AI “Step back,” Detective Harlow Quinn said, lifting the battered tape with a gloved hand and ducking beneath.
The smell struck first, sharp iron scored with something older, dust and rot. Harlow scanned the derelict platform: corrugated shadows, a spatter against crumbling tile, yellow tape sagging between rusted benches. Camden Down, last stop for nothing but ghosts and, by the look of it, someone’s last breath.
A pair of constables lingered at the far edge, trading theories above bowed heads. In the centre, knees pressed to linoleum, forensics snapped photos around a blood-dark pool. Harlow squared her shoulders, slicing through the hush.
Davies straightened, mouth twisting in clear relief.
“Quinn. Glad it’s you.” A cheap biro spun between his fingers, anxious energy in clockwork flicks.
She didn’t answer, didn’t have to. Shoes scuffed, Davies led her between puddled newsheets and half-charred rat tails.
“ID?” she asked.
“Not yet. No wallet, no phone. Just this.” He gestured at the backpack propped near the body, patches sewn along the straps, faded punk band logos and a single mishmashed tarot card—The Tower—shoved beneath a broken buckle.
Harlow knelt. The corpse, youngish, lay twisted, jacket torn along one sleeve, throat bruised in two distinct lines—one broad, one finer and closer to the chin. Blood haloed the head, but the knife—no knife in sight. Her eyes travelled over the fingers, raw abrasions dusted with old soot, paleness beneath the nails. The shoes: white trainers streaked with black residue. She leaned closer.
“Strange place for a mugging. Tube’s been shuttered for years. Security’s a dead letter here,” Davies said.
“Too convenient,” Harlow muttered. “This was meant to be quiet.”
Davies flipped his biro again. “Junkie scuffle, you ask me. Kids squat all over these old lines. One swings, blames run out—” He shrugged. “Things go sideways.”
She reached for the backpack. The dead man’s hands were empty but tense, tendons taut. No sign of a defensive wound, but a patch of skin along the left wrist looked cleaner, washed careful as a saint’s relic. She rummaged through the bag—textbooks, wrinkled bus ticket, a battered tin that once held mints, now lined with steel shavings and what looked like bone dust . Tucked in the deepest pocket, she pulled free a small, tarnished compass, delicate, its face etched with sigils so fine they bit at her vision.
“That’s no junkie’s toy,” she said.
Davies frowned. “Found it on the body?”
“Deep in the kit. Hidden.”
Davies crouched beside her, peering at the compass. “Timepiece?”
She shook her head. “Compass. Needle’s wrong. See the markings?” Her finger traced the edges, careful not to smudge the oil-dulled gleam. Verdigris greened the seams. She snapped the lid closed, slipped it into an evidence pouch.
Davies grunted. “Odd, I’ll grant you. But a fight’s a fight—”
“There’s more here.” She scanned the tiles again, gaze narrowing on a scuffed ring an arm’s width from the head wound. Dark powder, almost a burnt scent.
Harlow rose, scanning for cameras already—none, she knew. But sometimes the ghosts left different traces. Behind the platform’s arch, the lighting flickered . Not a power surge. Something else.
She caught Davies’s sleeve, nodded to the circle. “Ritual? Or a decoy?”
He sucked his teeth. “Teen nonsense, more likely. Pentagrams next?”
“No sigil here. Just binding work. See?” She pointed to a faint mark bisecting the powder—a deliberate cut, not a slip. “Not showy. Quiet restraint.”
She prowled the perimeter. Her boot caught a lighter: brushed brass, initials half-gone under years of handling. The lid tasted of metal and wax, definitely not store-bought. She fished a scrap of white cloth from beneath the bench, printed with runes in careful, blotted ink.
Davies watched, frowning. “You smell something?”
“Apart from the blood?”
“Old earth. Cordite.”
She nodded. “This place has seen worse. But someone staged this. Carefully. That cut—binding, not violence. The wounds speak of control, not rage.”
Davies rocked back on his heels, unconvinced. “Students. They nick things. Get into trouble with locals. Could be regular debt collection, occult window dressing for fun.”
“And yet,” Harlow said, “they picked an abandoned station—no escape routes. Odd for amateurs. No scuffle, no hurried steps away in the dust. Whoever came, left orderly.”
She moved toward the far wall. Graffiti fanned outwards, but a cluster of chalk-white symbols glimmered, cleaner than the rest as if someone had wiped the older tags aside. Her gaze tracked them, a sequence ending in a stylised bone. She knelt, gloved fingers tracing chalk.
Footsteps echoed behind her, deliberate.
“Detective Quinn.”
She rose, recognising the voice before she saw the angular silhouette. Chief Inspector Ormsby, pressed as if the uniform might crumple under the station’s dirt.
“Ormsby.”
He surveyed the scene with clinical detachment. “Progress?” His eyes lingered on the compass in her evidence pouch.
She handed it over wordlessly.
Ormsby whistled. “Bit posh for a mugger.”
“Not a mugging. Too clean. No forced theft, personal items undisturbed but hidden. All the violence localised, specific, and the compass—a tool, not a trinket.”
Davies barked a soft laugh, the stress bleeding into a higher register. “Still could’ve been a lover’s quarrel gone bloody.”
Harlow straightened. “Not if you recognise the sigils. Shade work. Precision. The blood was let, not spilled.”
For a minute, no one spoke. Far off, a drip marked time. Ormsby’s fingers tightened around the compass, lips pressed so thin they paled.
She circled back to the faded cloth. “Someone came here for a transaction. They set the tools, staged the ritual, boxed their mark.”
“Deal gone wrong?” Davies asked, uncertainty crawling up his tone .
“Wrong, or too right. Whoever finished, cleaned up. No footprints but the victim’s, no stray fibres. Whoever died didn’t fight—trusted their killer, or thought they could win.”
Ormsby frowned, knuckles whitening as he rolled the compass over.
A shout rang out down the platform—a constable’s voice warped by echo : “Got something!”
They converged at the original tunnel entrance, the corridor where bricks turned raw and ancient. The constable jerked his chin at a fresh chalk mark: a spiral broken by a cross.
“Not on the last sweep,” he said. “Fresh, I’d swear it.”
Harlow eyed the opposing wall: a faint groove in the dust, as if something bulky had pressed through after the main event.
“Someone’s still here.”
Ormsby whipped out his torch, Davies already hauling at his radio.
Harlow didn’t wait. She plunged after the dust line, senses thrumming with the electric tension of a door cracked open. The darkness thickened, swallowing the echo of boots. Behind her, Davies’s shout fractured —something sharp, smothered.
She spun. A shadow detached itself from the bricks, gleam of metal, stench of sweat and old velvet .
A figure loomed , mask askew, blade upswept.
Harlow ducked, instincts dialled razor-sharp. She jammed forward, catching the wrist, twisting. Metal scraped concrete.
Davies’s torch stabbed through the gloom , catching the figure’s eyes—black-limned, almost luminous. They hissed, writhing, a guttural word splintering the air.
Behind them, Ormsby fired a warning shot. Concrete rained. The intruder bolted, cloak ghosting between archways, gone before she could breathe twice.
Silence slammed down. Harlow’s pulse hammered at her throat, sleeve torn in the scuffle.
Ormsby barked, “After them!”
She ran.