Run: 2026-02-19-01KHSSW0E4SGYBJAAHK299RQ14

The yellow tape had gone up around half the abandoned Tube platform before Quinn arrived, and the scene already smelled wrong — not the usual cocktail of blood and forensic spray, but something older. Mineral. Like the inside of a church that hadn't been opened in decades. She ducked under the tape and straightened, letting her eyes move slowly across the platform before her feet did anything. Chalk markings covered the tiles in concentric rings — not graffiti, not gang tags, but something deliberate. Geometric. The kind of thing that took hours and knowledge to produce. A single body lay at the centre of the outermost ring, face-up, arms arranged with the careful symmetry of someone who had taken their time. Male, mid-forties, well-dressed. No visible wounds. "Quinn." DS Peters materialised from a cluster of uniforms near the old ticket booth, a tablet tucked under his arm. Younger than her by a decade, with the rosy-cheeked confidence of someone who had never had a case they couldn't close. "Bit of a weird one." "When did Control call it in?" "Anonymous tip at half three this morning. Camden Council works team found the access point had been forced. They thought it was rough sleepers." He gestured at the body with his tablet. "Victor Ashworth. Solicitor. His firm's in Mayfair." Quinn crouched at the edge of the chalk markings without crossing into them. The lines were clean, unsmudged. They had not been disturbed by Ashworth falling or struggling. Either he had walked calmly to the centre of the rings himself, or he had been placed there after they were drawn. "No signs of a struggle," Peters said, reading from the screen. "No ligature marks, no blunt force, no obvious cause. The pathologist thinks cardiac, but she flagged it as provisional." "How old is this station?" "Closed in 1967. Camden uses the upper level for storage." He paused. "You think someone has been coming here regularly?" Quinn stood. Her torch swept along the platform wall and found what she was already looking for — scratch marks at hip height, dozens of them, concentrated around a section of tile near the far arch. Not random. Repeated. The same spot. She walked to it, and the marks resolved into something that had been made by many hands over many visits: a groove worn into the mortar, roughly the size and shape of a fifty-pence piece. Circular. With a slight concave depression in the centre. "Get me a list of everyone reported missing in Camden in the last six months," she said. "Ashworth wasn't reported missing —" "Not for Ashworth." Peters typed something. Quinn moved back toward the body, and this time she looked at the floor between the chalk rings rather than the rings themselves. The dust lay thick and even across the platform except for two things: a worn path cutting in from the southern arch — foot traffic, recent, multiple visitors — and a small clean circle of tile roughly a metre from Ashworth's right hand, where something had been removed. She hunkered down and examined the clean circle with her torch. The tile was lighter here. An object had rested in that spot long enough to prevent the dust settling. Small. Circular or slightly irregular. Perhaps the size of a compass. "Cardiac makes sense," Peters said, appearing at her shoulder. "Man comes down here alone, some kind of urban explorer situation, gets spooked by the dark, his heart gives out. The markings might be old. Previous occupants." Quinn kept her torch on the clean tile. "The chalk isn't old." "How can you tell?" "Because the dust sits on top of the lines." She drew her finger parallel to the chalk, not touching it, and tilted her head so he could see the elevation. "If these had been here for months, the dust would have filled them in. These were drawn recently. Within the last few days." Peters chewed the inside of his cheek. "Could still be unconnected to Ashworth." "He's dead at the centre of them." "Coincidence." Quinn looked at him. He had the good grace to stop talking. She moved back toward the arch and crouched at the worn path. The foot traffic had come through the southern access repeatedly and moved in one direction: directly toward the platform and then stopped at the ticket booth. Several people. Different shoe sizes. The booth itself had been cleared of decades of detritus — she could see the clean rectangle of the counter beneath a film of recently settled grime, as though someone had wiped it down weeks ago and the station had since begun to reclaim it. A market. The thought arrived fully formed. This place had operated as a site of exchange. Regular visits. A worn groove for some kind of token or entry mechanism. A clear counter surface. Multiple visitors of different sizes. And then one night, someone who should not have been here at all. She turned and found Peters watching her with the expression of someone waiting to be told what to think. "Pull every Council access log for this station going back twelve months," she said. "And I want to know who owns the buildings on either side of the southern tunnel exit." "You think someone runs a — what, an illegal market down here?" "I think Victor Ashworth came into contact with something he didn't understand, and whoever was using this platform knew how to disappear before we arrived." She looked back at the clean circle of tile. "Something was taken from beside the body." "Could have been personal effects. Robbery." "Then why arrange him so carefully?" She straightened, rolling her left wrist to check her watch without looking away from the scene. "Robbery leaves mess. This was housekeeping." Peters made a note. Quinn walked a slow circuit of the outer chalk ring, her torch cutting across the geometry, and paused at the eastern edge where the markings were densest. Nested within the outer ring, so subtle she had almost read it as decoration: a row of small symbols, eight of them, pressed into the chalk with a stylus or a fine tool. She photographed each one separately with her phone, kept her expression neutral, and said nothing to Peters. She had seen that script before. Not on this case. Three years ago, in the rain, on the pavement outside a warehouse in Bermondsey where Morris had gone in alone and had not come back out again the same man.