Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V5RRY13PRDT1TN35V7QEP

The patrol car's blue lights painted Camden's wet pavement in stuttering pulses. Quinn ducked under the cordon tape, badge already in hand, and followed the officer down the alley beside the shuttered pub until the alley became stairs and the stairs became darkness. "Mind your step, Detective." The constable's torch swept the descent. "Third tread's rotten through." She counted two, skipped the third, and felt the temperature drop with each step down. The city noise above — traffic, a distant siren, some drunk's laughter — sealed itself off as though a lid had been pressed over the world. By the time her feet found the lower platform, the only sound was the tick of cooling floodlights and the low murmur of her colleague already crouched over the body twenty metres ahead. DS Leonard Marsh. Seventeen years on the job, twelve of them in Serious Crimes, and he'd cultivated the particular brand of certainty that made him very good at closing cases and occasionally catastrophic at opening them correctly. "Quinn." He didn't stand up. "Thought you were off the rotation this week." "I was." She pulled on a pair of gloves and surveyed the platform. "Control flagged it for me specifically." The station was dead, not merely disused. The old tiling — cream and deep green — had survived decades of damp better than anyone deserved, though graffiti had colonised the lower half of every visible wall. Except it wasn't graffiti. She registered that discrepancy immediately and filed it away, moving first toward the body. Male, early forties, dressed in a heavy wax coat that had been expensive once. He lay on his back near the far wall, arms loose at his sides, eyes open and fixed on a ceiling crosshatched with old pipework. His face held no expression of alarm or pain, which was the first thing wrong. The second thing wrong was the smell: not decomposition, not blood, but something closer to struck flint and rain on hot stone. "Cause?" Quinn crouched opposite Marsh. "Unofficially? Cardiac event." He tilted his head toward two evidence bags already laid out on the platform. "Likely stress-induced. We found those on him." The first bag held a small quantity of a grayish powder in a glass vial, sealed with wax. The second held the compass. Quinn's eyes settled on it. Brass casing, no larger than a pocket watch, with the particular blue-green oxidation of something old rather than decorative. She leaned closer without touching it. The face was etched with markings — she'd been ready to classify them as engravings, maker's marks, something explicable — but they weren't. They ran in concentric rings around the fixed points, tight and deliberate, and they matched nothing in any convention she'd studied during her compulsory seminar eight years ago on counterfeit luxury goods. "Drug paraphernalia," Marsh said. "Compass might be stolen property, hard to say. Either way, my read is he came down here to make a deal, something went sideways, possibly the powder interacted badly with a pre-existing—" "Where are the other footprints?" Marsh stopped. Quinn stood and walked the platform slowly, tracking the dust patterns under the flood lighting. The victim's approach was clear — a single trail from the stairs, a slight scuff where he'd stopped, then the body. No converging path. No retreat. No evidence that anyone else had stood anywhere near him in recent hours. "The dust pattern's undisturbed everywhere except his approach line." She turned back. "If someone frightened him to death, where did they come from?" "Service tunnel, maybe. We haven't swept the full—" "What about the walls?" She crossed to the nearest section. Up close, what she'd clocked on entry resolved into something far more deliberate than spray paint. The symbols ran in repeating sequences along the lower tiles, some of them carved rather than painted, others applied in a dark substance that had dried shiny. She didn't recognise the language — if it was a language — but she recognised the intention behind it. This wasn't territorial marking. This was demarcation. Boundary work. Someone had drawn borders. "Ritualistic. Gang initiation stuff, probably." Marsh had followed her and stood with his thumbs hooked in his jacket pockets. "Occult imagery's popular with certain crews." "Certain crews don't have consistent iconography across three hundred metres of platform wall." She photographed a section with her phone. "This is systematic. This took time." A sound from the far end of the platform — not a footstep, more like something being set down — made both of them turn. One of the uniformed officers was escorting a woman toward them, the woman's hands wrapped around herself as though she was cold, a battered leather satchel clutched tight against her ribs. Red curls. Round glasses that caught the floodlights and threw them back doubled. A freckled face that had been crying recently and was currently doing its level best to appear composed. Quinn held the photograph out toward her. "You can identify these?" The woman's green eyes moved to the image, then to Quinn's face, then back to the symbols. Her fingers found a loose curl and tucked it behind her left ear. "Where did you—" She stopped herself. Started again. "Who gave you authorisation to photograph those?" "Detective Quinn, Metropolitan Police. And I'm asking the questions." Quinn let a beat pass. "Your name." "Eva Kowalski. I'm a research assistant. The British Museum." Marsh made a small sound — dismissive, or possibly amused. "Come to do a bit of late-night fieldwork, have we, Miss Kowalski?" Eva didn't look at him. Her gaze had dropped to the evidence bags on the platform. The compass, specifically. Whatever colour had remained in her face drained away in the space of two seconds. Quinn watched that happen and noted it precisely. "You've seen it before." "I want to speak to a solicitor." "You're not under arrest." Quinn took a slow step toward her, not crowding, just closing the angle so the woman's peripheral vision couldn't include the stairs. "The man who died here tonight — did you know him?" Eva's jaw tightened. Her hand found the curl again. "His name," Quinn said, and kept her voice level, "and why he was carrying that compass. Those are the only two questions I need answered tonight." Down the far end of the platform, one of the forensic officers called something to Marsh and he moved off to answer it, leaving just the two women and the yellow glare of the floods and the body in its expensive coat and the compass sitting in its evidence bag pointing at nothing, except it wasn't pointing at nothing. Quinn could see the needle now that she was close enough. It pressed against the bag's plastic, straining toward the far wall, toward the largest cluster of symbols, steady and insistent, as though it had somewhere urgent to be.