Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR9EMK05NH3GR4WNVAMJN6

By the time Detective Harlow Quinn stepped off the emergency-lit service stairs, damp had crept under her collar and into her bones. The abandoned platform yawned out of the gloom below, a concrete trench lined in cracked tiles and rusting signage, long since stripped of its name. The air smelled of old oil, wet brick, and that particular railway dust that turned to paste underfoot. Her watch said 02:17. The worn leather strap bit into the skin of her wrist as she tightened it out of habit. Another late call, another pissed-off inspector upstairs, another body in a place no one was supposed to be. Uniforms waited at the bottom, their yellow jackets turning ghostly in the pallid fluorescent wash. One young constable glanced up, clocked her sharp jaw, the salt-and-pepper crop, the no-nonsense set of her shoulders, and straightened instinctively. “Ma’am,” he said. “Scene’s just ahead. DI Markham’s with SOCO.” “Any press leak yet?” she asked. “Negative. Station’s sealed topside. We’ve told Transport we’re running a training exercise.” “Good. Keep it that way.” She moved past him, boots ringing on metal treads, posture precise without thinking about it—eighteen years of habit and a few more before that courtesy of the army. The tunnel opened out and the platform hit her in one bleak, low-ceilinged sweep. A dead Tube station beneath Camden. Unusual, even by tonight’s standards. Floodlights had been rigged along the track, harsh white cones pinning the far end of the platform. Figures clustered there: SOCO techs in white suits, a couple of uniforms, and Markham’s tall, spare shape in a dark overcoat. The body lay at the center of it all. Markham turned as she approached. His tie was crooked, grey hair standing up at the crown where he’d probably run a frustrated hand through it. “Quinn. About time.” “You woke me up,” she said. “I had to remember how trousers work.” He gave a humorless grunt and stepped aside. “Male, mid-thirties, no ID. Found by a track engineer doing an inspection this side of the security door. Door was locked from the outside when he got here. There’s something wrong with the lock, but SOCO’s still picking at it.” Harlow let his words slide into the back of her mind and looked at the man on the floor. He’d been laid out on his back, arms bent awkwardly against his sides. His eyes were open, pupils blown so wide that the irises were just a thin green ring. His mouth hung slack, as if the shock hadn’t had time to resolve into a scream. There was no obvious trauma: no blood, no stab wounds, no impact injuries that matched being hit by a train. There was, however, the mark on his chest. The shirt had been cut away, fabric peeled back and tagged by SOCO. Just left of the sternum, over where his heart should be, the skin had darkened in a roughened circle the size of a teacup saucer. Not a bruise, not quite a burn. More like someone had pressed something very cold there for too long. The edges feathered out into normal flesh, no blistering, no singe on the cotton around it. She crouched, knees protesting, and leaned in until she could see the fine crazing of broken capillaries radiating out from the center. Heart stopped, she thought. But not the way it’s supposed to. “You’re thinking drugs,” Markham said behind her. “I can see it.” “I’m thinking I don’t like that mark.” “Could be electrical.” He gestured vaguely at the overhead cabling. “He might’ve grabbed a live rail or a junction box. The engineer said there’s been issues with power down here. You can get weird current paths in these old tunnels.” “Mm.” She swept her gaze up, slow and methodical. The overhead lights nearest the body flickered intermittently, a faint stutter that seemed more like old ballast than lethal voltage. No scorch marks on the concrete. The third rail was beyond the far edge of the track, shielded, untouched. She took in the clothing. Jeans, dark. A navy jumper of good wool, not charity-shop pilling but quality, worn at the elbows. Brown leather brogues, well-made, soles showing city wear but recently resoled. Not what she saw on most rough sleepers or thrill-seekers who broke into abandoned stations for a laugh. “One of your junkies on a dare?” she asked. Markham’s mouth pinched. “We’re near Camden. Could be a user, could be some idiot urban explorer. Bloke gets high, wanders somewhere he shouldn’t, cooks his heart on a bit of stray current. It happens, Quinn.” She touched the back of the dead man’s hand lightly with her gloved fingertip. The rigor was starting, fingers half-curled. Under the nails, something pale and chalky had packed in, not the greasy grey grit of the track. She made a mental note. “Engineer’s sure no trains came through?” she said. “Positive. Line’s been blocked off at both ends since they decommissioned the station. Power’s off to this section. Only the maintenance lights are live, apparently.” Markham shrugged. “We’ll get the report.” Her gaze moved beyond the body to the wall. The tiles here, once white, had yellowed to nicotine. Long stretches were tagged in layers of graffiti—old bubble letters half-hidden under newer black-letter slogans. But above the dead man, someone had used chalk, not paint. Faint white lines etched curves and intersecting symbols in a rough circle, waist height, about a metre across. At first glance, she might have taken them for more student occult nonsense. But the circle wasn’t random. The lines had been drawn with care, compass-perfect arcs and repeating sigils at the compass points. At the lower right quadrant, one section had been smeared, as if a hand had dragged through still-fresh chalk and broken the line. She felt a thin, unwelcome thread of recognition tug under her ribs. Three years ago, in another dead place under the city, there had been chalk like that. Patterns that made her eyes ache to follow. DS Morris lying wrong on the floor, throat— She cut the memory off with a mental flick, the way she always did. Not now. Not here. “Kids,” Markham said, following her look. “Or some twit with a YouTube channel. Urban legends. Seances. Black magic bollocks…” He let it hang there, watching her. “You brought in an occultist already?” she asked. “On the way. Some museum type the super’s fond of. That’s why I called you—thought you’d enjoy the reunion.” Harlow didn’t smile. Eva Kowalski. Two years in London, one at the museum, and somehow she and Eva had managed to collide into each other three cases back over a cursed-looking book. The girl had a knack for finding the uncomfortable parts of a scene and naming them. “She’s not an occultist,” Harlow said. “She’s a historian.” Markham made a noncommittal sound that suggested the distinction meant little to him. She stood and moved around the body, careful of the yellow evidence markers peppering the floor. Someone had numbered a scattering of minor debris: a cigarette butt, a scrap of ticket, a small dark stain. And near the dead man’s left hand, a little off to one side, there was something the techs had bagged last. The plastic sleeve crinkled as she bent to pick it up. Inside, nestled in the wrinkles, lay a small disc of bone, about the size of a two-pound coin. Both faces were carved—one with a simple spiral, the other with an angular sigil that made her think of a bird’s footprint and a trident at once. “Found just out of his reach,” Markham said. “No chain or cord. Could be a keyring charm. Could be nothing.” The bone had a matte, dead-white finish that looked old in a way plastic never did. She turned the bag, watching the way the sigil caught the light. “Door to this place was locked?” she asked. “Show me.” At the far end of the platform, a double door of heavy steel sat in the tunnel wall, paint blistered with age. A fresh chain and Transport for London padlock now hung loose where uniforms had cut through earlier in the night. She ran a gloved finger over the sliced metal. Clean cut. The chain itself was new, galvanised links still bright under the dust. The area immediately around the latch, though, told a different story. The paint there was rubbed away down to bare metal, with old scrape marks radiating outwards in a worn fan shape. “Engineers have a key,” Markham said. “They come down, lock up behind them. That’s the theory. They swear blind they didn’t open it tonight before the call.” “And before the chain?” He frowned. “What?” “The chain’s newer than the door. There are older scratch marks here—from something else being used to open it, over and over, before Transport slapped their chain on. Different pattern to a regular key.” “You can tell that from a few scratches?” “I can tell someone’s been coming in and out of here before tonight, long enough to wear the paint away. Your engineer’s maintenance log will be interesting reading.” He didn’t argue, which she filed as a small win. Footsteps echoed on the stairs. Harlow glanced back. Eva Kowalski appeared at the bottom of the flight, slightly out of breath, curly red hair twisted into a messy knot that had already escaped in tendrils. Her round glasses had slipped down her freckled nose. She clutched her perpetual leather satchel to her side, the bulge of too many books and not enough sense. She spotted Harlow, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her left ear—a nervous habit that had survived a dozen horror scenes—and offered a tight half-smile that didn’t reach her green eyes. “Detective Quinn,” she said. “DI Markham. I was told you had…unusual markings?” “We’re calling them chalk,” Markham said dryly. “You tell us if it’s the name of Satan’s dog or something.” Eva’s mouth twitched. “Satan’s dog would be ‘Fluffy,’ according to a rather apocryphal—never mind, sorry. Show me?” Harlow led her back to the circle on the tiles. Eva set the satchel down, unzipped it, and pulled out a folded notebook and a pencil stub. She peered up at the wall, lips moving as she traced the lines with her gaze. “Protective,” she murmured at last. “Or meant to be. It’s a reactive circle—see here, the repeated sigils at the quarter-points? These are meant to ground or redirect…something. Energy, spirits, whatever the practitioner believes in. The circle’s only as good as their conviction and design.” “We’re not entertaining ghosts tonight,” Markham said. “Tell me how some numpty with a bit of chalk kills a man with no obvious trauma.” Eva didn’t look at him. She pointed instead to the smeared section. “If this were whole, it would be complete. But someone or something disrupted it. Broke the line. That’s usually bad news in this sort of setup, even if you only think of it as…a psychological boundary, yes?” Harlow watched the smear more closely. The chalk streak arced downward, gravity pulling it. No handprints were visible, but there were faint darker tracks through the white, as if wet fingers had dragged, diluted the chalk. She pictured the dead man, alive and standing. Hand pressed to the wall, maybe, something happening that made him lose balance, slide down. “Could he have drawn this himself?” she asked. Eva studied the neat arcs and intersections. “Possibly. The iconography’s not mainstream, but it’s consistent, like someone who’s made a study of a particular system. Or bought a very esoteric grimoire on eBay.” Harlow dug the bone token’s bag out of her pocket and held it up. “What about this?” Eva’s pupils dilated slightly behind the lenses. She reached out, then thought better of it and kept her hands at her sides. “May I…?” “Gloves,” Harlow said. “Of course.” Eva fumbled with a packet of nitrile gloves from her satchel, snapping them on with less authority than Harlow liked but at least some caution. She took the bag by its edges and brought the token closer to her face. “Bone,” she said softly. “Not modern. The carving is…hm.” Her brow furrowed. “The spiral motif is generic, could be anything from Iron Age to last week. But this”—she turned it, tapped the angular sigil gently through the plastic—“I’ve only seen a variant once. In a contraband inventory list. Objects seized at the border twelve years ago, en route to…an ‘unregulated market.’” “Unregulated,” Markham repeated. “You mean criminal.” “Black market in…specialist goods,” Eva said, choosing her words with academic care. “Occult paraphernalia, supposedly. The list used code names. One was the Veil Market. Might just be romantic branding.” She shrugged one shoulder. “But that symbol was marked as an access token.” Harlow felt the hair prick at the nape of her neck. “An access token to what?” “Allegedly? A hidden space. They claimed it was…between places.” Eva pushed her glasses up. “Again, these are stories attached to smuggling operations, Detective. No one in the archive believed they were literal.” “Between places,” Markham muttered. “We call that ‘a van.’” Eva ignored him. Her gaze had snagged on another bag on the SOCO’s evidence tray. “What’s that?” The tech obligingly held it up. Inside, on a bed of labeled paper, sat a small brass compass. Its casing was dull with age, greenish verdigris crusting in the crevices. The glass face was etched with tiny, precise sigils along the rim instead of degrees. The needle inside did not point north; it pointed, unwavering, toward the far end of the platform, away from the body. “That was in his coat pocket,” the SOCO said. “No manufacturer’s mark. Looks like a novelty you’d buy on Portobello Road.” No, Harlow thought. Portobello didn’t stock things that made her stomach clench just to look at them. Eva’s breath hitched. “Oh,” she said, very quietly. “You recognise it?” Harlow asked. “Not specifically. But conceptually, yes. A…veil compass.” She sounded as if she half-expected the word to bite her. “There was a sketch in that same inventory. Said to be ‘attuned to liminal thresholds.’ Doorways that aren’t doors. It’s supposed to…” She hesitated, as if weighing how much nonsense they’d tolerate. “…point at rifts. Places where the boundary between here and…elsewhere…is thinner.” “Elsewhere,” Markham said. “Mars?” Eva flushed, freckles standing out darker. “In folklore, that’s often the word they use. I’m just relaying—” “Functional?” Harlow cut in. “Or decorative?” “I have no idea,” Eva said honestly. “The sketch I saw didn’t exactly come with a user manual.” Harlow stepped closer to the compass. The needle remained steady, dead-centred on a patch of tiled wall beyond the chalk circle, where an old service arch had been bricked up decades ago. Hairline cracks crazed the mortar. A faint, almost imperceptible draft brushed her face, carrying a scent that didn’t belong in a Tube tunnel—something metallic and sour, like rain on hot iron. She glanced at the overhead, where a security camera drooped from its bracket, red recording light dark. “That camera live?” she asked. The SOCO shook his head. “No feed from it. Control says it’s been offline since last month. Never made it onto a work order.” “Convenient,” she said. “Bloody ancient wiring,” Markham replied. “Half these subsurface units fail every other week. You’re making patterns out of pigeons, Quinn.” Maybe. But her chest had that tight, compressed feeling she remembered too well from the night Morris died. The sense that the world had shifted half an inch to the left while no one was looking, and the evidence refused to line up in the usual neat rows. “The door was locked from the outside,” she said slowly, half to herself. “Engineer swears he didn’t open it. No sign of anyone else down here. No trains. No power surge in the logs. Yet we have a well-dressed man with an access token in bone and a…veil compass in his pocket, lying dead under a broken protective circle.” “Which equals,” Markham said, ticking off on his fingers, “one trespasser or dealer who comes down here with his odd little toys, gets high, scares himself stupid in the dark, and drops from a cardiac event. Maybe he drew his own circle because he saw it in a book. Maybe he thought the compass would...guide his spirit animal. It goes wrong. End of.” “Then where’s his gear?” Harlow said. “No paraphernalia, no needles, no pills, no bottles. Not on him, not on the platform. You’re telling me his mates tagged along, watched him drop, politely cleaned up their drugs and left him laid out just so?” Markham’s jaw worked. “They panicked. People do.” “Through a locked door.” She let the words hang. Eva shifted her weight, the sole of her boot squeaking faintly on the damp concrete. “Detective,” she said softly, “you know it’s a full moon tonight?” Harlow glanced at her. “And?” Eva’s fingers worried the edge of her notebook. “Some of the…stories attached to that market place—the Veil Market—say it moves. Changes location every full moon. Always underground. Always behind doors no one else sees.” Markham snorted outright. “Brilliant. We’ve got a calendar of fairy fairs now.” Harlow ignored him. She checked her watch without really needing to. The date stared back at her, impassive. “Suppose,” she said slowly, “for the sake of argument, that someone believed this Market existed. Suppose they had one of these tokens. Suppose they thought this derelict station was the entrance, tonight of all nights.” She nodded toward the bricked-up arch. “What were they expecting to find behind there?” Eva met her gaze, something like fear flickering in her green eyes. “Depends on who they were buying from.” “And what did they get instead?” Harlow asked. Silence pressed in. The distant hum of the active lines farther along the network felt unreal, as if they belonged to another city. Harlow stepped up to the bricked arch and laid her palm flat against the cold tile. Nothing moved. No Hollywood shiver, no sudden revelation. Just clammy ceramic under her glove, the wall solid as it had been for seventy years. But at the edge of her hearing, she thought she caught something—the echo of voices that weren’t there, a susurration like market crowds heard through thick glass. The rational part of her brain dismissed it. The part filed under Morris remembered charred chalk circles on another underground wall and a case file that had never closed properly. She dropped her hand and turned back to the scene. “No,” she said. “This isn’t a trespasser who got unlucky.” Markham folded his arms. “Then what is it, Quinn?” “A locked-room job,” she said. “Without the room. A man who walked into a place that doesn’t exist, carrying tools for a journey no one takes sober. Something went wrong. He died trying to protect himself from…something. And whoever’s running their little fairy-tale market tonight either knows why, or wishes he’d never bought a ticket.” “Christ.” Markham scrubbed a hand over his face. “You want to put that in a report?” “No.” She watched the compass needle, still unwavering, aimed at the unseen. “I want to find out how you get into a market that moves every full moon. And who sells a man a broken circle.” She felt Eva’s eyes on her, a mix of dread and reluctant excitement. Harlow didn’t blame her. Mystery had its own gravity. It pulled at you, even when you knew better. She looked once more at the bone token, at the sigil that might have been a footprint or a trident or an arrow pointing into nothing at all. Eighteen years in the Met had taught her that evidence told stories if you were patient enough to listen. Tonight, the story was wrong. The lines didn’t meet. The chalk circle broke where it shouldn’t. Harlow Quinn had lost one partner to a case that didn’t add up. She wasn’t about to lose another night’s sleep to pretending this one did.