Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ94M10Q5C1F9VHKBMY341W

The rain came down in sheets, turning the Soho gutters into rivers and the neon signs into smeared watercolour. Quinn turned up the collar of her jacket and pressed herself against the wall of a shuttered newsagent, watching the green light above The Raven's Nest pulse and flicker in the downpour forty metres ahead. She'd been sitting on Tomás Herrera for three days. It had started with a tip — anonymous, typed on plain paper, slid under the door of her home address, which was the detail that had kept her awake that first night. Someone knew where she lived. The note contained one line: *Ask the medic what he buried in Barnet.* She'd pulled Herrera's file before breakfast: former NHS paramedic, licence revoked eighteen months ago, currently of no fixed employment on paper. In practice, her surveillance had shown a man who moved through the city like water finding its level — slipping into buildings, emerging from others, carrying a medical bag that never seemed to get any lighter. Tonight she'd followed him from a flat in Clerkenwell to a chip shop in Covent Garden he hadn't bought anything from, and then here, to the wet dark mouth of Old Compton Street. She'd watched him enter the Nest forty minutes ago. She was still watching when he came back out. He was moving fast. That was the first tell. He'd gone in with the easy loose-limbed saunter of a man dropping in for a drink; he came out checking behind him, shoulders tight, the medical bag clutched against his body instead of swinging from his hand. He turned right without pausing and broke into a jog. Quinn was moving before she'd consciously decided to. The rain hit her face like static. She kept him in sight — olive coat, dark curls plastered flat, the faint gleam of something metal at his throat. He was fast for a man carrying a bag, and he clearly knew the streets. He cut left down a narrow passage between restaurants, vaulting a low chain across a patio of upturned chairs without breaking stride. Quinn followed, catching the chain on her shin, swearing quietly, carrying on. He was heading north. She keyed her radio, remembered she'd switched it off — operational discretion, she'd told herself at the start of the evening, which meant she didn't want anyone asking questions about what she was doing working solo on a night she was technically stood down. Old habit, and a bad one. Morris had told her that repeatedly. *You're not a one-woman unit, Harlow.* He'd said it six days before he died, and she'd been turning the sentence over in her head for three years like a stone she couldn't put down. She put Morris away and kept running. Herrera crossed Oxford Street against the lights, horns erupting behind him, and Quinn followed into the gap, her hand out, a black cab braking with a shuddering hiss. She held her warrant card up to the windscreen on instinct, which achieved nothing except making her feel foolish, and ran on. Camden. He was making for Camden. She gained ground on the long straight stretch of Tottenham Court Road, close enough now to hear him breathing hard, close enough to see the scar on his left forearm as his sleeve rode up — a pale line that caught the streetlight for just a moment before the darkness swallowed it again. She thought about calling out, about the formal declaration, *Metropolitan Police, stop*. She thought about how many times she'd watched a suspect's back disappear the moment those words left her mouth. She said nothing. She ran. He ducked into a side street she didn't recognise, then another, and suddenly they were in a pocket of Camden she'd never worked — a dead zone between the market and the canal, industrial buildings with bricked-up windows, streetlights down to one in three. Herrera slowed to a walk and Quinn slowed with him, pressing into a doorway, watching. He stopped in front of what appeared to be the sealed entrance to a Tube station. Not one she knew — the signage had been removed long ago and the ironwork gates were chained and padlocked, threaded through with old police tape that the rain had softened to strips of wet tissue. Herrera didn't hesitate. He reached into his coat, produced something small — bone-white, flat, the size of a large coin — and pressed it against the padlock. The chain fell. Not unlocked. Fell, cleanly and completely, each link separating in sequence like a zip pulled open, the whole length dropping into the puddle at his feet without a sound that should have been physically possible. The gate swung inward on darkness. Herrera slipped through, and the gate swung shut behind him, and the chain rose. Quinn stood in the doorway for six full seconds. She checked her watch — the leather band dark with rain, the face fogged. Half eleven. She checked her phone: no signal, which told her something, though she couldn't have said exactly what. She was two kilometres from the nearest police station. She had no radio contact, no backup, no warrant, and no legal basis for anything she'd done in the last forty minutes beyond a note pushed under her door by someone who knew where she slept. She thought about what she'd seen at the padlock. The rational thing — the professional thing, the thing Morris would have approved of — was to note the location, photograph the entrance, go back and run it through channels in the morning. Build the case. Don't get ahead of yourself. She pulled her jacket tighter and walked to the gate. Up close she could hear it: a low murmur from below, like a city heard through a wall. Voices, perhaps music, the suggestion of light from somewhere deep down. The smell that came up through the dark gap between the gates was strange — old stone and something chemical, the metallic bite of things she didn't have names for. She thought about the note. *Ask the medic what he buried in Barnet.* She thought about DS Morris, and the case report she'd read forty times that still made no sense, and the gap at the centre of his death that three years and eighteen decorated years of service hadn't given her so much as a word to fill. Quinn checked her phone again. Still no signal. She pushed the gate. It opened. She wasn't surprised — not entirely. Some part of her, the part that had been accumulating small impossibilities for three years and storing them carefully in a room she didn't open, had understood what she was going to do the moment she'd watched that chain fall. The gate admitted her with the easy indifference of a thing that didn't particularly care who passed through it, and she stepped across the threshold into the dark stairwell and started down. The steps were original Tube tile, cracked and damp, and her footsteps were too loud no matter how carefully she placed them. The murmur grew. The light resolved itself — not electric, not fluorescent, but something warmer and more erratic, torchlight or gas, pooled and scattered across a vast underground space that opened before her at the bottom of the stairs in a way that made her stop with one hand braced against the tunnel wall. The market was enormous. Stalls crowded the old platform and spread out across tracks that had been boarded over, lit by lanterns in colours she couldn't immediately categorise — amber and green and something that was almost violet, throwing strange shadows across faces that were not, in several cases, quite the faces she was used to seeing on the street. The noise was the layered cacophony of a bazaar, shouts and laughter and haggling, and the smells were dense and overlapping: burnt herbs, something sour and chemical, food she couldn't identify, old stone, rain carried down on the coats of people who were still arriving behind her and pressing past without a second glance. No one looked at her the way people looked at police. That, more than anything, straightened her spine. She was invisible here. She was, for once, simply a woman standing at the edge of something large and unfamiliar and dangerous, without the armour of authority that had defined every room she'd entered for eighteen years. She touched the worn leather of her watch strap without thinking — a habit when she was recalibrating — and scanned the crowd for an olive coat and dark curls. Tomás Herrera was forty feet away, speaking urgently to a figure behind a stall draped in what appeared to be surgical implements and glass jars of uncertain contents. He hadn't looked back. He didn't know she was here. Quinn stepped into the crowd.