Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0CCHYSG3V67D18JBP6F7Y

The Tube station smelled of old iron and something else — something that didn't belong to any maintenance crew or urban fox. Detective Harlow Quinn crouched at the bottom of the emergency access stairs, letting her eyes adjust to the generator-powered floodlights her team had strung along the platform walls. The light was harsh and flat, the kind that made everyone look like suspects. Camden wasn't supposed to have an active station here. The maps said this stretch of tunnel had been bricked up in 1962. Someone had clearly disagreed. "Uniform found it at half three this morning." DS Patel appeared at her shoulder, tablet in hand, scrolling through preliminary photographs. He was young, thorough, and had the unfortunate habit of narrating what was already visible. "Male victim, mid-forties, no ID. Blunt force trauma to the back of the skull. Cashless wallet in his jacket, gym card in the name of R. Tolliver. We're running it." Quinn moved along the platform edge without responding. The tiles were original — cream with a green border, cracked in places, the ghost of a station name still legible under decades of grime. ALDWICH SOUTH. She'd never heard of it. "Medical examiner puts time of death between ten and midnight," Patel continued. "Where's the blood." "Sorry?" "Blunt force trauma to the back of the skull." She turned to look at him. "Where's the blood." He glanced at his tablet, then back at the body. The victim lay on his back near the far end of the platform, arms loose at his sides, palms up. A man in a quality overcoat with his shoes still on. "Perhaps he — " "Fell forward, bled out, someone moved him?" Quinn finished. "Then show me the blood pool. Show me the transfer. Show me a single scuff mark on that floor between where you think he fell and where he's lying." Patel looked at the floor. It was dusty, yes, but the dust was largely undisturbed except for the officer tracks from the initial response team. The victim's resting place was pristine. No drag lines, no heel tracks. "He wasn't moved here," Quinn said. "He was placed." She pulled on a fresh pair of gloves and crouched beside the body. R. Tolliver was a broad man, thick through the chest, the kind of weight that made placement a two-person job at minimum. His expression was neutral. Not frozen in shock the way victims of sudden violence usually were. Restful, almost. She'd seen that once before, that particular vacancy, on a case she wasn't allowed to think about. She tilted his chin gently and examined the wound at the back of his skull with her torch. Clean depression, no spidering fractures, no debris embedded in the tissue. Whatever made contact with him had been smooth. "Point of entry?" she called toward the far stairs. One of the forensics team answered. "We don't have one. The access hatch shows signs of recent use but there's no corresponding wear pattern on the stairs consistent with carrying a body." Quinn stood. She turned a slow circle, taking in the platform. The floodlights carved deep shadows behind the support columns, and she walked toward them, scanning the walls. Someone had cleared this space. The detritus of sixty years — the bird nests and damp cardboard and the particular archaeology of urban abandonment — had been brushed to the edges. The centre of the platform was clean. Not cleaned. Cleared deliberately. Ceremonially, something in the back of her mind offered, and she told it to sit down. Between two of the columns, where the light didn't quite reach, she found what she was looking for. "Patel. Bring me a secondary light." He did. When the beam swept the floor, they both saw it — a faint circular pattern in the dust, roughly two metres in diameter. Not scuff marks. Not footprints. Something had rested here, or been drawn here, and then erased with a careful hand. Within the circle's ghost, three points of contact remained, slight compressions in the debris consistent with something placed at regular intervals. A triangle inside the circle, if she mapped it. "Could be kids," Patel said. "Urban explorers. They do ritual things, take photographs, post it." "Urban explorers don't leave behind bodies and no blood." "Maybe they found him elsewhere and — " "Patel." She kept her voice even. "What did the access hatch look like on the inside." He pulled up the photograph on his tablet and handed it over. The hatch bolt was rusted solid. Quinn zoomed in on the photograph. The surrounding frame showed tool marks from the outside, fresh scratches in the rust patina — someone forcing it open — but the underside bolt was visibly corroded into its housing. It hadn't been turned in decades. Whoever had opened that hatch had done so only to establish a route for the officers responding to the call. The body hadn't come through there. So it hadn't come from above. And the only tunnels branching off the platform were bricked up. She walked to the nearest sealed arch and pressed two fingers flat against the brickwork, the way her father had taught her to test a wall. Solid, cold, damp. She moved to the second arch. The cold was different here. It moved. She pressed her palm flat. Behind the brick, air circulated — not the dead, stale breath of a sealed cavity, but a slow and deliberate current, as though something on the far side exhaled. She stepped back and studied the mortar lines. They were consistent with the rest of the platform at eye level. Below knee height they were not. The lower courses had been repointed recently, and not by a conservationist. The colour was fractionally whiter, the lines too clean. She photographed it without comment. Her torch caught something on the ground at the base of the arch — so small she'd nearly stepped over it twice. She crouched and looked without touching. A small object, brass, no bigger than a fifty-pence piece. Round. She could make out markings on its surface, fine-etched lines that weren't decorative in any way she recognised. She looked at it for a long moment, then looked at the sealed arch, then at the body lying composed and deliberate on the platform behind her. "Get me an evidence bag," she said.