’t they have any policewoman costumes left?’ I thought she was going to punch him—no one had ever told her she looked like a stripper before—but she just cracked up and didn’t leave his side all night. At the end of the evening he offered to walk her home, but she was having none of it. She turned him down so politely, then said to him, ‘I’ll see you again though, funny man.’ When we got home, she spent hours talking about him like a lovestruck teenager.”

  I try to hold back the feelings of jealousy. I imagine Mark going home that night, frustrated that his best efforts had been thwarted and vowing to get his girl no matter what, like some valiant fairy-tale prince. Memories of my slightly less class
y and slightly more inebriated self falling drunkenly into bed with him the very first night we met come crashing to mind. How much of an easy disappointment I must have been.

  What was it he saw in me? I was the complete opposite of what he was used to: I’d never been the center of a man’s world before, let alone a man like Mark. Was it because I was easy? Because I bore no resemblance to the love he’d lost? Did he love me, or was I a punishment for him, chosen because I wasn’t even a close second to his first love?

  “After that night they were inseparable,” she continues. “Mark was a big man on campus, him and his friends used to strut around like they owned the place—which his father practically did, by the way. He was the last person I’d have expected Beth to fall for; she never could stand the rich list.”

  “The rich list?”

  Jennifer nods. “The Durham elite. Mark was way up top, second really only to Jack Bratbury, the most affluent boy at the university. He was a nasty piece of work, the only one of Mark’s friends Beth couldn’t bear to be around. I think he used to hit on her in front of Mark, but Mark was too scared to say anything to him. One word from Jack and Mark would have been relegated to nothing. Beth hated the way it worked here, but Jack’s father made some incredibly generous donations to the university. And didn’t we all know it.” She makes a face and finishes the last of her tea, which I’m guessing is probably stone-cold by now. She doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Mark’s best friend, Matty, was Durham elite and so were most of the boys he went around with. Beth said they weren’t so bad really; she said she actually felt sorry for them, never knowing the true value of money. She thought Mark was different, though: he disliked the way the university worked as much as she did and hated that people thought he got in on his father’s merits. The first real argument we ever had was about that. I remember saying, ‘God, my heart bleeds for him,’ and accusing her of selling out to the rich kids. I told her that before she knew it she’d be acting like she owned Trevelyan too. I was pretty harsh. She looked so hurt.” She shakes her head to remove the memory. “I said I was sorry the very next day, but things weren’t really the same after that. She kept her distance and her relationship with Mark seemed stronger than ever. That was until she turned up at my room, the week before she died, in floods of tears.”

  My heart speeds up a little. This is more like it, this is what we’ve come to hear. I don’t dare to speak in case I say something to change her mind.

  “It was a Friday night, Mark’s poker night with the boys. Beth turned up soaking wet and crying her eyes out. I immediately let her in, of course—it was the first time I’d actually seen her up close in a few weeks; before that I’d only spoken to her on the phone or seen her from a distance in the lecture theater. She looked awful. She’d lost so much weight, she was pale and around her eyes was so black, I thought she was on drugs.”

  “What did she say?” I ask, captivated.

  “I couldn’t get much sense out of her, just that she had to break up with Mark because of something that had happened. She kept saying something about how she shouldn’t have gone there; she should have kept out of it. She kept talking about Ellie Toldot—I still have no idea who she is. I thought she meant Mark had been cheating on her but she said I’d got it all wrong, how I’d never understand. She wasn’t just upset, she was scared.”

  “What was she scared of?” Nick asks. Jennifer shakes her head.

  “I don’t know. Of Mark, I think, something she’d seen. She took off as quickly as she’d arrived, said she shouldn’t be involving me in her problems, that she shouldn’t have said anything at all.”

  “Did you see her again before she died?”

  “We had some classes together but she kept her distance. The week she went missing she’d barely been at class at all, and every time I saw her outside lectures Mark was glued to her side. It was like she was avoiding me completely. The night she died, I went over to her room to talk some sense into her.”

  “And did you?”

  Jennifer shakes her head again. “No, and God knows ever since I’ve wished I’d tried harder. When I got there, I could hear through the door that she was on the phone. She said something like ‘What’s he doing there?’ and then ‘Oh God, Matty, fine, I’ll be there as soon as I can.’ She sounded pissed off, and before I had a chance to knock she came rushing out of the door. She looked surprised to see me, and when I said we needed to talk, she told me she was in a bit of a rush and she’d come to my room the next day to chat. She apologized to me for how she’d been lately, said she’d had some stuff to sort out but things were going to be okay now. I made her promise to come and find me the next day and she swore she would. She kissed me on the cheek and told me she’d missed me. I said me too. That was the last time I ever saw her.”

  “Did you tell the police what you’d heard?”

  “Of course I did. They didn’t want to know.” Her face contorts in anger. “I told them she’d been going to meet Matthew Riley somewhere, but they just said I had no proof it was Riley she’d been on the phone to, that it could have been her ‘client’s’ name. They pretty much called me a liar but I knew what I’d heard.”

  “I thought Matthew Riley and Mark both had alibis for the time of Beth’s murder?” Nick remarks. Jennifer gives him a derisive look.

  “Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said? The Mark Websters and Matthew Rileys of Durham could have found a room full of people who would swear they were onstage at Carnegie Hall if they’d wanted to.”

  “What about the guy they arrested? They must have had some proof.”

  Jennifer nods. “He had Beth’s purse and was covered in her blood. They said she’d gone to have sex with him.” She grimaces. “There’s not a chance in hell Beth would have slept with a guy like Lee Russon. Not for all the money in Durham.” She checks her watch. “I’m sorry, but I have to start work. I hope you find what you came for.”

  “Jennifer, wait.” Nick stands to stop her as she rises from the wall, squashes her cigarette butt under her toe, and turns to walk away. “Just one more thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “After Beth’s body was found, how did Mark Webster react?”

  She turns to look at me. “He was devastated. To be honest, when I saw what he was like afterwards, it made me completely doubt his involvement. He was so crushed. He was ready to give up university altogether. If his father hadn’t convinced the dean to let him finish from home, he’d never have got his degree.”

  “Thanks for all your help, Jennifer,” Nick says. “We really appreciate it.”

  “Doesn’t make one bit of difference, though, does it? Beth’s still dead,” she replies, turning to go once more. “You want the truth? Well, it won’t bring Beth back.”

  46

  Where the hell are you? Why haven’t you called me? I thought you were bloody dead!” Cassie is shouting so loudly I have to hold the phone away from my ear until she’s finished her rant.

  “I texted you,” I try weakly.

  “That could have been anyone! After everything we’ve been through, do you think I want to turn on the news and see you dead in a ditch?”

  I almost laugh out loud but realize she’s serious.

  “Cass, the only time you’ve ever turned on the news is when you were on it,” I reply as seriously as I can. “And why on earth would they show me dead in a ditch?”

  “I don’t think you’re seeing the point I’m trying to make,” she practically hisses.

  “I do, I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ve been ridiculously selfish. I’m on my way back now, can I call you tomorrow?”

  “You’d better.”

  “Oh, could you do something for me?” I ask, before she can hang up.

  “I don’t know, I’ll have to check my calendar.” She pretends to flick through pages. “Ah, as expected, I’ve got a busy day of waiting for my best friend to call.”

  “So is that a yes?” I reply impatiently.
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  “Fine, what is it?”

  “I need you to try and find someone called Ellie Toldot.” I spell it for her. “I’m guessing it’s not an overly common name; can you Google it for me? Maybe have a look on Facebook, et cetera.”

  “Okay, but you’ll only find out if you call me tomorrow. Do you hear me? Call me.”

  We both hang up and I sink lower in my seat, glad that that’s over. She wasn’t nearly as angry as I’d expected, considering how badly I’ve binned her the last few days. If I were her, I’d be furious at me.

  My phone has an unread text message. Rob Howe from ZBH. Had a look at notes, nothing stands out yet. Changed your mind about that drink? If you can shake off your bodyguard long enough that is. X

  I suppress a smile and fire off a quick Sorry, still minded 24/7. Worse than my dad. Is it a cliche to say it’s complicated?

  “She okay?” Nick asks.

  “Furious. She’ll be fine.”

  My phone buzzes again. Total cliche. Is it unprofessional to say you make cliches sound cute? X

  I reply with Totally unprofessional and end with an X. Then I delete the X and add a smiley face. See? This is why I don’t date.

  “Are you okay? You know, hearing all that about Mark . . .”

  “I’m not sure what to think.” I don’t want to talk to Nick about my relationship with Mark. I don’t want to admit that I’m hurt and humiliated that I’ve had to hear more about my ex-husband’s earlier life from a librarian than I ever heard from him. I’m confused. I don’t know if I was a distraction for him, fighting for his love with a ghost I never even knew about. Would I have tried harder if I’d known about Beth? Would I have been more graceful, more polished, more like a “Durham elite” wife? More like Kristy Riley, more like Beth Connors? I search my mind for any hint that Mark was hiding this secret from me. Little things we did together now seem like they all lead back to his university sweetheart. Was he thinking of her when we went to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the theater? How could he not have been? Was he thinking of her when we spent a lazy Saturday at the National Gallery, or on our honeymoon? Was I just a cheap replacement?