Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TKBSMVCDHWF9F1NDTHGBM

The smell hit Quinn before she reached the bottom of the emergency access stairs — damp concrete and old iron, the mineral rot of a space that hadn't seen proper ventilation in decades, and beneath all of it something else. Something charred and chemical that she couldn't name and didn't like. She ducked under the incident tape and straightened, letting her eyes adjust. The abandoned station had been sealed since 1967, according to the briefing she'd skimmed in the car. It sat beneath the Camden Road junction, swallowed by the Northern line expansion that had rerouted everything and left this particular stretch of tunnel to gather darkness. The platform was still intact — the original green and cream tiles, the ghost of a station name someone had scrubbed to illegibility, the curved ceiling overhead pressing down like the inside of a ribcage. Three of her uniformed officers had set up work lights at intervals along the platform edge, but the light they threw was industrial and cold and seemed somehow reluctant to penetrate the far ends of the space. DC Farrell was waiting for her near the body. He had his notebook out and the particular expression he wore when he thought a case was simpler than it was being made. "Quinn," he said. "Glad you're here. Straightforward, by the look of it." She glanced at him, then past him to the body. The deceased was male, mid-forties, dressed well. Dark overcoat, good shoes. He was lying on his back on the platform tiles with one arm extended toward the track below, as though he'd reached for something in the moment he fell. There was no visible wound that Quinn could see from where she stood, though the forensics team was still working the perimeter and she hadn't yet crouched close. "Straightforward," she repeated, not as agreement. "Cardiac event, most likely. Place is a maze down here — there are two more tunnels feeding off the main platform, both blocked. We think he got lost, panicked, heart gave out. His wallet's on him, nothing taken. Name's on his oyster card, Nils Bergman, registered address in Islington. No criminal record so far." Quinn walked slowly around the body in a wide arc, keeping her hands in her coat pockets. She counted the work lights. She counted the officers. She looked at the tiles near the body, at the edge of the platform, at the far end of the station where the light didn't reach. "Who called it in?" she asked. "Anonymous. Burner phone, no signal trace. Someone who knew enough not to leave a trail." "Someone who was here." "Possibly." She stopped. Crouched. Looked at the dead man's face without touching anything, reading it the way she'd learned to read faces in the field, in the dark, under pressure. Bergman looked surprised. Not afraid — she knew fear on a dead face, the slack jaw and the furrowed brow, the body's final protest. This was different. His expression was open. Almost curious. Cardiac arrest from panic didn't leave you looking curious. She stood and kept moving. Near his right hip, half tucked under the fold of his coat, she saw it. "Farrell. Has this been photographed?" He came over, peered down. "Yeah, we got the full grid before anyone touched anything. That's — some kind of compass, it looks like." Quinn pulled on a glove and lifted it carefully. A small brass compass, no larger than a pocket watch. The casing was warm despite the cold of the station, and the metal had gone green at the seams — not from neglect, she thought, but from age of a particular kind. Real age. The kind that accumulated in things that had been handled by many different hands over a very long time. She turned it over. The face was etched with markings she didn't immediately recognise — fine lines and angular symbols arranged in concentric rings around the central dial. Not a manufacturer's mark. Nothing she'd seen before. The needle was pointing east-northeast. She tilted it left. The needle swung. She tilted it right. The needle swung back, and then, slowly, corrected itself back to east-northeast. It wasn't tracking magnetic north. "Someone's been down here," Quinn said. Farrell looked at her steadily. "Bergman was down here." "Before Bergman." She straightened, still holding the compass, still looking at the needle. "This station's been sealed since the sixties. The dust pattern on the access stairs — you noticed it?" "Footprints going in and out on the dust, yes. We logged them. That'll be whoever found the body." "There were four different tread patterns, Farrell. I counted them on the way down. One set going in and out that matches Bergman's shoes." She looked around the platform. The work lights. The far dark. "Three others. And the dust on this platform has been disturbed in arcs — not tracks, arcs — as though people were moving in deliberate patterns, setting things up or taking them down." She gestured along the platform. "Look at the tiles. Look where the grime is broken. There were tables here. Stalls, maybe. Whatever was happening here tonight was larger than one man getting lost." Farrell was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully: "A meet of some kind?" "More than that." Quinn looked at the compass in her gloved hand. At the needle still pressing east-northeast with a kind of insistence that made the hairs on her forearm stand up through the latex. "Where does east-northeast take us from here?" Farrell checked his phone's map. "Islington. Highbury, roughly, if you follow it far enough." "Bergman's address." "His address." "He didn't get lost," Quinn said. "He came here on purpose. He knew exactly where he was. Something happened to him here, and then whoever else was here left before we arrived and took their evidence with them." She turned the compass over once more. The markings on the face caught the work light and for a moment the shadows in the etched lines seemed almost to move. She filed the sensation away without indulging it. "Get someone cross-referencing Bergman's financials with any properties or businesses in that Highbury radius. And I want a full cast of those tread patterns on the stairs — all four sets." "Right." Farrell made his notes with the tone of a man recalibrating. Quinn was still looking at the far end of the platform when she heard footsteps on the access stairs — lighter than her own, quicker. She turned. The woman who appeared under the incident tape was short, freckled, and breathing hard, her curly red hair escaping a knot at her neck. She wore a leather satchel slung across one shoulder that was clearly heavy, its strap creasing the shoulder of her jacket. Round glasses. Somewhere in her mid-twenties. She stopped when she saw Quinn and the composure in her face did something complicated — not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it. The kind of careful neutral expression that people built when they had relevant information they were deciding whether to volunteer. Her eyes went straight to the compass in Quinn's gloved hand. They stayed there for just a fraction too long. "This is a closed crime scene," Farrell said. "I know." The woman shifted the satchel strap. "I was — I work at the British Museum, restricted archives. My name is Eva Kowalski. I received a call about an hour ago that there'd been an incident down here. I came to see if I could be of assistance." "Who called you?" Quinn asked. A beat. "A colleague. I don't know their name — it came through an internal channel." Quinn watched her. Eva Kowalski's left hand moved upward, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and then dropped back to her side with visible deliberateness, as though she'd caught herself at something. "What kind of work does the British Museum's restricted archives do that would make an incident in a sealed Underground station any of their business?" Quinn asked. "Historical significance. These old stations sometimes contain artefacts." "Is the compass historically significant, Ms Kowalski?" The hair went behind the ear again. The woman couldn't help it. "I'd need to examine it properly to say." "You recognised it from twenty feet away," Quinn said pleasantly. "So I'll ask again. Is the compass historically significant — and more importantly, what can you tell me about what was happening in this station tonight?" Eva Kowalski looked at the compass, then at Quinn, then at the body of Nils Bergman lying on the old platform tiles with his arm extended and his expression of faint, terrible surprise. "I think," she said slowly, "that you may be investigating something more complicated than you realise." Quinn looked down at the compass in her hand again. The needle was still pointing east-northeast. Still insisting. Still certain of something she wasn't yet. "Yes," she said. "I'm beginning to think you're right."