I would like to be able to say that sometimes the unexpected catches me out in the middle of my operations but that would be lying. I’m an adept at the horoscope, the major and minor arcana, tea-leaves and coffee-grounds, the crystal ball and automatic writing, scrying of all kinds, divination with wires, pendulums, crystals and the naked hand. Your hand, too, is a map I can read from birth to death. I have seen auras like electrical clouds about the bodies of wealthy women and heard the voice of a man’s long-dead sister apologize for an incident in the garden involving a doll and a rubber hose. The answers to all your questions bounce in the air like balloons. I just pluck them out at will. Cynics and journalists, what do they know? No one pays them for comfort. We live, we die. For most it’s a struggle for love and money from one shortening year to the next. The unexpected is always predictable - except in my own case, for once, I remember, an old lady in Hampstead I’d known for years, so keen on the cards on a Sunday night, left half her fortune to me in her will. The rest she bequeathed to her stinking cats. Now I hadn’t been expecting that.