‘Orla’s visions had started a good while before that,’ I argued. ‘The first one was in the Australian Rangelands. On a trip to visit her maternal grandfather who ran a sheep farm just outside a place called Bourke. She collapsed into what appeared to be a dead faint. She wasn’t able to feel any kind of external stimulation. She started talking – prophesying – about an extraordinary contagion, an epidemic, which would infect the entire planet …’

‘A lethal disease?’ Mrs Meadows asked, eyes widening. ‘Like … like Aids?’

‘Not lethal, no. Almost a … a good virus, I suppose. She said people would infect themselves. Voluntarily. She said it would change the face of the world – as we then knew it – for all time.’

Mrs Meadows scowled.

‘Of course they initially thought she had heatstroke, even Orla herself …’

‘Although prophesying a terrible virus—’ Mrs Meadows shrugged, not really buying it.

‘People also say that she predicted the Sylmar earthquake,’ I interrupted. ‘She talked repeatedly during another trance about seismic activity in the San Fernando Valley. But when the quake happened in the February of the year before she died – 1971 – she insisted that the quake she had seen – or been shown in a vision – was much, much larger and more powerful and that the aftershocks would be felt …’

While I was speaking there was a crashing sound from the neighbouring room as someone walked into the fireguard and then swore. It was Sorcha, of course (who else?).

‘Sorcha?’ I turned, scowling.

She appeared at my shoulder, with her camera.

‘What type of idiot keeps a rabbit under a fireguard?’ she demanded, rubbing furiously at her shin with her spare hand, and then, ‘Are you’se two talking about my beautiful little angel Orla by any chance?’

Mrs Meadows nodded.

‘Orla loved her daddy, so she did.’ Sorcha passed me her camera (it was recording) and indicated, brusquely, that I should film her with it. ‘As God is my witness, that dear child would never, never grass on her own father!’

‘What if she confessed something to the priest – in confidence – and then …’ Mrs Meadows persisted, ‘… I don’t know, they cooked up some kind of a scheme between them to try and warn people off?’

Sorcha was looking around the room. She reached out her hands – wearing an expression of great reverence – and touched the bedside table and the lampshade, then sat down on the bed next to Mrs Meadows and put her arm around her shoulder (much to Mrs Meadows’s evident dismay), spreading the fingers of her other hand across the counterpane.

‘This here was the very bed where my beautiful Orla breathed her last upon this sorry earth …’ She spoke straight to camera, indicating (brusquely, again) that I angle it correctly (I naturally obliged; Sorcha, at the best of times, is difficult to resist).

‘I always feel my little girl’s spirit in this room,’ she sighed, squeezing Mrs Meadows. ‘It’s a holy place, so it is …’ She gazed down at Mrs Meadows’s skirt as she spoke. ‘Is that a suede skirt you have on you there?’