Imelda sat down and once again the spectres of past clients returned to haunt her, as though they had been disturbed along with the dust that Billie continued to sweep from the shelves and brush from the curtains. Their voices whispered in Imelda’s ears and their faces floated through her mind like images in her crystal ball. She had shared their hopes, their fears, their excitement and their despair, and vicarious though these feelings might have been for her, she had not always managed to protect herself from their onslaught. Her emotional armour had been dented, split and occasionally breached and she would always bear the scars. Billie’s hand on her shoulder broke her reverie.

‘It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.’

Imelda placed her hand over Billie’s and smiled.

‘So long as you promise not to tell.’

‘It’s where I used to keep things for my clients – like a safety deposit box.’

‘But why did they want to keep them here?’

Imelda raised her hands and gestured to the walls around her.

‘This place is a confessional. People come to me for answers, for advice, for reassurance. But sometimes their questions are inextricably linked to confessions – an unavoidable quid pro quo – and they are prepared to trade their secrets for answers. For others, their secrets are too onerous to bear alone, but too dangerous or damaging for them to share with friends and family. Once people have learned to trust my cards and my crystal ball, they trust Madame Burova too. Here, alone with me inside the safety of these four walls, secrets roll off the tongue as easily as iced vodka slips down the throat. And they are sacrosanct. You were one of the secrets that I kept.’

‘Did my mother visit you here?’

‘I can’t answer that, Billie, but I can tell you here is where I kept the things that she wanted you to have, the bank account details and the photograph.’

Imelda got up and began searching with one hand inside the hole in the wall. ‘And there’s something else.’ She pulled out a bundle of photographs that were tied together with a piece of faded ribbon and handed them to Billie. Imelda watched as Billie leafed through the images of herself as a baby cuddling a teddy bear, a toddler taking her first steps, a schoolgirl in a pristine new uniform, and a proud graduate in a cap and gown.

‘I don’t understand.’ Now it was Billie who looked as though she’d seen a ghost.