Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ91JDPG47AXN50JJ1E38K0

The call had come in at half past two in the morning — a body, Camden Underground, decommissioned stretch below the Tube lines that hadn't seen a passenger since 1968. Quinn had driven over in twelve minutes flat, which was six minutes faster than she should have managed on rain-slicked roads, but she'd never been good at respecting speed limits when a scene was waiting. She ducked under the blue-and-white tape and descended the maintenance stairs into the dark. The first thing that hit her was the smell. Not the expected damp rot of an unused tunnel, though that was underneath everything like an old bruise. No — this was something sharper. Sulfurous and sweet at the same time, the way she imagined a struck match might smell if you could set fire to something that didn't have a physical form. She'd smelled it once before. Three years ago. She pushed that thought back behind the door where she kept DS Morris and didn't open it. DC Brennan met her at the bottom of the stairs, a stocky young man with honest eyes and too much gel in his hair for two in the morning. He handed her a torch without being asked. Good instinct. "Victim's female," he said, falling into step beside her. "Early thirties, no ID on her. Scene photographer's done. Forensics are still processing the far end of the platform, but — " He paused. "You should just look at it, ma'am." Quinn appreciated that about Brennan. He knew when description was insufficient. The abandoned platform stretched away from them, the ghost of its signage still visible on cracked tiling — faded letters that spelled CAMDEN ROAD in the London Transport font of a different era. Emergency lighting had been rigged by the first response team, casting the space in a flat white glow that threw everything into planes of light and deep shadow. The body was positioned near the far wall. Quinn walked to it and stood for a long moment without speaking. The woman was lying on her back with her arms at her sides — not thrown, not curled, not contorted. Placed. Her dark coat was buttoned to the throat, her shoes were on, and there was no visible trauma. No blood. No bruising that Quinn could see on the pale skin of her face and hands. She looked, more than anything, like someone who had decided to lie down on an abandoned Tube platform and go to sleep, and had done so with great care and considerable composure. Around her — and this was the detail that had made Brennan lose his words — the concrete floor was marked. Not with paint or chalk but with something burned into the surface in overlapping rings and intersecting lines. Sigils. Quinn didn't know the word for them consciously, but some part of her older and less rational brain did, and it made her still. "Any witnesses?" she asked. "One. That's the other thing." Brennan pointed toward the far end of the platform, near the old ticket booth. A uniformed officer was standing beside a small, curly-haired woman in a canvas coat, who was hugging a leather satchel to her chest with both arms as though it contained something breakable. Even from forty feet away, Quinn could see the woman's shoulders were rigid with the particular tension of someone trying very hard to appear calm. Quinn took one more careful look at the body, at the position of the hands, at the floor around it, at the unmarked dust that should have shown footprints leading away and didn't, not in any direction that made physical sense. Then she walked toward the witness. The woman was younger than Quinn had estimated from a distance. Mid-twenties, freckled, red curls escaping from behind where she'd tucked them carefully behind her left ear. Round glasses. She was doing it again as Quinn approached — that small unconscious gesture, pressing a curl back into place, though it fell forward immediately. "I'm Detective Quinn," Quinn said. She didn't add her rank or her division. She'd learned that witnesses who were already frightened clammed up faster when you announced the full institutional weight of what was standing in front of them. "And you are?" "Eva." The woman's voice was steadier than her body language. "Eva Kowalski." "Ms. Kowalski. What brings you to a decommissioned Tube station at two in the morning?" A pause. A microscopic one, but Quinn caught it. "I was doing research. I work at the British Museum — the restricted archives. There are documented cases of Victorian-era use of abandoned stations for — " "You came here alone?" "Yes." "With a torch?" "I — yes. I had a torch." Quinn looked at the satchel. It was old leather, worn at the corners, and it was full — she could see the spines of several books pressing against the flap. It was also, she noticed, buttoned shut, and Eva Kowalski's hand was resting on the buckle. "I'll need to see the contents of the bag," Quinn said. Something moved behind the green eyes. Not guilt, exactly. More like calculation. "I don't think — " "Not a request, Ms. Kowalski." Another pause. Then Eva unsnapped the buckle and opened the satchel and held it toward Quinn with the posture of someone who has decided the game is up and is now betting that what's inside appears less interesting than it is. Books. A notebook, densely written in a hand too small to read at this angle. A Tupperware container of what appeared to be tea lights. And in the inside pocket, loose among pens and receipts — a small brass compass, no larger than a pocket watch. Verdigris on the casing. Something etched on its face that was not north-south-east-west. Quinn reached in and lifted it out. The needle swung immediately, not toward magnetic north, not toward any wall or door, but down toward the floor — toward, Quinn registered with a cold sliding sensation in her chest, the platform where the body lay. "Where did you get this?" she asked quietly. Eva Kowalski said nothing, but her left hand moved to tuck her hair back again, though there was nothing there to tuck. Quinn turned the compass over. The brass was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the tunnel. The sigils on its face were identical — she looked back at the floor, at the burned rings around the dead woman, and confirmed it with the certainty of someone who had spent eighteen years training herself to see what was actually in front of her rather than what was convenient — identical to the markings on the body's right palm, which she had noted and said nothing about to Brennan because she needed more data before she spoke. "Detective." Brennan had come up behind her. He had a tablet in his hand, the blue light of it making his face look washed out. "Lab just called up. Initial tox on the platform air — can't explain the chemical signature. Says nothing in their database matches it." "Tell them to look harder," Quinn said, not turning around. "And — forensics say no footprints leading to or from the body. I mean, nothing. The dust is undisturbed except in a two-meter radius of the victim." Quinn turned the compass over again in her palm. The needle trembled. "The door to this station," she said. "The maintenance entrance. When first response arrived, was it locked?" Brennan checked his notes. "Padlocked from outside. Undamaged. They had to cut it." She looked at Eva Kowalski. Eva Kowalski looked back at her with wide, steady, carefully neutral green eyes. "You're telling me," Quinn said, "that there is a woman with no identification and no visible cause of death, who appears to have walked to the center of an abandoned Tube platform, lain down, and died, inside a locked room with no footprints, surrounded by markings that match something you're carrying, and you found her while conducting archive research at two in the morning." She left it there, not as a question, just as the architecture of what didn't fit. Eva touched her hair again. "I'm happy to answer whatever questions — " "You're going to answer all of them," Quinn said. "Starting with what this compass points to, and why the floor smells like the last scene I worked where someone died in a way my reports still can't account for." She kept her voice level with the practice of someone who had made a career of keeping her voice level. "Brennan. Get her a car. She's coming to the station." She looked back at the platform. At the body lying in its perfect, deliberate stillness. At the burns in the floor still faintly radiating that sweetness and sulfur into the cold air. The compass needle swung in her palm and pointed straight down.