AI Detective Harlow Quinn ducked under the scene tape and stepped into the old access tunnel, the air turning immediately damp and close around her. The place smelled of rusted metal and old water, an iron tang that clung to the back of her throat. Above, the distant rumble of trains from the active lines vibrated through the brick, a faint, ceaseless growl.
Not abandoned, then. Not truly . Just forgotten.
She checked her worn leather watch out of habit, though she already knew the time. 02:17. She always remembered the times in the early hours; they stuck, same way 03:08 had stuck three years ago, when Morris—
No. Not now.
Ahead, the tunnel opened onto the old platform, a decommissioned spur off Camden Town that never made it into the tourist ghost tours. Sodium work lights on portable stands threw a harsh orange glare over cracked tiles and peeling roundels. The original signage—white on blue, the proud old font—was mottled with mold.
And in the middle of the platform, like something carefully placed rather than dropped, lay the body.
DS Amir Shah straightened up from his crouch as she approached, flicking his gloves free of imaginary dust. He was younger than her by a decade, good suit already going to shine at the elbows, tie loosened just enough to suggest exhaustion without sloppiness. Bloodshot eyes. He’d been first on scene.
“Morning, guv,” he said, voice echo ing off the curved ceiling. “Or night. Take your pick.”
She ignored the pleasantry and went straight to the body. “Talk me through.”
“Male, mid-thirties maybe. No ID yet. Found by a survey team at 00:49.” He nodded toward a uniform constable and a woman sitting on a bench under a foil blanket. “They’re from the British Museum, apparently. Doing some kind of mapping of the disused network.”
Her gaze flicked briefly to the woman. Short, curly red hair frizzing around a pale, freckled face. Round glasses slipped halfway down her nose. She clutched a leather satchel to her chest like a shield. Even from here, Harlow could see the white-knuckled grip and the fast, jerky movement as the woman tucked a strand of hair behind her left ear, again and again.
Nervous. Or guilty. Or both.
Harlow crouched beside the body, her knees popping in quiet protest. The tiles under her boots were slick with decades of grime, but only grime. No fresh pooling, no spreading stain.
The victim lay on his back, arms by his sides, legs straight. Too straight. Bodies that fell didn’t arrange themselves like that. His eyes were open, staring up at the arched ceiling, irises a pale, washed-out blue. His mouth was parted , lips tinged cyanotic. He wore a dark wool coat—expensive, though the damp had taken the crispness out of the fabric—over a grey suit. Good cut there too. Not a vagrant, then. Someone who’d started his evening somewhere entirely different.
His skin look ed wrong. Not just pale from blood loss or shock. There was a grey cast, like old paper left in a smoker’s flat.
“What are you thinking?” Amir asked, hovering at her shoulder.
“How did he die?” she said, not look ing up.
He shrugged. “Visible trauma, throat. Might’ve gone straight for the carotid. Look.”
He was right; there was a wound. A long, straight slice across the front of the throat, dead center, about two inches above the collar line. Clean. Too clean. No ragged edges, no hesitation marks. The kind of cut that came from a sharp blade wielded with familiarity.
But the tiles around the body—that was the problem. There should have been blood. A cut like that, hit the right vessel, you painted the world with it. Ceiling, walls, anyone nearby.
Here, there was only a narrow crescent of dried, dark rust along the collar of the coat and a faint smear beneath his head where some had seeped out after.
“Not enough,” she murmured.
Amir frowned. “What?”
She traced the air above the wound. “He didn’t die here.”
He gave a little huff. “Come on, guv. We’re forty feet underground in a sealed station. No fresh drag marks on the way in. Dust is undisturbed. Unless he teleported, he died here.”
She ignored the sarcasm and look ed closer. There was something just below the line of the cut, two faint parallel impressions. She leaned in, watch ing the way the sodium light caught them.
“See that?” She pointed.
He bent down beside her, breath smelling of stale coffee and mints. “Indentations?”
“Bruising. Old, by the look . Someone grabbed him, hard, just before or after the cut. Thumb and fingers here. Someone right-handed.” She rocked back on her heels, scanning the body. “Left cheekbone. That’s a bruise coming up too.”
“So he was grabbed, cut, dumped.” Amir cast a look down the empty platform. “Makes about as much sense as teleportation.”
She shifted her gaze to the floor around the victim, sweeping in slow, disciplined arcs. The dust told stories. Years of it, layered and compacted, broken only by occasional maintenance boot prints and the scurrying signatures of rats.
Except here, in a rough oval around the body, the dust was scuffed . Not in wide, random arcs, but in lines. Tracks. The ghost of something heavy being dragged and settled, again and again, in roughly the same places. Four parallel lanes along the platform edge, as if stall tables had once stood there. Or counters.
Not a one-off rave. Repeated activity. Regular.
“Have we got CCTV?” she asked.
Amir snorted. “From the ghost cameras?” He jerked his head toward the dark bulk of an old, dead housing high on the wall. “Station’s been off the grid for decades. The only working electrics are what we brought in. Even then, the SOCO kit tripped the breaker twice when we set up.”
Her gaze followed the tangles of temporary cable back to a generator in the tunnel, humming with a deep, oily growl. Beside the original junction box, higher up the wall, there was a blackened ring where plaster had bubbled and peeled. A scorch mark. Not from their equipment; this was old, the edges feathered with nonchalance.
“How much of the line’s dead?” she asked.
“This branch? All of it. Has been since the eighties.” He studied her face. “Why?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she look ed past the body, to the far end of the platform where the tiles darkened into shadow. There were marks on the walls there, half-hidden behind mildew and graffiti. Looping, sharp-edged sigils that didn’t quite fit with the crude tags around them.
One, in particular, hooked her eye. Three interlocking crescents and a broken circle. Her stomach tightened, an echo , a memory of another wall, another forgotten place, Morris’s torch beam catching on the same shape. The weight of the air that night. The way all the sounds had gone thin.
She forced her attention back to the now, the weight of it. Different case. Different city. And yet.
“Guv?” Amir said. “You with me?”
“Hmm.” She stood, knees cracking. “What did the museum people say they were doing down here at one in the morning?”
“Mapping for structural reports, apparently,” he said. “Some joint project with TfL, they said. I’ve checked; there is a program, but most of the surveys happen at sane hours. They claimed night access because they didn’t want to disrupt active services topside.” He didn’t bother hiding his skepticism. “Bit overcautious, if you ask me. But legitimate enough on paper.”
She glanced over at the woman again. The foil blanket shifted with her breathing. The satchel’s strap had worn a dark groove into the leather where a hand had gripped it over and over, years of small, compulsive movements embedding themselves into the material. That didn’t look like a Site Safety Officer.
“Name?”
“Eva Kowalski. Research assistant. The bloke with her is a facilities liaison; he called it in. He’s given a statement and gone home, per your standing orders about not cluttering the scene.” Amir’s gaze slid toward Eva. “She wanted to stay. Said she’d rather answer questions now.”
“Lucky us,” Harlow murmured.
She took one more look at the body. A faint glint by the man’s right hand pulled her eye. Something had slipped half under the edge of the platform, lodged where the concrete met the grime-packed gap.
She snapped on a fresh glove and reached down, fingertips probing until they found cool metal. She worked it out slowly , dust scratching at her wrist.
A small brass compass lay in her palm.
It was old—she could tell by the weight and the patina, a soft blanket of verdigris creeping across the casing. The lid was etched , not with a manufacturer’s mark, but with tiny sigils, sharp and deliberate, cut deep enough to outlast polishing. Protective. Or decorative, if you asked someone who didn’t know what they were looking at.
She flicked the lid open with her thumb.
The face inside was yellowed , the glass slightly fogged at the edges. No cardinal letters. Instead, unfamiliar symbols marked the directions, each one different. The needle quivered , then settled. Not pointing north—her instincts knew where north should be; she carried that kind of map in her bones after eighteen years of walking scenes all over the city. This needle angled sharply toward the far tunnel, away from the main shaft they’d come in through.
“Souvenir?” Amir said, leaning in for a look . “Hipster junk. Camden’s full of those stalls.”
“Maybe.” She closed her hand over it, tasting the faint bite of metal through the glove. “Bag it.”
He held a paper evidence bag open. For a second she considered slipping the compass into her coat pocket instead. It was an old reflex, the temptation to keep the things that didn’t fit where anyone else could see them. She shoved it into the bag then, hearing the soft clack as it hit the bottom. One secret at a time.
They moved over to Eva together.
Up close, the woman look ed younger than Harlow had pegged her, mid-twenties, though the heavy circles under her green eyes added a few years. Ink smudged the side of her left hand, the faint ghost of open pages reflected in the slight curvature of her shoulders. Academic. Indoor creature.
“Ms. Kowalski,” Harlow said. “I’m Detective Quinn. This is DS Shah. I understand you found the body.”
Eva nodded, the movement jerky. Her gaze darted briefly to the bag in Amir’s hand. The smallest flicker . Then away.
“I—yes. Well, we both did. Me and Lewis. He went to check the generator and… I almost stepped on him.” Her voice went up half a pitch on the last word.
“The victim,” Harlow said. “You’d never seen him before tonight?”
“No.” A quick, emphatic shake of the head. A strand of hair came loose again and she tucked it behind her ear, fingers trembling.
“You said you were here on a survey,” Harlow went on. “From the British Museum.”
“Yes. I work in the archives. Research assistant in—” She stopped herself, a tiny hitch. “In the restricted collections. They wanted a reference survey of subterranean London for… context. There’s a lot of crossover between urban development and ritual sites in—”
“Ritual sites?” Amir repeated lightly . “Sounds spooky.”
Eva flushed. “It’s just a term. Archaeological interest. There are layers under the city that predate paved streets; the patterns matter. We’re cataloguing.”
“At one in the morning,” Harlow said.
Eva’s fingers tightened on the satchel strap. “We could only get access when traffic was lowest. Safety protocols. It’s on the paperwork.”
“Paperwork can say a lot of things.” Harlow let her gaze drift, deliberately , to the dark tunnel where the compass needle had pointed. “You didn’t hear anything before you found him? No voices, no movement?”
“Nothing.” Eva’s eyes widened . “I swear. It was… quiet. Just the generator. And then Lewis called me over and—the man was there. Like he’d… like he’d been dropped.”
Harlow watch ed her face, the minute twitches of the muscles around the mouth, the eyes. Not a practiced liar. Too many raw edges. But there was something else. Not what she said, but what she didn’t.
“You look ed at this.” Harlow nodded toward the evidence bag in Amir’s hand. “When we picked it up.”
“I—what? No, I just—”
“You recognized it,” Harlow went on, soft. “Or something like it.”
Eva’s throat worked. For a moment, she seemed about to deny again. Then something in her sagged, just a fraction.
“I’ve… seen similar,” she admitted, voice low. “Old artifacts. Catalogues. Nothing in use.”
“In use,” Harlow repeated. “What does that mean?”
Eva’s fingers flew again to her hair, tucking, tucking. “It’s just a compass. A decorative compass. People brought them back from… from markets. Tourist tat trading on superstition. North Africa, Eastern Europe. That kind of thing.”
Mercifully vague. Too vague. Harlow filed it away.
“You ever been down here before tonight?” she asked.
“No,” Eva said. Too fast.
The echo of that “no” bounced off the tiles, thin and sharp.
Harlow studied her. The worn leather satchel. The ink-stained hand. The faint trace of something like rosemary or burnt sage clinging to her clothes, out of place in the old damp station.
She stepped back. “We’ll need a formal statement at the station when we’re done here,” she said. “Don’t leave town.”
Eva gave a little strangled laugh. “I live in Holloway. I’m hardly going anywhere.”
Harlow turned away before the woman could see the flicker of something dark in her own expression. Holloway. Three years ago, Morris had—
No.
She walked the length of the platform instead, letting her feet find the rhythm, her eyes the details. Wax drips hardened on the floor in irregular constellations, many of them scraped by later activity. The residue of candles, placed and replaced in roughly the same spots along the wall. Different colours overlaying one another—white, beeswax-yellow, red.
She crouched by one cluster. The top layer broke clean under her glove. Underneath, the wax had darkened, dirt pressed into it by time. Months, at least. Maybe years.
People had been coming here. Regularly. Doing… something. Trading? Worshipping? Both often overlapped.
She look ed up at the sigils again. The broken circle, the crescents. Harsh, deliberate lines cut through them as if someone had tried to scrub them out with a blade, leaving angry scars in the tile.
“Looks like kids’ devil worship, doesn’t it?” Amir said behind her. “Bit of gothic drama under the city. They light some candles, draw some doodles, then one of them gets carried away and it goes wrong.”
“They don’t make hipster junk like this,” she said, nodding toward the bag in his hand. “Not with that kind of precision. Not with those marks.”
“Every thing’s got a market, guv. Especially here.” He gestured, a sweep that took in the whole decaying station. “Drugs, parties, urban explorers. Could’ve been an underground fight club for all we know. This is Camden.”
She straightened slowly , feeling the weight of it all settling on her shoulders. “Underground fight clubs don’t teleport bodies,” she said softly .
“Teleport is a strong word for inconsistency in your crime scene,” he countered. It came out light, but she could hear the edge beneath. He’d been with her long enough to know when she was drifting into the territory the others snickered about in break rooms.
She thought of Morris on the floor of that Lockerbie warehouse, his eyes black with reflected emptiness that had not belonged in this world. How the air had folded around him, dark and wrong, just for a second. How the CCTV had fried itself to static at 03:08 and never come back.
“Sometimes inconsistency is the crime scene,” she said.
He sighed. “So what, you think we’ve got some kind of… what, ritual murder cult in a dead Tube station? Because I’m going to struggle to sell that one to the DCI.”
“I think,” she said, look ing down at the man on the floor, at the neatness of the cut, the lack of blood, the way the dust petals spread around where he’d appeared, “someone brought a body into a place that’s been seeing a lot of unreported foot traffic. And they expected us not to notice the difference.”
She glanced back toward Eva. The woman sat very still on the bench now, eyes unfocused, lips moving just slightly as if reciting something under her breath.
Harlow turned away, toward the tunnel where the compass needle had pointed. Dark there, beyond the last pool of orange light. The generator’s hum didn’t seem to reach that far. The shadows were thick, almost textured.
She took the evidence bag from Amir, ignoring his questioning look , and held the compass up.
Through the clouded plastic, the needle shivered and snapped, aligning itself with a twitch.
Not north. Not any direction that made sense on her internal map of London. Just… there. Toward the dark.
For a moment, standing on a forgotten platform beneath a city that stacked its secrets in layers, Harlow felt the same prickle at the back of her neck she’d felt three years ago. The certainty that she was brushing against the edge of something that did not give a damn about police procedure or what made sense in witness statements.
She lowered the bag, expression smoothing back into something the job would recognize.
“Get me every thing on access to this station for the last five years,” she said to Amir. “Maintenance, surveys, unauthorized entries. I want schedules, keys, the lot. And pull the files from that Holloway warehouse case. The one we closed as gang activity.”
He opened his mouth, closed it again. “You think they’re connected.”
“I think patterns matter.” She tapped the bag with one knuckle. The needle quivered in response, as if irritated. “And I think we’ve been walking over the same ones for a while without seeing them.”
“Right.” He exhaled. “I’ll get on it.”
He moved off toward the knot of uniforms. Harlow stayed where she was, the damp air cold against the back of her neck, the weight of the city pressing in from all sides.
Something was wrong here. Not just the cut without blood or the bruise without a fight. The whole geometry of the place was off. The dust, the wax, the sigils. The compass that refused to acknowledge north.
She look ed once more into the dark of the side tunnel.
You missed it last time, she told herself. Whatever killed him took Morris and left you with static and a closed file. Don’t miss it again.
The unseen trains rumbled past overhead, the sound like distant thunder rolling through old bones. Beneath Camden, in an abandoned station that was not as empty as it should have been, Detective Harlow Quinn tightened her grip on the evidence bag and began, quietly, to count the inconsistencies.