Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TN14CWRHS65ESZ1W7YFCQ

The uniform at the top of the service stairs had said "possible overdose, abandoned station," and Quinn had nodded and started down, her torch cutting a pale disc through the dark. Eighteen years had taught her what overdoses smelled like. This wasn't it. The smell that rose to meet her was older. Mineral and charred, like a struck match held too long. The stairwell let her out onto a platform that shouldn't have existed. Camden High Street rumbled somewhere above — she could feel it in the soles of her shoes — but down here the world had gone quiet in a way that pressed against the ears. Her torch swept across the platform and the beam bounced back off tile work, the old roundel signs still mounted to the walls, the station name long since faded to a pale ghost of letters. Someone had been busy down here long before tonight. Folding tables were collapsed against the far wall. Iron brackets had been drilled into the brickwork. A burnt-out brazier sat in the centre of the platform, its base circled by scorched marks that radiated outward in a pattern no chance spark had ever made. The body was at the far end of the platform, near the mouth of the tunnel. DS Callum Reeves was already crouching over it, his scene-kit bag open beside him, nitrile gloves pulled to his wrists. He looked up when he heard her footsteps. "Thought you were off rotation." "Marsden rang me directly." Quinn pulled on her own gloves. "What have we got?" "Male, mid-thirties, no identification. Blunt-force trauma to the back of the skull. Classic robbery gone wrong — the tunnel mouth connects to a maintenance passage that backs onto the canal path." Reeves gestured at the tunnel with his pen. "My money's on someone jumping him while he was down here, possibly squatting." Quinn crouched on the man's other side and looked at the face. Pale, slack, the blood beneath pooled and dark. She noted the clothing — good quality, not the kind of thing you'd find at a charity shop. The jacket was wool. The shoes were leather. "Squatting in a six-hundred-pound overcoat." "People fall on hard times." "How did he get down here? That stairwell's been sealed with a padlock." "Padlock was cut." "Before or after?" Reeves opened his mouth and closed it again. Quinn stood and moved her torch back along the platform, away from the body. The beam pulled details out of the dark. The folding tables weren't randomly collapsed — they'd been stacked deliberately, the way a market packs up at close. The iron brackets were uniform in spacing, a row of them running the length of the wall, and each one had a small hole drilled at its base. Pegs, or hooks. Display fixtures. She thought of the Camden market above and then dismissed the thought, because whatever had been displayed here was nothing sold in daylight. The floor told its own story if you knew how to read it. Foot traffic, heavy and recent, criss-crossing in the grime — not one or two people but dozens. The dust near the platform edge was disturbed in a wide arc, as though a crowd had gathered and then dispersed, not panicked, not rushed. Orderly. "There's no secondary scene." She turned back toward the body. "He wasn't robbed here and dragged. He dropped where he stands. No drag marks, no smear in the blood pool." Reeves stood up. "He could have walked in injured." "With a fracture at the rear of the skull." She crouched again, studying the wound. The edges were clean and deep, the kind that happened fast and final. No defensive marks on the hands. No scraped knuckles, no torn nails. He hadn't fought. She almost missed it. Her torch was moving back to his face when the beam caught something in his jacket breast pocket. The faintest green glint. She reached in with two fingers and drew it out. A compass, barely larger than a fifty-pence piece. Brass, the casing gone green with age along every seam and ridge. The face was etched — not printed, etched — with a series of interlocking marks that her eyes moved over and couldn't quite settle on. The needle was black rather than steel. She held it level and the needle swung away from north, swung past north, and pointed steadily in the direction of the tunnel mouth. "What's that?" Reeves stepped over. "Evidence." She turned it over. The back had the same markings, smaller, packed tighter. Not decorative. "Bag it." She straightened and shone the torch down the tunnel. The beam dissolved into dark after twenty metres but the rails were clearly visible, and they were not the rusted, broken rails of a long-dead line. They were clean. Too clean. "Reeves, when was this station decommissioned?" "Nineteen-something. The fifties, I'd have thought." "Then what's cleaned those rails." He came to stand beside her and looked down the beam's length. His jaw moved. Movement at the stairwell end of the platform. Quinn turned fast, hand going to her jacket, and the beam found a woman standing at the base of the stairs, frozen. Late twenties. Red curls, round glasses, a leather satchel clutched to her chest with both arms, her face a constellation of freckles drained of its colour. "Police." Quinn was already walking toward her. "Don't move." The woman's hands came up, the satchel swinging. One hand went instinctively to her hair, tucked a loose curl behind her left ear. "I'm not — I didn't — I'm a researcher." Her voice was controlled, barely. "Eva Kowalski. British Museum, restricted archives. I have identification." "Keep your hands where I can see them, Ms. Kowalski." Quinn stopped two metres away and looked at her properly. The shoes were mud-caked in the same white clay she'd seen in the grout lines between the platform tiles. She'd been here before tonight. "You want to tell me what a museum researcher is doing in a decommissioned Tube station at half past one in the morning?" Eva's green eyes moved to the far end of the platform, to the body, and the colour left her face entirely. "I gate-crashed." Her voice dropped. "I wasn't the only one here earlier. There was a market. There were maybe forty, fifty people." Her gaze dropped to Quinn's gloved hand. To the compass. "Where did you find that?" Quinn turned the compass once in her fingers and watched Eva Kowalski watch it with an expression that wasn't simply recognition. It was fear.