AI
"Body's through here, ma'am. Mind the third rail."
Quinn ducked under the police tape and dropped onto the platform. The torch beam from her phone carved a pale wedge through the dark, catching the ceramic tiles of a station that hadn't seen a passenger since 1924. Camden Town's ghost platform. She'd walked past the sealed entrance a hundred times on her way to the weekend markets and never once thought about what lay beneath.
Now she stood in it, and the air tasted wrong. Copper and something older, something mineral, like licking a cave wall. The kind of smell that settled in your sinuses and refused to leave.
DS Hargreaves waited at the far end, his bulk silhouetted against a bank of portable LED floods that his team had rigged to a generator. The hum of it echoed off the curved ceiling and mixed with the distant rumble of the Northern Line running through adjacent tunnels. Active trains, metres away, carrying people who had no idea a dead man lay just beyond the wall.
"Male, mid-thirties, no ID," Hargreaves said. He stepped aside to let her see .
The victim lay on his back in the centre of a wide clearing where the platform opened into what had once been a maintenance corridor. His arms rested at his sides, palms up, fingers slightly curled. Peaceful. Like someone sleeping off a hangover on a park bench, except for the expression frozen on his face, a rictus of such complete terror that Quinn's jaw tightened involuntarily.
No visible wounds. No blood. Clean clothes, relatively new: dark wool coat, tailored trousers, polished brogues. Not a rough sleeper. Not someone who'd stumbled down here by accident.
"Who found him?"
"Urban explorers. Two lads with camera gear came through a ventilation shaft on Hawley Street around four this morning. Called it in at half past."
Quinn crouched beside the body, pulling on nitrile gloves. She lifted one of the victim's hands. The fingertips were scorched black, as though he'd pressed them flat against a hot stove. All ten fingers, both hands, the burns perfectly symmetrical.
"Hargreaves. Look at this."
He leaned in. "Christ. What does that?"
She turned the hand over. The burns stopped at the first knuckle. Precise. Not the ragged spread of flame or chemical contact. A clean line, as if whatever burned him had been calibrated .
"Pathologist been through?"
"Dr Ansari's stuck in traffic. Gave us preliminary over the phone, said don't move him, she'll be forty minutes."
Quinn stood and swept her torch across the wider scene. The maintenance corridor stretched another thirty metres into blackness. Alcoves lined both sides, old electrical housings stripped of their copper decades ago. But something caught the light in the nearest alcove. She moved towards it.
Tables. Folding tables, the kind you'd find at a car boot sale, arranged in rows. Most had been cleared , but one still held merchandise: glass vials stoppered with wax, bundles of dried herbs bound with red thread, and a collection of small carved figures that looked like they'd been shaped from bone . The whole setup reminded her of a market stall packed away in a hurry.
"We've catalogued all of it," Hargreaves said behind her. "Looks like some kind of new age rubbish. Herbal remedies, crystals, that sort of thing."
Quinn picked up one of the bone figures. It depicted something with too many limbs, and where its face should have been, the carver had left smooth blankness. She set it down carefully .
"New age rubbish doesn't explain burned fingertips on a dead man."
"Drug interaction, maybe. Some of those vials could be anything. GHB, liquid ketamine. Wouldn't be the first underground rave gone wrong."
"In brogues and a tailored coat?"
"Rich kids do drugs too, ma'am."
She ignored that and moved to the next table. Empty, but not clean. A fine residue covered the surface, greyish-green, faintly metallic. She scraped a sample into an evidence bag and held it under her torch. The particles caught the light with an iridescent shimmer that reminded her of verdigris on old brass.
Something small glinted beneath the table. Quinn knelt and retrieved it: a token, roughly the size of a fifty-pence piece but heavier. Bone, not metal. One side bore an engraved symbol she didn't recognise, a circle bisected by two curved lines, like an eye seen from the side. She turned it over. The other side was smooth and warm to the touch, warmer than it should have been given the chill of the station.
"Hargreaves. What's this?"
He squinted at it. "Some kind of poker chip? Goes with the new age theme."
"Bone poker chips."
"I've seen weirder."
Quinn slipped it into a separate evidence bag and pocketed it. She returned to the body and crouched again, this time studying the face. The terror was absolute, every muscle contracted, the tendons in the neck standing out like bridge cables. But the eyes were the worst part. Open, glassy, and shot through with tiny bursts of red where the capillaries had ruptured. Not just in the whites. In the irises too, which should have been, she checked her notes from the initial call, brown. They weren't brown anymore. They were almost black, the pupils blown so wide they'd consumed the colour entirely.
She'd seen burst capillaries before. Strangulation, hanging, extreme vomiting. But this pattern was different. The haemorrhages radiated outward from the pupils like cracks in ice, as if something had pressed against the inside of his eyes and pushed.
"Hargreaves, pull the explorers' footage. Those lads were filming when they found him. I want every second of it."
"Already requested."
Quinn turned her attention to the floor around the body. In the dust, and there was plenty of it, a century's worth of London grime, she could read the traffic. Dozens of footprints, overlapping, recent. The body lay in a cleared space, as if people had stood in a rough circle around this spot. She counted the distinct shoe patterns. Eight, nine different sets at least. All leading in from the direction of the platform edge, none going deeper into the tunnel.
"Everyone came from one direction," she said.
"Makes sense. One way in, one way out."
"No." She pointed her torch at the far end of the corridor, where it disappeared into shadow. "That goes somewhere. Connects to the old King's Cross branch line, if I remember the TfL heritage maps. Two exits. But nobody used the second one."
"Or they cleaned their tracks."
"In one direction but not the other?"
Hargreaves shifted his weight . He pulled out his notebook and wrote something down, a habit Quinn had noticed he used when he wanted to avoid eye contact.
She studied the circle of footprints more closely. One set stood out. Smaller than the rest, positioned not in the circle but slightly behind the body, near the head . And these prints didn't just arrive and leave. They shifted. Weight transferred from foot to foot, a person standing in place for a long time. Someone who'd stayed when the others moved.
"I need forensics to cast these." She tapped the smaller prints. "Priority."
"The whole floor's a mess, ma'am. We'll be lucky to pull anything clean."
"These are clean. Someone stood here for ten, fifteen minutes at least. Look at the depth, the compression overlap. Whoever this was, they watched him die."
Hargreaves stared at the prints. She could see him constructing his narrative, the one that fit the evidence into a shape the Met could process. Drug den. Overdose. Panicked associates fled the scene. Case closed, or close enough.
But Quinn had seen something Hargreaves hadn't. In the dead man's right hand, curled so tight between the index and middle fingers that only her second examination caught it, a thin brass chain. She teased it out gently , link by link, until the object on the end rested in her palm.
A small brass compass, its casing thick with greenish patina. The face bore markings she didn't recognise, not cardinal directions but symbols, etched with a precision that belonged to a jeweller's workshop, not a market stall. The glass was intact. The needle was intact. And the needle moved.
Not toward north. It swung in a slow, deliberate arc and pointed deeper into the tunnel, past the body, past the row of abandoned tables, into the part of the corridor where nobody's footprints went.
"Ma'am?"
"Get Dr Ansari on the phone again. Tell her to bring a full tox panel kit, not standard ."
"What am I telling her to screen for?"
Quinn closed her fingers around the compass. The needle pressed against the glass with something that felt almost like urgency, a faint vibration against her palm, the way a phone buzzes in your pocket when someone calls and you can't answer.
"Everything."
She pocketed the compass and stood. The torch beam found the mouth of the deeper tunnel. Cold air drifted from it, carrying that mineral taste again, stronger now, mixed with something sweet and organic that she couldn't name.
Those smaller footprints, the ones that belonged to whoever had stood watching the man die, Quinn noticed they ended at the circle. As if the person had walked in from the platform, stood behind the body, and then vanished without walking back out.
She aimed her torch at the floor between the body and the tunnel entrance. Dust, undisturbed, for fifteen metres in every direction.
"Hargreaves. How did our witness leave?"
He looked at the prints. Looked at the untouched dust. Looked back at her.
"I'll get those casts done."
Quinn turned off her torch. In the half-second before the LED floods filled her vision, she saw it, or thought she did. Faint light from deep in the tunnel. Not torchlight. Not electrical. Something pale and shifting, like moonlight reflected off water, except they were forty feet underground and there was no moon and no water and no reason at all for light to exist where the compass needle strained to point.
Then the generator coughed, the floods flickered , and in the strobing dark, the dead man's fingers twitched.