Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VJ93NH1RVKC6NFMF0DZSZ

The stairs down to the abandoned platform smelled of damp concrete and something older — something that reminded Quinn of the inside of a church, incense and extinguished candles and the faint copper note that she'd learned, eighteen years ago, to associate with blood. She ducked under the blue-and-white tape without breaking stride. "Mind your step," said Constable Yates from somewhere behind her, though she was already three metres ahead of him, her torch cutting a clean wedge through the dark. Camden's disused Tube station had been sealed since the seventies, and someone at the council had done a thorough job of it — the entrance bolted, the street-level ventilation grilles welded shut. The Metropolitan Police forensics van was double-parked on the service road above, which meant Ellard was already down here, which meant Quinn was going to have to be patient about the body. She wasn't particularly good at patient. The platform opened up ahead of her. Portable work lights had been positioned in a loose triangle around the scene, casting everything in that particular bluish-white glare that made living faces look cadaverous and everything else look theatrical. The walls were covered in old tile — cream and green, the Camden roundel still legible beneath decades of grime — and someone had strung what looked like lengths of black cord between the support pillars, looping them in patterns that weren't decorative. Weren't graffiti, either. Quinn stopped walking and looked at them carefully. "Detective Inspector." DS Callum Marsh approached from the far end of the platform, stepping around a scatter of overturned wooden crates. He was thirty-four and conventionally handsome in a way that had never worked on Quinn, and he held his tablet like a shield. "Glad you're here. Got a strange one." "Tell me." "Male, mid-forties, no ID. Cause of death looks cardiac from the prelim — Ellard thinks it was sudden. No signs of struggle." Marsh glanced down at his tablet. "Found by a trespasser at approximately twenty-two hundred hours. She'd come down through a maintenance hatch on Kentish Town Road. Apparently she's done it before." "The trespasser." "Still here." He nodded toward the far end of the platform, past a stack of pallets draped in heavy canvas. "Bit of a character." Quinn moved toward the body first. Ellard was crouched beside it, working with the methodical patience of a man who had long ago made his peace with the dead. The victim lay on his back near the platform edge, one arm extended as though reaching for the tracks below. He was wearing a good coat — wool, charcoal grey, with a lining that had been partly torn away at the hem. His face was slack and grey and surprisingly undisturbed. "Cardiac?" Quinn said. Ellard looked up at her over his glasses. "Provisionally. No trauma to the body, no signs of asphyxiation, toxicology pending. Heart attack's the working assumption." "Working assumption," Quinn repeated. "It's what the evidence suggests." She crouched beside him. The man's right hand was closed in a loose fist. She leaned closer, close enough to see the faint marks on the knuckles — not bruising, but a kind of stippling, symmetrical, like a burn pattern but without the tissue damage. She did not touch it. "What are those?" Ellard looked where she was looking. "Mineral transfer, most likely. There's a lot of particulate matter down here." Quinn did not say what she thought of that. She stood and turned back to the platform, scanning the full geometry of the scene. The wooden crates. The black cord strung between the pillars — she could see now that the pattern was deliberate, each knot placed at precise intervals. The overturned pallets. The walls, which were not only grimy but marked, in several places, with small careful symbols that had not been painted but scratched into the tile with something sharp. She moved to one of the pillars and examined the cord more closely. It wasn't cord. It was waxed silk thread, and the knots were not decorative but functional — they held small paper packets in place, folded into tight triangles, each one seamed shut with something dark. "Market," Quinn said, half to herself. "Sorry?" Marsh had followed her. "I've seen something like this before." She hadn't, exactly. But she'd read about it, in the files she wasn't supposed to have kept after Morris died, in the notes she told herself were just a coping mechanism. "This whole setup. It's not squatter's camp." "Forensics found a token of some kind near the body," Marsh said. He scrolled on his tablet. "Small, made of bone. Possibly ivory. We've logged it as personal effects." Quinn straightened. "Where is it now?" "The evidence kit. Along with some other personal effects — wallet, no cash, and a compass of some kind." A compass. She walked to the forensics table, a folding affair set up at the north end of the platform, and found the tray of bagged items. The bone token was unremarkable — small, disc-shaped, carved with a series of radial lines that she couldn't quite resolve into a symbol. The compass was next to it. She picked up the bag. It was brass, small enough to fit in a palm. The casing was green with age, a deep verdigris that had settled into the seams like moss into stone, and the face was covered in fine-line etchings — geometric, dense, layered over and under each other in a way that made her eyes slide sideways if she tried to focus on any one element. The needle inside was dark, almost black, and it wasn't pointing north. It wasn't pointing anywhere magnetic at all. It was pointing, as far as Quinn could tell, directly toward the body. "Where's the trespasser?" she said. Marsh led her around the pallets to a section of platform where someone had set out a canvas folding chair. The woman sitting in it was young — mid-twenties, Quinn estimated — with a mass of red curls that had come mostly loose from a ponytail, round glasses pushed up into her hair, and the expression of someone who was working very hard at looking less frightened than she was. A worn leather satchel sat across her knees and she was gripping the strap with both hands. Freckled. Green-eyed. Watchful. Quinn pulled up a crate and sat across from her. She didn't introduce herself. She let the silence work. The young woman broke it first. "I've already told the other officer everything." "Tell me." A pause. The woman pushed her glasses back down onto her nose. "I found him when I came down. He was already dead. I didn't touch him. I called it in immediately." "Your name." "Eva Kowalski." "You come down here often, Ms. Kowalski." It wasn't a question. Eva's grip tightened on the satchel strap. "A few times. I'm a researcher. The station has some surviving Victorian-era infrastructure I've been documenting." "At ten o'clock at night." "I work odd hours." Quinn looked at her. Looked at the satchel — overfull, the buckle straining, the corner of something hardback pressing against the leather. Looked at the mud on her boots, which was not the sandy grit of the platform but darker, organic, the kind of mud you got from the street above. "You came down through the maintenance hatch," Quinn said. "Yes." "Which has a welded lock on it that someone has recently cut and replaced with a padlock." Quinn watched Eva's face. "So either you've been down here more than a few times, or someone gave you a key to that padlock. Which is it?" The girl tucked a curl behind her left ear. It was a precise, habitual gesture, the kind you made when you were deciding something. "I come down here to research," she said, carefully. "That's all." "The man who died," Quinn said. "Did you know him?" "No." "Have you ever seen him before?" A fraction of a pause. "No." Quinn stood and walked back to the forensics table. She stood in front of the bagged compass for a long moment while Marsh hovered somewhere behind her. "She's just a researcher who found a body," he said, with the mild reasonableness he used when he thought she was chasing something unproductive. "Probably a trespasser. The victim most likely had a cardiac event, fell, the compass was his personal property and I doubt it points anywhere particularly interesting — " "Come here." He came, and she held the bag up so the light caught it. The needle moved. Not much, barely a tremor, but it moved, pivoting within the sealed evidence bag to track the small adjustment as she shifted her position by a foot. Marsh stared at it. "Faulty," he said. "Or there's something magnetic." "There's nothing magnetic." "Quinn — " "Look at the marks on the walls." She set the compass down and turned, gesturing across the full length of the platform. "Look at the cord. Look at the pattern of the crates — they're not stacked for storage, they're arranged. Someone was using this station as a venue." She thought about the word venue and discarded it. "As a market. A regular one, from the dust patterns on the floor — you can see where it's been cleared and re-cleared. An ongoing operation, not a one-off. And that man died here tonight, on what looks like the night it was in session." She could feel the shape of it, just at the edge of where thinking became knowing. It had the same quality as the Morris case had had, before she understood what she was looking at — that sense of a logic running beneath the visible evidence like an underground river, present but invisible, making the ground above it subtly wrong in ways that were difficult to name. She looked back at Eva Kowalski, who was watching her from the folding chair with an expression that had shifted slightly. The fear was still there. But there was something else in it now — something that looked, Quinn thought, almost like recognition. "The bone token," Quinn said, not to Marsh, not to anyone in particular. "What does it open?" Nobody answered. But Eva Kowalski's hand moved to the strap of her satchel again, and her knuckles went white. Quinn picked up her torch.