Even if she found a job tomorrow morning, she couldn’t get the money she needed in time. Nobody would pay her in advance. There were girls she knew who would know how to get that kind of money quickly. In a seaside town, there were always ways that you could supplement your income. Jenna wasn’t going to take that path. Once you got into that, there was no way out. Anyway, the thought made her skin crawl. If she’d wanted to sell herself, she’d have made a deal with The Prof already . . .
As she felt the music from the pub pound through her body, she began to turn over possibilities in her mind.
Five minutes later, Jenna sat up as an idea occurred to her. Her heart thumped. Was it crazy? It seemed so simple. Of course it was wrong, but in the grand scheme of ‘wrong’, it was way down the scale. There were far, far worse things she could do.
She asked herself which was better – to be straight and penniless, or crooked and in the black, as far as money was concerned? She’d spent enough time already being the former, and it had nothing to recommend it. She’d always had a clear conscience, but you couldn’t eat a strong set of moral values.
The more she thought about it, the more enticing her idea became.
As she went over the details and eventually drifted off to sleep, she told herself she only had to do it once, just once, until she got herself back on her feet.
T
here was nothing more perfect than waking up by the sea and watching the sunrise.
Every time he saw it, Craig couldn’t believe how lucky he was. By six o’clock in the morning, the copper from the Midlands was walking towards the sea with his surfboard tucked under his arms, his footprints in the damp sand the first of the day. He reached the water’s edge.
The white frill of surf had looked like nothing from the hut, but once he got up close he realized the waves were pretty big. He ran straight into the water without stopping. His breath was taken away for a split second by the cold, but he carried on, paddling out behind the waves.
He surfed for nearly an hour. Craig was no expert and he envied the surfers who cut through the water with grace and elegance, as if they were at one with the waves. He knew that came with years of practice. These guys were devoted. They surfed every day, in all conditions. They were fanatics.
He’d heard their tales in the bar often enough. They told him about the surfing hot spots as far away as Hawaii, India and Australia, and their stories inspired him. He admired their devil-may-care attitude to life. They lived to surf. That was it. They picked up work when they could, where they could. They didn’t worry about anything else. They had no responsibilities.
That kind of mindset didn’t really suit him, being in the police. Until recently, Craig figured he had the best of both worlds. Where were these guys going to be in their old age? None of them would have a pension, just their memories. It was only now that he’d started to have doubts, to begin thinking differently, that he wondered about whether he’d really got it right.
Craig had given everything to his career. He loved his home town, and he’d wanted to contribute to its future. He wanted to make it a safe place, to protect his fellow townspeople from harm, to give them hope. Someone had once given him hope, after all, which was why he was lucky enough to be here now, enjoying the crystal-clear water.
By the time he got back to the beach hut with his surfboard, the early-morning sun had nearly dried him off after his dip in the sea. He pulled on his jeans and walked up the beach to the cafe in the arcade, taking a table outside. He ordered a surfer’s breakfast of bacon, sausage, egg, mushrooms, tomato, beans, hash browns, toast and a pot of tea.
A guy he knew vaguely, Rusty, pulled up a chair next to him and sat down. That was the great thing about Everdene. You didn’t see someone for months, but when you bumped into them, it was as if you’d seen them yesterday.
‘Hey, buddy, how’s it going?’
Rusty was from South Africa and was a photographer. He took pictures of the sea, blew them up onto canvas and sold them out of a camper van on the front. The tourists loved these shots, which funded Rusty’s lifestyle. He didn’t have to answer to anyone. He’d helped Craig out when he’d started surfing last summer. And Craig knew he would never be as good as Rusty could be in the water.
‘Good, thanks,’ replied Craig. ‘Though I’ve had a rough time of it the past few weeks.’
He didn’t know if Rusty would even remember he was a copper.
Rusty nodded. He looked up at the sky. ‘Bad times, man.’
His hair was bleached blond by the sun. His skin was tanned, and his bright blue eyes shone out. Craig felt a twinge of envy at his lifestyle. Rusty would never have experienced the stress that Craig went through on a daily basis because of his job. The dryness in your mouth because you didn’t know how things were going to turn out, or whether you were going to make the right decisions. And even if you did, whether you were going to make a difference.
And even if you did make a difference, whether it was then going to backfire.
Craig sighed. He didn’t want to turn into a cliché of the disillusioned cop.
‘So what have you been up to?’ he asked.
Rusty took a tiny roll-up cigarette out of a tin in his pocket and lit it. He took a drag, sucked in the smoke, then blew it in a thin stream up in the air. Then he began to tell Craig what he’d been doing. He’d spent two months in Goa, then a month in Ireland, playing at festivals with some friends who had a band. Now he was back in Everdene to spend August teaching surfing to the tourists until the days grew short.
Craig put his head back and let the sun warm up the skin on his face as he listened. Rusty’s life was as far away from his own as you could get. Every minute of Craig’s life was accounted for. He didn’t have a choice from the second he woke up.
Did he envy Rusty? He had very little, just his camper van, his surfboard and some worn and faded clothes, but he took opportunities as they presented themselves. Craig thought of his one-bedroomed apartment by the waterfront. The furniture he’d filled it with was all bought and paid for. He had a car, a wardrobe full of clothes and a top-of-the-range entertainment system. They were all the rewards of a tough job. Yet somehow the thought that nothing was going to change was constantly nagging at him. In the future, Craig would get a promotion, then probably a wife and kids, then maybe a house. There was nothing wrong with any of that, but would he ever see the world, like Rusty? Would he ever wake up in the morning and think, ‘What now? Where next?’ Who knew?
Even when he was down here at Everdene, he knew he was on borrowed time. It wouldn’t be long before it was time to get back into the car and drive up the motorway. Then he would have to get back into his uniform and clock on. He’d be out in his police squad car, patrolling the streets, never knowing how much trouble the day was going to bring. He rarely came home feeling he’d done a good job. It wasn’t that he was shocked by what people did, far from it. It was because he knew why they did it. The saying, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ was often in his thoughts.
Next morning, Jenna woke at seven and listened to the sound of seagulls circling. She knew they would be feasting on the packets of leftover chips and kebabs dropped in the streets. They were scavengers to the end, those seagulls. She lay for a moment looking at the ceiling. There was a huge brown stain in the middle of it that seemed to bulge. She lived in fear of the roof caving in, imagining the bloke upstairs falling through the floor and landing on top of her, leaving a man-shaped hole.
She gave herself five minutes to decide whether she was going to go through with her plan. Even though it would mean she had failed. She had been so determined to prove herself.
‘You think you’re better than I am, don’t you?’ This had been her mother’s parting shot.
‘Yes, I do,’ Jenna had told her, and her mum had just laughed. She could hear the cackle now, fuelled by fags and cheap bottles of supermarket own-brand vodka. Her mother’s bloke went and bought a bottle of vodka every morning from the corner shop, and by four o’clock in the afternoon the pair of them would have polished it off, just in time to head to the pub.
Of course she thought she was better than that.
Jenna had dreamed that, if she got away from the grimy house where she had been brought up, she could make something of herself. She had to escape the lazy, drunken woman who had given birth to her and four other kids. Her mum had never been a proper mother to any of them. If anything, they had to look after her. There were days when Jenna hadn’t gone to school because her mum was so drunk that she was scared to leave her.
Jenna could remember going back to her friends’ houses sometimes. She had looked on, wide-eyed, as their mothers fussed over them, made them tea and asked about their day. She had sat in the bedrooms of her schoolfriends, with their crisply ironed duvet covers and matching curtains, and fluffy dressing gowns and slippers. They had clean towels hanging in the bathroom and toilet paper on a holder. There were proper mealtimes when the whole family sat round the table. They had fathers who came home and hugged them. They had fathers who would never raise a voice, let alone a hand, to their wife or kids.
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 realized 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.