Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQXJ7S5MVW6120BEA6FZ67

By the time Harlow Quinn ducked through the rusted service gate and felt the stale cold of the old platform, dawn had only thought about London. The station under Camden was a hollow thing, tiled in a green that the dark had eaten, with soot-bloomed posters clinging to the brick like old skin. Her breath steamed. Somewhere beyond, modern trains carried other people with places to be, but here, nothing moved. Just the drip of mineral-heavy water into black ballast and the low murmur of her own team. “Down here, ma’am.” A uniformed constable held the tape for her. His boots scraped on grit. The electric torches threw long bones of light along the curve of the tunnel. She checked her watch—worn leather strap, face scuffed by time and carelessness in equal measure—though she already knew the time. It anchored her. She stepped onto the platform, tall and straight-backed, the same economy of motion that had made DS Morris call her a bloody metronome. Three years since. She pushed it aside with the same force she used on a swinging door. Look, then think, then feel. The body lay partially over the platform edge, jacket riding up to show a pale wedge of skin and a belt that had seen better days. Male, thirties. Shirt soaked along the collar, though not with rain—it hadn’t rained here in a century. Someone had pulled him back from the drop or had left him draped in that theatrical way. The torches made the whites of his eyes too bright. “Drug thing if you ask me,” DS Cameron Reed said. He had the grey pallor of a man dragged out of bed too soon and a voice that wanted to be kinder than it was. He gestured to a heap of canvas off to the left. “Squatters, coppers nicked, bad batch. He comes down here, takes a hit, falls. Seen it before.” Harlow stepped around him and crouched. The bones in her knees complained; she told them no. She pulled on gloves. The air had a tang—spice and something like pennyroyal, underneath the damp stone and iron. Her brown eyes flicked over the man with a soldier’s inventory: hair, jaw, hands. The fingers were rubbed with chalky residue, something pale that caught light differently than dust. His nails were clean. The skin at the sides of his neck was abraded, a line like a fine rope had once kissed too hard and too long; not livid, not chaotic. Deliberate. She didn’t respond to Reed right away. He filled the silence on his own. “There’s a lot of weird here, I give you that. But the tins”—he nodded to a caddy of what had once been tea, now filled with smaller, labelled bottles—“and the… symbols. Kids get creative. Camden breeds it.” Harlow looked past the body. The platform had been turned into alleys with canvas and tarpaulin, with crates made of old pallets and stalls that still smelled faintly of burnt juniper. Chalk lines had been drawn on the tiles and track edge in looping shapes that hummed with a logic she didn’t like. She could have laughed if she’d been the kind of person who laughed at things that wanted to be taken seriously. On one tile, exactly where a boot would land after stepping off the trains, a circle of chalk had been carefully inscribed and then scuffed through by something heavy. The soot around it was not quite soot—finer, and it didn’t smear so much as squeak under her glove. She leaned closer to the dead man’s belt. No wallet chain. The wallet still there—she felt the rectangle through cloth and grimaced for the future inventory officer. A ring had been removed recently; the pale band on his finger said so. His shoes were wrong for a squatter: Oxfords, stitched with money and care, soles still new enough that when she tilted one, she could read the maker’s name ghosting the leather. He’d stepped in something powdery—the same residue as his fingers—and then nothing. No track grease. No black macaroni of rubber from slipping on the edge. She cupped his jaw gently and tilted. A bruise hid under his left ear, the kind people got when they were convinced to be still. His pupils stared past her towards the brickwork arch, too wide for the light. “SOCO’s on their second box,” Reed said, trying to be useful. He pointed at a small brass thing bagged on a crate. “We pulled that from his inner pocket. Souvenir compass by the looks of it. Face covered in doodles.” Harlow glanced at the bag. It wasn’t a souvenir. The brass had bloomed with verdigris, that bright, old green that took years and salt and the right kind of neglect. Fine lines had been etched into the face—sigils that were neither decorative nor exhaustive. They had purpose the way good soldiers did. Her lips thinned. “May I?” she asked the scene tech. He passed the bag with the weary resignation of someone used to CID rummaging through his domain. Harlow held it up to her torch beam. The needle inside trembled like a trapped insect. She turned, slowly, a steady, deliberate arc from tracks to tunnel to old bricked-up arch where a side passage would’ve been once, the muscle in her jaw moving as if she were chewing something too tough to swallow. The needle swung and then fixed, quivering, toward the arch the Borough had bricked seventy years ago when they declared fashion had outpaced safety. Not north, not east. Toward brick. She took a step; it pulled harder, the way cheap compasses pulled toward a radiator, except there was no metal in that wall worth the name. There was a draft though—so slight it was all crease and no wind, a colder taste on her lip in that direction. Her hand drifted—almost without her consent—to the watch face she always wore, a thumb rubbing the notch at eight o’clock. Morris had had a compass, once, the kind you used to course by a different sort of star. Reed watched her. “You think someone hid something behind there? Old storeroom? We can get Estates to—” “Later,” she said. “Don’t touch it. Photograph it. All of it.” He nodded, because she had that tone now, the one she’d brought back from Southampton Row after the Morris case and had kept oiled like a gun. He crossed to the chalked circle and prodded at the soot with a swab. “Stage set for a séance, then?” His attempt at humour fell between them, heavy and scared of its own echo. Harlow returned to the body. The edges of his nostrils were lined with a bitter crystal. His tongue had a grey cast to it, but his teeth were too clean for a rough sleeper. She pulled the jacket open. No track rash, no gravel pressed into cloth fibres. A smell rose from him when she shifted him—something like scorched sugar—and she stilled, held it, matched it to a memory of standing in a different tunnel with torchlight making monsters out of the old ceramic tiles and Morris laughing too loudly so he wouldn’t hear his own nerves. “Drug thing, yep,” Reed said, dogged, because it was easier to stand on familiar floor. “Could’ve been lured down with the promise of a bargain. He has money, you can see that, but maybe he likes to feel rough. He takes something dodgy. He falls. Whoever he’s with legs it. We’ll pull CCTV on the street entrances. Always some movement up there. Camden never sleeps.” She reached into the dead man’s hand. Between two fingers, caught by the stiffening of death, a small disc lay like a pill he meant to swallow but never did. Harlow teased it out. It was bone. Polished by thumb. Edges notched with intent rather than accident. Not coin. Not jewellery. She held it up, and the torch made it translucent for a heartbeat, a pale thing with a darker core like a seed. Entry admitted. That phrase stepped into her head and sat down like it belonged there. She didn’t say it aloud. Instead she slid it back into his palm, then into an evidence bag with the same care you gave to a sleeping animal. Her eyes travelled along the platform, mapping. Stalls aligned like a market street. Chalked sigils at stall edges to mark threshold and safety. That scuffed circle right where someone would stand to haggle if the world were other than the world. Her shoulder ached, a conversation with age, and she rolled it. “You see it,” Reed said. Not a question. He knew her tells, had learned them the way you learned the rush-hour rhythm of Piccadilly—by getting bruised enough times to pay attention. “I see pieces,” she said. He sniffed, which was not disrespectful so much as the comfort of a man who trusted himself more when a colleague played cards face up. “I’ve got a constable up top says a bloke in a hoodie came by before dawn and complained about weird people under the streets. He didn’t want to give his name and frankly I had time for zero of his grievances. Could be our victim’s mate. Could be a line we can tug.” Harlow nodded, because you never turned down a thread. She returned to the arch. The bricks had been laid decades ago, but someone had washed this patch recently—the patina scrubbed, the grime different, a softness to the mortar like it had been tampered with too soon in damp. On the floor, close in where a careful foot could hide a secret, a smear of green stained the tile. She scraped at it with her nail through the glove and lifted the pale fleck. Verdigris. Not from the compass. From something bigger, something that had been lifted or swung here. “The bastard money in his shoes,” she murmured, mostly to herself, “but he keeps a compass in his coat with protection carved where only he’d see. He carries a token that isn’t minted by any mint. He dies to the left of a broken circle a child wouldn’t draw. He’s either a liar about who he is or we’re liars to ourselves about what he died for.” Reed made a face. “You want me to put that in the report as column A or column B?” She breathed once through her nose, let it bleed into the rhythm of the station. “Bag all chalked areas. Tell SOCO I want casts of the footprints along that edge. The powder will hold shapes we can read if we’re quick. Get Estates on the line and tell them we need plans from before the war, when this line still thought it would be used. And tell them to keep this quiet. No press. Not yet.” Reed frowned. “You think it ties to your—” He stopped himself before he said the word. Clique. He didn’t like the way it sounded in his mouth. Her jaw worked again, a click at the hinge. “I think it stinks of money pretending to be poor, and somewhere in there is a room behind a room. People with keys the rest of us don’t have.” She held up the compass again. The protective sigils on its face—the little chevrons, the sunburst broken into six, the binding knot—were familiar in a way that made the hairs along her arms lift. She had seen them sketched, once, in pencil smudged grey, on the back of a pub napkin that Morris had pulled from his pocket with a grinning dare. “Look at this, Harlow,” he’d said then. “Tell me it’s not bollocks.” She had told him it was and then followed him anyway. She turned the compass toward the arch and watched the needle’s quiver steady. “It’s pointing at something that isn’t supposed to be here.” Reed exhaled, a stream of humourless air. “You’re going to say portal and get me laughed out of the canteen, aren’t you.” She let the smallest sound leave her. Not a laugh. A grunt with edges. “I’m going to say passage. Hidden access. Old service tunnel reopened. Pick something that doesn’t make you itch. But no, Cam. He didn’t die here by accident.” He folded his arms to keep his hands from fidgeting. “What doesn’t add up for you?” She pointed without touching. “Lividity pooling along the chest suggests he lay face-down for hours. He’s on his back now. No scrapes. No fibres of rough concrete in his clothes or hair. Ligature marks abrading skin at the neck, not consistent with a fall or with self-administered anything. Powder on his fingers, same on the tiles, same in that circle there. He stepped in it, handled it, whatever it is, then he was moved. And he was moved with care. Whoever did it knew enough not to drag him; they lifted.” Reed’s eyes tracked where she did, making the map late. “Okay.” “And there’s this.” She angled her torch to the void between two canvas-hung stalls. The dust was disturbed there in a narrow line that ran directly to the old arch. A scuff of heel with a cut she had seen in Oxford soles, that narrow waist that pinched just there. Then, nothing. No return line. No reverse. Whichever way they went, they didn’t come back this way. Reed looked up at the brick, then back at her. “Door.” “Of a sort.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. His stubble rasped. “You’ll have to write it so a coroner won’t throw it out.” “I always do.” She bagged the compass herself and handed it back to SOCO. “Get that to the lab but not to anyone who’ll laugh. I know who. And someone find me a record for last night’s moon.” Reed blinked. “The moon?” “Humour me.” He took out his phone. “Waning gibbous. Full three nights ago.” She felt a piece click with other pieces, a safe she’d only half heard tumbling. The Market—she didn’t call it that aloud, not with uniformed ears close enough to mishear—did not like to be found. But if it moved with the fat, bright moon, there was always a lull after, a spill of people and goods who didn’t catch the tide. If you needed to meet someone without the rest of the crowd, you came late. You brought a token. You brought a compass. If you were unlucky, you brought a friend you shouldn’t have trusted through a door you couldn’t see. Harlow stood. Every joint remembered its age. Reed grimaced in fellowship. She looked back down at the dead man, at the way his mouth had set as if he’d planned to say no and never got to finish the word, at the small white token sealed in its neat bag, at the chalk that meant business, not art. The bile that lived at the back of her throat when the world got odd tasted a bit stronger than usual. “You’re going to call in one of your… people,” Reed said carefully. He meant someone outside the usual maps. Academy taught you to write neat reports and fear headlines. Nineteen years in taught you that sometimes you rang a number you swore you didn’t know. “I’m going to call someone who’s good with old marks,” she said. She didn’t name the British Museum, not yet, not in a place where echoes went to ground and grew. She looked at the bricked arch one last time, and the draft coming through it touched her cheeks like fingers from a room that had been keeping its breath in too long. “Keep them out,” she told Reed, meaning everyone who wasn’t on her side of the tape. “Seal the street access. No one in or out who doesn’t have a badge. Bag anything that looks like it belongs to a theatre propmaster. And if anyone comes asking for a token they dropped, you don’t let them past your shadow.” Reed inclined his head. “Yes, guv.” She traced the chalk scuff with the toe of her boot, careful not to break what mattered. There was a whisper to it when she did, a sound that was probably just the brush of grit. She looked at her watch again, the leather worn where she’d worried it with thumb and time, and put that hand in her pocket so she’d stop. Then she turned, sharp jaw set at an angle that answered questions before they were asked, and went to find a signal strong enough for a call that would start a chain she couldn’t stop. The station watched her go and kept its secrets pressed tight to tile and bone.