Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0DHEWZZZ94CW6V6ZGM7Q7

The air hit Detective Harlow Quinn first. It was a stale, metallic breath held too long in the lungs of the city, thick with damp and decay. Below the streets of Camden, the abandoned station was a forgotten tomb. The halogen glare of the forensic lights bleached the colour from the curved, tiled walls, turning grime and graffiti into stark monochrome patterns. Water dripped a steady, maddening rhythm from a corroded pipe somewhere in the echoing dark. A constable with a face too young for the job stood guard at the tape, his breath pluming in the chill. He nodded as Quinn ducked under. "Detective. Forensics are just finishing their sweep. DS Evans is with the body." Quinn gave a curt nod in return, her gaze already sweeping the platform. Her worn leather watch felt tight on her wrist. The place was a ruin. Peeling advertisements for products that no longer existed hung like dead skin from the walls. The tracks, slick with slime, vanished into a yawning blackness at either end of the platform. It was an impossible place for a body to just turn up. Detective Sergeant Evans stood with his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels. His suit was rumpled, his expression one of weary impatience. He was watching the forensics team pack up their kits. "Harlow. Glad you could make it. Don't trip on the rats; they're the size of terriers." Quinn ignored the jibe, her eyes fixed on the form under the sheet. She stopped a few feet away, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. "What have we got, Ben?" "John Doe. No ID, no wallet, no phone. Found by a pair of urban explorers with a YouTube channel. Lucky us." Evans gestured vaguely at the body. "ME gave a preliminary. No obvious cause of death. No marks, no wounds, no signs of a struggle. Looks like he just lay down for a kip and never got up." Quinn crouched beside the sheet, the sharp line of her jaw tight. She lifted a corner. The man was young, maybe mid-twenties. His clothes were ordinary—jeans, a dark jumper—but his face was serene. Too serene. His skin had a waxy, pale quality, and his eyes were wide open, staring at the vaulted ceiling with a look of mild surprise. There was no terror in them. No pain. "Toxicology?" "We'll have to wait. My money's on an overdose. Some new designer muck doing the rounds. They find a quiet place, shoot up, and that's that." Evans kicked at a loose piece of concrete. "Case closed before it's even open." Quinn ran a gloved finger along the man’s jaw. The skin was cold, but not rigid. "He's not been dead long. A few hours at most. But look at his hands." She pointed to the man's fingertips. They were stained a faint, dark grey, as if he'd been working with charcoal. But it wasn't dust; it was ingrained in the skin. "Soot?" Evans shrugged. "This whole place is filthy." "It's not soot." Quinn leaned closer, examining the platform floor around the body. There was no discarded paraphernalia. No needles, no wrappers. The dust was thick, but undisturbed, save for the footprints of the forensics team and the kids who’d found him. There was no scuffing, no sign of a body being dragged or dropped. "So he walked in here, lay down, and died of... what? Politeness?" Evans sighed, the sound echoing in the cavernous space. "Look, Harlow, we've got a dead junkie in a hole in the ground. It's not exactly a locked-room mystery. He came in through the maintenance access two hundred yards back, same as we did. Shot up, had a bad reaction. The dealer probably took his wallet and phone." "His shoes are clean." Quinn pointed to the victim's trainers. The soles were almost pristine. "The floor between here and that maintenance hatch is coated in a century of filth and god-knows-what. If he walked from there, he'd have dragged half of it with him." She stood up, her eyes scanning the walls. Most of it was typical spray-can art—tags, garish cartoons. But there, directly above the spot where the body lay, was something else. It was a single, complex symbol, painted not with spray paint, but with some kind of thick, black pigment. It wasn't a tag. It was deliberate. A geometric pattern of interlocking circles and sharp, angular lines that seemed to trick the eye, to shift as the light hit it. "What's this?" Evans glanced up at it. "Just more graffiti. Means 'danger' or 'the police are idiots' in some language only sixteen-year-olds understand." "No." Quinn traced its shape in the air with her finger. "The lines are precise. This isn't vandalism. It's a sign." The symbol sparked a flicker of a memory, something from three years ago. The smell of ozone and something else, something like burnt sugar. The case that took Morris. The case that had symbols just like this one, scrawled in the victim’s own blood. A case file the brass had buried so deep it barely existed anymore. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She pushed the thought away, focusing on the here and now. He couldn't afford to go down that rabbit hole. Not again. "The kids who found him. Have they been questioned?" "On their way to the station. Scared witless, but they swear they didn't touch anything. Just saw him, screamed, and ran." Quinn walked a slow circle around the body. Her gaze caught on a small object lying half-hidden under the lip of the platform, near the victim’s outstretched hand. It was almost lost in the gloom. Evans and the forensics team had missed it entirely. She crouched again, her knees protesting against the cold concrete. It was an old brass compass. Small, fitting neatly in her palm. A patina of green verdigris coated its casing, and the glass was scratched. She picked it up. It felt heavy, solid. The face wasn't marked with the cardinal points. Instead, it was etched with a series of intricate, swirling sigils, echoing the design on the wall. The needle wasn't pointing north. It was spinning, slow and lazy, as if searching for something it couldn't find. "What is that?" Evans walked over, peering down. "An antique? Maybe he was a collector." Quinn didn't answer. She held the strange compass, the cool metal a stark contrast to the warmth of her glove. She turned it over. A maker's mark was stamped into the back, but it was no manufacturer she recognised. Just a single, stylised raven's head. The needle in her hand gave a sudden, violent twitch, swinging to point directly at the tunnel's dark mouth before resuming its aimless rotation. A cold draft, smelling of damp earth and static electricity, seemed to breathe from the blackness. "This man didn't walk in here, Ben," Quinn’s voice was low, devoid of emotion. "And he wasn't a junkie. His wallet and phone weren't stolen to cover up a drug deal." Evans crossed his arms, his skepticism hardening his face. "Go on, then. I'm all ears. What's your grand theory this time?" She stood up, pocketing the compass in an evidence bag. Her gaze was locked on the unblinking eyes of the dead man. "They were taken because whoever killed him didn't want us to know who he was or how to contact him. They wanted him to be a ghost. A John Doe who fell through the cracks." She looked back at Evans, her own brown eyes hard as stone. "You're right about one thing. This isn't a locked-room mystery. The door was right there." She pointed with her chin towards the black symbol on the wall. "We just can't see it."