The Last Reading
A Story of Unfortunate Accuracy
I — IN WHICH WE MEET OUR HEROINE
Morag Finch had been getting it wrong for twenty-three years, and she was very good at it. Not wrong in the way that ruins reputations — wrong in the way that keeps them. She had an instinct, finely honed by decades of practice, for missing the precise truth while gesturing warmly in its general direction. Her predictions were like horoscopes written by someone who had once, briefly, met a person: comfortingly vague, structurally plausible, and essentially useless as a navigational tool.
She operated from a converted Victorian terrace on Abbots Lane in the market town of Hexbury, where the sign above the door read Morag Finch — Tarot Consultations — By Appointment, and below that, in smaller lettering which she had never quite got round to removing: Also: Palm Reading, Rune Casting, and Reasonable Rates for Parties. The window was dressed with a velvet curtain of ecclesiastical purple and a hand-painted Eye of Providence that had, over the years, developed a slight squint.
Her clients came for the tea and the listening, mostly. Morag understood this. She was a gifted listener in the way that some people are gifted singers. She made it seem effortless, when in fact she was doing a tremendous amount of very careful work. She leaned forward at precisely the right moments. She made small, understanding sounds. She asked questions that began with ‘And how did that make you feel?’ and waited, with every appearance of genuine interest, for the answer. The cards she laid out were largely decorative, a framework upon which the client could hang the things they already knew but needed someone else to tell them back.
“The Tower,” she would say, turning over a dramatic image of a lightning-struck building ejecting tiny people into the void, “suggests a period of disruption.” And her client, who had just described losing their job, their marriage, and their ability to keep houseplants alive, would nod slowly, as if this were a revelation of staggering profundity. Morag charged forty-five pounds for the hour. It was, everyone agreed, worth every penny.
THE CARD: THE FOOL — REVERSED
“You are standing at a threshold,” she told Gerald Butterwick in March, who was indeed standing at a threshold, specifically, the threshold of deciding whether to tell his wife about the conservatory extension he’d had quoted without consulting her. “Trust the journey,” said Morag, who had no idea about the conservatory. Gerald nodded. He told his wife. The conservatory was built. It leaked. The marriage survived. Morag took no credit.
II — IN WHICH THINGS BEGIN TO GO WRONG
(BY WHICH WE MEAN: RIGHT)
It started on a Tuesday in October, which is when most things that subsequently cause tremendous problems tend to start. A woman called Debbie Hartshorne came in wanting to know whether her ex-husband Barry was lying about his redundancy payment. Morag laid out the cards with her customary theatrical deliberateness and turned over the Seven of Swords.
“Deception,” she said. “Hidden information. Something —” she paused here, because a peculiar sensation had arrived in the back of her skull. It was rather like the feeling one gets when a word is on the tip of the tongue, but larger, and considerably more specific — “something concealed in a blue folder. In a filing cabinet. Second drawer.”
She had not intended to say this. It had simply arrived, fully formed, the way a hiccup arrives: involuntarily, and with some inconvenience.
Debbie stared at her.
There was, as it transpired, a blue folder. In a filing cabinet. Second drawer. It contained evidence that Barry had received a redundancy payment of forty-seven thousand pounds, of which he had declared eleven.
Morag sat with this development for some time after Debbie left, looking at her cards with a new and deeply unwelcome suspicion.
THE CARD: THE HIGH PRIESTESS
She turned it over again and again that evening, alone. The High Priestess gazed back at her from between her pillars with an expression that Morag could only describe as insufferably smug.
The next client was a nervous young man who wanted to know whether he should invest in his friend’s cryptocurrency venture. Morag laid out three cards, opened her mouth to deliver her standard observation about Mercury being in a transitional phase, and instead heard herself say: “His name isn’t really Kevin and he’s currently in Malaga.”
The young man lost no money that week. He did, however, lose a friend, which he would later decide was the better outcome.
III — THE UNFORTUNATE BUSINESS OF THE HORSES
By November, Morag had become deeply reluctant to turn over any card at all. She had taken to stalling, pouring tea with geological slowness, rearranging her crystals, enquiring at length about her clients’ journeys — in hopes that the information would remain where it was rather than arriving through her mouth like an unwanted guest at a party she hadn’t organised.
It did not remain where it was.
During a reading for a retired insurance assessor named Trevor, the Knight of Wands produced, uninvited, a complete winner for the two-fifteen at Kempton Park. Trevor, who had not mentioned horses and had come about his daughter’s choice of boyfriend, sat very still for a moment.
“Thunder’s Legacy,” Morag repeated, helplessly. “Fourteen to one. I’m so sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”
Trevor placed a twenty-pound each-way bet on the way home. Thunder’s Legacy won by three lengths. Trevor returned the following Tuesday with a bottle of Scotch and a look of reverent terror that Morag found, frankly, worse than scepticism.
Word travels in small towns with the speed and enthusiasm of a motivated rumour, and Hexbury was a small town with excellent rumour infrastructure. By December, Morag had a waiting list of seventeen people, and four of them had mentioned horses in their enquiry emails despite the website clearly stating she specialised in personal guidance and life transitions.
She raised her prices to seventy pounds. The list grew longer.
IV — THE ROBBERS AND THE DETECTIVE
In January, things became considerably less amusing. A client — a Mrs Geraldine Pryce, who had come about her kitchen extension and was therefore an unwitting participant — received, in the middle of a spread about timing and investment, a description of two men, a blue Transit van, a compromised CCTV camera, and the precise location of the NatWest on Market Street at eleven-fifteen on the following Thursday morning.
Morag stared at the Five of Pentacles she had just turned over. The Five of Pentacles depicts two ragged figures in the snow beneath a lit church window, which traditionally symbolises hardship and exclusion and has nothing whatsoever to do with armed robbery.
“I need to make a telephone call,” said Morag.
She rang the non-emergency police number. The officer she spoke to was patient in the way that people who speak to members of the public for a living learn to be patient — with enormous effort concealed beneath a professional veneer of mild interest. He took down her details. He did not, his tone suggested, expect to do anything further with them.
On Thursday at eleven-seventeen, two men in a blue Transit van attempted to rob the NatWest on Market Street. They were apprehended before they reached the door, because Detective Sergeant Claire Morrow had decided, after some internal argument, that following up a tip from a Tarot reader was preferable to explaining to her superintendent why she hadn’t.
DS Morrow came to Abbots Lane the following morning. She was a compact, watchful woman who had the demeanour of someone who had seen most things and classified them efficiently into categories marked “Explicable,” “Technically Explicable,” and “Currently Inconvenient.” Morag appeared to belong to the third category.
“We’re not saying you knew,” said DS Morrow, accepting tea with a directness that suggested she was saying exactly that. “We’re just saying it would be helpful to understand how you knew.”
“So do I,” said Morag.
V — THE KILLER
The serial killer was the worst of it, naturally.
There had been three deaths in the wider county over eight months. A hiker near Darnwood, a student in Moorfield, a retired schoolteacher outside Hexbury itself. The press had named him, with characteristic originality, The Wolds Wanderer, because two of the three had been found near walking paths, and newspapers find it difficult to resist a definite article followed by an alliterative noun.
Morag had not been thinking about the Wolds Wanderer when she sat down to eat her lunch on the third Wednesday in February. She had been thinking about whether she had enough milk and whether the dripping in the upstairs bathroom was getting worse. She turned over a card. She had begun doing this reflexively, compulsively, the way some people check their phones, and turned over the Devil.
A name arrived. Then an address. Then a face, complete and specific in a way that felt entirely different from seeing a face, more like remembering one from a very long time ago.
She sat with it for four hours. She made three cups of tea and drank none of them. Then she rang DS Morrow’s direct number, which she now had because DS Morrow had given it to her after the robbery with the expression of someone who was hoping never to use it and suspected they would.
“It’s Morag Finch,” she said. “I need to tell you something and I need you to not ask me how I know.”
“I can’t promise that,” said DS Morrow.
“No,” said Morag. “I didn’t think you could.”
THE CARD: THE DEVIL
The man arrested the following morning was a landscape gardener of apparently unremarkable life, who had a garden shed containing things that nobody’s garden shed should contain. He had been a client of Morag’s two years previously for a single session regarding his late mother’s will. She had not known him then. She had given him the standard reading. The cards had said nothing of note. She found this, later, in the small hours, more frightening than all of it.
VI — IN WHICH THE TOWN HAS OPINIONS
Hexbury, as a community, processed Morag Finch the way it processed most things that did not fit neatly into its existing categories: loudly, with strong coffee, and across multiple conversations in the Co-op.
There were those who thought she was a fraud of a new and elaborate kind. That she must have informants, or had hacked something, or was running some kind of long game whose shape they couldn’t quite determine but felt sure existed. There were those who thought she was genuinely psychic and treated this as either thrilling or concerning, depending on their temperament. There were those who wanted horse tips and felt that withholding them was frankly selfish, given the current cost of living. And there was a small contingent, led principally by a retired geography teacher named Malcolm, who felt that the whole thing smelled of sulphur and organised a petition, though what the petition was calling for remained somewhat unclear even to its signatories.
The local paper ran three pieces. The regional paper ran one. A national tabloid sent a journalist who lasted forty minutes before Morag asked him to leave, at which point he drove to the pub and wrote the piece he’d already decided to write, which described her as “enigmatic” and included a photograph taken without her permission that made her look like she was suppressing a threatening smile, which she was not. She was suppressing a sneeze.
DS Morrow came back. And came back again. She stopped pretending to be there for any reason other than the one she was actually there for, which Morag appreciated. They sat across the table from each other like two people playing chess with rules that had not yet been agreed upon.
“I’d be much more comfortable,” said DS Morrow, during the fourth visit, “if you were a fraud.”
“So would I,” said Morag. “I was very good at it.”
VII — THE LAST READING
On the first of March, Morag decided to do a reading for herself. She had avoided this. Readers who consult their own cards are generally regarded, in the professional community, with the same mixture of pity and wariness extended to surgeons who attempt to operate on themselves. Technically possible, structurally inadvisable, and usually a sign that something has gone seriously wrong.
She cleared the table. She lit the candles because it seemed right, even though she knew it didn’t matter. She shuffled the deck with the particular attention she gave to shuffling when she was frightened of what might come up, which was to say: very thoroughly indeed.
She laid a Celtic Cross. Ten cards. She turned them over one by one, and with each card the sensation in the back of her skull, her name for it now, the knowing, grew stronger and more specific and more terrible.
The final card. She kept her hand on its back for a very long moment. Then she turned it over.
The information arrived the way it always did: complete, specific, unrequested, and entirely without mercy. Not a symbol to interpret. Not a metaphor to soften the edges. Just the knowledge itself, delivered with the flat precision of a postman who has no opinion about what he is delivering, only that it must be delivered.
Morag sat back. She looked at the card for a long time. Then she got up, put the kettle on, and sat at the kitchen table staring at the wall in the specific way of a person who has been given information that cannot be unknow-ed.
The card she had turned over was Death.
This in itself was not remarkable. The Death card, she had explained to hundreds of clients over twenty-three years, does not mean death. It means transformation, endings, necessary change. Every Tarot reader says this. It is one of the first things you learn. It is, Morag had always felt, one of the more reassuring features of the craft.
The knowing, however, was not interested in traditional interpretations.
The knowing was extremely specific. It had a date. It had a cause. It had a detail so particular and so mundanely horrible that Morag made a sound she had never made before — not quite a laugh, not quite anything else — and sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet door.
She knew when. She knew how. She knew — and this, she would decide later, was the precise point at which the gift became something else entirely — she knew that she had four days.
She rang DS Morrow. Not because DS Morrow could help, but because there was no one else she trusted to listen without either weeping or ordering her a psychiatric assessment.
“I’ve done a reading,” said Morag. “For myself.”
A pause. “And?”
“It’s extremely accurate.”
Another pause, longer. “How accurate?”
“Completely,” said Morag. “As far as I can tell.”
The silence on the line had a texture to it — the specific texture, Morag thought, of a very practical person confronting something for which practicality offers no purchase whatsoever.
“Right,” said DS Morrow, finally. “I’m coming over.”
“I’ll put the kettle on,” said Morag. “And Claire — bring something stronger than tea.”
EPILOGUE — IN WHICH THE CARDS HAVE THE FINAL WORD
Morag Finch died on the fourth of March, of causes that were, in the official account, entirely natural and in no way remarkable. A cardiac event, sudden, at her kitchen table, the cards spread before her in a configuration that the attending paramedic later described, to his wife, as “sort of arranged, like she was in the middle of something.”
She was sixty-one years old. She had been, on balance, wrong about most things for most of her career, and right about everything that mattered for the last four months of it.
DS Morrow sat in her car outside Abbots Lane for some time after. Then she drove home, poured a glass of wine, and sat at her own kitchen table thinking about the difference between knowing something is true and being able to do anything about it, and whether those are the same problem or two completely separate ones.
She had been at the house the previous evening. They had drunk the Scotch Trevor had brought in November, which Morag had been saving. They had not talked about the cards. They had talked about other things: DS Morrow’s ex-husband (also named Barry, which they found unreasonably funny), Morag’s years of comfortable incompetence, whether the dripping upstairs had been a leaking pipe or something stranger, the view from the window when the light was right.
At eleven-fifteen, Morag had walked her to the door.
“For what it’s worth,” Morag had said, on the step, “you’re going to be absolutely fine.”
DS Morrow had looked at her.
“Is that the cards talking?” she’d asked.
Morag had smiled — the real one, not the professional one, not the one the tabloid had photographed.
“No,” she’d said. “That’s just me.”
Alan /|\