Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMZRB77B77PH9J9WBFY

The abandoned Tube station smelled of damp concrete and something older — a mineral sharpness that caught at the back of Quinn's throat the moment she ducked under the cordon tape. Her torch swept across the platform, catching the glint of standing water between the tracks and the peeling remnants of a 1987 British Rail poster still clinging to the far wall. "Down here." Constable Reeves waved from the far end of the platform, his breath fogging in the cold. Quinn picked her way along the edge, avoiding the evidence markers that dotted the ground in uneven clusters. Fourteen years since this station had seen a passenger. The Underground had sealed it off after a structural survey, and Camden Council had been arguing over the redevelopment rights ever since. She'd read the file in the car on the way over. None of that paperwork had prepared her for what Reeves was standing next to. The body was a man in his mid-forties, dressed well — a decent overcoat, leather Oxford shoes, a silk pocket square still neatly folded in his breast pocket. He lay on his back with his arms at his sides, palms up, as though he'd lain down deliberately and simply stopped. His face held no expression of distress. No contortion, no clawing at the throat or ground. DS Carver stood on the other side of the body with his hands in his jacket pockets, watching her cross the platform toward him. "Marcus Bellamy." He tilted his head at the corpse. "Solicitor. Forty-six. His assistant reported him missing when he didn't turn up to a court appearance yesterday morning." "Who found him?" "Urban explorers. Two lads, nineteen and twenty-one. They're upstairs with uniform now." Quinn crouched beside the body, pulling on nitrile gloves. No visible trauma. The skin of Bellamy's face was faintly ashen, the lips bloodless, but there was no bruising at the neck, no petechial haemorrhaging around the eyes. She lifted his right hand by the wrist and examined the palm. Clean. She checked the left. "Path think cardiac?" she asked. Carver shrugged. "Healthy forty-six-year-old drops dead in an abandoned tube station miles from his office, his home, and anywhere he was supposed to be. Clean hands, clean shoes." He gestured at the Oxfords. "Like he materialized here." She looked at the shoes properly. Carver was right — no scuffing, no grime from the walk down the access stairs, which she'd noted were thick with decades of dust. Her own boots had picked up grey smears from the second step down. Bellamy's shoes were immaculate. "Who moved him?" "Nobody. Urban explorers said they found him exactly like this." Quinn stood and turned a slow circle, letting her torch run over the platform. The evidence markers sat around the body at irregular intervals. She crossed to the nearest one — a small brass object the size of a coat button — and bent to examine it without touching it. "Carver. Come here." He walked over, unhurried. "What do you make of that?" He looked down. "Compass. Maybe it fell from his pocket." "It's not near his pocket. It's two metres from the body." She stood and moved to the next marker, a fragment of what looked like bone — polished smooth, roughly hexagonal, with a small hole drilled through its centre. "And this." Carver leaned over. "Could be anything. Old station, this stuff accumulates." "A bone token." Quinn straightened, keeping her voice level. "Sorry?" "Never mind." She moved away before he could press her. The phrase had surfaced from a briefing she'd sat through six months ago, after the Whitechapel incident — a presentation by an analyst from a unit she'd never been formally introduced to, working out of an office she'd never been invited back to. The analyst had shown photographs. One of them had been a polished hexagonal disc of bone, identical to the one sitting two metres from the body of a solicitor who shouldn't have been able to find this station with a map and a guide dog. She walked the perimeter of the platform with her torch angled low. The dust told a story Carver hadn't read yet. There were footprints — dozens of them, overlapping, coming from the far end of the platform where a set of maintenance doors stood ajar. Not one set, not two. Many. Some of them were strange. One set of impressions was too narrow for any natural foot, too long in the toe. Another was circular, as though whatever had made it moved on a single point of contact per step. "How many do you think frequent this place?" she said. Carver checked his notes. "There are a handful of documented urban explorer incidents going back two years." "I'm not talking about urban explorers." She crossed to the maintenance doors and pushed one open with her elbow. Beyond it, a short corridor ended in a larger space — an old storage room, she guessed, though it bore no resemblance to a storage room now. Tables had been set up along the walls. Most were bare, but one still held a constellation of wax drips, a broken glass phial, and a set of small iron weights on a scale. The floor around the tables was scattered with debris: scraps of paper covered in symbols, more bone fragments, a leather strap with corroded buckles. Quinn pulled out her phone and photographed everything before she spoke. "This was a market." Carver appeared in the doorway, took in the room, and pulled a face. "Occult? Some kind of ritual space?" "A market." She crouched over the iron scale. The weights were calibrated in units she didn't recognise. "Bellamy didn't stumble in here. He knew how to get in. He was a customer, or he was a seller, or he was both." She walked back to the table with the wax drips and crouched to examine a scrap of paper near the scale. The symbols were dense and deliberate, not the amateur scrawlings of someone with a weekend interest in Crowley. She photographed them separately. "So what killed him?" Carver said. "If he was here buying whatever, and someone had a problem with that —" "No signs of struggle." Quinn stood and tucked her phone away. "No marks on him. Nothing. He just stopped." She thought of the polished shoes. The clean hands. The body arranged with that particular tidiness that suggested the person who'd laid him out had wanted him found exactly as he was. "Someone left him as a message." "To who?" She walked back through to the platform and stood over the brass compass in its evidence marker. With a gloved finger she turned it, just slightly, to see where the needle settled. It didn't point north. It didn't point toward any wall or door or any fixed point she could identify. It pointed down — at an angle, as though whatever it was calibrated to detect lay beneath the station floor. She straightened up and looked at the far end of the platform, where the tracks disappeared into the darkness of the old tunnel mouth. "Quinn." Carver came to stand beside her. "To who?" She didn't answer immediately. Her torch found the tunnel entrance. The footprints in the dust — the strange ones, the narrow ones — came from that direction. Not the maintenance doors. The tunnel. They'd come up from somewhere deeper. "Whoever runs this place," she said.