Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMWP848W55N2TBTR54D

The abandoned station smelled of rust and old damp, the kind of smell that settled into your lungs and stayed there. Detective Harlow Quinn ducked under the police tape and clicked on her torch, sweeping the beam across the platform. Camden Tube — the one that never opened, the one that didn't appear on any map issued after 1942. She'd been down here once before, years ago, on an unrelated case. A body found by urban explorers. Even then the place had made the hairs on her arms stand up, and she'd put it down to the cold. Tonight it was something else. "Careful on the edge," called DS Petra Vance from behind her. "The platform lip's crumbling." Quinn already knew. She'd clocked it the moment she stepped off the maintenance ladder — a long section of the platform edge broken away, the concrete debris sitting on the track bed in a pattern that made no sense for simple decay. The pieces faced inward, not outward. As if something had pushed through from the track side. She crouched down and looked at the fragments without touching them. "Who called it in?" she asked. "Anonymous. Burner mobile registered to nobody." Vance appeared beside her, holding her own torch, twenty-eight years old and already carrying the careful neutrality of someone who had learned not to express opinions before her senior officer. "Uniform found the entrance hatch open when they arrived. No signs of forced entry." "On a hatch that's meant to be welded shut." "It was welded. The welds were cut. Cleanly." Quinn stood and turned in a slow circle. The torchlight slid over the old station walls — faded green tiling, a few rusted advertising frames still bolted up, one of them holding the ghost of a wartime poster, the ink long since bled to illegibility. Wooden market stalls ran the length of the platform. Not a few of them — dozens. Makeshift tables, folding trestles, display cases with their glass cracked or missing altogether. All of it abandoned in a hurry. A pewter cup on its side, a dark stain spreading from its mouth across the cloth beneath. A set of scales with one pan bent out of shape. Items scattered across the ground as though swept from surfaces by a single panicked arm. No body. That was what the call had reported. A body. "Where's the victim?" she asked. Vance pointed her torch toward the far end of the platform where the tunnel mouth opened into black. Two uniforms stood well back from a shape on the ground. Quinn walked the length of the market, taking her time, stepping around a knocked-over lantern, a leather-bound book with its pages fanned open, what appeared to be a glass jar filled with dried flowers or possibly teeth — she'd come back to that — and stopped when she reached the shape. A man. Mid-forties, dressed in a long coat that might have been oilskin once and was now something else, something that caught the torchlight strangely. He lay on his back with his arms at his sides. Not thrown, not twisted. Arranged, or fallen with a precision that bodies didn't manage on their own. His eyes were open and entirely silver. Not the clouded silver of cataract or death, but a clean, bright silver, like polished coin. Quinn looked at him for a long time. "Cause of death?" she asked. "Pathologist's on her way," Vance said, from two steps behind. "But visually, nothing obvious. No apparent wounds. No blood beyond that spillage at the stall back there, and it doesn't match the body's position." "Meaning?" "Meaning if he bled there, he moved here under his own power afterward." Quinn looked at the distance between the stall and the body. Eleven, twelve metres. She looked at the man's coat, his hands — no drag marks on the platform, no scuff on his palms, no indication he'd crawled. "He didn't walk it." She studied the sole of his left boot. "Look at the dust on this platform. Look at it." Vance leaned in. A thick, undisturbed layer of the old station's particular grey grime covered everything, decades of it, except for two places: the market stalls, where the disturbance was obvious and expected, and a rough circular area around the body. Within that circle, the dust was gone. Completely gone. Not swept — the platform stone beneath was clean in a way that stone left alone for eighty years was never clean. "Heat," Vance offered. "Some kind of intense localised heat could do that." "There's no scorch. No discolouration of the tile. Run your hand two centimetres above that surface and tell me if it's warm." Vance hesitated, then crouched and did it. "Cold," she admitted. "Colder than the rest of the platform." Quinn had already moved to the edge of the clean circle. She didn't step inside it. She studied it from where she stood and pulled a small notebook from her inside pocket, made a rough sketch of the shape. It wasn't quite circular. It had edges that caught faintly — she tilted her torch until the angle was right — faint lines in the stone itself. Grooves. Either very old or made to look it. She photographed them with her mobile. The photos came out dark and then, when she raised the brightness, showed nothing at all where the grooves should have been visible. She photographed them again. Same result. Vance was back on her feet. "The market stalls are the obvious angle. Someone running an unlicensed operation down here, rival party comes in, things go wrong—" "Look at this man's hands." Vance looked. The dead man's hands were folded now. Both officers had seen them flat at his sides thirty seconds ago. A long silence. "The uniforms move him?" Quinn asked. "No, ma'am." She crouched at the edge of the clean circle and pointed her torch at the nearest wall. In the green tiling, at roughly eye level if a person were sitting on the platform floor, someone had scratched three symbols. Recent — the scratches were bright against the old glaze, the ceramic dust still sitting in the grooves. She had seen one of those symbols before. On a small brass compass she'd recovered from the pocket of DS Morris three years ago, on the night he died in a way she had never been able to explain to anyone, including herself. Quinn straightened up slowly, the leather of her watch strap pressing into her wrist as she gripped the notebook. She kept her face as she always kept it — still, readable as nothing. "Get me a list of every business registered within a half-mile radius," she said. "And find out who owns the freehold on this station."