Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ9430J7ME9JYXAY02W5DGV

The rain came down in curtains. Quinn turned up the collar of her coat and pressed herself against the wet brickwork of a doorway on Dean Street, watching the green neon of The Raven's Nest bleed its colour across the slick pavement below. She'd been outside for forty minutes. Her leather watch told her it was quarter past eleven. The bar closed at midnight, and the man she was watching had gone in just after nine. She had a name. Tomás Herrera, twenty-nine years old, formerly of the NHS, currently of no fixed professional address. Three prior cautions, no convictions. A ghost on paper. In practice, something considerably more interesting. He'd been at the scene of two of the four incidents she was building a case around — "incidents" being the polite word for events that had left her with crime scene photographs she kept in a separate locked drawer in her flat, away from the official files, because she couldn't explain them and she didn't want anyone else trying to until she could. Morris would have known what to call them. Morris was three years dead, and she still heard his voice sometimes, usually at moments like this, standing in the rain outside a bar in Soho, telling her to think carefully before she pushed a door open. *You don't know what's on the other side, Harlow. You never do.* The door opened. Herrera came out at eleven-twenty, coat zipped to his chin, shoulders hunched against the weather. He wasn't running — not yet — but there was a purposeful tightness to his step that she recognised. He knew he was being watched, or suspected he was, which amounted to the same thing. She gave him the corner. Then she followed. He went north on Wardour Street, then cut east, moving quickly through the narrow arteries between Soho and Covent Garden. She kept a full block behind him, letting the pedestrian traffic — thin as it was in the rain — provide whatever cover was available. He didn't look back. People who didn't look back were either oblivious or very good. She'd stopped assuming oblivious about three years ago. He ducked into a cab. She swore under her breath, raised her hand, and by some minor miracle of London meteorology managed to flag the next one within forty seconds. "Follow that cab." She showed her warrant card to the driver's mirror. "Don't lose it." The driver, admirably, didn't say a word. They went north. Up through Holborn, through Bloomsbury still gleaming and deserted in the rain, and then across the Euston Road. The cab ahead of them turned into Camden, and she felt something shift in her attention — a tightening, the way the air felt before something broke open. Herrera's cab stopped on Chalk Farm Road, just past the bridge over the canal. She watched him pay the driver and stand for a moment on the pavement, doing what looked like nothing in particular, which meant he was checking his surroundings. She had her driver stop short and paid him without looking away from the figure in the rain. Herrera moved again. He turned off the main road into a narrow passage that ran along the back of a row of shuttered market stalls, the kind of Camden labyrinth that tourists got lost in by daylight. By night, in the rain, with the market closed and the security lights casting orange pools that left more shadow than light, it felt like a different city entirely. She followed him in. The passage bent twice, and she caught a glimpse of him near the second turn — a flash of dark coat, the gleam of something at his neck. A medallion of some kind. Then he was gone again, and she followed the sound of his footsteps over the wet stone. The footsteps stopped. She stopped too, pressing into shadow, listening. Rain on corrugated metal. Distant traffic. Nothing else. She moved to the place where she'd last heard him and found a section of hoarding — wooden panels covering what had once been a service entrance to the old station. Camden Town had redundant tunnels beneath it; she knew that much. Transport for London occasionally sent engineers down to check on them. She'd done enough years on the Met to know that various other people went down too, for various other reasons. One of the wooden panels was slightly ajar. She crouched and examined it without touching it. The gap was about two feet wide. Darkness beyond. And something else — a smell that didn't belong to rot or concrete or old earth. Something mineral and faintly sweet, like the air near a burning match, if the match had been burning something other than phosphorus. Morris had described a smell like that once. He'd been trying to explain something to her, the week before he died, and she'd told him to get some sleep. She hadn't listened properly. She'd been so sure there was a rational explanation. The sound that came from below was not easily rational. It was a low, uneven murmur, like a crowd but stranger — voices overlapping in rhythms that didn't match, in a space that seemed larger than the ground above could account for. She heard what might have been music. She heard something that was definitely not music. Quinn straightened up and stood in the rain. The sensible thing was to radio in. Request backup. Get a warrant for the tunnels. Do this properly. The sensible thing. The problem was that the last time she'd waited for the sensible thing, she'd been standing over Morris's body trying to explain to paramedics why a man in perfectly good health had died of causes that no post-mortem would adequately name. The coroner had written *cardiac event*. She'd written *insufficient answers* in the notebook she still kept, and she'd been working on it ever since. Her hand rested on the wooden panel. Herrera was down there. And whatever she'd been building a case toward for three years was down there too, she could feel it with the same certainty she felt in her jaw before a storm. She checked her watch. Twenty to midnight. The leather strap was dark with rain. She took out her phone and typed a message to the one number she trusted implicitly — DS Chen, who owed her three favours and asked no questions — with her location, the time, and the words *if you don't hear from me in two hours, come and get me.* She sent it. She put her phone away. Then she pulled the panel back and went down. The air changed immediately. Cooler, still, carrying that strange mineral sweetness more intensely now. A string of bare bulbs had been rigged along the tunnel wall at shoulder height, and in their unsteady yellow light she could see that the floor had been swept clean and that there were marks on the walls — not graffiti, something older-looking, angular shapes pressed into the stone like stamps. She kept moving toward the noise, one hand trailing the wall, the other loose near her hip where her warrant card and her radio both lived, neither of them likely to be much use here. The tunnel opened. She'd been in Grand Central. She'd been in the concourse at St. Pancras. She thought she had a reasonable sense of interior scale. What she was looking at dismantled that sense completely. The abandoned station had been transformed into something that had no name in any category she possessed. Stalls lined the old platform edges and spilled out across the tracks, lit by lanterns of a dozen different colours — amber, violet, deep arterial red. The vaulted ceiling above was strung with chains of light that moved without wind. The crowd was dense and close and wrong in ways she was still cataloguing, because some of them were wrong in ways she couldn't look at directly, couldn't hold in focus, like a word you know but temporarily cannot read. The stalls sold things she had no framework for. She could see glass vessels containing substances with no analogue in any evidence locker she'd ever touched. She could see what looked like documents, but the text moved. She could see a woman — possibly a woman — behind a table of small objects, speaking to a customer in a language that sounded like English but structured differently, like English being spoken by something that had learned it from the outside. She stood at the mouth of the tunnel and no one had spotted her yet. Herrera was fifty feet away. She could see the back of his dark coat, the Saint Christopher medallion catching a lantern's red light at his collar. He was talking to someone. He looked, despite everything, completely at ease — like a man who belonged somewhere, in a way she was beginning to understand she did not. Her jaw was tight. Her heart was doing something measured and controlled, the way it always did when she was about to make a decision she couldn't take back. She thought about Morris. She stepped onto the platform.