Run: 2026-02-19-01KHSSW0E7RPTXKPF2T5HXVHMA

The abandoned Tube station smelled of damp concrete and something older — a mineral sharpness that caught at the back of Quinn's throat the moment she ducked under the police tape. Her torch swept the platform in a long arc. The beam caught fractured Victorian tiles, a collapsed ticket booth, and three forensic officers in white suits who moved between numbered yellow markers like ghosts haunting their own scene. She checked her watch. Half two in the morning. "How'd we even get a call out here?" She directed the question at DS Patel, who stood at the platform edge with a clipboard pressed to his chest and a look on his face like a man who'd bitten into something and wasn't sure yet what it was. "Anonymous tip. Uniform responded, found the body, and called it in." He tilted his head toward the far end of the platform. "It's a strange one, Quinn." She walked the length of the platform without rushing, letting her eyes drag across the details. Rusted iron benches. A row of old enamel signs — CAMDEN TOWN in faded blue — and beneath them, along the base of the wall, a collection of objects that stopped her mid-stride. Tables fashioned from wooden pallets. Shelving units bolted into the brickwork. Brass fittings and glass jars and what appeared to be, at a distance, the dried and pinned wing of something with too many joints. Not an abandoned station, then. Not simply. She crouched in front of a low shelf and let the torchlight move over the jars without touching them. Powders in colours she had no name for. A sealed vessel with something coiled inside it that she chose not to examine at length. The labels were handwritten in a script she didn't recognise. "Someone was trading down here," she said. "That's one theory." Patel appeared at her shoulder. "My theory is a drug operation. Some of this is consistent with chemical processing. We've sent samples to the lab." Quinn straightened and moved on without answering. She'd learned over eighteen years that the fastest way to miss something was to name it too early. The body was at the far end of the platform, where the tunnel mouth yawned black and the cold came rolling out of the dark in waves. Male, mid-forties, lying on his back with his arms at his sides in a posture so composed it looked arranged. The forensic pathologist, a compact woman named Dr. Osei, was kneeling beside him with a penlight. "Talk to me, Osei." "No external trauma. No signs of struggle. No defensive wounds, no bruising, no ligature marks." Osei sat back on her heels. "Preliminary observation is cardiac event, but I'll reserve that until I open him up." "He just lay down and died." "People have done stranger things." Quinn stood over the body and looked at the man's hands. Clean. The nails trimmed. He wore a good coat — good enough that its presence in this place was its own kind of evidence. She looked at his face. The expression was not the slack vacancy of a man surprised by death but something closer to relief. Her torchlight dropped to the ground around him. The concrete was dusty with age, and in the dust she could see the impressions of feet — dozens of them, overlapping, a record of movement that spoke to regular use of this space. The impressions converged in the centre of the platform, near a cleared area she'd noticed but not yet approached. She walked to it now. The cleared space was a rough circle, perhaps four metres across. The dust had been swept back from it deliberately. Around its perimeter someone had scratched marks into the concrete — not graffiti, not the bored geometry of teenagers, but careful, repeating symbols, the kind that carried intention in every line. In the centre of the circle, where she might have expected to find a focal point of some kind, there was only a small depression in the floor and, beside it, the faint green smear of oxidised metal. Quinn crouched and examined the smear without touching it. "Patel." He came over. "What do you make of this?" He looked at the circle, at the symbols, at the depression. "Ritual staging. Possibly for theatrical effect — there's a whole subset of organised crime that leans into occult aesthetics to intimidate. I've seen it." "The green mark," she said. "That's verdigris." "Oxidised copper. Something small sat here for a long time." He shrugged. "Could be anything." Quinn photographed the marks with her phone, getting in close on each symbol, taking her time. She was not a superstitious woman. She had no framework for this kind of thing and had never needed one. But she'd learned to catalogue what she didn't understand with the same rigour she applied to everything else, because understanding arrived later, and it arrived faster when you'd recorded the details faithfully. She stood and turned back toward the body, walking the sight line from the circle to where the man lay. Fifteen metres, perhaps. Direct line of sight to the tunnel mouth. Something had been here. Something small, brass, with a green patina. It had sat in the centre of that circle for long enough to leave its ghost behind, and now it was gone. She looked at the tunnel. "Has anyone gone down the line?" "It's a dead tunnel," Patel said. "No access from the other end." "Has anyone gone down it." A pause. "Not yet." Quinn took out a fresh pair of gloves, pulled them on, and lifted a heavier torch from the equipment case near the tape. She moved to the tunnel mouth and stood there for a moment with the beam pointed inward. The circle of light reached maybe thirty metres before the dark swallowed it. She was about to step forward when her radio crackled, and the uniform on the cordon above ground said, "Detective Quinn. There's a woman up here says she has information. She won't give a name. She's got a museum pass on her lanyard and a bag full of books, and she's asking specifically for you by name." Quinn kept her eyes on the tunnel. The cold came out of it steadily, and there was something beneath the mineral smell now — a warmth that had no business being there, faint and electric, like the air before a storm breaks. "Keep her there," she said. "I'm coming up."