Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TTJHE4VVYXR9ZW8BV2RHR

The call had come in at half past eleven: body found in the service tunnels beneath Camden High Street, accessible only through a rusted maintenance hatch that a pair of council workers had pried open while hunting a gas leak. Quinn had been in bed, not sleeping, staring at the ceiling with the particular restlessness that preceded every case worth having. She arrived before the scene had fully opened. Blue lights strobed across the pavement outside the hatch, throwing strange colours over the faces of the street officers managing the perimeter, and she ducked under the tape and descended the iron ladder without stopping to sign the log, flashing her warrant card at the constable who moved to intercept her. The abandoned station swallowed her. It took a moment for the scale of it to register. She had known, technically, that disused Tube stations existed beneath the city like forgotten rooms in an old house — she had even worked a case tangentially involving one, years ago — but knowing and standing inside were different things entirely. The platform stretched away in both directions, longer than seemed possible from the street above, arched ceilings thick with the mineral smell of old stone and something else underneath it, something she couldn't name. Burnt copper, perhaps. Or ozone after lightning. Her torch swept the space. Whoever had been here had been here in numbers. The platform was not, as she had expected, simply a derelict concrete shelf gathering dust and pigeons. Market stalls, or the remnants of them, lined the far wall — bare wooden trestle tables, iron brackets still bolted to the tile, a collapsed awning of dark fabric pooled on the floor like a shed skin. Scattered across the platform: broken glass, ceramic shards, the residue of what looked like candle wax in colours she'd never seen in a church — deep arterial purple, black-veined amber, a blue so pale it was almost white. In the centre of all of it, DS Terence Okafor stood with a clipboard and the expression of a man who had already decided what he was looking at. "Quinn." He raised his chin in greeting. "Thought you were off the roster." "I asked to be called." "It's not Morris," he said, which was what everyone said now whenever a body turned up in strange circumstances. She let it pass. The victim was a man in his late forties, well-built, dressed in ordinary clothes — a waxed jacket, dark jeans, decent boots. He was lying on his back three metres from the nearest trestle table, one arm flung out, the other folded beneath him at an angle that would have been uncomfortable in life. No visible wounds on the front. His face held an expression that Quinn could not quite categorise. Not fear. Not pain. Something closer to surprise caught and frozen before it could fully form. "Pathologist's assessment?" she asked. "Cardiac event, preliminary." Okafor made a note of something. "Man fits the profile — age, build. Heart just stopped." "Healthy-looking man." "Hearts stop in healthy-looking men. Happens every day." He said it without dismissiveness; it was simply, to him, the logical terminus of what the evidence offered. "What I'm more interested in is the market setup. Looks like they cleared out in a hurry. We're working on identifying the tables, cross-referencing with known unlicensed traders. There's a list of names associated with underground markets in Camden going back four years — I think this is the same outfit." Quinn crouched beside the body. She didn't touch anything; she never did until SOCO had finished, and she could hear them working behind her, the soft language of cameras and evidence bags. She looked at the man's face. She looked at his hands — calloused across the palms, clean fingernails, a faded scar along the right thumb. She looked at the floor around him. No drag marks. No sign he'd fallen from any distance. No overturned furniture close enough to suggest a struggle, a stumble. He had simply stopped, right there, in the middle of the open platform. Standing one moment and horizontal the next. She stood. Moved toward the nearest trestle table. "Quinn." Okafor's voice carried a note of gentle redirection. "Scene's already logged. You don't need to—" "There's something under the table." He paused. Then his torch moved and joined hers. Tucked against the back leg of the trestle, half-buried under a fold of the dark fabric awning, was a small object. Brass, Quinn thought at first glance. A pocket compass, the old-fashioned kind, no larger than a fifty-pence piece. She signalled to the nearest SOCO officer, who came with a camera, documented it in place, and then bagged it. Quinn took the evidence bag and held it up. The casing was worn to the soft gold-green of old coins, verdigris collecting in the engraved lines that covered the surface. Not decorative lines, she realised. The markings were too deliberate, too dense — covering the brass in a tight pattern that seemed to repeat and then deviate, repeat and then deviate, like a language she almost recognised as a language. The compass face itself was partly visible through the cracked crystal lid — and the needle was not pointing north. She was standing east of the entrance ladder. North was the far tunnel wall. The needle of this compass was pointing directly toward the body. "What is that?" Okafor asked. "I don't know yet." "It's probably just a novelty item. Something the market was selling." "Probably." She kept looking at it. The needle hadn't moved, even as she turned the bag in her hand. She was still holding it when she heard the voice behind her. "You shouldn't be touching that." Quinn turned. The woman standing at the edge of the forensic perimeter was short — several inches shorter than Quinn — with a cloud of curly red hair that the tunnel's damp air had frizzed into something almost architectural. Round glasses, a smear of what might have been ink across the back of her right hand, a leather satchel hanging from one shoulder so heavy with its contents that it had pulled her cardigan askew at the collar. She had a freckled face that might have seemed guileless if not for the careful way her eyes were moving across the scene — cataloguing, assessing, the way Quinn's own eyes moved. A constable materialized at her elbow. "Miss, this is a restricted—" "She called me," Quinn said. A beat of silence from Okafor. "Did she." "Twenty minutes ago." This was a slight revision of the truth; Eva Kowalski had in fact sent a text message at eleven-forty-three, which Quinn had read in her car on the way over, and which had contained the words *Camden Tube hatch, Northern Line ghost station, don't let them move anything before I get there* with no further context. Eva rarely provided further context in the initial message. More followed, always, when you were face to face. "She's a research consultant." Eva Kowalski stepped under the tape with the confidence of someone who had done it before — not the brittle over-confidence of someone performing authority, but the quiet ease of someone who had simply learned that tapes were obstacles for people who hesitated. She reached Quinn, looked at the evidence bag, and her expression shifted. "How was it positioned?" she asked. One hand rose reflexively toward her left ear, tucking a coil of red hair back behind it. "When you found it. Which direction was the needle pointing?" "Toward the body." Eva's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. She looked at the body, then back at the compass, then up at Quinn. "This isn't a cardiac event." "The pathologist—" "The pathologist hasn't seen one of these." She nodded at the evidence bag. Her voice was steady, the kind of steady that lived adjacent to fear and had made its peace there through long practice. "That's a Veil Compass. It doesn't point north. It points toward the nearest supernatural rift — a portal, a threshold, a tear in the boundary." She paused. "Or toward whatever caused one to open." The tunnel was quiet around them. Somewhere deep in the dark, water dripped against stone in an uneven rhythm. Quinn looked at the body again. The expression on the dead man's face — not fear, not pain — something closer to surprise that had had no time to complete itself. She thought of Morris. She thought of the case report she had read and reread and never fully believed, the one that said his heart had simply stopped in a clean, empty room with no witnesses and the door locked from the inside. The pathologist had written *cardiac event* in the same flat, reasonable hand. She looked at the ceiling of the station — the thick stone arch, the old tiles streaked with damp, the empty black mouths of the ventilation shafts. She looked at the floor, at the arrangement of candle wax residue, which she now saw was not scattered randomly but arranged in a rough circle, the kind of circle that had a centre, and the centre was where the man lay. "The market cleared out fast," she said. "Yes." Eva's voice was careful. "Before or after he died?" Eva looked at her. Something in the question had surprised her, pleasantly — the shape of it, maybe, the fact that it had been asked at all. "I'd need to know more. But my guess? After." She shifted the satchel on her shoulder. "They weren't running from him. They were running from whatever he brought with him." Okafor had taken several small, unconscious steps backward. He was a good detective, Quinn had always thought — methodical, thorough, reliable in the ways that mattered on most days. But his world had a particular shape to it, clean and bounded, and she could see him deciding, efficiently and without drama, that whatever was happening between Quinn and this red-haired woman was above his grade. "I'll be with the uniforms," he said, and went. Quinn looked down at the compass in its evidence bag. The needle had not moved. "I need everything you know about these," she said. "How they work. Who makes them. Who uses them and why. And I need to know if there's a way to trace where this one has been." Eva was already unclipping her satchel, already reaching inside. "I brought books," she said, as though this were a reflex rather than a decision, which with Eva it generally was. "I thought you might ask." "How long have you known about this station?" A pause. Eva set a thick, cloth-bound volume on the nearest trestle table and did not immediately answer. "Eva." "Long enough." She opened the book. "I'll explain everything. But you need to understand — the people who ran this market, they're not criminals in any sense your department has a framework for. And what happened to this man—" She glanced toward the body, and her voice dropped a register. "It's happened before. You know it has." Quinn said nothing. The compass needle trembled once in its bag, fine as a breath, and stilled. She didn't look away from it. Eighteen years of cases and the world reduced, always, to the same question: what actually happened. Not what looked like it happened. Not what was tidiest to write in the report. What actually happened, when you followed every thread to where it led, even the ones that went somewhere you hadn't expected. She pocketed the evidence bag and turned toward the book. "Start from the beginning," she said.