Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR7FV8380SBJH2TF5J4G92

The air was colder than it had any right to be. Detective Harlow Quinn paused halfway down the rusted iron staircase, fingers resting on the flaking rail, and listened. The stairwell swallowed sound; even the distant rumble of trains didn’t reach this far down. All she heard was the low, mechanical breath of the generator they’d dragged in and the occasional murmur of voices echoing up from the shadowed station below. Abandoned Tube stations always felt wrong to her—like a throat that had forgotten how to swallow. Everything shaped for movement, for traffic, for noise, and instead: dust, silence, and the sense of something held too long in the dark. She checked her worn leather watch—02:17—and descended the last few steps, boots steady, posture straight, the old military habits embedded in her bones. A strip light flickered ahead, stuttering across a peeling enamel sign that still read CAMDEN—only the letters were half-obscured by soot. “Oi, Quinn.” DS Connor Lake stood just off the bottom step, one hand tucked into the pocket of his suit trousers, the other cradling a takeaway coffee that steamed faintly in the stale underground air. His tie was crooked, hair mussed. He looked like he’d been dragged from bed and hadn’t forgiven anyone yet. “Thought you’d got lost,” he said. “Signal’s bloody useless down here.” Harlow brushed past him, the smell of his cheap aftershave cutting briefly through the station’s blend of damp concrete and metal. “Some of us can follow directions without Google Maps,” she said. “This is it?” He grimaced. “This is it. Welcome to our very own ghost train.” The old platform opened out before her—wide, curved, and wrong. They’d set up floodlights on slim aluminium stands, their cables snaking across cracked tiles. The white beams turned the place into a stage: every broken tile, every patch of mildew and flaking paint, caught in harsh relief. It had the quality of a crime scene and something else underneath; like make-up hastily applied over a bruise. Blue-suited SOCOs moved through the light, bent over evidence markers. A white tent squatted near the far end of the platform, its entrance flap stirring with the slightest draft. Behind it, the black mouth of the tunnel yawned, swallowing light a few metres in. Harlow’s eyes tracked across the scene. The dust patterns were wrong. Long, bare rectangles cut through the greyish film across the floor, as if tables or racking had stood there recently. Scuff marks overlapped in arcs and straight lines, a palimpsest of hundreds of feet moving in ordered lanes rather than the chaotic scatter of a rave or squat. “Council contractor found the body,” Connor said at her shoulder. “They were surveying old utility lines, something about expansion work. They weren’t supposed to be down this far, apparently. Got curious when they found the access hatch.” “Because curiosity always ends well,” Harlow murmured. He huffed. “You’ll love this. Station’s not even on the current maps. Proper Cold War relic. They sealed it in the seventies. Should only be cable ducts and vermin down here. Instead we’ve got one dead bloke, a lot of weird crap, and a superintendent who wants this wrapped before the press get a sniff.” She took that in without comment. The air tasted faintly of ash, like a bonfire extinguished hours ago. No obvious fire damage, though. No blackened ceiling, no melted signs. The scorch was in the air, not on the walls. “Show me,” she said. Connor led her along the platform. It was only then she saw the fine white circles traced faintly on the floor, almost lost beneath the overlapping footprints of police boots. Chalk, mostly smeared now. Fatter, darker circles where candles had sat, judging by the rings of cooled wax still clinging to the cracked tiles. Someone had been careful with them: spaced in deliberate intervals, forming no pattern she recognised but definitely a pattern. “Kids playing at Satanists?” Connor suggested when he caught her looking. “Or one of those live-action role-play groups. People dress up as druids and bash each other with foam swords, don’t they? Maybe this is the underground branch.” “Druids with a bolt cropper,” she said dryly. He snorted. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” They reached the white tent. A SOCO held the flap aside, and the smell hit her first—copper and meat, overwritten but not erased by the sharp tang of disinfectant. The victim lay on his back on the platform, head towards the rails, feet towards the wall. Male, thirties, maybe early forties. Dark hair matted with blood at the back of his skull, though the pool beneath his head was oddly small. Black T-shirt, dark jeans, black boots with thick soles ground grey by city grit. No wallet on the tarp beside him, no phone, just a bagged keyring with three keys and a flattened metro ticket from a different line. His eyes were closed. Someone had done that much, at least. Harlow crouched beside the body, her knees popping. Salt-and-pepper hair fell forward a little as she bent, and she pushed it back impatiently. The latex gloves snapped softly over her fingers as she pulled them tight. “Time of death?” she asked. One of the SOCOs, a wiry woman named Prentiss, glanced at her notes. “Roughly eight to ten hours, ma’am. We’ll know more back at the lab. No visible needle marks. No ligatures. Massive trauma to the skull. My money’s on blunt-force trauma. Or a nasty fall.” Harlow studied the man’s neck, the pattern of lividity along his jaw. The blood had settled more along one side than his back. He hadn’t been lying perfectly flat for the first hours after he died. He’d been somewhere else. Or in a different position. She looked up. The rails were about four feet away. The drop from the platform edge was less than a metre. If he’d slipped and hit his head… “Connor,” she said. “Cause of death theory?” He folded his arms, leaning against the tent’s frame. “Contractor says he came in through the access door up top, followed the tunnel down, spotted the lights and the circles, panicked when he saw our friend here. He didn’t move the body. We’ve got one entry point everyone knows about, no sign of a struggle, and a man with a head injury lying conveniently visible where he can be found. I’m thinking trespasser gets in, trips in the dark, skull meets platform. Maybe he was high. Maybe drunk. His mates do a runner, taking anything that might identify him.” “And the chalk, the candles?” Connor shrugged. “Urban explorers. Weird art kids. Squatters who got creative. Doesn’t change the angle of the fall.” She glanced down at the back of the man’s head. The wound was on the right occipital, a crescent of torn flesh and matted hair. She shifted, squinting past him at the lip of the platform. The concrete edge directly behind his head was clean. No blood, no hair. No smear where his head might have bounced. “Except,” she said softly, “he didn’t hit his head here.” Prentiss looked up. Connor straightened a bit. “You’re sure?” “I’m sure he’s been moved.” She pointed with one gloved finger at the faint tide mark of blood around the wound. “This much trauma? The first impact should’ve left a very obvious transfer stain on whatever he hit. We’ve only got pooling. No cast-off spatter, no fine mist. This is the blood that left him after. Not during.” Connor frowned, pushing off the frame. “Could be he fell onto something else, then someone dragged him away. Or he thrashed.” “Dragged with no drag marks?” Harlow said. She let the question hang. The floor beneath the body was relatively clean of smearing. Someone had been careful. They’d lowered him here, not hauled. She scanned his hands. No defensive wounds. Fingernails clean of fibres. The right wrist, though, had faint bruising not yet fully developed, like fingers had gripped too hard. The watch tan-line on his left wrist had no watch to match it. She thought of her own watch, the worn leather strap snug against her skin, and suppressed the absurd flicker of superstition. People lost watches. People died underground. The two facts did not automatically share a thread. Almost. She rose, her knees complaining, and ducked out of the tent, tugging the flap open with more force than necessary. The platform seemed wider after the cramped space inside, the lights harsher. Her eyes took a moment to adjust. “Victim was placed,” she said to Connor. “After death or very near it. There’s been more than a handful of people down here recently. Your chalk circles and bare patches—those are stalls.” “Stalls?” “Tables, benches, call them what you like.” She pointed to a long rectangle of clean tile flanked by scuffed arcs. “See how the dust line is sharp along here? Whatever was standing there stayed long enough for dust to build up around it, and disappeared recently enough that the difference is still visible. Same over there, and there. That’s traffic patterns, not a bunch of kids mucking about for an hour.” Connor followed her gaze, his brow creasing. “Car boot sale in a ghost station?” “Something like that.” She moved along the platform, stepping over cables. Here, the scuffs were denser, the chalk more layered. Several wax circles overlapped, built up from candles that had been burned and replaced, burned and replaced, possibly over weeks, months. This wasn’t a one-off. Near one of the columns, something caught the light. She crouched, brushing away a smear of bootprint dust with her gloved knuckles. A small disc sat half-embedded in the grime. Bone, by the look of it, smoothed by fingers over years, the creamy surface stained grey. A hole pierced near one edge, as if it had once hung on a cord. Faint, shallow markings scratched around its circumference—lines and curves that weren’t quite letters. She picked it up, turning it to the light. It was warm against her latex, as if it had only just been dropped. Ridiculous. Her fingertips prickled anyway. “What’ve you got?” Connor asked, peering. “Token of some sort,” she said. “Could be a game piece. Or an access pass.” He laughed. “What, like a membership card? You flash your bit of bone at the bouncer and he lets you into the secret rave?” She didn’t answer. The thought lodged, uncomfortably neat. A token. A market. Patterns that repeated in places they shouldn’t. The memory slid in unbidden: a warehouse three years ago, DS Morris on his knees in a ring of symbols half-washed by rain, the air thick with the same faint ash-and-ozone tang. A small wooden disc in his hand. The CCTV that had shown twelve minutes of static at the critical point. Gas leak, they’d said. Faulty wiring. Nothing to see, Detective Quinn. Case closed. She’d kept Morris’s disc in a sealed envelope at the back of her desk drawer. Sometimes, on late nights, she took it out and just looked at it, trying to decide if the similarity was real or if grief had become a pattern-making machine in her brain. “Quinn?” Connor’s voice tugged her back. “You’ve gone quiet. That’s never a good sign.” She straightened. “Bag this,” she said, handing the bone token delicately to Prentiss. “Properly. No contamination.” “Oh, now she cares about our processes,” Prentiss muttered, but she smiled as she took it. Harlow moved on. Near the bench midway down the platform, something lay half-hidden under its rusting metal slats. Only when she knelt did she see the curve of brass, greened with age where the lacquer had failed. She reached in, fingers closing around cool metal, and drew it out. A small brass compass lay in her palm, the casing worn smooth by years of handling. Verdigris traced the edges, seeping into tiny etched lines along the rim. The glass face was scratched but intact. Beneath it, instead of the usual cardinal points, the pale disc was scored with tiny sigils—curling, hooked shapes that might have begun life as letters in an alphabet she didn’t recognise. The needle quivered. It wasn’t pointing north. She knew this because she knew where north was. The old Camden line ran roughly northwest to southeast. She’d glanced at the street map before coming down, oriented herself as habit. The compass should have aligned somewhere along the direction of the tunnel. Instead the needle angled stubbornly toward the far wall of the station, to a patch of cracked tiles and a crooked enamel advertisement for a brand of cigarettes no longer in production. She rotated the compass slowly. The needle didn’t waver towards north as she moved. It struggled briefly, like something tugging at it from a distance, then snapped back to its original bearing, quivering as if with effort. Harlow’s mouth went dry. “Tourist tat,” Connor said over her shoulder. “You get those at the markets in Shoreditch. Compass in a locket, that sort of thing. Probably dropped it in the panic.” “Ever seen one like this?” she asked, voice level. He leaned in, squinting. “Huh. Fancy. Nice touch with the weird writing. Goths’ll love it.” The sigils along the rim felt wrong. Not decorative, exactly. Deliberate. Protective, a word surfaced from somewhere, and she set her jaw against it. “Bag it,” she said, then hesitated. “Actually—” She slipped the compass into a clear evidence bag herself, sealing it carefully. Her reflection ghosted back at her from the smeared plastic: sharp jaw, tired eyes, closely cropped hair flecked more with silver under harsh light than it looked in her bathroom mirror. For a moment, the image doubled, overlapped with another in memory—another underground space, another body, another object that didn’t behave as it should. She handed the bag to Prentiss, then paused, fingers still on the edge. “Give me a minute with that,” she said. “Before it goes upstairs.” Prentiss shrugged. “You break it, you buy it.” Harlow stepped away from the others, towards the edge of the platform, taking the bagged compass with her. The tunnel ahead was a black throat, swallowing light three metres in. The floodlights’ reach faded into grainy shadow. Somewhere beyond that, the old rails ran on into darkness, dead-ended by brickwork if the plans were accurate. Officially, there was nowhere to go. She held the compass at chest height. The needle swung sluggishly, then snapped back—this time, pointing dead into the tunnel’s mouth. She turned, slowly, a neat rotation—ninety degrees, one-eighty, a full circle. The needle fought every inch, whining around the dial like something anxious in a cage, but always, always settled back to the same point. Into the dark. “Magnet in the wall, maybe,” Connor said behind her. She hadn’t heard him come up. “Old equipment. Or the steel in the rails playing tricks.” “The rails are everywhere,” she said. “That needle should be useless if it’s just picking up random interference. This is…consistent.” “You’re seeing ghosts, Quinn.” “Maybe I’ve been working with you too long.” He made a face. “Look, I’m not saying there’s nothing off about this. Whole place gives me the creeps. But if you start telling the super we’ve got haunted compasses and secret markets under Camden, he’s going to send us both for a welfare check.” She lowered the compass, feeling the pull of the needle as a faint buzz in her fingers through the plastic. “What we have,” she said, enunciating each word, “is an unauthorised gathering in a sealed station, organised enough to leave almost no personal effects behind. A body that’s been placed, not dropped, with no identification, after whatever this”—she gestured to the chalk circles, the bare patches, the candle stubs—“was, wound down in a hurry. And we have one piece of kit that doesn’t behave the way it should. That’s not ghosts. That’s organisation. Planning. A group that’s comfortable operating outside normal spaces.” “Drug market,” Connor said readily. “Pop-up rave. Underground fight club. Any of the above. People do weird stuff for money.” “People do weird stuff,” she agreed. “But this isn’t a one-night stunt. Look at the wax layers. The dust lines. They’ve been coming here for weeks, maybe months. Moving big objects in and out regularly. And yet we’ve got no chatter. No missing persons report that jumps out for this bloke. No noise complaints from residents above. No CCTV breadcrumbs on the surface routes.” She let that sit there. Connor shifted, discomfort creasing the corner of his mouth. “We only twigged because some contractor took a wrong turn,” she added. “You really think that’s chance?” “I think,” he said slowly, “you get spooky when you’re tired.” She almost smiled. “Maybe I do. But I know when a crime scene’s lying to me.” She looked down the tunnel again. The darkness stared back, flat and indifferent. Deep in its throat, she thought she heard the faintest whisper of air movement, a colder breath that didn’t belong to the generator. The compass needle twitched, eager. Behind her, voices rose and fell, the mundane litany of a London crime scene: measurements called out, evidence markers shuffled, the rustle of paper bags. Normal. Grounding. She drew in a breath that tasted of old dust and something she refused, for now, to name. “Get me everything on that access hatch,” she told Connor without turning. “Who’s had keys, when it was last inspected, what work orders mention it in the last year. Cross-check for patterns. Same contractors popping up on different jobs, that sort of thing.” “You think one of them’s feeding people down here?” “I think somebody is. And I think our dead man isn’t a random drunk who fell in a hole. He’s part of whatever this is.” “And ‘this’ is…?” Harlow watched the needle strain towards the void. “An operation,” she said finally. “Black market, maybe. Something that doesn’t want daylight. Something big enough to think it can stay under our feet without us noticing.” Connor let out a low whistle. “You’re really aiming for the paperwork award this quarter.” She turned to face him, her bearing as crisp and precise as on any parade ground she’d ever stood on. “Connor. When have you ever known me to stop at the easy answer?” He held up his hands. “Fair. I’ll chase the hatch. You going to be all right down here a bit longer, or do I call in an exorcist?” “Piss off,” she said mildly. He grinned, the tension breaking, and headed back towards the knot of SOCOs. Alone for a moment, Harlow looked once more into the unfinished night at the tunnel’s mouth. Her heart beat steady against her ribs, not quick but weighted, as if bracing. Three years ago, she’d walked away from a different scene with too many questions and not enough courage to push past the official line. Morris had deserved better. The city had deserved better. She closed her hand around the bagged compass. Through the thin plastic, the brass felt colder now, the needle jittering faintly as if aware of being contained. “You’re going to tell me where you point,” she said under her breath. “One way or another.” The compass quivered, unwavering in its aim. Toward the dark.