Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR3FKTNJS8669ZR3P98A21

The abandoned platform beneath Camden smelled of rust and old electricity. Detective Harlow Quinn stood at the entrance to what her constables had cordoned off as a crime scene, though the yellow tape looked absurd strung between Victorian iron pillars that had stood here since before the Tube's first expansion. Her worn leather watch read half past three in the morning, and the temperature had dropped enough that her breath misted in the beam of her torch. The body lay twenty feet down the platform, positioned too neatly against the curved tile wall. Male, mid-forties, expensive suit now ruined by the pool of blood that had spread beneath him and dried to a dark, tacky substance. The Metropolitan Police photographer had already done her work, and the forensics team was packing up their equipment with the efficient movements of people who wanted to be anywhere else. Quinn's jaw tightened as she approached, her boots echoing on the concrete. The victim's throat had been cut—a single deep wound, left to right. The weapon was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the victim's wallet, phone, or any form of identification. "Straightforward enough," said Detective Inspector Marcus Reed, materializing at her shoulder. He'd been her partner for six months now, ever since—but she didn't let herself finish that thought. Reed gestured at the body with his notebook. "Robbery gone wrong. Victim wanders down here, maybe drunk or lost. Assailant follows, demands valuables, things escalate." Quinn crouched beside the body, careful not to disturb what remained of the scene. "Victim's shoes are clean." "Sorry?" "Look at them." She pointed with her pen. "Italian leather, probably eight hundred pounds new. Not a scuff on them. No dust, no grime. This platform is filthy—you can see our footprints everywhere—but his shoes look like he walked out of a shop." Reed shifted his weight. "So he was carried?" "Maybe." But Quinn's attention had already moved to the victim's hands. The right one was clenched around something, fingers locked in rigor mortis. She pulled on a latex glove and carefully pried the fingers open. A small brass compass tumbled onto her palm. The casing was tarnished, covered in what looked like green corrosion, and the face was scratched all to hell with marks she couldn't quite make out in the dim light. But what caught her attention was the needle. It spun lazily, making three full rotations before settling to point directly at the far wall of the platform—nowhere near magnetic north. "Broken," Reed said dismissively. "Probably sentimental value. Family heirloom or something." Quinn stood, turning the compass over in her hand. The markings on the face weren't scratches. They were deliberate, carved with precision into the brass. Symbols she didn't recognize but had seen before, three years ago, in the photographs from Morris's case file. The file that had gone missing from the archives two weeks after Morris's death. The file she'd memorized before it disappeared. Her pulse quickened, but her face remained neutral. "When did forensics clear out?" "Ten minutes ago. Said there wasn't much to process. No defensive wounds, minimal struggle, no trace evidence besides what you'd expect in an abandoned station." "Did they dust the pillars?" Reed frowned. "Why would they?" Quinn walked to the nearest iron pillar, running her torch beam along its surface. Rust flaked under her fingertips, decades of oxidation and neglect. But there—about chest height—the rust had been disturbed. Not brushed away, exactly. More like burned away in a perfect handprint, the metal beneath showing clean and dark. "Marcus, come look at this." He joined her, skepticism clear in his expression. "Could be anything. Kids exploring, homeless using this place as a shelter—" "The victim's blood splatter." Quinn cut him off, directing her torch back toward the body. "Look at the pattern." The blood had spread outward from the neck wound, which was expected. But it had stopped spreading about six inches from the body, forming an almost perfect circle. And the tiles within that circle were pristine—no dust, no dirt, nothing but blood and clean ceramic. "Someone cleaned the floor before he was killed," Quinn said. She crouched again, this time examining the perimeter of the blood pool. "But they only cleaned a specific area. Why do that?" Reed was quiet for a moment. "Ritual?" The word hung between them. Reed meant it as a joke—she could hear it in his tone—but Quinn's mind was already racing. The compass needle had steadied now, pointing at the wall with absolute certainty. She stood and followed its direction, stepping carefully around the blood. The wall where the needle pointed looked unremarkable at first. Curved white tiles, advertisements from the 1960s still barely visible beneath layers of grime. But when Quinn pressed her palm against it, the tiles were warm. Not hot, but distinctly warmer than the surrounding surfaces. Warmer than they should be in an abandoned station in November. "Feel this," she said. Reed placed his hand beside hers, then pulled it back. "That's—that's odd." Quinn traced the outline of the warm section. Roughly six feet tall, three feet wide. Door-shaped. And there, at what would be waist height on a door, more of those burned-away handprints. "We need to call in structural engineers," Reed said, stepping back. "Could be electrical wiring, gas lines—" "No." Quinn's voice was steady, but something cold had settled in her chest. "This isn't infrastructure." She pulled out her phone and began photographing everything. The warm wall. The handprints. The clean circle around the body. The compass in her hand, its needle unwavering. Reed watched her with growing unease. "Quinn, what are you thinking?" She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she walked back to the body and crouched beside it once more, studying the victim's face. In death, his expression wasn't one of fear or surprise. It was resignation. Like he'd known this was coming. His left hand, she noticed now, bore traces of something on the fingertips. She leaned closer, catching a faint smell beneath the copper tang of blood. Chalk. And something else—herbs, maybe? Something organic and old. "I'm thinking," she said finally, "that this wasn't a robbery. I'm thinking our victim came here deliberately. I'm thinking someone was waiting for him, and whatever happened here was planned down to the last detail." "Based on a broken compass and some warm tiles?" Quinn stood, meeting her partner's eyes. In the six months they'd worked together, she'd never told him about Morris. Never explained why she sometimes spent her off hours in the archives, pulling files on unexplained deaths and disappearances. Never mentioned the dreams that still woke her at 3 AM, where her old partner called her name from the darkness. "Based on eighteen years of instinct telling me when something doesn't fit." She pocketed the compass, ignoring procedure, ignoring the voice in her head that sounded like her sergeant major from basic training. "I want every camera in a three-block radius pulled. I want background checks on anyone reported in this area in the last week. And I want the archives searched for similar cases—unusual murders in abandoned spaces, victims with no defensive wounds." "That could be dozens of cases—" "Then we start going through them tonight." She headed toward the exit, then paused. "And Marcus? Not a word about the compass or the wall to anyone else. Not yet." She could feel his confusion behind her, his half-formed questions. But she kept walking, the brass compass warm against her hip, its needle still spinning uselessly in her pocket. Somewhere in this city, someone had opened a door that shouldn't exist. Someone had killed a man in a place that wasn't entirely on any official map. And three years ago, her partner had died investigating something just like this. Quinn's hand went to her watch, fingers tracing the worn leather strap. She'd waited three years for another thread to pull. Now she had one, and she wasn't going to let it slip away.