‘I couldn’t get what Saranya Ji told you out of my mind and, as I was going to sleep last night, I thought that first we should look for someone named Billy Jackson. We could check records, you know, births, deaths, marriages, see where and when anyone of his name lived. It might give us some clues. We could look for Grace too. You never know what we might find and where it might lead us.’

‘Good idea Marcia,’ said Pete. ‘So much history is on the Internet now, census records and so on. It shouldn’t be too difficult.’

I groaned. ‘Please, don’t encourage her.’

‘I’d like to do it,’ said Pete. ‘You know I love stuff like that. A challenge.’ It was true: he was a closet computer geek and was never happier than when researching history or suchlike on the web. ‘I traced my father’s family back to the seventeen hundreds on one of the ancestry sites.’ He got out his laptop. ‘In fact, I could start looking now while we’re waiting.’

‘Oh please don’t. When you were looking you were tracing back a family tree, your family tree, not tracking down someone that a clairvoyant told you that you might have been in a past life.’

‘What have we to lose by looking up the names that Saranya Ji gave you? It will be so easy to do. I have subscriptions to all the main sites and know my way around. I could put in the names and see what comes up.’

‘Please, please don’t do it on my behalf. Don’t waste your time.’

‘Someone has to do it and we know you won’t. Pete is a whiz at it all now,’ said Marcia. ‘The woman, what was her name? The surname?’

‘Harris. Grace Harris. A name Saranya Ji made up. I was thinking about it as I fell asleep too. She could have plucked any names out of the air. You probably will find them if you look on your ancestry sites; there will be loads of people who lived with those names, just like there are hundreds of Saranya Jis on the Net.’

‘Ah,’ said Marcia, ‘so you are interested. You looked her up.’

‘Only to see if there were any reviews saying she was a charlatan. You will find a Grace Harris and a Billy Jackson, thousands of them probably, and not only in the UK but all over the place – Australia, America. It won’t mean anything.’

‘Didn’t she say where they lived?’ asked Marcia.

‘She said London and that it was in the Second World War.’

‘See, that narrows it down already.’