Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ947G1TPRFAAV6WQNES1MQ

The abandoned station smelled of wet concrete and something older — a mineral bitterness that caught at the back of the throat like pennies dissolving on the tongue. Quinn descended the maintenance stairs with her torch angled low, one hand trailing the damp brick, each step deliberate. Behind her, the door at street level had already swung shut, cutting off the grey Camden morning. She'd been on the job long enough to know that crime scenes had their own atmosphere before you even looked at the evidence. This one felt wrong in a way she couldn't yet name. The call had come in at half past six. A utility worker, rerouted to check a gas main, had found the body. Now, forty minutes later, Quinn reached the platform and swept her torch across it. The Tube station had been decommissioned in 1952. That much she'd confirmed on the drive over. The tiles on the curved walls were the old cream and burgundy style, many of them cracked, some missing entirely, their absence leaving dark rectangular wounds in the brickwork. The platform itself was perhaps thirty metres long. At the far end, her colleague DS Priya Mehta crouched beside a collection of market stalls — or what remained of them. Folding tables upended, their contents scattered across the concrete. Glass vials shattered. Small cloth packages burst open, spilling their contents into powder traces that had already been photographed and flagged. The body lay between two of the overturned tables. Male, fifties, well-dressed in the specific way that suggested money spent quietly rather than loudly. No wallet. No phone. The Scene of Crime officers had already done their preliminary sweep, and Quinn could see their numbered yellow markers dotting the platform like a field of small flowers. "Quinn." Mehta stood as she approached, pulling her mask down to her chin. She was twelve years younger than Quinn and sharper than most people gave her credit for, which Quinn had always appreciated. "Victim is Thomas Vane. ID came from a signet ring — monogram inside the band. Next of kin not yet notified." "Cause of death?" "Pathologist's preliminary is cardiac event. No obvious trauma, no ligature marks, no puncture wounds they can find." Mehta paused. "Straightforward, if you ignore where he is." Quinn crouched beside the body, studying the face. Vane looked peaceful in the particular theatrical way that sometimes happened — eyes closed, expression slack rather than strained. No petechiae, she noted. No burst vessels. If his heart had stopped, it hadn't struggled doing it. "Who called this market in?" she said. "It's flagged at the station as a known location for — " Mehta consulted her notebook — "unlicensed trade in controlled substances. Vice has been trying to get a warrant for months." "When did Vice know about it?" "Six weeks ago. Anonymous tip." Quinn stood. She walked slowly along the row of upended stalls, her torch moving across the scattered goods. Most of the vials had shattered, but a few had survived, rolling into corners or coming to rest against the platform wall. She looked at them without touching. They were stoppered with wax, their contents dark — deep amber, near-black in some cases — and the labels, when she could read them, were handwritten in a script she didn't recognise. Not any European language she knew. Not any language she knew at all. She moved further along. There were small carved figures wrapped in felt. A collection of dried botanicals in waxed paper, some of them charred at the edges. Books, several of them, their covers plain and their pages foxed with age. Near the far wall, almost beneath the platform's decorative tiling, she found something that hadn't been flagged. A small brass compass lay in the shadow of a broken wooden crate, its casing pale with verdigris, its face etched with a fine repeating pattern she needed to angle her torch to read properly. Not north-south markings. Something else. The needle was spinning. She stared at it. The needle on a compass didn't spin. Not like this — not a slow, deliberate rotation, tracking something as methodically as a clock hand. It moved with what she could only describe as intention. "Mehta," she called, keeping her voice level. "Come look at this." Mehta appeared at her shoulder. "Bit of junk market stuff." "The needle's moving." A pause. "Probably magnetic interference. Old station, old wiring." "There's no power in this station. It was decommissioned in 1952." Mehta said nothing to that. Quinn didn't touch the compass. She straightened and looked back at the body, then at the stalls, then at the platform entrance — the old passenger access, long bricked up, though someone had clearly removed a section of the brickwork recently. The mortar around the removed section was fresh. No dust on the edges. "Tell me about the stall holders," she said. "Gone. Cleared out before the utility worker arrived, presumably. We have no witnesses, no CCTV — this section of the station predates the network upgrade." "So we have a dead man in a black market that had very recently been vacated, with stalls full of goods that don't correspond to anything in our controlled substances database, and a cause of death that a pathologist is calling cardiac without evidence of exertion, struggle, or distress." She said it aloud not because Mehta didn't know the facts but because saying them helped her hear the shape of the problem. "It tracks," Mehta said carefully. "He came to buy something. Overexcited, perhaps. Older man, could have had an underlying condition —" "His shoes." Mehta blinked. "What about them?" Quinn pointed. Vane's shoes were polished black leather, expensive. The soles faced slightly upward because his legs were angled. Both soles were clean. Not merely clean — unmarked. Not a scuff, not a trace of the grime that covered every square centimetre of this platform. "He didn't walk in here," Quinn said. Mehta was quiet for a moment. Then, quietly: "He was moved." "He was brought here after he died. Or he died precisely where he fell, which means he arrived here without walking." She moved back toward the compass, studying the needle's slow rotation. It had shifted its angle in the time she'd been standing here. The direction it pointed had changed — and it was pointing now, she realised, directly at the bricked-up entrance. At the section of brick that had been recently removed. The mortar. She went back to it, crouched, and looked at the fresh edges properly for the first time. Smooth. No trowel marks. No tool marks. No sign of the physical work that removing and relaying that section of brickwork would have required. She stood up very slowly. Eighteen years. She'd built her entire understanding of how the world worked on eighteen years of it staying consistent. Cause and effect. Physical evidence as the grammar of truth. She'd lost Morris to a case that had never resolved, never made sense no matter how many times she'd read back through her own notes, and she'd filed the cognitive dissonance in a drawer she kept carefully closed. The drawer was opening now whether she wanted it to or not. "Get someone with archaeological training to look at that mortar," she said, keeping her voice perfectly flat. "And bag the compass. Full chain of custody." "We don't even know what it is." "That's why I want it bagged." She turned to face Mehta. "And pull everything Vice has on this location. Every report, every tip, everything back to the beginning. I want to know who gave them that anonymous information six weeks ago." Mehta was looking at her with an expression that was three-quarters concern and one quarter something more careful. "You think this connects to something bigger." Quinn looked once more at the compass on the floor, its verdigris-pale casing, its needle still moving with that slow and purposeful rotation like a finger drawing a circle around something it wanted her to notice. "I think," she said, "that someone wanted us to find this scene. And I want to know why before we oblige them by behaving exactly as expected." She pulled a small notebook from her coat pocket and wrote the word compass, followed by a question mark and the name Morris. Then she put the notebook away, straightened her coat, and went to find out what Thomas Vane had been trying to buy.