Read When The Devil Drives for Free Online

would have wanted. It was a kind gesture but not one so munificent as to make her feel duty-bound to accept. By Angela’s admission, the business was almost worthless except as a going concern and, having been a one-man operation prior to Jasmine’s brief recruitment, it wasn’t going to be going at all without her. The office was rented, so there was no property tied into it, and other than a van that might be worth two or three grand at trade in, the only material assets were barely worth liquidating. There was an ageing PC that most third-world charities would turn up their noses at, particularly given thatit lacked an operating system due to the hard disc having been completely erased by the conspirators responsible for Jim’s death. There was a range of surveillance equipment and covert recording devices that had probably cost a few grand to amass, but for which the second-hand market was extremely limited. Like the business itself, they were only worth something if they were being put to use.
    Angela didn’t put her on the spot. She gave Jasmine a few weeks to consider the offer, aware of her truncated dramatic training and how heavily those years weighed in the vocational stakes against her brief few months as Jim’s barely – or rarely – competent assistant. Jasmine was equally decorous in saying she would take those weeks to mull it over, when her instinctive response was to tell Angela to terminate the lease on the office and stick all its contents on eBay.
    However, something quite unexpected beset Jasmine at Jim’s funeral, as it had also done at the commemorative services held in the wake of the Ramsay case. People were saying thank you to her. Grown-up people, people generations older than her, were taking her hands in theirs and offering often tearful gratitude in acknowledgment of what she had done for them. Since her mother’s death – and throughout the months preceding its inevitability – Jasmine had spent so much time feeling afraid, vulnerable, abandoned: a lost and scared little girl.
    When she was eight years old, one Saturday afternoon she came back from playing at a friend’s house to find her mum’s front door locked and no answer to the bell, no matter how many times she tried it in her growing, tear-streaked desperation. What she most recalled was the feeling of rising panic giving way to cold dread as she realised that she didn’t know where her mum had gone, it never having occurred to her that her mum could be anywhere other than at home in the flat waiting to welcome her inside. It didn’t – simply wouldn’t – cross her mind that Mum might have nipped out to the shops, nor did it strike her that Mum had been expecting her back at five as usual, when in fact Jasmine had returned closer to quarter-past four, cutting her visit short because Rachel’s annoying younger cousin had turned up and ruined their game.
    All she knew was that her mum wasn’t there, and it utterlyterrified her. She had stood at the door in a tearful blur, feeling helpless. Theirs was a basement flat with its entrance down a short flight of steps beneath street level, so she was enclosed in her own isolated little courtyard of fear and misery, no neighbours noticing and coming down to offer help. Eventually she pulled herself together enough to come up with a plan of action, which was to return to Rachel’s house, where there were other trusted adults. She felt reluctant to implement this plan, however, as it seemed to cement the idea that her mum had gone away and left her; as though by embarking on the journey back to Rachel’s house she was taking her first steps into a world without her mum.
    After Mum’s death, that combination of rising panic and cold dread was something she felt almost every day, burned into her emotional memory and anchored to that specific incident. She became that terrified eight-year-old over and over again as she stared beyond the precipice into this world of isolation