“As the summer went on, I realized that I had a decision to make. I was either going to remain in this hospital, or I was going to get on with my life. I decided the best thing to do was lie, tell the doctors I couldn’t see or hear them anymore. They assumed I was recovering from my injury, and I was released. I decided, because of my problem, to become a psychiatrist. I was a medical student at Oxford, and when I was done there, I went on to St. Barts. St. Barts is in the old body-snatcher district. If there’s one place you don’t want to have the sight, it’s in the old body-snatcher district, because that place is thick with them, and they aren’t pleasant. But I finished my training, took my exams, and qualified as a psychiatrist. My first position was with the prison system, working with young offenders. It was good work for me—dealing with people who were young, misunderstood, angry. It was a good place to learn about evil. About fear. About what happens to people who are isolated and confined from a young age. And, it might not surprise you, I encountered four teenagers there who had our sight.”

Stephen was trying to keep himself together, but he had to sit down on the steps. Callum too was struggling, but the things Newman was saying . . . I knew they resonated with him.

“Then one day a man came up to me in the street and asked me if I’d like to put my abilities to good use. I still don’t know who he was—someone quite high up in the Met or in MI5, I suppose. It turns out they had started reviewing files at psychiatric institutions to see if anyone was reporting a very specific set of delusions—reporting that they could see ghosts after a near-death experience. A brilliant way of recruiting, really.

“I was taken to Whitehall, to a small office, and the Shades were explained to me. They knew what I was. They liked that I had worked in the prison system. They liked everything about me. They gave me the one thing I had wanted since my accident—a weapon. Something to protect me against these things I was seeing. They gave me some control over my life. The day I became a Shade, I was truly happy for the first time since I was seventeen. I’ll bet it was the same for you.

“I knew we were doing the jobs of bin men, cleaning ghosts off Tube platforms and out of old houses, but I didn’t care. For the first time in my life, I was happy. But I couldn’t help my nature. The others—they were drawn from ordinary police stock. I was an academic. I was a doctor. A scientist.