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That turned out to be bollocks, and Snow saved tens of thousands of lives when he tore the handles off the Soho pumps to prove his point. In the twenty-first century most people laugh at miasmas.

Not exorcists, though. We know better than anyone that things can gather in the air, unseen, and that you can breathe them in without knowing it. Most places have emotional resonances: random echoes of the emotions felt by the people who live in those places or walk through them. Mostly they stay at a low level because - to use a crude metaphor - the peaks and troughs don’t match up.

It’s like ripples in a pond cancelling each other out as their wave fronts intersect. Occasionally, though, if a lot of people are feeling the same thing, then instead of cancelling each other out the emotions reinforce each other, etch themselves deeper and deeper into what we flippantly call reality. When that happens you can get a very strong emotional residue hanging over a particular place and enduring over time. Schools, prisons, death camps, brothels, army barracks, even churches: they have their own psychic flavour, which exorcists pick up on the same wavelength that allows us to see the dead. We’re like dogs in that way, pricking up our ears at a whistle that nobody else can hear.

The Salisbury Estate had an aura of this kind. I could feel it from a long way away, when I got off the bus at Burgess Park and started to walk north towards it.

The closest of the towers was a good half a mile off, but already there was a thickening in the air that you could almost taste. The people around me - mothers with pushchairs, mainly, along with the occasional homeless guy and truanting kid, because this was the dead waste and middle of the day - didn’t seem to notice anything wrong. They kept right on walking, didn’t even look over their shoulders at the great grey towers looming behind them. So I knew it was my tuning-fork soul, resonating on a frequency that the rest of the world was deaf to.

The miasma intensified as I got closer, but although the individual towers of the Salisbury separated themselves out in my fie byout in ld of vision the feeling didn’t attach itself to any one of them."

"The contradiction between those two impressions - the vividness of the sensation and the vagueness of its source - came as something of a surprise.