Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TM2K0K28J13PJRYT07NCC

The rain came sideways off the Thames, the kind that found the gap between collar and neck and stayed there. Quinn moved through it without flinching, her eyes fixed on the figure forty metres ahead, weaving between the last of the Camden market stragglers and the shutter-down shopfronts. Tomás Herrera. Twenty-nine years old. Former NHS paramedic. Three prior interviews, zero charges, and a talent for being adjacent to things Quinn couldn't yet prove. She'd been watching him for six days, ever since his name surfaced in the margins of a missing persons case — two victims, no bodies, and a witness who described a man matching Herrera's description loading what she called "medical equipment" into a Transit van outside an address in Kentish Town. The witness had recanted within forty-eight hours. They always did. Tonight Quinn had followed him from a bar in Soho — the Raven's Nest, green neon cutting through the fog like a wound, the kind of place that made the back of her neck prickle in a way she'd learned not to dismiss — and now he was moving with purpose, no longer the casual amble of a man who thought himself unobserved. He knew she was there. She adjusted her pace, let a couple with a shared umbrella drift between them as living cover. The rain drummed against every hard surface, a white noise that swallowed footsteps and turned the street into something close to underwater. Herrera turned left at the canal bridge, moving away from the lit main road, and Quinn followed at the corner, pressing herself against the wet brickwork for a half-second before rounding it. He was running. She ran. Her boots hit the pavement hard, water spraying up her shins. He was fast — longer stride than she'd anticipated — but she'd run suspects across worse terrain than this and she kept the gap at thirty metres, threading between a pair of cyclists who shouted something she ignored entirely. He cut through an alley, knocked a recycling bin sideways behind him. She hurdled it without breaking stride, the worn leather of her watch strap snagging briefly on the rim. "Herrera." Her voice carried over the rain, not a shout, something colder. "Metropolitan Police. Stop." He didn't stop. The alley spat them both out onto a residential street, lamp-lit and empty, and he veered right without hesitating — not the move of a man navigating blind, but someone following a route he'd memorised. Quinn marked that. He wasn't running away from her. He was running somewhere specific. She keyed her radio with her left hand, barely breaking rhythm. "DS Quinn, in foot pursuit of suspect Herrera, Tomás, heading north from Camden Lock vicinity, request—" Static answered. Not interference. Complete silence. She checked the display: full signal, then nothing, then full signal again in the span of two seconds. She'd experienced that before, once, three years ago, the night Morris had gone into a building she hadn't followed him into, and she pushed the memory flat the way you pushed a loose floorboard down so nobody heard it. Herrera reached a chain-link fence, found a gap already bent back at the base, and pulled himself through in one practised motion. Quinn was through before the fence stopped rattling, scraping her shoulder on the way, not caring. On the other side: a service road, unlit, running alongside what looked like a derelict entrance to an old Tube station. The signage had been stripped, the tiling around the arch was cracked and black with decades of damp, and the wooden boarding across the entrance had been recently disturbed — pale raw wood showing at the edges where screws had been removed and reseated without care. Herrera was at the boards, a hand fitting into a gap she hadn't seen from here. "Don't." Quinn had her warrant card in one hand and her baton half-extended in the other. "Step away from the entrance. Hands where I can see them." He turned. For the first time since the chase began, he fully faced her, and something in his expression wasn't fear. The Saint Christopher medallion at his throat caught a guttering light from somewhere, briefly gold against his rain-darkened shirt. "You don't want to follow me in there." His accent was still strong even after years in London, and his voice carried no hostility. It was a practical statement, the same flat tone a paramedic used when assessing rapid blood loss. "I mean that genuinely, Detective." "My job's not wanting." She moved closer. Ten metres. Eight. "Step away from the boards." "There are people inside who will not react well to police presence. I'm not threatening you. I'm telling you what happens in that situation." "People." She kept moving. "What people?" He glanced at the gap in the boards and back to her. The rain had plastered his dark curls flat against his forehead, and along his forearm — the left one, where the sleeve had ridden up during the run — the scar she'd noted in his file sat like a white seam against his olive skin. "People who are sick. People who need help that the NHS isn't built to provide. People who aren't—" He stopped. "Finish that." The radio crackled, went dead again, in exactly the same rhythm as before. "I can't explain it to you out here." He put a hand flat against the boards, not moving yet, not exactly. "If you call for backup before you've seen it, you'll bring people into something they'll misread, and it will go badly for everyone. If you come in alone, I can get you through it without incident, but you'll have to trust me. Or—" "Or?" "You let me go tonight, and I walk back out of there in two hours, and I sit down with you and I tell you everything you can actually use." Quinn stopped at five metres. The rain hit her shoulders and ran down the back of her hands, cold as tap water. Behind the boards, from somewhere deeper than the entrance arch, came something she couldn't immediately categorise — not sound exactly, more like pressure. A low, collective presence, the subterranean suggestion of a crowd. Her teeth were not quite together. She looked at Tomás Herrera, at the gap in the boards, at the dark beyond.