Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMZFZMGTV4QCDRGHV3Z

The rain had turned Soho into a mirror. Every streetlamp doubled itself in the black puddles, and Detective Harlow Quinn ran through the reflections without looking down. She'd clocked him outside the Raven's Nest twenty minutes ago — a thin man in a waxed jacket who'd been watching the entrance for the better part of an hour before slipping inside, staying twelve minutes, then leaving with something tucked under his arm wrapped in brown paper. That was enough. She'd been watching the Nest for six weeks. Anything that moved in or out moved with purpose, and purpose was exactly what she was building a case around. He was fast for someone who didn't know he was being followed. Quinn gained ground on Charing Cross Road, dodging a group of tourists huddled under a single inadequate umbrella, her boots hitting the pavement in the rhythm she'd kept since Hendon training days. Sharp jaw set. Breathing controlled. He glanced back. There it was — the slight rotation of the head, the stumble in his stride. He knew. He broke into a full sprint across the junction at Cambridge Circus, a cab leaning on its horn as he cleared the bonnet by half a metre. Quinn followed without breaking stride, one hand briefly on the warm metal of the cab's roof as she vaulted past. The driver shouted something she didn't catch. He cut left into a narrow passage between two Georgian terraces, then right again onto a street she didn't immediately recognise — the city folding itself into unfamiliar geometry the way it did when you left the main arteries. The green neon of the Raven's Nest sign was already two streets behind her. Rain came in sideways now, needling her cheeks, and she blinked it away. He was heading north. She pulled out her phone without slowing, tried to pin the route, but he ducked into a stairwell she nearly missed entirely — worn stone steps descending below street level, no signage, the kind of entrance that registered as a maintenance shaft unless you were looking. She stopped at the top of the steps. Steam rose from a grille somewhere below. The passage smelled of damp stone and something older, something mineral and faintly sweet that she couldn't name. Fluorescent light flickered up from the bottom of the stairs, weak and intermittent. Quinn stood in the rain and thought about DS Morris. Three years ago, Morris had followed a lead into a building in Bermondsey that shouldn't have contained what it contained. He'd gone in radioing that he had eyes on the suspect. He'd come out two days later in a condition the coroner's report described, inadequately, as exposure-related organ failure. He had been thirty-four years old. He had taken his coffee with two sugars and kept a photograph of his daughter on his desk. She descended. The stairwell opened into what had clearly once been a Tube station — the curved Victorian brickwork was unmistakable, terracotta tiles still adhering to the walls in patches, the ghost of a station name barely legible beneath decades of grime. But the platforms on either side of the dry tracks had been transformed into something that bore no relationship to Transport for London's remit. Stalls. Dozens of them, stretching the length of the platform under a canopy of mismatched lighting — Edison bulbs strung between iron hooks, lanterns burning something that wasn't quite gas, strips of cold blue LEDs that gave the sellers' faces an aquatic pallor. The crowd moved at a low, unhurried frequency entirely at odds with the hour. A man in a long coat with his back to her examined rows of glass vials arranged by colour. Two women conferred in whispered Spanish over a wooden box whose contents Quinn couldn't see from this distance. A child — she thought it was a child — sat on an upturned crate eating something that left dark stains on its fingers. None of them looked up when she arrived. She scanned for the waxed jacket. The crowd was thick enough to lose him, thin enough to track if she moved quickly. She stepped down from the stairwell access onto the platform and felt the change immediately — a shift in air pressure, a faint resistance, as if the atmosphere here maintained a slightly different density. Her ears adjusted with the small pop of altitude change. A hand closed around her wrist. "You're going to want to relax your hand away from that." She looked down. Her right hand had gone automatically to the inside of her jacket where her warrant card lived alongside her personal-issue Glock. She hadn't consciously decided to reach for either. The man holding her wrist was around thirty, olive-skinned, a Saint Christopher medallion catching the blue LED light at his throat. A scar ran the length of his left forearm — she clocked it because his sleeves were rolled to the elbow despite the underground chill. He wasn't gripping hard. His hold was the kind that communicated information rather than force. "Tomás Herrera." She recognised the name from the periphery of her case notes. Former NHS paramedic, license revoked under circumstances the file described vaguely. "You know me." His warm brown eyes moved past her shoulder to the crowd, assessing. "Which means you came in here with a badge and a name and absolutely no idea what this place does to both." "I'm following a suspect." "Everyone down here is someone's suspect." He released her wrist, stepped back, hands open at his sides. "The man you followed — waxed jacket, carrying a package — he's already gone. There are three exits from this platform and he knows all of them. You don't know any." Quinn looked down the length of the market. The stalls receded into shadow at both ends. She couldn't see where they terminated. "What is this place." It wasn't entirely a question. He seemed to understand the distinction. "Somewhere that doesn't appear in any case file you're building." He picked up a small canvas bag from the floor beside him — medical supplies, she noted, the shape of it familiar. "And somewhere that will end your career, your case, and possibly your physical continuity if you start flashing credentials."