She called her cousin Angela, Jim’s eldest, whom Jasmine had always deemed most likely to have a nose in Jim’s business. She posed the query neutrally, disguising her concern, playing up her own scatterbrained disorganisation as the most likely reason she didn’t know where Jim was.

Angela reported that she hadn’t spoken to her dad since the preceding weekend. She didn’t seem concerned, but then her dad not being around when he was supposed to be was a circumstance Angela had grown up with.

Putting down the handset and being once again confronted with interminable silence, Jasmine decided she could no longer tolerate this state of limbo. She had to do something, take some form of action, to dispel this feeling of being helpless.

She got in her car and drove across to Hyndland. In the early-afternoon traffic it took about twenty minutes to reach Jim’s address, the time of day also contributing to her unaccustomed ease of finding a space to park.

As she turned off the engine and glanced across at the door to Jim’s close, she felt sick. She could see so vividly what might be about to unfold. She would walk up there to the second floor and ring the bell, then, when there was no answer, she would peer through the letter box. That was when she would see him, maybe just an arm or a leg, motionless, dead on the carpet. She didn’t think she could take that. She had seen Mum slip away by small increments, fading from normal life to exist only among drips and monitors. Mum was still warm the last time Jasmine touched her. She still took comfort from that. If Jim had been lying there for days, then no, she really didn’t think she could handle it. Somebody had to, though, and she needed to know.

She closed her car door, looking again at the unfamiliar plethora of available parking spaces, and realised the purpose of her visit was moot. She wouldn’t find Jim in the flat, dead or alive, as his car wasn’t here. Just to be sure, she took a walk back and forth along Jim’s street and then a good hundred yards around the corner, in case he had last come home at a busy time and been forced to park further afield, but his Peugeot was nowhere to be seen. Grateful for this minor relief, she decided to check out the flat anyway for what little information she might be able to glean.