Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMKP0H1MXRZ2J05XX4R

The rain had turned Soho into a black mirror. Every puddle threw back the orange smear of streetlights, and the gutters ran fast and cold. Quinn kept her eyes on the figure fifty metres ahead. He'd bolted the moment she'd stepped out of the Raven's Nest, which told her everything she needed to know about his conscience. She'd only wanted to ask him a few questions about a body found near Waterloo three nights ago — a body with wounds she still couldn't explain to her superintendent — but the moment her eyes landed on him across the bar, something in his face had collapsed, and he was through the door before she'd even moved her hand. Now her shoes were soaked through and she was running hard past shuttered restaurants and a supermarket with its lights still blazing, past a group of students who pressed themselves against a wall and stared. The man ahead of her wasn't Tomás Herrera — she'd confirmed that back inside, when she'd put his face against the photograph on her phone and come up short. But he'd been sitting with Herrera's associates. He'd been listening to things she suspected Herrera had told them. That was enough. He took a left onto a side street so narrow the buildings seemed to lean together overhead. Quinn went with him, her stride eating the distance. She was faster on the flat, always had been — eighteen years of early morning runs had made her legs reliable things — but he was lighter and he knew these streets better than she did. He moved with a specific, practised panic that suggested he had a destination in mind. That worried her more than the running. He swung right, then immediately left. A market stall someone had left half-assembled blocked most of the pavement and he vaulted it without breaking stride. Quinn went round it, lost two seconds. He glanced back once, and in the amber quarter-light she caught his face: young, tight with fear, a cut above one eyebrow she hadn't noticed inside. He wasn't running from the law. He was running from being caught *talking* to it. She pulled out her radio and kept moving. "Control, this is DI Quinn, I'm in foot pursuit, suspect heading north on—" She looked up for a street sign and found none. "Camden direction, on foot from Soho. Male, early twenties, dark jacket, grey trainers. Requesting any available units to—" He disappeared. She lowered the radio and ran harder. The street ended in a junction she didn't recognise, a dead-looking stretch with a boarded-up pub on the corner and a bus stop with the timetable torn out. The rain intensified without warning, a sharp lateral sheet of it that hit her in the face and turned everything grey and indistinct. No figure. No sound of footsteps. Quinn stopped. Turned. Read the street the way Morris had taught her — *start with what's wrong, not what's there* — and her eye caught it almost immediately. A corrugated metal fence that ran along the edge of what should have been a pavement had a section pulled back at the base, just wide enough. Beyond it: a staircase going down, concrete steps, ancient tiling visible at the edge of her torch beam. An old station entrance. Camden, she thought. The decommissioned line. She stood in the rain with water running off her jaw and considered it. Eighteen years of instinct said call it in, wait for backup, do not go underground alone pursuing an unidentified suspect into an unlit disused transport tunnel at eleven-forty at night. Eighteen years of something else said she was running out of nights like this one. She'd started pulling at the Herrera thread four months ago, after the Waterloo body. Before that, another one in Bermondsey that the coroner had filed as inconclusive. Before that, DS Morris, three years ago, who had gone into a building in Lambeth following a lead she'd given him and had come out — been brought out — with injuries the hospital had photographed and quietly stopped asking about. Morris, who had been her partner for six years and who had died in a ward in King's College with his hands folded and his face completely still, and who had never once told her what he'd seen in that building. She crouched and went through the gap. The staircase went down further than any disused station she'd seen. The tiles were original — she could tell from the curves and the faded lettering she couldn't quite read — but the lights were new. Not the fluorescents of the Underground. Something lower, amber, almost warm, strung along the walls on cables that vanished around corners. The air smelt of burnt wax and something sharp beneath it, chemical, with an edge of copper. At the bottom of the stairs, a crowd. Quinn stopped with one foot on the last step. Thirty, forty people in a space that had once been a ticket hall. Stalls. Tables covered in cloth, behind which figures stood with their backs half-turned. Objects she couldn't immediately categorise arranged under glass and in cases and hanging from hooks driven into the old tiling. A man nearby had a coat that moved at the hem independent of the air. A woman's face, when she turned under the amber light, was the wrong shape in a way Quinn's brain refused to process directly and filed instead as *probably a trick of the light.* The man she'd been following was twenty feet away, speaking rapidly to someone she couldn't see. Quinn's hand went to her warrant card out of pure reflex, and she stopped herself. She stepped back against the wall. Thought about Morris. Thought about what she'd photographed in Bermondsey, what she'd photographed at Waterloo, what she had on her phone and in three locked notebooks that she'd told no one about, not her super, not the team, no one. She put the warrant card back in her pocket. Then she moved off the step and into the market.