AI "Do not touch that."
The constable froze with his gloved hand an inch above the dead man's boot, head jerking up like a kid caught nicking sweets. The word bounced off the stained tiles and came back thin and nervous.
Harlow stepped off the last iron rung of the access ladder and onto the platform. Her boots scraped dust, old ballast, something brittle underfoot. Arc lamps on stands turned the disused station into a stage set, light too white, shadows too black. The Tube line sat silent beside them, twin rails running out into darkness in both directions.
She checked her watch without thinking. The cracked leather dug against her wrist.
"Thought you had retired, Quinn."
Callum Reese appeared from behind one of the lamps, paper mask pulled down to his chin, blond hair damp at the temples. DS stripes on his shoulder, the easy grin of a man who believed the world still made sense.
"You keep calling me that, I might," she said.
He snorted.
"Come see our Sleeping Beauty."
He led her to the centre of the platform. The body lay on its back between two support pillars, head tipped a little to the right as if listening to the tunnel . Male, early thirties, lean. Shirt open to the navel, skin pale under the bleaching lamp. No blood on the clothes, no obvious wounds.
Just the marks.
They spread across his chest in thin, deliberate lines. Circles and intersecting curves, like someone had copied a sketch and lost patience half way. Harlow crouched, her knees popping.
"Overdose?" she said.
"Yeah," Reese said. "With extra arts and crafts."
He flicked a glove toward the far side of the platform. A clear plastic bagged syringe waited on a collapsible trestle, labelled and neat.
"Found that tucked by his hand," Reese said. "No sign of a struggle. No wallet gone, no pockets turned out. Junkie comes down here, shoots up, gets weird with a compass and a marker, taps out."
"Compass?"
Reese reached for another evidence bag on the trestle and held it up. A small brass circle, smeared with grime, caught the light. Its glass face showed a spider web of faint scratches. Where the numbers should have sat, sigils curled and hooked instead, cramped around the edge like insects pressed under glass.
"This was his," Reese said. "In his left trouser pocket. Souvenir shop in Soho caught in a crime scene net."
The needle inside did not point to the north end of the station. It quivered and held steady against the glass, angled toward the brick wall by the old "Way Out" sign.
Harlow watched it for three beats of her heart.
"Souvenir shops sell runic compasses now," she said.
"Probably somewhere with incense and dreamcatchers," Reese said. "We can ask the Metaphysical Department."
He said it like a joke. A few uniforms laughed on cue.
Harlow looked back at the chest.
The lines were not drawn. The cuts sat shallow but clean, blood dried hard in the grooves. The circles overlapped in three precise places, not many people bothered with that for a laugh. She leaned closer, the smell of dried copper rising, nose catching something else under it, faint and salty, like old stone left wet too long.
"SOCO lifted prints?" she said.
"Nothing yet," Reese said. "No spray on the walls, no tags. Whoever carved him did it tidy."
"Tidy people usually clean up needles," she said.
She slid two fingers along the dead man's forearm, pressing against the veiny inside of the elbow. The skin felt smooth. No track marks. No bruises from a cuff or belt.
"No kids knackered by spice cleanse like that," she said.
Reese shifted his weight .
"Early days," he said. "Maybe he practised safe destruction."
Harlow let that glide past. She looked at the hand that had held the syringe. Fingers curved, two knuckles grazed. A black crescent of recent dirt sat under the nails.
"He came down ladders not used in months," she said, "and still managed dirt under his nails thick enough for a gardener."
"We are standing in a dust bowl," Reese said.
She straightened, let her eyes move, slow and methodical , away from the body.
Dust lay thick on the tiles, soft and grey between the sleepers of the dead track. It turned every footprint into a stamped story. There, by the ladder, clustered boot prints from the team, fresh and sharp-edged. Past those, further along the platform, a single path of smoother ovals came from the tunnel mouth, not the ladder. Trainers, average size, tread worn at the heel. They stopped at the body.
And they did not go back.
"Where is his return trip?" she said.
Reese frowned.
"What?"
"His prints," she said. "One path, from darkness to the body. No overlap, no messy doubling. He did not walk away from where he fell, and he did not come from the access ladder."
"He could have come down the tunnel, carried, dragged, whatever," Reese said. "Look, Quinn, some street pharmacist and his client get creative, client snuffs it, dealer legs it along the sleepers, disturbs his own prints, hides in the mainline like a rat when the first train slows."
Harlow walked to the rails. The beam from her hand torch cut across the sleepers, bright white on grey. Dust sat undisturbed on the wooden slats except for a single narrow groove, recent, cutting diagonally from the tunnel mouth toward the body. Like something heavy had slid, not been carried .
"A drag mark," she said.
Reese came up beside her, peered down.
"Maintenance trolleys," he said. "They still come through. Manual override, emergency call, the usual heroics."
Harlow walked along the drag line. It ended a foot short of the body. No smear of blood, no hair, nothing to say a head or arm had bumped across it. Just the same clean, fine dust.
"They did not move him that way," she said.
"Then how did he land there," Reese said, "out of thin air?"
Harlow looked at the wall where the fake compass pointed. Old enamel signs with chipped corners, adverts for cigarettes that no longer existed, graffiti in fading black paint. The bricks behind the "Way Out" sign wore a faint fan of soot. Not from fire. It spread in a neat cone from a point on the floor, rising to the middle of the wall. No scorch, no melted grout.
She walked back to the body and looked up at the lamps.
"You moved him," she said.
Reese bristled.
"We do not move bodies until the doc signs off," he said.
"Then why is there dust under his shoulder," she said.
She crouched again, took a latexed thumb and pressed just under the man's right scapula. The body rocked, faintly, and a soft half-moon of clean tile peeped at her. A print, not of fingers, but of pressure where he had not touched.
"Someone set him down and stepped away," she said.
Reese watched, jaw tight.
"Okay," he said. "You want weird, you can have weird. Coroner's keen. But I'll tell you what I see, Harlow. Bloke on some bespoke designer poison, sees God, does a little self-harm art project and dies. Dealer panics, dumps him somewhere off the grid, maybe with a short stay down there first."
"Down where," she said.
Reese jerked his head toward the tunnel at the north end. A metal gate sat there, half-rolled, rust flaking from its teeth.
"Service corridor," he said. "Network Rail, or some subcontractor with fewer vowels in the company name. Padlock's been cut."
Harlow walked toward it, her torch picking out a glint where Reese said. The padlock hung from the hasp, its bow sawn clean through. The cut edges shone fresh bright steel. No filings on the ground, no scorch, so not a grinder, neat work. A bolt cutter or something sharper.
She looked back at her constables.
"Who touched the lock," she said.
Silence, then the youngest one, helmet askew, raised his hand like a schoolboy.
"PC Dwyer," he said. "When we got here it was hanging like that. I checked the gate, that was it. Did not go in."
"Scene log backs him," Reese said quickly .
Harlow ducked and stepped through the half-lifted gate. Her shoulders cleared with a flake of rust that whispered down her coat. On the other side, the noise of the platform dropped. The air felt different, thicker, full of old damp concrete and something faintly sweet. Her torch beam picked out a narrow corridor with cable trays bolted to the walls, plastic sheathing aged to the colour of nicotine. Puddles sat in shallow dips in the floor, their surfaces still.
"Bring the lamp," she said.
A SOCO pushed one of the arc stands under the gate and plugged its cable into a different socket. Light widened the world, pushed the shadows back a little. The corridor ran maybe ten metres then doglegged right out of view.
Reese ducked through behind her.
"You know this is all civils property," he said. "They will whinge about contamination for a month."
"They can send a fruit basket," she said.
She moved along the corridor, boots echoing . On the walls, graffiti changed. The spray paint on the platform gates showed tags and swear words. In here, someone had drawn, slow and patient. Circles, triangles, knots of lines that doubled back on themselves. Markings about the size of a hand, chalk in pale blue and dull red. Some clean, some smeared into ghost stains.
Her heart ticked once, hard, against her ribs.
Three years had not worn all the memory from those shapes. She had seen them on a cellar wall in Tottenham, under the flaring light of a portable halogen, Morris's voice in her ear. Heard the scream. Smell of meat and ozone.
She closed her hand around that and set it aside.
"Kids from an art course," Reese said behind her. "Alternative geometry club."
"These were not for art," she said.
Reese made a soft noise.
"You took a course in old symbols while I was out chasing burglars," he said.
"Something like that," she said.
She stopped at the dogleg and peered around.
The corridor opened into a rectangular chamber the size of a single Underground carriage. Concrete walls, low ceiling, one old ventilation fan dead in the corner. On the floor someone had drawn a circle in white chalk, thick enough to show texture, twice as wide as a man. The same overlapping curves from the dead man's chest curled inside it, this time complete. Footprints patterned the chalk where someone had stepped through, messier, hurried. The drag line from the rails stopped here, a darker scrape through the whiteness.
Reese whistled, softly .
"Okay," he said. "Your boys have been busy."
Harlow walked to the edge of the circle. Inside, the dust lay thinner, as if a draught had passed through and licked it cleaner. In the very centre, a faint dark smear, like spilled ink rubbed at then left.
She crouched, reached, stopped an inch above the smear.
"Get me a swab," she said.
A SOCO shuffled forward, passed her the kit. She dabbed the cotton bud against the mark. It picked up brown. Dried blood. Old enough to flake, fresh enough to stain.
"Two events," she said. "One here, one where we found him. They used the same pattern."
"They," Reese said. "You sound very sure about the plural."
"See these," she said.
She pointed at the shoe marks that crossed the chalk. One set small, narrow, deep at the heel as if the wearer favoured their toes. One broader, flatter, toe pointing out slightly . A third set scratched just at the perimeter, half-prints cut off by the line.
"You do not make an effort like this alone," she said.
Reese watched the circle, his jaw moving as if he chewed a thought.
"And what is this effort for," he said.
Harlow looked at the pattern, the curves closing in on each other, the places they pinched like a throat.
She had no name that fit in the Met's list of standard motives.
"We will ask whoever cut his chest," she said.
She straightened. Fabric pulled at her shoulder. Her watch strap bit again.
Something in her coat pocket moved.
Harlow froze.
Slowly, without taking her eyes from the circle, she slid her fingers into the inside pocket of her jacket. The evidence bag with the compass rasped against her knuckles. The plastic had creased warm against its shape. The disk inside trembled , knocking a faint rhythm against the sealed edge.
She pulled it out.
The needle inside no longer held steady at a polite angle. It spun in a tight, urgent circle, then jerked and locked, pointing not at the wall behind the platform but at the far side of the chamber .
Reese's breath changed beside her.
"Thought that thing was broken," he said.
Harlow lifted the compass level with her chest. The needle twitched, desperate to align. She turned her body, followed where it wanted to point.
It settled on the back wall of the chamber, between the dead fan and a stack of forgotten cable drums. Plain concrete, hairline crack running diagonally near the floor. A damp stain spread around the crack like a map of an island.
"Get everyone out," she said.
Reese frowned.
"Quinn."
She did not look away from the wall.
"Now."
Something passed through the air, subtle as a pressure change before a train arrived on an active line, that little shove in the chest that said, weight of air moving. Only no train ran down here. The puddles on the floor shivered once. Chalk dust lifted in a thin breath from the lines at her feet.
The arc lamp flickered .
"Power issue," Reese said, too loud.
The fan in the corner gave a single exhausted turn, blades scraping limescale. The damp patch on the wall darkened at the centre, as if something on the other side had pressed its palm flat to the concrete.
The crack thickened. Not with falling fragments, not crumbling. The line simply widened, like a mouth opening. Hairline became finger width, finger width became thumb. Cold spilled out, needle-sharp against the sweat at the back of Harlow's neck.
"Everyone out," she said again.
The first constable moved, stumbling backwards, bumping the lamp. Its light swung, throwing their shadows huge and bent across the circle. The compass needle snapped so hard against the glass it clicked.
The crack tore down the wall in a sudden, breathless rush. Concrete groaned. Dust exploded outward, a dry cough that tasted of stone and rust. Something black and thick pulsed in the widening gap, not emptiness, not quite . It wrinkled like oil on water and then pushed forward, bulging, as if the wall had started to breathe in the wrong direction.
The last thing Harlow saw before the lamp failed was that blackness swelling, reaching, its edge catching the light, not flat at all but made of something that glistened and moved. Behind her, someone screamed.
Then the concrete split like old bone.