Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0RF3XJ40DM622ST9FRDJK

The old station swallowed sound. Harlow took the last steps down from street level and the hum of Camden at night thinned to a faint shiver through the brickwork. Her torch beam caught flakes of green paint curling from the handrail, then slid over cracked cream tiles and a rusted Underground roundel, the red almost gone. Two uniforms waited at the barrier. One shifted his weight when he saw her, boots scraping the grit. “Detective Quinn. Scene’s on the far platform. SOCO’s still working.” She ducked under the tape. Her leather watch pinched her wrist when she lifted the line; she didn’t adjust it. The air grew colder past the barrier, with a smell of old water and metal and something sharp beneath it, like burnt dust. The concourse opened into the disused ticket hall, wide and empty, except for stacks of old timetables sagging against a wall. Light rigs threw white pools across the floor, leaving the ceiling in shadow. Graffiti climbed the tiles, fresh colours over ghosted advertisements for films no-one watched anymore. Amir Patel waited by the stair down to the platforms. He rested against the rail, tie loose, scene suit only half-zipped. “Took your time.” “You pulled me across town for an old Tube station,” Harlow walked past him, kept going down. “Better be worth the petrol.” “You’ll love it. Proper ghost story for you.” His trainers clacked behind her as he followed. The tunnel to the platforms bent left. The air grew wetter, the smell of oil thicker, though the tracks ahead had no shine, just dust and the dark thread of old grease. “Power to the line’s been cut for years,” Patel’s voice bounced off the tunnel. “No trains. No squatters. No bloody reason for anyone to come down here at all.” “So how did he get in.” “Good question. Gate upstairs was locked and chained when response units arrived. Had to cut it.” “Keys?” “Nothing on him. You’ll see.” The tunnel spat them out onto the platform. Light rigs glared off the white tiles and turned dust into drifting veils. The tracks beside the platform slept under a film of grime broken by a few scuffed patches where boots had stepped. The body lay ten metres down, in the middle of the platform, inside a ring of black. Forensics clustered around it in white suits, masks up, gloved hands moving in small, precise arcs. A camera flashed. Harlow stopped at the edge of the circle. The black stain spread across the tiles in an almost perfect loop, a band the width of her palm, edges crisp. Not spattered. Not smeared. Just there, painted by something that had no brush. Patel came to stand opposite her on the other side of the ring. “Male, thirties. No wallet. No phone. No obvious ID. SOCO’s still digging.” She swept the beam of her torch along the circle. The stain wasn’t paint. The glaze on the tiles had crazed under it, hairline fractures spidering toward the grout. In a few spots, the ceramic had bubbled. “Fire?” He pointed to the light rig. “If it was, it burned fast. No soot on the ceiling. Nothing outside the circle. Clothes aren’t charred.” She stepped around the ring to the gap the pathologist had left. The man lay on his back, arms at his sides, fingers half-curled. His jeans held one tear at the knee. Black hoodie, unbranded. Trainers cheap but new. Skin waxy and tight, lips pulled back a fraction from his teeth. His eyes had gone. The sclera and iris had collapsed into two black pits, edges glassy. As if someone had set a match inside the sockets and let it burn out. Harlow straightened, the muscles between her shoulder blades knotting. “Electrocution?” Patel’s mouth twitched. “That’s the working theory. Lines may be cut but there’s still power down here. Emergency lighting. Comms. You know the old boys who nick copper out of live substations.” “He doesn’t look fried.” “Burns on the soles of his feet. Clothes dry. No external bleeding. Medical examiner reckons current went up through his shoes, cooked him inside. Popped his eyes.” She looked at the tracks. No cable. No sign of any panel forced. The dust lay unbroken except for that thin trail of footprints from the tunnel mouth to the ring and away along the edge where the first uniforms had moved. “Where did he touch?” She met Patel’s eyes. He shrugged. “Maybe he tried to jump down, grabbed something. They’re still tracing it.” “There’s no disturbance on the ballast.” “So he didn’t jump.” “Then the current came to him.” Patel rubbed the back of his neck, slicking the collar of his shirt. “You hear yourself?” She crouched beside the body. The man’s hoodie bunched at his shoulder, revealing a line of ink along his collarbone. Not gang script. Not elaborate. Four straight strokes like the points of a compass, joined at the centre. Her torch picked something at his hip. A thin cord trailed from his pocket. The SOCO nearest shifted his boots out of her way. “In his front left,” he murmured through his mask, then went back to his evidence markers. She eased the pocket open with the edge of her glove. A small brass disc lay inside, attached to the cord. She used a forceps one of the techs handed her without comment and lifted it into the light. A compass. Palm-sized, brass casing eaten with green in the grooves. The cover bore a shallow etching, lines and curls that at first looked random, then resolved into shapes that teased memory. Not letters. Not any she recognised. She flicked the lid with her thumb. It opened with a faint rasp. The glass over the face had a crack from edge to centre, like a single thin lightning strike. The needle shook, then settled. Not north. It pointed along the platform, into the tunnel at the far end, away from the stairs and the way out. Patel watched her hand. “Tourist tat. Camden stall job.” “Tourists don’t bring tat down here.” “Maybe he worked a stall topside. Knick-knack fallen into the pocket of a hoodie. Doesn’t scream murder weapon.” Her gaze returned to the ring. “What time did control get the call?” “Twenty-three twenty. Anonymous. Male voice, sounded local. Gave the station name, said, ‘He’s down there, he’s not right,’ and hung up.” “No CCTV.” Patel’s mouth went thin. “Place hasn’t had cameras since the eighties. Closest working ones cover the street entrance. Nothing but a fox passing through an hour before response units.” She closed the compass and handed it back to the tech for bagging. Her eyes moved over the platform again, slow now, slicing the scene into sections. White tile. Black ring. Body. Light rigs. Tripods. Beyond the light, further down the platform where the rigs didn’t reach, darkness thickened. Something broke the straight line of the wall down there. Stalls. Shapes. Piles of… crates? “Amir.” He’d already turned to follow her gaze. “Yeah. That’s new on the Underground. Thought I’d walk you down.” They skirted the evidence markers and moved along the wall. The tiles here carried more graffiti, layered until colours bled. Between two tags in fat, dripping letters, someone had scratched lines straight into the glaze. Circles, triangles, a six-point star. Not gang work. Too careful. “You get our neighbourhood kids with compasses now,” Patel snorted. “Upgrade from spray cans.” Her fingers rested over the marks without touching. The scratches matched the faint patterns on the compass lid. Same hand? Same habit of line. Deep enough to chip the tile, not enough to flake it. Recent. “How old d’you reckon these are.” “Fresh chips on the floor. I’d say last few days.” “At least we know our victim wasn’t the only one down here.” “That,” Patel kicked a loose bottle cap off the edge with his boot, “already goes without saying.” The darkness ahead resolved into structure. Rough wooden tables jammed together, some with stained cloths still hanging from the edges. Crates sat stacked three high, many open and empty, a few with shredded paper inside. A makeshift bar, cobbled from planks and old Underground signs, leaned at an angle. Harlow paused at the first table. Rings on the surface marked where jars had stood. Something greasy stained one corner, spread in thumbprints toward the floor. The smell here changed, undercutting the dust and metal. Herbs. Bitter, resinous, sharp enough to sting her nostrils. “Rave set-up?” Patel walked ahead, hands on his hips. “Pop-up market. Kids sneak down, flog pills and bootlegs, make it look edgy. This end’s out of our usual patrol routes.” “Music decks?” “No decks. No cans. No glow sticks. But lots of tables to sell things from.” He nudged a crate with his foot. Inside, scraps of grey cloth and black glass winked in her torch beam. Bottles, round-bottomed, smashed in transit or under a boot. Some still held crusted residue at the neck, white as bone ash. Harlow picked up a shard with tweezers from a SOCO’s box. The inside had a film of something crystalline, too coarse for sugar, too dull for salt. “What’s your poison,” she lifted the shard and let the torch catch it. Patel scratched his jaw. “New designer nonsense. I’ve sent samples up. My money’s on party favours. Explains why you’d hold an underground market in an abandoned station. Hidden, atmospheric, feeds the legend.” “Legend?” “You know. London under London. Secret tunnels. Ghost trains. Charge double for a pill if you sell it somewhere daft enough.” Harlow’s torch skimmed more tables. Burn marks. Circular stains etched into the wood, as if hot plates had sat there. Scorching never spread outside the neat outlines. “SOCO get prints?” “Partial, all over. Gloves most of the time. A few nice, clear latents on the bar and the stair rail. Already on their way to IDENT. My guess, our victim’s prints will be in the mix.” She stopped near the end of the platform. A chalk line marked a square on the flagstones, the chalk thick, re-traced several times. Within the square, the tiles looked cleaner. No dust, no scuffs. Two small dark flecks rested in the centre. She lowered herself, knees near the chalk. The flecks gleamed a dull brown. “Blood,” Patel’s boots crunched the grit behind her. “We found that before the rig came in. Only spot apart from anything under him.” “Swabs?” “Already gone. Lab will tell us whose.” “Trail?” “Nothing. No drips, no smears. Just those.” Her torch picked out the edges of the chalk lines. They met at neat right angles. At each corner, a small circle, blackened like the ring around the corpse. “You ever see squatters put this much work into decorating floor space.” “Squatters? No. Dealers? Maybe they like a bit of theatre. Pentagram chic.” “Marking out a stall makes sense.” She stood and looked back down the platform toward the body, from this end now. The black ring hugged the centre line, equidistant from both edges. Perfect shape. No flat spots. Beyond it, in the distance, the compass-faced graffiti on the wall lined up with the dead man’s feet. From here, the lines pointed straight through him. “Harlow.” Patel watched her. “You’re frowning. That look normally ends with more paperwork for me.” “Your anonymous caller. Voice stressed? Calm?” “Middle. No panic. No shouting. Like he’d already seen it once.” “Or caused it.” “If he did, why wait around to call? Why not vanish, let the cleaners find the body in a decade.” She stared at the ring again. The fractures in the tile caught the light, each tiny crack running inward, toward a point under the corpse’s spine. “How long from call to first unit on scene.” “Seven minutes. Cars were close.” “And the body?” “Still warm, according to first medic. Not much, but enough.” She ran the numbers without a watch. Twenty-three twenty call. Seven minutes. Arrival. Allow a minute for them to force the gate. Time of death… if he’d just gone, they should’ve found smell of burned fabric, lingering heat in the air, some echo of whatever had done this. The air now held that sharp, burned-dust smell, but faint. Not seven minutes faint. Older. It sat in the brick, the tiles, soaked in. “Any reports of power surges on the grid.” “Already checked with Transport. Nothing flagged.” “So a man cooks himself from the inside in a dead station, with stable power, no cables, inside a perfect ring, right under a compass scratched on a wall and carrying another in his pocket, next to a pop-up market that packs up neat enough to leave chalk squares and empty bottles, and someone up top thinks it’s worth a seven-minute-fast call but not worth giving a name.” He winced at the list. “Sounds messy when you put it like that.” “It is messy.” She walked back toward the body, letting her torch trace every change in the floor. Halfway along the platform, the dust pattern broke. A set of prints smaller than uniform boots, tread narrower, cut across from the platform edge to the wall, then vanished at the black ring. She knelt, touched the air above them. Trainers, not steel-toes. Deeper at the heel, like someone had paused there, pushed off. The final step landed right at the ring’s boundary. No imprint inside. She pointed. Patel leaned in. “We clocked those. Could be his, before he dropped.” “He wouldn’t jump the ring if he didn’t know it was there. No scuff. No overlap. He stopped at the line.” “And?” “And he ended up in the middle.” Patel’s eyes flicked from the prints to the corpse, then to the compass bagged nearby on a tripod tray. “Maybe he stepped in, wiped them on the burn before it set. Maybe the surface… I don’t know, sealed over.” “You want to hang an explanation on ‘maybe’?” “You got a better one?” Her thumb tapped against her watchstrap. The faint smell in the air pressed at the back of her throat now, and under it something older, a memory of another warehouse, another ring scorched into concrete, a different body on its back with the same hollow eyes. Three years gone and still the image rose when she closed her eyes on a bad night. She opened them wider instead and looked at the compass again, the needle steady, pointing away from north and deeper into the dark tunnel. “Get me the grid maps for every disused station within a mile,” she spoke without turning. “Any reports of unauthorised access, trespass, abandoned gatherings. I want them tonight.” Patel blew out through his nose. “You think this is a pattern.” “I think this isn’t a one-off stunt for some rave kids.” “For all we know, he licked the wrong pill.” “Pills don’t make tiles crack.” She stepped over to the tripod and picked up the evidence bag with the compass. The plastic crinkled under her glove. Through it, the brass casing caught the light of the rigs, sigils on the lid etched deep and precise. She pinched the edge, turned it until the face looked straight up at her. The needle floated free inside, then swung again as if tugged by something beneath the floor. It settled, once more, pointing into the tunnel’s mouth.