AI Rain hammered Soho like it had a grudge. It ran in sheets off awnings, churned gutter water into black froth, and glazed the pavement so every step threatened to skid. Detective Harlow Quinn cut through it in a dark coat that shed water in sharp streams, jaw set, shoulders square, eyes locked down the street.
A figure in a hooded jacket clipped past the green neon glow of The Raven’s Nest, the sign fizzing as if it also wanted out of the weather. For a blink the suspect’s face turned—pale oval, mouth tight, eyes wide—then vanished behind the hood and the night.
Quinn pushed harder. Boots slapped puddles. Her worn leather watch pinched cold against her left wrist as she checked it without breaking stride, numbers shining for half a second under a streetlamp.
“Stop! Police!”
The shout ripped out of her and got shredded by the rain. The hood didn’t slow. It darted between two late-night smokers huddled beneath a shopfront, shoulders hunched like birds.
“Oi!” one of them barked, more offended than scared.
Quinn didn’t spare them a glance. She cut left, shoulder brushing wet brick, and swung round the corner into a narrower lane that stank of spilled beer and old fryer oil. The suspect’s trainers squealed on slick cobbles.
A door thumped open behind the neon. Light spilled in a dirty wedge. A man’s voice carried out, Spanish edges to it, sharp with warning.
“Mate, you can’t bring trouble in here.”
Quinn caught a glimpse of him in the doorway—olive skin, short dark curls plastered to his forehead, Saint Christopher medallion flashing at his throat. His left forearm showed a pale scar in the split second before he pulled his sleeve down.
The suspect blew past him. The man flinched back, eyes snapping to Quinn as she surged after.
“Detective!” he threw out, like he knew the word tasted dangerous.
Quinn didn’t stop.
“You seen that hood?” Her voice came out clipped, military clean.
The man lifted his hands, palms out, water dripping off his fingers.
“Yeah. Running like he nicked a priest’s wallet. Down there.” He pointed into the lane, then jabbed the air toward the main road. “He’s heading Camden way. Don’t drag this into the Nest.”
Quinn’s eyes flicked once to the maps and black-and-white photos lining the bar’s walls through the open door. Faces frozen in old smoke. Streets from another century. Then her focus snapped back to the wet street ahead.
“Get inside.”
“Already in,” he shot back, and the door banged shut.
Quinn drove forward. The suspect cut across Shaftesbury Avenue, forcing a cab to brake hard. Tyres hissed. The driver leaned on the horn.
“You mental?” the driver yelled into the rain.
Quinn slapped a palm on the cab’s bonnet for balance and kept running, coat dragging like a soaked flag behind her. The suspect slipped between a bus and a bollard, vanished into a warren of side streets that led north.
Quinn stayed on the line of movement—footprints, splashes, the way the hood bobbed when it turned a corner. She heard breath ahead, ragged, and it didn’t belong to the rain.
A cyclist skidded as Quinn burst into the cycle lane.
“Watch it!” the cyclist shouted, wobbling.
Quinn raised her warrant card without looking back, the gesture automatic, then let it drop and took the turn the suspect took, through a narrow archway painted with wet graffiti.
Her lungs burned. Rain pooled at her collarbone. She tasted metal.
The suspect glanced back again. Streetlight caught a glint of something at their neck—chain, pendant, metal tag. The hood jerked forward and the figure slipped down a stairwell that shouldn’t have been there, a concrete cut between railings half-hidden by a billboard.
Quinn reached the stairwell and stopped dead for a heartbeat.
The entrance yawned like a throat. Steps slick with rain went down into darkness. The air rising from it felt warmer than the street, thick with old dust and something sharp like burnt sugar.
A tube access. But not marked. No Transport for London signs. No CCTV dome. Just a padlocked gate swung open on broken hinges like someone had peeled it back.
Her hand went to her radio clipped under her coat. It crackled once, then spat out a thin hiss that didn’t match any channel.
“Control, this is Quinn,” she spoke into it anyway . “Foot pursuit. Suspect heading underground off—” she looked up, reading the street sign through rain, “—Chalk Farm Road. Unmarked access. I’m going in.”
The radio answered with a wet, useless shush.
Quinn lowered it. Her fingers tightened around the grip of her torch. She pulled it out, clicked it on. The beam speared down the steps and caught a smear of mud, fresh. Water trailed over it like it tried to wash it away.
A sound came from below. Not footsteps . Murmurs. A low hum of voices, too many for an abandoned station.
Quinn took the first step.
The second.
Her boots found purchase on algae-slick concrete. She kept her weight low, shoulders angled, like training had put an extra hinge in her spine. The rain noise faded. The air closed around her. The smell changed—iron, incense, damp paper, fried food.
She moved fast but quiet, one hand skimming the wall. Rust flaked under her fingertips. The beam jumped with her breath and caught old posters, the edges curled like dead leaves. A woman in 1960s lipstick smiled through mould.
A shadow flickered at the bottom landing. The suspect, already cutting right.
“Stop!” Quinn’s voice cracked off the tiles and came back at her in pieces.
The suspect didn’t answer. It bolted into a corridor where the walls sweated and pipes ran like veins overhead.
Quinn followed, boots splashing through shallow water. Her torch beam found a painted arrow on the wall—a raven in black chalk, wings spread, pointing deeper.
She’d seen that mark before. Not in any official report. In the corner of a photograph on DS Morris’s old case file. A warehouse wall behind him, half-cropped, like it hadn’t mattered until it did.
Her mouth went tight. She pushed on.
The corridor opened into a bigger space and the noise hit her full on. Voices layered on voices. Laughter that sounded forced. Someone arguing in a language she didn’t place. A metal shutter clanged. Music thumped from a speaker that buzzed with bad wiring.
Her torch beam caught a line of stalls set up along a platform. Not commuters—traders. Tarps strung from old signage. Lanterns that burned with pale green flame instead of yellow. Glass jars filled with things that shifted when the light touched them, like smoke caught in syrup. A butcher’s block with no meat, only a row of bone-white tokens stacked like poker chips.
People moved through it like they owned the underground. Coats, hoods, masks, bare faces too. Eyes turned toward Quinn as if a cold wind had blown in.
A man at the nearest stall leaned forward, his smile too wide, teeth too neat.
“Evening, love. You lost?”
Quinn swept her torch across him and kept it moving. She didn’t answer the bait. The beam landed on the suspect’s back as it shoved through the crowd, shoulder-checking a woman with silver paint on her eyelids. The woman spun, hissed something, then caught sight of Quinn and shut her mouth fast.
Quinn pushed in after the suspect. Bodies pressed close. Someone’s elbow dug into her ribs. A hand brushed her pocket and she slapped it away without looking, grip like a vice.
“Hands off.”
A man with a scarf covering his mouth chuckled.
“Cop’s got sharp manners.”
Quinn’s eyes pinned him.
“Move.”
She kept advancing. Her torch bobbed over goods she couldn’t name: bundles of dried herbs tied with red thread, knives laid out on velvet with blades that drank light, a bowl of milky liquid where a goldfish floated belly-up then righted itself and stared at her.
A teenager, face pocked with acne and freckles, held up a small bottle with a cork.
“Rain off your shoulders, yeah? One sip, you’ll—”
“Not interested.” Quinn pushed past.
The suspect reached a gap between stalls guarded by two thick-set men. One had a tattoo that crawled over his knuckles like living ink. The other wore a battered bomber jacket and a chain of teeth around his neck.
The suspect dug into a pocket and slapped something into the tattooed man’s palm. Bone clicked against bone.
Quinn saw it clear as a photograph: a token the colour of old ivory, etched with a symbol like a split circle.
The tattooed man stepped aside at once. Respect. Fear. Something like it.
Quinn shoved through the last of the crowd and reached the gap.
The two guards blocked her, solid as wall studs.
The tattooed one held out his hand, palm up.
“Token.”
Quinn lifted her chin. The torch beam cut up his arm and caught the ink writhing, not from movement but from itself, as if the skin carried something that wanted out.
“I’m police.”
The man’s smile didn’t reach his eyes.
“And I’m the Queen. Token.”
The other guard leaned in. His breath carried cloves and rot.
“You don’t want to walk in empty-handed, officer.”
Quinn’s fingers tightened round her torch until the knurling bit her skin. She flicked a glance past them.
The suspect slipped through a heavy curtain of dark fabric that hung like theatre drapes. It swallowed the hood and left only a sway in the cloth.
Quinn stepped closer to the guards. The crowd noise dimmed behind her, as if the market listened.
“I’m pursuing a suspect,” she snapped. “Move.”
The bomber-jacket guard lifted his chin toward the curtain.
“Your suspect paid. You didn’t.”
Quinn’s hand drifted to the inside of her coat where her baton sat. Her pulse thudded against the strap of her bra, hard enough to count. She pictured DS Morris’s face, the last day she saw him alive—coffee stain on his tie, eyes tired, mouth set like he already knew what waited in the dark.
She lowered her hand before it touched the baton. She pulled her warrant card out instead and shoved it into the tattooed man’s palm.
The man looked down at it like it stank.
“This ain’t currency.”
Quinn didn’t blink.
“It’s authority.”
The tattooed man tore the card in half with a slow, casual pull and let the pieces fall into a puddle at his feet. Wet paper stuck to the concrete like a dead leaf.
A hush spread. People leaned in. Someone behind Quinn laughed once, high and sharp, then stopped.
The bomber-jacket guard tapped the side of his own nose.
“Authority ends at street level. Down here, you pay or you bleed.”
Quinn’s jaw flexed. Her left wrist rolled and the worn leather watch flashed. She took in the market in a single sweep—stalls, exits, faces, hands near pockets, the way two men watched her from a shadowed alcove with the calm patience of dogs waiting for meat.
She looked back at the curtain. The fabric settled, still now. The suspect vanished behind it. The space beyond waited, unseen.
Quinn drew a slow breath through her nose and let it out through her mouth. She slipped her torch into her coat pocket and freed her hands. She reached into her trouser pocket and pulled out a small evidence bag from earlier that day, the plastic crinkling in the damp air. Inside sat a fragment of something white and curved, tagged and sealed—a piece of bone lifted from a crime scene she hadn’t filed yet because she didn’t want the paperwork attached to it.
The tattooed man’s eyes sharpened.
“That’s not—”
Quinn tore the bag open with her teeth, spit the plastic aside, and dropped the bone fragment into his palm.
The guard rolled it between finger and thumb. The living ink on his knuckles paused, then twitched.
He held it up, inspecting the cut edges. His gaze slid back to Quinn, measuring.
“You nicked this from someone.”
“I collected it,” Quinn threw back, voice flat .
The bomber-jacket guard chuckled, low.
“Same thing, innit.”
The tattooed man closed his fist around the bone and stepped aside, slow, like he gave the market time to record the moment. The bomber-jacket guard moved too, shoulders turning, making a narrow lane.
Quinn didn’t rush. She walked forward and stopped at the curtain. The fabric smelled of smoke and damp wool. She lifted the edge with two fingers. Darkness pooled behind it, thick and warm, threaded with a faint red glow.
A voice came from the other side, close enough to touch, rough with amusement.
“Detective Quinn,” it called, using her name like it had weight .
Quinn held the curtain up and leaned in just enough to let the red light paint one side of her face.
“Show yourself.”