Desperate act of a troubled girl
It clearly wasn't. Within days, an argument was sparked between Sufiah and her father.
"They had a row and I heard Farooq tell her to shut up, then within minutes she had packed her bags and was out the door," Halimahton recalls.
Astonishingly, she has had no verbal contact with her daughter since. Voicemails and emails passed unanswered, the only contact a terse email, sent in August 2005, in which Sufiah revealed she and her husband were separated.
She wanted no further contact with any member of her family under any circumstances.
"I felt numb," Halimahton says.
"I didn't understand why she felt this way. I always thought her quarrel was with her father, not us.
"But I knew it was pointless to fight her, I had to respect her decision. I could only hope she would come back to us."
So far that hasn't happened.
Instead, Sufiah has gone down the most depressing path imaginable, reduced to selling her body to strangers, presumably to fund an economics course she is pursuing in London.
It seems the final desperate act of a profoundly troubled girl, who can only have been further distressed by news of her father's recent misdemeanours.
Halimahton is as bewildered by her husband's conviction as she is her daughter's behaviour.
"At first I thought there must have been a mistake," she says.
"There was never anything to suggest..." she blinks.
"I thought these two girls weren't telling the truth. But after he pleaded guilty, I had to accept they were. I have to accept he has confessed."
And without Farooq in the house, Halimahton hopes Sufiah might feel able to return, and that she might finally be able to prise from her daughter quite how her upbringing came to wreak such psychological damage.
For now, however, it seems the brilliant little girl who could do jigsaw puzzles as a baby remains hopelessly incapable of pulling together the pieces of her own fractured life. -- DM
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