Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ918KKJJZCYXWSBXZXJD5P

The call had come in at half past two in the morning, and Quinn had driven through rain-slicked streets with her window cracked, needing the cold air to keep her sharp. Now she stood at the mouth of the service entrance to the old Camden Town station — the one that had been shuttered since 1924, according to the placard some heritage board had bolted to the wall and nobody ever read — and she watched the forensics team set up their lights below. The entrance was a steel door set back into the brickwork of a converted music venue. Someone had burned the lock out. Quinn crouched and examined the door frame: the metal around the latch was scorched from the inside, not the outside. She stood, noted the time on her leather watch — 2:51 a.m. — and descended the stairs. The station had that particular smell of old tunnels, mineral and cold, with something else underneath it tonight. Something that reminded her, in a way she couldn't pin down, of the smell in DS Morris's flat the morning after. She pushed the thought away. Detective Constable Patel met her at the bottom of the stairs. He was young enough that being called out in the middle of the night still gave him a kind of bright-eyed alertness rather than the grey fatigue Quinn wore like a second skin. "Victim's a John Doe," Patel said. "Male, fifties, no wallet, no phone. ME puts time of death somewhere between nine and midnight." "Cause?" "That's the thing." He lifted the cordon tape for her. "We're not sure yet." The platform was enormous in the way that abandoned spaces always seemed enormous, freed from the press of commuters that would have given it scale. The forensics lights turned everything harsh and white. Quinn walked the length of it, hands in her coat pockets, eyes moving. The body was positioned at the far end of the platform, near where the tunnel mouth opened into darkness. The man was lying on his back, arms at his sides, in an arrangement that was almost too composed. His face was slack, his lips slightly parted. No visible wounds. No blood. His clothes — good quality, a wool overcoat, leather-soled shoes — were entirely unruffled, as though he'd lain down for a nap and simply not gotten up. "Staging," Quinn said. "That's what DI Fraser thinks. He's over there." Patel tilted his head toward the wall. Fraser was a barrel-chested man from Serious Crimes who had a habit of reaching conclusions before the evidence did and then constructing a path backward. He was talking to a junior officer and gesturing with a coffee cup. "Quinn," he said when she approached. "Nasty one." "What's your read?" "Drug exchange gone wrong, most likely. This whole area's got a history. Market stalls operating down here, off the books — we've had intelligence on it for months. Someone moved a meeting underground, things turned. He's been posed afterward, show of force. We're looking for associates, known dealers in the Camden network." Quinn looked at the body again. "What drug kills a man his age with no symptoms, no injection sites, no obvious ingestion evidence, and leaves him looking like he died in his sleep?" Fraser shrugged. "Toxicology'll tell us." "Mm." She turned away from him and crouched beside the body. She didn't touch anything. She looked. The man's right hand was open, palm up, fingers slightly curled. His left hand was closed. Not clenched — closed, as if he'd been holding something and the grip had relaxed in death. Quinn looked up at the attending forensics officer. "Has the left hand been documented?" "Photographed, yes. Nothing in it." "What do you mean, nothing in it?" "Nothing. It was empty when we got here." Quinn looked at the floor around the body. The platform was dirty with decades of grime and old dust, and in that dust there were disturbances — footprints, multiple sets, some from the forensics team and some older. But closest to the body, on the left side, there was a mark in the dust she couldn't account for. A circular impression, roughly three centimetres in diameter, with a faint radial pattern around it. Like something had been resting there and been picked up. She photographed it with her phone. "Patel." He materialised at her elbow. "Who found the body?" "Anonymous call. Male voice, according to dispatch. Wouldn't give a name." "Time of call?" "One forty-seven a.m." Quinn stood. She walked toward the tunnel mouth and stopped where the platform edge met the dark. She took out her torch and shone it down the tunnel. Nothing moved. But on the curved wall of the tunnel, just at the edge of the light's reach, there was something scratched into the old plaster. Symbols. Not graffiti — too deliberate, too evenly spaced. She photographed them. She was still looking at the tunnel wall when she heard footsteps on the stairs. The figure that appeared at the bottom of the platform stairs wore a long coat and carried a worn leather satchel that looked like it belonged in a university library. Red curly hair caught the forensics lights. Round glasses. The woman stopped when she saw the cordon tape and the assembled officers, and something crossed her face — not surprise exactly, but a rapid, private recalibration. Quinn moved before anyone else had registered the intrusion. "Excuse me." She had her badge out. "This is an active crime scene. How did you get past the perimeter?" The woman blinked. Her hand went to the side of her head, tucking a curl behind her left ear. "I'm sorry — I saw the lights, I was just—" "Name." A pause. "Eva. Eva Kowalski." Quinn looked at her. The satchel was bulging. The woman's green eyes were moving over the scene with a quality of observation that wasn't voyeurism and wasn't horror. It was something closer to recognition. "You've been here before," Quinn said. It wasn't a question. Eva Kowalski's expression confirmed it, even as her mouth prepared a different answer. "I do research," Eva said carefully. "Local history. Abandoned infrastructure. This station has been of academic interest for—" "At three in the morning." Silence. Quinn stepped closer. She was nine inches taller than this woman but she didn't use the height as a weapon — she simply held her ground and waited. In her experience, the wait was worth more than the pressure. Eva's hand moved to the satchel strap, gripping it. "Is there — has something happened?" "A man is dead." Something shifted in Eva's face. Genuine, this time. Quinn had learned, over eighteen years, to read the difference between performed emotion and real feeling, and this was real — a flash of something that wasn't quite grief but was adjacent to it. "Did he have anything with him?" Eva asked. "When they found him?" Quinn studied her. "Why would you ask that?" "I'm just — it's a strange place for someone to—" "Ms. Kowalski." Quinn kept her voice level. "I'm going to need to speak with you at length. Tonight, not tomorrow. You can either do that here, or you can do it at the station." She let a half-second pass. "This is a courtesy." Eva looked at the body. Then she looked at the symbols Quinn had photographed on the tunnel wall. Then she looked at Quinn, and in her eyes there was a calculation happening — the same kind Quinn recognised from mirrors, the interior arithmetic of someone deciding how much truth was safe. "I know what this place is," Eva said finally, quietly, so that only Quinn could hear. "What it's used for." "Tell me." "You'll think I'm—" "I've been doing this job for a long time," Quinn said. "I've seen a lot of things I couldn't explain." She thought of Morris. She thought of that smell in his flat, and the way the case files had simply stopped making sense, and the way no one above her had ever wanted to pursue it. "I'm not as easy to dismiss as I look." Eva studied her for a moment. Then she reached into her satchel, and Quinn's hand moved instinctively to her side before she saw what the woman was drawing out: a book, small and battered, its spine handwritten in two languages. Eva opened it to a page dense with photocopied symbols and held it up. The symbols on the tunnel wall. The same ones. "This is a market," Eva said. "Or it was. It moves — it's never in the same place twice for long. People come here to buy and sell things that you can't get anywhere else." She hesitated. "Things that shouldn't exist." Quinn looked at the circular mark in the dust beside the body. Three centimetres in diameter. Radial pattern. "What's normally sold here?" she asked. "Information. Substances. Tools." Eva's voice had steadied; she was on familiar ground now, academic footing. "Navigational instruments. There's one — a brass compass. Small. Sigils on the face. It finds—" She stopped. "It finds what?" Eva looked at the tunnel mouth. At the dark beyond the platform's edge. "Doorways," she said. "It finds doorways to places that shouldn't be accessible." Quinn turned back to the body. The closed left hand. The circular mark in the dust where something small had rested, then been removed. The composed, bloodless stillness of a man who had come here to buy something, or to sell it, or perhaps to take it from someone who hadn't wanted to give it up. She thought: someone got here before we did. She thought: someone knew to come. She looked at Eva Kowalski and made the only decision that made sense in the circumstances. "Tell me everything you know," she said. "From the beginning. And don't leave anything out because you think I won't believe it."