Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VG5PDQX5RJBC0060HVNWY

The uniforms had strung blue-and-white tape across the mouth of the service tunnel before Quinn even reached the bottom of the access stairs, which told her two things: the junior officers had got there first, and someone had already decided what they were looking at. She ducked under the tape. The abandoned station swallowed sound the way old churches did — not silence exactly, but a thickness in the air that made every footstep feel deliberate. Quinn swept her torch across the platform and let the beam settle. The tiles were the original Victorian ceramic, cream with a terracotta border, though decades of damp had turned most of them the colour of old teeth. Graffiti ran in layers along the far wall like geological strata, the newest tags luminous orange and purple over the faded ghosts of older ones. Three portable halogen lamps had been set up along the platform edge, and in their flat white light the scene looked surgical. DS Fielding stood beside the body with his arms crossed and the specific expression of a man who had already written his report in his head. "Quinn." He lifted his chin by way of greeting. "Bit late to the party." "I was in Deptford." She crouched beside the body without looking at Fielding. Male, mid-thirties, dressed in a waxed canvas jacket and heavy work boots. No wallet, no phone, no keys. His face was turned toward the tracks, one cheek pressed against the platform stone, and whatever expression he'd worn at the end had gone slack. "Who found him?" "Maintenance crew doing a scheduled inspection of the tunnels. They called it in at half-six this morning." Fielding unfolded his arms and dug his hands into his coat pockets. "We're thinking it's a handover gone wrong. There's been chatter about the Camden network being used for distribution — we had intelligence on it last quarter." Quinn said nothing to that. She leaned closer to the body, tilting her torch. There were no visible wounds on the visible surfaces of the jacket, no tears in the fabric, no blood pooling beneath him or staining the platform stones. The forensics team had already photographed the scene, and she could see the numbered yellow markers scattered across the platform — eight of them. Most clustered near the body. Two sat further along the platform, at the base of the far wall. She straightened and walked toward the far markers. "Cause of death?" she called back. "Waiting on the pathologist. But the position, the location — it reads like a confrontation. He ran, he fell." Quinn looked at the markers. One flagged a scattering of what looked like fine grey powder across the tiles. The other flagged a small object near the wall, bagged already in clear evidence plastic. She picked it up, held it under her torch. A compass. Brass, palm-sized, with a casing the colour of an old copper pipe — green-brown, eaten through with verdigris in the decorative grooves. She turned it over. The face was visible through the bag. The markings around the dial were not compass headings. She brought it closer. Symbols, fine and deliberate, etched into the brass around the edge of the face — not a manufacturer's mark, not a serial number. Something older-looking. The needle sat still beneath the glass. "Where's the closest CCTV?" she asked. "Surface level on Buck Street. Nothing down here obviously." She set the bagged compass down precisely where she'd found it and walked back to the body. Crouched again. This time she looked at the hands. His fingers were curled toward his palm, which was natural for a body that had cooled. But the fingernails on his right hand were broken back — not torn, broken, the way nails broke when someone braced themselves against a hard surface with force and desperation. The platform stones around his right hand were scored in short, parallel lines. She counted them. Four. Spaced like fingers. "He wasn't running when he fell," she said. Fielding uncrossed and re-crossed his arms. "He could've tripped on the tracks—" "He's thirty feet from the tracks. And he's facing them." She stood and turned a slow circle, looking at the platform geometry. The access stairs at the north end. The sealed tunnel mouth to the south, boarded with plywood that had been screwed into the original iron frame. One of the boards was fractionally misaligned — the screws on the left side flush, but the right side bowed slightly outward, a gap of perhaps a centimetre between the board edge and the frame. She walked toward it. "Who checked the tunnel?" "Sealed. We confirmed it before you arrived." She put two fingers into the gap and pulled. The board moved on the right side with almost no resistance. The screws on that side were cosmetic — they sat in the holes but had nothing to bite into. Old holes, larger than the screw shanks. Someone had set it to look sealed. Behind the board, the tunnel mouth breathed cold air, and in the swept concrete just inside the threshold, she saw footprints in the grey dust. Dozens of them. Coming and going, layered over each other, but distinct enough that she could see the variety — different soles, different sizes. Whatever this station had been used for, it had not been a handover between two people. She let the board rest back into place and turned around. A commotion at the top of the access stairs, then the sound of someone being talked down firmly by a uniform. A voice — female, carrying — insisting something about the archives and having clearance. Then a second uniform's voice, less patient. Quinn climbed the stairs. The woman at the top was short, red-haired, wearing a canvas satchel so overfilled that the flap sat at an angle. Round glasses. A freckled face that was currently arranged in the expression of someone fighting between urgency and composure and losing on both fronts. She was tucking a curl behind her left ear with the repetitive energy of a nervous tic, then stopping herself, then doing it again. "You can't be down here," said the uniform. "I know what this station is," the woman said. Not to the uniform. To Quinn. She'd fixed on Quinn the moment Quinn appeared at the top of the stairs, with the particular focus of someone who had rehearsed an argument and needed the right person to deliver it to. "You won't find what you're looking for in the pathology report." Quinn studied her. The museum lanyard tucked half-inside the open collar of her coat. The ink stain on her right index finger. The books visible through the gap in the satchel — spines she couldn't read at this distance, but the bindings were old. "And what is it I'm looking for?" Quinn asked. The woman's jaw set. "Something your evidence markers aren't going to cover." Quinn looked at the uniform, then back at the woman. Behind the round glasses, her green eyes carried the particular weight of someone who had spent a long time knowing a thing that no one around them believed. "Let her through," Quinn said.