Clairvoyant Sharon Neill - who will be bringing her show to Bolton on Monday - is so highly regarded that she has worked with the police on murder investigations. Emily Rawlins spoke to her . . .

THE familiar opening credits to EastEnders rang out, but Sharon Neill was paying no attention to the television.

In front of the blind student's eyes, a different set of images appeared: A silver car, trees, a windowless building. The initials "CE".

With a shock, she realised they were connected to the news bulletin she had just heard about an abducted four-year-old girl, Marie Payne.

What should she do? If she went to the police, they would think she was crazy. But she decided she had to try. She telephoned Scotland Yard and told them what she had "seen".

To her surprise, the woman on the phone calmly took her details and thanked her for her call.

A few days later, two detectives came to her college to interview her, saying she had known details about the case which had not been released to the public.

Tragically, it was too late to save Marie. Her body was eventually found in a bare concrete building in Epping Forest, London.

She had been sexually assaulted and murdered.

But police managed to track down the killer, and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. His name was Colin Evans.

Amazingly, it is not unknown for the police to co-operate with a medium on an investigation such as this. Sharon claims to have worked on around 70 cases, with forces across Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland as well as in her native Northern Ireland.

She is unable to say exactly how helpful her evidence has been, as the police rarely keep her informed of the outcome of investigations.

But she claims that, after initially being the one to contact the police, her reputation grew to the point where they started to approach her for help.

A spokeswoman for Greater Manchester Police said she could not recall an example in which a medium's evidence had made a significant difference to a case.

But she stressed that they would keep an open mind if they were offered such assistance.

"If a clairvoyant came to us, we would listen to what they had to say," she said. "We would never dismiss anyone with information about a case."

Sharon, now aged 39, recognises that her police work is of interest to people.

She cannot fail to have grasped how this has served to authenticate her work - it is mentioned prominently in the publicity for her tour as well as on her website www.sharonneill.com.

But when I spoke to her, she was keen to play it down, saying she has chosen to concentrate on the other aspects of her work.

This change in focus has come about mainly because, she says, she was getting inundated with requests for help on unsolved cases.

In addition, there was the element of danger - particularly in Northern Ireland - in being seen to collaborate with the police in bringing killers to justice.

And, from an emotional point of view, "seeing" attacks from the victim's point of view was something she found extremely distressing.

"I've known what it's like to be abducted, raped, stabbed and shot," she said. "It's terrible to experience."

She is keen to devote more time instead to training other people to become mediums.

She is reluctant to see her vocation as a gift, preferring to believe that everyone has the ability to hear messages from the dead - it's just a question of tuning in to the right frequency and learning how to listen.

"As far as I am concerned, we are all here to learn. Above all, I try to teach people that it shouldn't be a frightening thing."

She is full of enthusiasm for touring, describing a show which veers from the humourous to the emotional.

And she is excited by the swift sale of tickets for her first ever show in Bolton.

"Whenever I go to the North, it's always fantastic," she said.

"In London, I find the audiences a bit stiff - they're hard to interact with."

She tries to meet as many of the audience as possible after a show, and says many come to her with tales of how they were unconvinced at the beginning, but have been won over.

A major factor in swaying people is that Sharon has been blind from birth and claims to be the only practising blind medium.

TV personality Derren Brown has made programmes demonstrating how it is possible to appear to communicate with spirits through psychological skills, such as an acute awareness of body language.

But her blindness means this is not a technique open to Sharon.

When asked whether she believes there are quacks in her industry, she answered defensively: "There are quacks in any industy. There will always be people who are just out to make money. But I do it because I love my job - I love helping people."

By way of proof, she points out that she charges only £20 for a reading, which can be done over the phone - although there is currently about a year's waiting list.

But she accepts that there will always be sceptics.

"People are entitled to believe what they want to believe," she said. "I don't believe it's my job to convert the sceptics. They will believe when the right time comes."

And she says that even she was "100 per cent sceptical" about spiritualism while she was growing up.

Her conversion came when she moved to England from Northern Ireland at the age of 16 to attend a college for blind people.

As part of a sociology thesis on comparative religions, she attended her first seance.

She said: "I knew what the messages were going to be before the medium read them out - it was almost as if I was being given a script.

"I realised the communicators were coming to me first - then, because I had no idea what it was all about, going back to the person on stage."

On another occasion, her grandmother, who died when Sharon was 14, appeared in front of her to tell her not to worry about a forthcoming college assessment.

Sharon claims she "saw" her as a sighted person would do, and described what she had seen to her mother with astonishing accuracy.

"I described the striped dress granny had worn and the colour of her eyes," she said.

"Mum said, 'You've got her down to a T. How did you know?'"

For anyone brought up in the modern world - where everything must have an explanation and everything must be questioned - listening to Sharon opens up a world which requires a huge leap of faith.

But whatever your views on spiritualism, Sharon - who has also trained as a counsellor - does seem genuinely convinced that her work brings a ray of happiness into the lives of bereaved people.

Back home in Belfast, she has become something of a celebrity, but remains unfazed by the attention.

"I will stop and talk to anybody," she said. "It's a bit like being a doctor - you expect to be asked questions wherever you go. But these are the people who are paying for my tickets and giving me support. Answering their questions is the one way I can give something back to them."

l Sharon Neill performs at Bolton Albert Halls at 8pm on Monday. Call 01204 334400 for tickets.