This week ‘Madame’ Vasso, Fergie’s Greek clairvoyant with the blue pyramid, is starting up a new telephone helpline service. She has 10 Mercury Premium Rate service lines on which, for 48p a minute, she will explain how to use crystals and pyramids, and give advice on loneliness, anxiety, love, health and money.

She says she’s doing it ‘to help people’. She also intends to start a ‘candle’ phone line soon. ‘To tell people how to use candles for problems with love and depression.’ How do you use a candle for love? ‘If people are very depressed, you should light the candle and say Our Father’s prayer.’ Vasso will make 15 per cent of the 48p from each phone call. ‘Nothing,’ she calls it.

This is the tale of a woman who was launched from basement obscurity to international fame in February when the papers carried a picture of her hugging her client Fergie. The story of a psychic who was going quietly about her business in Islington’s Chapel Market where she charged £10 for a tarot reading, but who now charges £50 for a reading at home and is offering an international telephone service – plus spiritual healing, hypnosis, Greek herbal medication, healing with ‘pure wax candles’ and crystals. ‘My clients,’ she says in her heavy Greek accent, ‘are professional, business people and high profile.’

Born Vissiliki Kortesis, she is actually only called Vasso. ‘Just because I’m foreign,’ she says, high-pitched and indignant. ‘People should have more respect and not treat me as if I’m in a circus and call me Madame.’ When the names of Vasso and Fergie were first linked, Vasso said she was treating the Duchess, whom she met a year ago at the house of another healer, for a bad neck and back. ‘She loves him very much,’ Vasso commented on the Yorks’s marriage. ‘They’re very happy together.’

Twenty-four hours after the announcement of the royal split, it was reported that Vasso was driven to Sunninghill Park in a chauffeured Range Rover. ‘I have nothing to say about that,’ she says now.

But does she still see the Duchess? ‘Don’t try to ask me questions. I will not answer you,’ she replies. ‘She’s a friend of mine, put it that way.’ How often does she see her? ‘You see friends whenever you feel like it.’

Born in Nafpaktos 54 years ago, Vasso is one of five children and her psychic powers were first noticed when she was just two years old – she saved her parents from a bomb on the bridge to their village. ‘I started to talk and said, ‘Run, run, run’. A few minutes later the Second World War began and the bridge was blown up.’

Then there was the time when her brother tried to board his ship. ‘I told him not to and he didn’t go. Later, the ship sank and all of the others died.’

She started healing when she was just five years old, using special heated medical glasses on the body and rubbing olive oil into her grandmother’s rib cage. Her grandmother was also a healer: ‘She used to mend bones not with plaster but with green soap and white egg.’

She left school when she was 12 and, apart from a brief spell as a seamstress and knitter, she has always worked in the field of the paranormal. She came to England 28 years ago.

Vasso claims she has healed herself of a bump on her wrist (‘I have photographs of it’) which the doctors had wanted to remove surgically. ‘I have also healed people who were crippled and they have been able to walk. I have healed people who have been to hospital expecting to die and a few days later they were fine. I have helped people give up drugs.’

We go upstairs to her room with the blue pyramid and diplomas of mysticism, a bronze of Hippocrates and a Druid calendar on the wall. She sits under her pyramid to absorb the energy of an Egyptian god whose mother was a sphinx. The dimensions of the pyramid are said to have power and significance.

She gives me some healing with hands that smell faintly of onions. ‘Can you feel energy?’ No. ‘You’re blocking it because you are testing me.’ She then prepares herself for my Tarot reading. ‘When were you born?’ September 24. ‘Ah, Virgo.’ No, Libra. ‘You had abortion.’ No. ‘You have trouble with your left leg.’ No. ‘You look like your father.’ No, I look like my mother.

But, to be fair, when she actually does the tarot reading, she comes into her own. She reveals things I haven’t told her about, things about my career and my romantic life, with great accuracy, She does not seem to enjoy her new-found fame. ‘It has made my life very difficult. I’m not free. People think I’m rich, when I’m not. I can’t go to the market, because I’m frightened. Maybe people think I have money, they can mug me or something.’

We’re sitting in what was her former council flat, her spotlessly clean two-storey Islington maisonette on a noisy road in a rundown part of town. In the sitting room are Greek photos, a picture of the Acropolis, a quarry-full of healing crystals and a takeaway-sized blue pyramid on the table beside my tape recorder.

We talk about money. Her financial circumstances must have changed post Fergie, although her home is not that of a rich person. ‘I don’t think you have the right to ask me such private questions. I don’t make money. Just very, very little. I’m not a rich person.’

A ‘one-parent family’ (twice married and divorced), she lives in her flat with her son. She bought her home for £36,000 and has now increased her mortgage to £90,000. ‘I borrow money from the bank to live. I don’t make enough money to pay the mortgage.’ So how much does she make? ‘I suppose in a week I average £250 or £300, not more than that.’ She says she sees five to 10 people a day.

She doesn’t, however, charge people for healing. ‘Anyone who charges is not a healer. Healing is coming from God,’ says this Orthodox Greek believer who goes to church every Sunday. ‘It is natural and you have to be in service. It is not to sell. If you sell the healing energy, I don’t believe you will keep it.’ She says that money isn’t important to her. ‘I am interested in helping people. I don’t believe in material things.’