“Daddy.” She pauses. Now she comes to it, she doesn’t know how to begin.
“Whatever you need, sweetheart.”
She frowns. “What do you mean?”
“In all the years since you left home, you’ve never once called until today. Therefore, you must need something.”
“But we speak every week,” she objects.
“No, darling. Your mother and I call you every week. You don’t call us. And as younevercall, so it must be something important. And if it is important to you, then there is no argument.”
Jasmine is nonplussed. In all her rehearsals, she had not foreseen the conversation going this way. She feels a need to get the discussion under control. “It is important, but it’s also enormous. And not without danger. So you can’t just blindly agree to it!”
“Stop a minute.” Her father’s face fills the screen as he leans forward but his tone is incredulous. “Are you in trouble?”
“It’s not me. Well, only peripherally.”
“Explain!”
So Jasmine finally gets to give the speech she has rehearsed. She explains how she met Natasha Smith and her children, how she had offered the woman help, how Natasha had come seeking that help. She describes the night Adam Smith turned up outside her apartment and how they found the tracker, and she hears her father’s breathing change – shorter, heavier.
She presses on. She tells him about Adam Smith turning up at the refuge and Natasha’s desperate flight with nowhere to go. And finally, she tells him why Adam could find his wife, why it is so imperative Natasha find somewhere safe, far away.
“He threatened to kill their kids if she left. You know as well as I do it’s happened before.”
“It’s rare …” Her father purses his lips. “But it’s not unheard of. And he’s a police officer?”
“An inspector.”
Her father makes a gruff noise. “It does make things a lot harder. She’ll need to stay under the radar for a bit until she’s got some legal protections in place. But make no mistake, that might not be straightforward. He could accuse her of deliberately alienating the children.”
“Would that matter?”
“If the court believed him, they might take the children off her and give them to him?”
“But he’s threatened to kill them!” Jasmine cries.
“So she says, but has she got proof? That gives me an idea. I happen to know a really good firm of private investigators. I might ask them to have a little poke around. See what they can uncover. It’s amazing what people put on social media and chat groups.”
“You’ll help?” Jasmine sags against someone’s garden wall in relief.
“I told you at the start, sweetheart. Whatever you need.”
“A job for her, as well?”
“The baby doesn’t make it easy. She’s probably won’t be able to afford childcare, but I was talking to your Aunty Mary the other day. You know she’s running kennels now for her rescue greyhounds. She needs some help walking them. Your friend could do that if she put the baby in one of those carrier things. It’s only part-time, but it’s a start.”
“A home?”
“One of the east gate house tenants is moving out in a fortnight. We were going to renovate before letting it out again. If Mrs Smith is prepared to live in it while the work is ongoing, we could do it for a peppercorn rent. Long-term, we’d need to sort something else out but we can deal with that then. I guess she can stay at the Hall for a fortnight.”
“So she can come to you today? Can you take her immediately?”
Her father chuckles. “Your mother will have a fit at the short notice, but yes, she can come today.”
“Thank you, Daddy.” Then she says the words that haven’t crossed her lips for a decade. “I love you.”
“Love you too, sweetheart.” And he is gone.
