E WERE SITTING IN THE POLICE CAR ACROSS THE street from Regis House. It was one of countless large office buildings in the City of London, maybe ten stories, made of grayish-white stone, full of offices. The front was mostly made of glass, with a large circular overhang in black metal giving its name and address, 45 King William Street. We had dropped Callum off at London Bridge station a few minutes before. Right now, he was making his way under the Thames via a tunnel.
“We’ll give him ten more minutes,” Stephen said, glancing at the dashboard clock. It was three forty-five.
Stephen looked out the window and surveyed the street. King William Street led up to London Bridge, and there weren’t many pubs or restaurants on this stretch. The street was deserted except for us. I watched the traffic lights change, the little man on the “walk” sign turn from green to red.
Once again, it was time to wait. All of London was waiting, silent, as if the population had collectively drawn its breath in anticipation. There wasn’t enough air in the car for me. Something was pressing on my chest. Fear. I tried to keep Jo’s words in my mind—fear couldn’t hurt me. It was a snake with no venom.
This was no snake. This was a thousand pounds of pressure.
“Remember how I said I had a boating accident?” Stephen said, breaking my train of thought. “It’s not true.”
He adjusted something on his tactical vest nervously.
“When I first met Callum and he asked me what happened, I started to tell him the story, which starts in a boathouse. But then I changed my mind. He just assumed I had a boating accident, and I never corrected him. I’ve said boating accident ever since.”
“So what really happened?” I asked.
“My family is fairly wealthy. They aren’t kind, or functional. We may have had a lot of things growing up, but a warm family life wasn’t one of them. When I was fourteen, my older sister died of an overdose. It appeared to be accidental—she was out partying in London. The autopsy showed she had large amounts of both heroin and cocaine in her system. She was seventeen.”
This was the kind of thing you should say something in response to, but given our circumstances, I felt it was okay to remain silent.
“She died on a Saturday. By the following Thursday, my parents sent me back to school and they went to St. Moritz on a skiing trip to ‘get their minds off things.’ That was how my family dealt with the death of their daughter. They sent me off, and they skied. For three years, I just tried to block everything else out. I studied. I did sports. I was the perfect student. I never let myself stop for one second to think about what had happened. Years of just blocking it out. Then, when I was in my last weeks of school and had been accepted to Cambridge, I realized it was the first time I really had nothing to do, nothing to work toward. And I started to think—all the time. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. And I got angry. And I got sad. All the things I thought I’d kept out of my mind, they were all there, waiting for me. I was captain of the rowing team, so I had access to the boathouse. One night in early June, I went in, got a rope, and threw it over one of the beams …”
He didn’t need to go any further. I got the idea.
“You tried to kill yourself,” I said. “You must have failed. Because you’re here. Wait. You’re not a ghost, are you? Because that would totally destroy my mind right now.”
“I didn’t fail,” he said. “I was interrupted in the middle of the process.”
He took the keys from the ignition and put them in a pocket on his vest.
“The thing they don’t tell you about hanging is how much it hurts,” he said, “and it’s not quick. That’s why it’s such a horrible punishment. The merciful hangmen knew how to break a neck instantly, which is humane. When you hang yourself, though, the rope slices into your neck. It’s agonizing. As soon as I did it, I could see what a mistake it was, but I couldn’t get the rope off. You can’t, once it tightens around your neck and your body weight pulls you down. You kick, you pull on the rope, you fight. I was about to give up when I saw someone walk up to me. Another student, but not someone I recognized. He said, ‘You can see me, can’t you?’ And he just sort of watched me, curiously. Then he put the chair upright and walked away. I got my feet back on the chair and got the rope from around my neck and swore never, ever to take my life for granted again, no matter how bad things seemed.”
A keening siren in the distance interrupted the conversation.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I accept what I did, and I won’t do it again. I don’t tell people mostly because … I can’t. I can’t tell most people ‘I tried to kill myself because I couldn’t deal with my sister’s death, but I’m okay now because I was saved by a ghost.’”
“No,” I said. “I can see where you’re coming from with that. But how did you get from there to this? To the ghost police?”
“Another thing they don’t mention—probably because it hardly seems relevant—hanging leaves some terrible bruising around the neck.” He adjusted his collar, as if remembering. “There’s no mistaking it. The next morning, I found myself called to the infirmary, where a psychiatrist was waiting to talk to me. I could have lied to him, but I was still pretty dazed. I told him exactly what I had seen. That afternoon, they transferred me to a private mental health facility where they medicated me and put me in therapy. Two days after that, someone came to offer me a job. She said that I wasn’t crazy. I was depressed, but I wasn’t crazy. And I was depressed for a good reason. She knew what had happened to my sister. What I had seen was real. I had an ability that made me rare and very special, and did I want to do something worthwhile with it? Did I want to make a difference? A week later, I was released from the hospital. I was taken to an office in Whitehall, where a different person explained the rules to me. I would be the first of a newly re-formed and highly specialized squad. Technically, I would be a police officer. I would be trained as such. I would be, to the outside world, a police constable. That’s what I had to tell everyone I was. In reality, I would be the commanding officer of a new police squad.”
Stephen squeezed the steering wheel so hard, his fingers went white. This was as close as I’d ever seen him come to an emotion.
“That’s how they used to recruit, you see,” he said. “They’d look through psychiatric records for high achievers who told a similar story—those who had had brushes with death at a young age and then reported seeing people who weren’t there. We were drawn from mental hospitals. I’m the last of that breed. Boo and Callum were tagged at A&E after their accidents. They were both talking about these mysterious people they’d seen … Both had been in accidents. Both were athletes. Both were street smart, if not academic. Both were from London and knew their way around. They were identified, and I was sent to recruit them. I’m the last of the mad ones.”
“You don’t sound crazy to me,” I said.
Stephen nodded and looked out the window at Regis House, then back at the clock.
“Three fifty-five,” he said. “Callum’s in by now. It’s time to go.”
Regis House was a building that should clearly have been locked at four in the morning, but the doors were open when we tried them. The lights in the lobby were on, and there was a security desk that looked like it was normally manned. The guard was ominously absent, the chair pushed back almost to the wall. We saw a half-empty mug of tea on the desk and a computer opened to the BBC news site. Stephen leaned over and looked at the screen.
“Last updated a half hour ago,” he said.
I noticed a piece of paper on the desk, the following scrawled on it: “Take the lift down a level. Stairs are at the far end of the hall. Look for the black door.”
Neither one of us discussed the fate of the guard. There was no point. We took the elevator, then the stairs down into the physical plant of the building—the room with the heaters and pipes and all the heavy stuff needed to run a place of that size. In the far corner of the room, there was a black door. It had a few safety and warning stickers on it, but nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to suggest where it might lead. Stephen removed his reflective jacket and dropped it to the floor, then carefully tried the handle. The door opened. I felt a rush of cold air come through the crack.
“One question,” I said. “Did you tell me all that because you think I’m going to die?”
“No,” he said. “It’s because you’re doing something brave, and I felt I should too.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said.
Before I could hesitate another second, I put my hand on top of his and pulled the door open wider.