AI Harlow took the rusted iron stairs two at a time, ducking beneath strips of yellow tape that trembled in the breath of the tunnel. The hum of a generator soaked the dark. Halogen floodlights turned the platform tiles into a glazed wound, slick with condensation that smelled of bleach over old urine and metal. She checked her worn leather watch without thinking. 03:17. The hands kept steady. Down here, time often lost its purchase.
“Morning, ma’am.” DS Lennox stood near the base of a crumbling pillar, rain still beading on his jacket. Early thirties, careful, a little too quick to decide. He flicked the edge of his ID lanyard with a forefinger. “You’re going to love this one.”
“Doubtful.” Harlow’s voice bounced off the tiled tunnel and came back thinner. She drew her shoulders in, the old habit—a soldier taught to reduce profile in unknown terrain. Her eyes went to the body.
Male, late twenties, maybe early thirties. Lean. Dark hair clumped against the tile from damp, a chalky pallor to his skin that look ed wrong down here, wronger than usual. His eyes were open and fixed on the shadowed curve of the ceiling. A borrowed syringe lay near his curled hand at the edge of the light pool—too clean, like a stage prop lost between takes.
“OD,” Lennox said. “Easy one. Junkie got lucky with a gap in the barrier and found himself a private platform. Used, died, no one here to help. No ID. Pockets turned out. We’ll push to Missing Persons in the morning.”
Harlow stepped in. The soles of her shoes made a tacky sound as they took up the damp. She crouched with a crack in her knees she pretended wasn’t there, and let the platform come to her in layers. The air had a spice she didn’t like: pepper and resin over something like ozone. A faint sweetness undercut it, anise and syrup.
She look ed at the syringe. Cap half-on. No residue on the barrel. The plunger’s rubber seal smooth, unscratched. She pinched it with gloved fingers and rolled it. The needle had a tiny curl at the point, as if it had been pressed to something firm and then eased off. She set it back exactly where it lay.
“No track marks,” she said.
Lennox sighed. “New to it? Plenty of first-timers get themselves killed. Purity’s up, or so Op Trident tells me.”
“Mm.” She parted the dead man’s sleeve. Skin pale and delicate. Faint bruising at the crook of the elbow from being manhandled onto the platform, not from a needle. No scarred veins, no scatter of dots. She leaned in until she could smell the man under the tunnel—citrus soap, cheap, from a shop that sold brushes and razor blades. A drop of something dark had dried in one nostril and flaked at her touch — not blood. She rubbed it against Glove and lifted it to the light. The granules caught and threw a brief glitter, mica caught in tar.
“Trendy dealer’s cut,” Lennox said lightly . “Or they’ve taken to snorting fireworks.”
“Listen before you speak,” she said, and didn’t soften it. Lennox's mouth closed with a click.
She studied the pattern around the body. The film of moisture on the tiles had broken in arcs, as if something had stood there for hours in short rows. The scuffed places made straight-edged prints, square, like the feet of stall tables. Candle wax dotted the grout in tear shapes. Her eye followed a line of soot up the support pillar. Above, a circle of ceiling tile was blackened by old smoke, careful, as though someone had burned a little furnace and kept it just so. Over the soot, faint scratched symbols caught the floodlight. Not graffiti—there was no hand to it. Lines even and clinical, the work of a compass and steady pressure.
Her pulse pushed against the leather watch strap. Three years dropped under her like a trapdoor. A damp alley off Whitechapel, Morris stepping through steam and into a place that had no place; chalk signs half-washed from brick. Harlow closed the door on the memory and set her jaw.
She walked the perimeter. Something snicked under her shoe, hard and small. She eased it out with a gloved finger and caught a circle the size of a two-pound coin, pale and matte. Bone. A hole bored neat through the center. Edge nicked with careful notches in a pattern her thumb recognized before her mind parsed it. She turned it, and there, four tiny crosshatches in a quadrant, a code. Entry? Token? The bone was old, polished by many thumbs.
She straightened, bone disc in her palm.
“Kids,” Lennox said behind her, triumph in the lift of his voice. “Satanic scrapbookers. They watch a horror film and think the Tube is a bloody altar.”
Harlow ignored him and slid the disc into an evidence bag. As she sealed it, something else caught her eye—almost lost under the dead man’s shoulder, pressed to the tile like a beetle playing dead. Small. Brass case the size of her palm, caked with green in the crevices. She eased it free and turned it in her hands.
A compass. Not a sailor’s, not military. The face was etched —not with numbers, not with the pretty marks a tourist buys. Tiny sigils cut so fine they drank the light. The needle trembled as she watch ed and then fixed, breathing toward the brick throat of the tunnel, a place with nothing to show it worth pointing at. The brass wore a skin of verdigris that stained her glove like bruised mint.
“What the hell is that?” Lennox leaned in. “Junkie’s jewellery?”
“It’s a compass.”
“Yeah? Find me north.”
“It’s not interested in north.”
Her voice sounded too flat. She bagged the compass and wrote nothing more than ‘brass instrument’ with her initials, careful letters. The evidence clerk could chase her for romance later. Last time she’d put ‘unknown device, possible ceremonial use’ on a form, it had evaporated between lab and lockup.
A noise scuffed near the train entrance, where uniform held back a small clump of the curious. Harlow glanced there. A woman stood a step ahead of the others, craning yet refusing the front. Petite. Curly red hair frizzed by the damp, peeping from the hood of a sensible coat. Round glasses flashed the light back at Harlow like a challenge. She held a worn leather satchel against her hip as if the strap had bruised her shoulder. When Harlow’s gaze met hers, she tucked a coil of hair behind her left ear. Nervous. Or keen.
“Who is she?” Harlow asked.
“Found the scene,” Lennox said. “Said she was—” he checked his notebook “—a researcher? Took a wrong turn. History geek having a midnight look at the old station.” He said the word geek with a fondness that made Harlow want to wipe it from his tongue. “Name of Kowalski.”
“Bring her.”
Uniform yielded the woman with a little wave as if sending a timid animal past a fence. As she stepped into the harsher light, freckles revealed themselves under the tunnel damp, scattered across a face more open than was safe.
“I’m Detective Harlow Quinn,” Harlow said. “You can call me Detective Quinn.”
“Eva. Eva Kowalski.” Her voice had a Museum hush to it, taught in carrels and under librarians’ chins. “I—thank you for letting me—”
“You found him. How?”
“I heard…” Eva swallowed. Her green gaze ticked to the dead man, then away to a soot mark on the pillar as if it could be kinder. “Sometimes I come down to see the old Tilework. I like vanished places. It’s stupid, I know. Tonight I heard—music.” She flushed. “It was faint and then gone. I thought it was teenagers. I—look , I know I shouldn’t have been down here, but the gate was open and… he was just there.”
“Music? What kind?”
“Strings.” Her smile flickered , self-mockery grazing her mouth. “And a flute. Not recorded. It felt… narrow. Like listening through a keyhole.”
Lennox made a small sound behind his tongue. Harlow didn’t indulge him.
“You touched him?” she asked.
“No, Detective. I called it in and waited. I didn’t touch anything.” Eva’s fingers twitched near her satchel and then made a fist from nothing, decisive. The satchel creaked like an old saddle.
“You work where?”
“British Museum,” Eva said, too fast. She pushed hair back from her ear again. “Research assistant. Restricted archives.”
Lennox’s eyebrows leaped and performed a small gavotte. Harlow kept her attention on Eva’s face. “So you collect vanishings as a hobby and keep the keys in your day job.”
Eva smiled because she had to. “I read a great deal. I’m not… I didn’t do anything here.”
Harlow believed that—believed the not-doing, if not the innocence underneath. The satchel zipper gaped enough to show book spines jammed in at wrong angles. The topmost bore a label in brittle library plastic. The title banded in Latin and then in fussy print: Portals and Efflux in Ancient Rite. Harlow filed it behind her eyes with a little click.
“What do you think happened?” she asked. She gave the curiously honest woman a choice and watch ed which way she jumped.
Eva’s throat worked. She look ed at the soot on the ceiling again, then at the arc-scuffed floor. She took a breath that made a little vowel. “I think… he wasn’t alone. This… it isn’t random.” She half-turned and gestured, small, like someone teaching children not to trip. “See the clean lines where the moisture’s been broken? Rows. There were tables here, or something like them. And the sigils—ah, the scratches—on the pillar. They’re—protective. Temporary. Someone did careful work quickly . And—” Her gaze snagged on the bag in Harlow’s hand. Her voice dropped. “And you have a compass you shouldn’t have.”
Harlow didn’t look at Lennox. “Meaning?”
Eva’s hand went into her hair. “It points at things that aren’t north. Doors. Weak places. I’ve… read about them. Shadow compasses. Veil compasses.” The last words left her reluctant. “You’ll think I’m mad.”
“I think a man is dead on my platform,” Harlow said. “Madness is a tertiary concern.”
“Detective—” Lennox tried, exasperation showing.
“Full moon tonight,” Harlow said to him without look ing away from Eva.
“How’d you—”
“Because it’s been two hours and your wife texted you a photograph of it over the canal, and you showed me in the lift. And because I can see the edge of a lunar calendar in our man’s jacket pocket, which you didn’t think to check.” She eased the corner of paper out with tweezers. Full moons circled in pencil. The current date double-ringed. She slid it back. “Last night something used this space. Something that leaves tokens and cuts careful circles into tile.”
“A market,” Eva whispered. The word was a moth she had to catch or it would bump at the light forever.
“A what?” Lennox said flatly.
“There are stories,” Eva said, eyes on Harlow, testing whether she would be laughed from the platform. “A market that moves. You don’t find it, it finds you if you know how to pay. It changes location every full moon. There’s a—an entry token. Bone. Sometimes antler. I shouldn’t—people call it the Veil Market.”
Harlow rolled that in her skull. Veil. The compass needle twitched against the plastic bag as if to be included. She stepped away from the body and toward the far end of the platform where tiles had cracked and the wall bricked up a century ago by someone with more mortar than imagination. Cold breathed from the hairline gaps between bricks.
“Lights,” she said.
Lennox swung one their way. In the new angle, Harlow saw a faint rubbed place low to the floor where knees might have worried at mortar. A scrape of metal. She went onto one knee and set her palm close. Air brushed her glove, cooler than the platform, smelling not of Tube grease or London’s swerve of human filth, but of stone and something briny, like sea held in old wool.
She lifted the bagged compass and held it flat. The needle leaped, almost a rattle, then steadied, pointing dead center at a brick the size of a book. Harlow’s breath lodged. She had felt this once before, years ago, a month before Morris died, in a stairwell that dropped where no stairwell belonged. She had told herself it was settling air. She had told herself a great many lies.
“Coincidence,” Lennox said. His voice had lost some of its surety. “Magnet in the wall. Old wiring.”
“Maybe.” Harlow let the needle hold. “Where would you put it then, if you wanted to leave a place fast and not be seen?”
“Not through a brick wall,” he muttered.
“Mm.” Harlow sat back on her heels and traced the scrape mark with a fingertip. The pattern returned to her in a rush—of crates drug across tile, the stall prints in tidy squares; a barrow wheel’s arc and the way one set of prints overlapped all the rest at a wrong angle, cutting through like a bold stroke. She followed that ghost path with her mind. It began at the body, led down the platform, hit the brick wall and stopped as if the feet had been plucked from air.
“You see the barrow tracks,” she said.
“What barrow—” Lennox stopped. The light found it as if she had conjured it. There—two parallel scuffs with a squeaking push between them, rubber marks smudged by damp but holding their geometry. They pulled up to the wall and vanished without turn or retreat.
“So,” Harlow said softly . “Not an overdose. He was moved. Either they brought him here to die and couldn’t be bothered to fake it right, or he died up there—” she jerked her chin at the old service tunnel that curved into black—“and someone didn’t want him left where he belonged.”
“Brought on a trolley?” Lennox faltered. “Why? Who does that?”
“People who like their rituals neat. People who trade in things you can’t buy on the King’s Road.” Harlow stood. Her knees hurt more than before. The watch on her wrist felt heavier. “Bag the syringe. Test it for sugar, see if anyone tried to colour the water. Swab his nostrils for resins. If you get as far as frankincense and myrrh, I owe you a fiver.”
“Quinn—” He ran a hand over his head.
“Check his fingernails,” Harlow went on. “He’s got grit under them that doesn’t belong to this platform. Maybe charcoal. Maybe something worse. Pull scrapings. And I want prints lifted from every one of these—look , here—” She pointed to the crisp edges in the moisture where legs had stood. “He wasn’t alone here. He died in a crowd and then was tidied away.”
“It was bloody empty when we got here.”
“Markets have to go somewhere when the sun comes up,” Eva said under her breath. She flushed as both detectives look ed at her. “I don’t—forget it.”
“No,” Harlow said. She studied her. The satchel lifted and fell with Eva’s breath. “Don’t forget it. You’ve heard more than stories.”
Eva worked her jaw. “I hear things at work,” she said finally. “People come to the restricted collections to answer questions they shouldn’t have. If there’s a place like that, it won’t be on a map. It sells enchanted goods, banned… substances. Old remedies. Information, mostly. Anything powerful ends up as information, in the end. And they take payment in bone because—” She stopped herself and shook her head. “Because stories make bloodless things feel safer. I don’t know who runs it. I shouldn’t—please don’t put my name in anything. I’ll lose my job.”
Harlow thought of Morris, of the chalk prints in an alley and his sudden absence like a door slamming where no door had stood. If there was a market for vanishing, he would have gone there to bargain his way back to her, stupid with loyalty. “You’re not the only one who’d lose something,” she said. She heard how tired she sounded and pulled steel into it. “Who is he, Eva? You’ve seen him before.”
Eva look ed at the dead man as if he might scold her for telling truth. “I think I saw him last week at—at a place that sells old books. He was buying atlases. Cheap ones. He didn’t have the… he had the wrong hands for a collector.”
“Wrong hands?”
“His nails were short. Cut to the quick, like someone who handles thread and doesn’t want to snag it. His thumb—” she mimed a motion “—had a thickening, a callus, where you’d catch a strap or a handle. He was a carrier, not a buyer.”
Harlow crouched again and took the dead man’s hand. The pad beneath his thumb was indeed hard, a little shiny patch of skin where force had paired with friction. Each thumbnail had small nicks, regular. Not chewed. Used as tools against smooth knots. Crates. Lids. Strings. She knew the feel. In another life, soldiers hauled ammunition boxes that left that exact story on their hands.
“He moved goods,” she said. “For who?”
“Not your friendly neighbourhood dealer,” Lennox muttered. He sounded chastened and angry about it.
“No,” Harlow said. “For something with a better sense of schedule. Ask Intel for any chatter about full moons and break-ins last night. Compare it with reports about unusual gatherings around Camden. Graffiti about doors, keys, eyes. Find me bones that aren’t from a butcher.”
“Great,” Lennox said, and there was no mock in it now. “You want ghosts with your coffee?”
“I want the person who put my corpse on this platform and thought I’d believe he did it to himself.”
Harlow let her gaze return to the bricked arch. The compassed needle pressed itself against plastic like a trapped insect, relentless, the cheap bag smearing the clean hunger of it.
“Shade craft,” Eva whispered very softly , not meaning to share. The word slid under Harlow’s skin, cool and unhelpful. She look ed at the woman until Eva flinched and tucked hair, ashamed of knowing the wrong thing.
“What did you say?” Lennox asked.
“Nothing,” Eva lied.
Harlow didn’t press. She had seen this exact pattern before: whisper, denial, mark rubbed off a tile too late. Her jaw ached from clenching . “Get a borescope in there,” she said to Lennox, pointing at the mortar’s hairline crack. “Nothing heroic. Have ARP do it. If there’s a void, I want to know if it’s a room or a tunnel. And call City to see if they’ve got any unauthorized works down here, even from a hundred years ago. Somebody used this. People are careless when they believe they’re invisible.”
“Copy.” He stood squarer than before. She watch ed him look at the syringe with loathing now, as if it had insulted his mother. Good.
Eva shifted from foot to foot, the satchel creaking. “Can I go?”
“You’ll give my constable your number,” Harlow said. “And you’ll answer when I ring. If you hear anything else, if any of your stories grow legs, you’ll tell me before they learn to run.”
Eva nodded, the motion bobbing her curls. “I will.”
“Good girl,” Harlow said, and immediately heard the contempt in it, old and bitter and not meant for Eva. “Thank you.”
Eva managed a smile that made Harlow’s throat ache. “Be careful with the compass,” she said, and then, before Harlow could ask how careful meant, she let uniform lead her back into the lessness of the tunnel.
Harlow stood alone for a moment in the slow breath of the station. Above, the city turned over in its sheets. Down here, something had lifted its tent and gone, taking its music and leaving careful dirt behind. She look ed at the compass again and then let her gaze settle on the brick. The scarred tile at the base bore three short lines and a longer one, angled—a sigil she knew like she knew the shape of her own bones. It had been chalked by a hand quicker than hers, once, and then smeared away when Morris didn’t come back.
She breathed. She unhooked her shoulders from around her neck. When she spoke, her voice was clipped and clean again. “Let’s photograph every thing,” she said. “This is what it look s like when a thing pretends not to have happened.”
The platform sighed. In the bag, the needle held steady on an absence no one else admitted was there.