A Sea Change (4 page)

Jenna wasn’t jealous, but she never invited anyone back to her house. She would have been too ashamed because their house was a hovel. The tiny front yard was studded with dog turds that baked hard in the sun or turned to mush in the rain. Sometimes, Jenna cleared them up but she ended up gagging. Inside the house, the lounge was covered in dog hairs and the wallpaper had been scratched off the wall. Every surface in the kitchen was covered in dirty cups and plates, cereal boxes and takeaway cartons. There were empty bottles everywhere, but no glasses. Her mum just poured vodka straight into a can of 7Up and glugged it. In the hall, there were tins of dog food upended straight onto the floor. Her mum argued that the dogs only took two seconds to eat it, because they were always starving, so what was the point of dirtying a dish?

Whatever happened, Jenna wasn’t going back there.

She blinked back the familiar tears. It was up to her now. She had no one else, and that was how she liked it – even though it was hard. She
forced herself to get out of bed. She could lie there all day, but then she would be just like her mother. She had to keep going, even though she knew that what she was about to do was wrong.

Jenna got herself dressed – before she could change her mind. She put on a bikini, then chose a dress. She didn’t want to stand out, so she picked out one with a simple white halter neck. In a bag, she put a towel, some suncream, a bottle of water and a book. She tied her hair in a high ponytail and finished off the look with a pair of sunglasses and some flip-flops decorated with big flowers.

As she left the house, she looked like any normal young girl about to spend a day on the beach.

Jenna had just enough money for the bus fare to Everdene. It was only five miles away, but it might as well have been a thousand. Her heart lifted every time she went down the hill towards the bay. It was as unlike Tawcombe as you could get. Everywhere you looked there was beauty, from the rolling hills to the sea to the sun on the distant horizon. There were shades of green and blue and shimmering gold.

She’d come here before – sometimes with her mates. They ate chips on the beach, washed down with bottles of cider, and got the late bus back. They never went in the sea. That was for tourists and surfers. As far as Jenna was concerned, the sea might look nice – but it was cold and wet.

She got off the bus in the centre of the village where the traffic was insane. On a hot day, in the height of summer, you had to find a parking space by nine o’clock or you had no hope. The pavements were crowded with people heading to the beach, lugging their beach bags, buckets, spades and body boards. It was a nightmare getting through, dodging pushchairs and dogs on leads, but Jenna kept her head down and pushed on. In the end, she walked in the road, because it was easier. The traffic was so slow that she was unlikely to get run over. She didn’t think about what she was going to do. She had no choice, she told herself – over and over.

She passed the Ship Aground, the pub in the middle of Everdene where everyone hung out. There was a huge poster outside, advertising their end-of-season pop-singing competition. The first prize was a hundred pounds. For a moment, Jenna hesitated. Her friends were
always trying to persuade her to enter competitions like this. They were always telling her she had an amazing voice, but she didn’t have the confidence. It was one thing mucking about in the ice-cream kiosk, but it was quite another walking out on stage.

Anyway, even if she did enter, and even if she won, what then? She’d have a hundred quid in her pocket, but that wasn’t enough to live on or to pay the rent she owed. Her current plan was going to make her more money. She turned away and walked on.

As she passed the coffee shop in the arcade at the top of the beach, she realised that she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since she’d left the ice-cream kiosk yesterday afternoon. She pulled out the last of her change and estimated she had enough for a cup of tea. With three sugars in it, it might keep her going for a while. She ducked inside and ordered a takeaway cup. As she paid and turned to leave, she was just taking off the plastic lid when she bumped straight into a man heading for the counter.

Luckily she hadn’t been holding the cup close to her, or it would have spilled all down her front. Instead, it went all over the floor.

‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’ The man put
out his hand and touched her arm. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Jenna, looking up, right into the most incredible eyes. Eyes that were silver-grey, with the longest lashes she had ever seen on a man – and set in a kind face, too.

‘I wasn’t looking where I was going . . .’

‘Neither was I.’ She managed a laugh. Wow! This guy was really good-looking, she thought. There were always a lot of good-looking guys in Everdene, but he was even hotter than most. He had dark curly hair, cropped close, and was lean and muscular in his T-shirt and faded jeans.

‘Let me get you another.’ He looked at her, his dark brows meeting in a frown. ‘Seriously. Go and sit down and I’ll bring you one over.’

Jenna bit her lip, thinking how wonderful it would be to sit down while he brought her a fresh drink. Then she remembered what she was doing here, and realised that today of all days she didn’t want to bring attention to herself. The last thing she needed was to strike up conversation with a handsome stranger who might remember her.

‘It’s OK. It’s fine. I’m in a hurry. Honestly. I have to go.’

She smiled and walked away as quickly as she
could, throwing her empty cup into the nearest bin.

Eventually Jenna made it onto the sand. The tide was in, which meant at the moment there was little room for people to set up camp. As the sea inched out again, the visitors began to spread out their rugs, putting up their windbreaks and laying out all the things they needed for the day. The sun grew ever more sparkling, welcoming the crowds with its rays.

Jenna spread out her towel at the bottom of the bank beneath the beach huts. She’d chosen her pitch carefully. She wanted to be on the edge of the crowds, so she could watch, but she didn’t want to stand out. Everyone was so busy having a good time that they weren’t going to notice her.

Chapter Five

Craig noticed Jenna straight away.

She was the girl he’d bumped into at the coffee shop. She was sitting at the bottom of the bank outside his beach hut. She looked as if she’d stepped out of a 1950s film set, with her curves and her high ponytail and her retro dress. She really was very pretty, and he wondered why she was here on her own. Maybe she was waiting for her mates, or her boyfriend? Maybe that was why she hadn’t let him buy her a drink, because there was another bloke in the picture.

Craig told himself to stop staring but he wasn’t sure what else to do. There was certainly no point in trying to surf while the beach was this busy. Even though there were supposed to be separate areas for surfers and swimmers, Craig could see it was chaos in the water. He wasn’t a good enough surfer to avoid hitting someone if they got in his way. He’d wait until later this evening, when the crowds had gone. The waves would still be good. In the meantime,
he put up his striped deckchair in front of the hut and sat watching all the people on the beach. He wondered who they were and where they had come from as little dramas unfolded. A teenage boy fussed over his gran, making sure she was comfortable. Two small toddlers fought over a spade until their mother intervened. A young couple stretched out on a rug together, sharing the headphones on an iPod.

His eyes kept straying back to the girl with the ponytail. She was still on her own. Maybe he should go and talk to her, or offer her another drink? If his friends were here, he knew they would be encouraging him, but without them he felt shy. Maybe she wanted to be on her own and didn’t want company? Craig decided in the end he would leave her alone. He picked up his book instead and started to read.

Jenna spread her things out around her, then rubbed some suncream on her arms and the back of her neck. She didn’t want to burn in the heat of the sun. From behind her sunglasses, she examined all the groups of people around her. She made sure she knew exactly who was in each group, and how the dynamics worked. Small families with toddlers would be the best
target. The parents of small children were always distracted.

Jenna had never stolen anything in her life before, but she knew plenty of people who had. Members of her family were always coming home with knocked-off gear or things that had ‘fallen off the back of a lorry’. Her mum was always sticking stuff in her pocket when she was out shopping. It was a way of life for them, but Jenna hadn’t had to stoop that low before.

She felt sick that it had come to this, but she was desperate. Her mum’s words came back to her time and again. ‘You’re no better than the rest of us.’ Well, maybe not, but at least she’d had a go at getting out there and trying to make a better life for herself. Anyway, she reminded herself, this was a one-off. She told herself she was only getting back what had been stolen from her a couple of weeks ago. She knew deep down that was no excuse, of course, but she didn’t know what else to do. It was either this or be thrown out of her room by The Prof on Monday.

Jenna looked around the beach again. She knew all the rules of pickpocketing. When you came from the kind of family she did, you picked up these things along the way. She knew how to identify an easy victim, a ‘mark’, and
the best conditions to steal from them. You had to wait until they were off their guard and weren’t paying attention. The beach was perfect for that, because people were concentrating so hard on having a good time that they forgot to look after their valuables. Of course, it was better to have an accomplice, a partner in crime, but that was out of the question. Jenna could hardly have asked one of her mates to come and help her.

She decided to try the ice-cream queue first. There were three vans parked along the beach, and the searing heat meant that the lines outside them were already long. She waited nearby until she saw a harassed-looking father join the queue with two small children in tow. She slipped in behind him, guessing it was going to be at least ten minutes before they got to the window. By then, everyone would be more hot and bothered than ever.

She examined her target. She could see his wallet in the back pocket of his shorts. He was doing his best to control his two children, who were bawling in fury that their ice cream wasn’t coming sooner. When he bent down to tell off one of them, she whisked the wallet out of his pocket and into her own.

Before the children had stopped arguing, she
left the queue. Anyone would think she was just bored with waiting. She didn’t wait to see the man’s reaction when he discovered his loss. At first he would assume he had dropped his wallet on the walk over, or that he’d forgotten to put it in his pocket. It would probably be at least twenty minutes before he figured out he’d been pickpocketed, and by then he wouldn’t be sure where it had happened. Jenna would be long gone.

Her heart was hammering and her mouth was dry as she made her way back to her towel. She felt slightly sick, too, although she wasn’t sure whether that was a combination of the heat and the fact that she still hadn’t eaten. She opened the wallet, pulled out three twenty-pound notes and a crumpled fiver and put them in her bag. All she had to do now was get rid of the evidence. She walked a couple of hundred yards back up the beach to where six big black bins were regularly emptied throughout the day. She lifted the lid, recoiling slightly from the stench of chip wrappers and dirty nappies baking in the sunshine, and dropped the wallet in. She wasn’t going to touch the credit cards. That wasn’t her level of crime at all, although she knew people who would have found them useful.

So far, so good, she thought. She didn’t want to think about whether she’d ruined the family’s day out. Feeling guilty was not going to help with the task in hand. She went back to her blanket for a few minutes and waited until her heart had stopped hammering. Then she decided to head up the beach in the other direction. She’d spotted a young couple walking down to the water, hand in hand. The girl had very carefully placed her handbag under a towel before they left, as if that was going to fool anyone. Some people, thought Jenna, were very stupid.

Craig woke with a start, realising he’d fallen asleep in the heat of the midday sun. There was sweat trickling down his forehead, and he was dying of thirst. He should probably go back into the hut, into the shade. He sat up and glanced around, mostly to see if anyone had spotted him dribbling while he was asleep. He looked down to the bottom of the bank to see if the girl with the ponytail was still there, but her towel was empty. Her stuff was still there, though, so she had to be around.

He scanned the crowds, looking for her, and thought he could spot her ponytail and white dress further up the beach. He reached down
for the pair of binoculars he kept by him. There were always interesting things to look at – a passing ship, a hang-glider, a bird of prey – and it also meant he could keep an eye on the surfing conditions when the tide was out. At last, he caught sight of the girl through the lenses. Was he being a bit of a stalker? Surely it wasn’t normal, to spy on someone like this, but the girl had fascinated him. He watched her as she walked further up the beach.

A few moments later, Craig couldn’t believe his eyes as she approached someone’s empty rug, reached under a towel, found a bag and took out a purse, all in one fluid movement that took less than five seconds. Then she walked calmly away, back up the beach towards him.

He didn’t know why he was so shocked. After all, he was used to this sort of behaviour. He arrested people like this girl every day of the week in the town centre. Admittedly, they usually worked in gangs rather than on their own. There would be one on lookout, and one causing a distraction. Maybe he was shocked because he viewed Everdene as an escape. He’d built it up in his mind as some sort of romantic hideaway where nothing bad ever happened,
but of course it did. A crowded beach was the perfect place for a petty thief.