AI The suspect vaulted the crash barrier before I closed the gap.
He hit the far side hard, stumbled, grabbed a parked scooter for balance, then sprinted between two honking cars. I cut left, boots sliding on the slick tarmac as I threaded through the traffic, sirens wailing somewhere behind us.
Rain turned the street into a mirror of smeared red and blue, headlights bleeding into the puddles. Water hammered my face, plastered my shirt to my back, made my fingers slip on the Glock. I ran anyway, lungs burning, watch strap biting into my wrist with every stride.
He glanced over his shoulder once, just enough for me to catch his face in the spill of a corner shop sign. Young. Eyes too wide, pupils blown. Either he felt terrified or he felt nothing at all. He shoved into a knot of tourists outside a kebab place, scattering paper bags and plastic forks.
I hit the same knot a heartbeat later.
"Police, move," I snapped.
Bodies parted in a chaos of complaints and hot meat and cheap perfume. Someone swore at me in Spanish. Someone else held their phone up, filming. My shoulder clipped a man with a takeaway tray and sent chilli sauce across my coat. I barely noticed.
Up ahead, the suspect darted across the pavement and jumped the metal gate of a narrow service alley. No hesitation, no glance at the "No Entry" sign. He vanished into the darkness like he already knew the route.
Of course he did.
I planted a hand on the wet gate, hauled myself over and dropped into the alley. The air changed at once. Colder, thicker, full of rot and something sour underneath. The kind of smell you found behind restaurants when the rubbish strike went on too long.
My radio crackled against my shoulder, voice lost in static.
"Control, this is Quinn. Foot pursuit, Camden High Street, suspect heading north behind the shops, male, mid-twenties, black hoodie, grey joggers, white trainers, possible connection to the Brewer Street body. Requesting units to cut off the other side."
Static hissed.
"Control, say again."
Nothing. The alley walls climbed high on both sides, brick sweating water. The rain above became a distant roar.
I swore under my breath and kept moving.
Ahead, the suspect vaulted another gate and hit a set of stone steps that dropped away, steep and narrow. He almost slipped, caught himself on the rusted handrail, then vanished round a bend. Faded paint on the wall beside him read: CAMDEN ROAD STATION, with an arrow pointing down, the rest lost in graffiti.
Camden Road had not been a station for a long time.
For a second, the back of my neck prickled. Three years ago, a sign on a wall, a partner vanishing into a space that should not have existed, a smell like hot copper and burnt hair.
I pushed the memory away and took the steps two at a time.
Water poured down the stairwell in thin rivers. My soles skidded. I slowed just enough to keep my feet. The thunder of the city dulled with every step until it felt like I moved down inside someone's throat.
At the bottom, a rusted metal shutter loomed , spray-painted with obscene cartoons and curses. A sliver of light leaked from a narrow gap at one side. The suspect squeezed through it.
"Stop. Police."
He did not stop.
I lunged for the gap as his heel vanished from sight. The opening looked too small for me in full kit. I turned sideways and shoved my shoulder through, scraping the fabric of my coat on the jagged metal, feeling it bite skin. My holstered gun caught, jarred. I swore and twisted, forcing my way in.
I spilled out on the other side into darkness.
No.
Not darkness.
A corridor of bare concrete with a weak yellow strip light buzzing overhead. The suspect already ran at the far end, a black flare of movement. He slapped a hand against another metal door and it swung inward, light and noise flooding out so sudden my eyes flinched.
And something else. Smell. Thick and layered. Incense and frying oil and damp stone. Human sweat. Animal musk. Herbs crushed underfoot. The faint sharp reek of blood.
This was not an abandoned station access. You did not get that smell in disused tunnels.
He disappeared through the door.
I slowed.
My pulse scratched in my throat. I pressed the radio again.
"Control, Quinn. I am in underground access beneath Camden High, looks like an old Tube connection. Confirm if this location is on record."
The radio spat white noise, like someone breathing sand.
I checked my phone. No signal.
Behind me, the gap in the shutter looked even smaller. The stairs curled up into darkness. Alone, then. No comms. No backup.
The metal door at the end of the corridor stood half open. Warm light spilled out, orange and flickering. Voices surged and fell beyond, a crowded low roar, like a market at closing time.
Brewer Street's victim on a slab flashed behind my eyes. The symbols carved into his chest. The bone dust under his nails. The stink of candle wax and river mud and something old.
I tightened my grip on the Glock and walked for the door.
A shape blocked it before I reached it.
Tall. Broad. Head and shoulders filling the frame. A man in a long dark coat, collar turned up, shaved skull gleaming in the light.
He planted a boot across the threshold.
"Token."
His voice rasped. Not aggressive, not questioning. Just flat fact.
I stopped three paces back.
"Detective Harlow Quinn, Metropolitan Police," I said. "Pursuing a suspect through here. Step aside."
"Token," he said again.
His eyes showed no curiosity. Just boredom, tinted with the kind of patience you only got from people used to blood on the floor.
My badge lay in my inside pocket, leather soft with years of use. I took it out and flipped it open with my thumb.
"Met Police, like I said. You can argue procedure with Professional Standards if you like. Or you can move your foot."
He did not look down.
"Bone token," he said. "No token, no entry. Your law stops at the shutter."
He smiled then, small and humourless.
"Detective."
The word sat wrong in his mouth. Like it did not belong in the same vocabulary.
Something moved behind him, glimpsed through the crack of doorway. Colour, motion, shadows.
My heart thudded, slow and heavy.
The smart choice sat clear. Secure the access point, wait for backup, call Firearms, cordon the street. Treat it like any other possible lair. Do it by the book.
The book also said you did not break pursuit of an armed suspect who had already put one body on the table. Not when you were one glass door away.
For a heartbeat, another stairwell rolled through me. Different place, different smell, DS Morris vanishing through smoke that slithered like liquid. Me hesitating. A scream cut short.
I felt the hesitation now too. Old, lodged in scar tissue.
The man watched my eyes.
"You walk in without a token," he said, "you do not walk out."
"That a threat?"
"That is a rule."
Something clicked behind him. A softer voice cut through the roar.
"She is with me."
A small white object arced through the air and clinked on the concrete at my feet.
I glanced down.
A button-sized disc lay there, pale and matte. It looked like carved bone. Someone had incised a symbol into the face, a spiral of notches that made my vision wobble if I stared too long.
The bald man bent with controlled slowness, picked up the disc and weighed it in thick fingers. He did not look at me. He turned it once, as if confirming some private truth, then stepped aside .
His coat brushed the doorframe.
"On his head," he said. "If you make trouble, it is his debt."
I slid my badge away, holstered the Glock, and picked up the disc. It felt too warm. Like someone else's mouth had held it minutes before.
Beyond the doorway, the man who had spoken leaned against a red metal pillar and watched me come in.
He had olive skin, damp curls stuck to his forehead, a day-old shadow on his jaw. A white T-shirt clung to a wiry chest, spattered with what might have been paint and might have been blood. A Saint Christopher medallion hung at his throat, glinting in the light. His left forearm carried a pale rope of scar.
Warm brown eyes took me in, fast, from boots to cropped hair to watch.
"You definitely do not belong here," he said.
His accent carried Spain in the edges, softened by London grime.
"That mutual," I said. "Name."
He smiled without showing teeth.
"Doctor," he said. "More or less."
The room behind him hit me in layered impressions.
Stalls. Dozens of them. Tables, tarpaulins, crates stacked high. Strings of bare bulbs hung low, interspersed with paper lanterns that bled red and green colour. People moved in dense loops, their voices knitted into a constant murmur threaded with laughter, argument, bargaining.
Smell hit harder now. Herbs, fried dough, old stone, metallic tang.
On the nearest stall, jars glimmered in rows. Some held dried roots. Some held liquids in shades of violet and orange. One held something that looked suspiciously like a human hand, shrunk and wrinkled.
A woman shuffled past me with a cage of rats. Their eyes glowed like embers. Or caught the light badly. I decided it was the light.
The suspect was not immediately visible.
The man with the medallion sighed.
"You chase that boy in here," he said, "you will not find what you expect."
"I expect an arrest," I said. "And I just cut my coat on your bloody door."
He glanced at the rip, at the damp patch of chilli sauce on my shoulder, and shook his head.
"You police," he said. "Always walking into churches with your shoes on."
"Not a church."
"Depends who you ask."
I scanned the crowd. Faces blurred past. A pale man with eyes like chipped glass. A child whose pupils ran vertical. A woman whose hair moved as if underwater.
Drugs, contact lenses, costumes. Camden never ran short on theatrics.
My brain clung to that explanation because the alternative sat too near to old case files that had never officially existed.
The suspect flashed in the corner of my vision, a familiar black hoodie threading between two stalls stacked with tarnished silver. He headed deeper, toward the far curve of the tunnel where the light dimmed and smoke bunched low.
I stepped round the doctor.
"Stay out of my way."
"I advise the opposite."
His hand brushed my elbow. Gentle, but my muscles tensed hard. Reflex. I pulled my arm clear, gave him a look that stopped most people.
He lifted his hands.
"Vale. Go. But when it goes wrong, remember, I tried to help."
"Noted."
I moved.
The floor changed from concrete to cracked old tiles, white squares stained grey and brown. My boots left wet prints. Stalls on either side spilled over with things that should not have been on any street in my jurisdiction.
Bones tied with coloured string. Feathers that caught the air with no apparent source. Knives with blades too dark to reflect anything. A jar full of teeth. A row of masks whose painted eyes tracked me.
Someone hissed at me as I brushed a curtain of beads. The beads sparked against my sleeve with a tiny fizz. Static, I told myself.
The crowd flowed round me, indifferent and yet aware. I kept the Glock low against my thigh, coat pulled forward to shield it. The suspect's hoodie bobbed ahead, a shark fin in human water.
He did not look back now. Either he trusted his ground, or he felt too focused on whatever waited at the far end.
He slipped behind a stall where an old woman in a faded floral dress arranged cards on a cloth. They were not any deck I recognised. Bone slivers inscribed with lines.
I cut round the other side and saw him drop down a short set of steps into a recessed section of tunnel. The space there felt wrong from twenty paces away, like the air turned thicker.
Nine circles of chalk covered the floor in front of the steps, nested and tangled, each one daubed with markings that twisted when I tried to read them. Candles stood at intersecting points, little flames steady in air that should have gusted with the passing bodies.
The suspect pushed a small package across the chalk to a man in a grey suit sitting cross-legged on the far side. The suited man's face stayed calm, expressionless, like he sat at a boardroom table instead of in a pit surrounded by symbols that made my skin crawl.
My radio crackled once at my shoulder, an empty burst.
I took the steps down, gun rising.
"Metropolitan Police," I called. "Hands where I can see them."
Everything stopped.
Sound thinned. The market's roar pulled back as if someone had closed a door. I felt eyes on me from every direction. The suspect's shoulders stiffened. He began to turn, slow and reluctant.
The man in the suit looked at my gun, then at my face.
"You bring that thing in here," he said, voice mild, "and you wonder why nothing works."
He reached toward the package.
"Leave it," I snapped.
His fingers froze a hair's breadth from the brown paper.
The doctor with the medallion appeared at the top of the steps. His breath came a little fast, chest lifting under the shirt.
"Detective," he said. "You do not want to do this."
"I am done with men telling me what I want."
Something moved at my boots.
I glanced down.
The nearest chalk circle had begun to blur, lines softening as if they melted into the stone. The candle flames at its edge stretched sideways, bending toward my feet.
"Out of the sigils," the doctor said. "Now."
The suspect took the opportunity. He darted back, slammed his shoulder into me. I staggered sideways. My heel scuffed across one of the chalk lines, crushing it, breaking the clean loop.
The air dropped ten degrees.
Every hair on my arms lifted.
A sound rose from the floor. Low at first, like wind in a drain, then building, shrill, scraping the inside of my skull. The candle flames flared black before they went out together.
Cracks spidered from the broken chalk line across the tiles.
Shadows pooled in the gaps, too thick, too slow.
Someone screamed behind me. Not in panic. In warning.
I tried to pull my foot back. The tiles under my sole writhed.
The shadow surged up from the floor in a column, tall and twisting, as if someone had poured ink and found it refused to settle. It smelled of river mud and metal and the air before a storm.
The Glock felt small in my hands.
Around us, the market erupted, stalls slamming shut, people running, shapes slithering away into cracks I had not seen before. The roar of bodies hit, high and jagged.
Something cold and sharp pressed against my ribs, right under the edge of my ballistic vest. A hand fisted in the back of my coat, pulling me still.
"Drop the gun, detective," a voice breathed against my ear, calm and close. "Or they will eat you first."