Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VQ41TN8WVPT7BD10SZF9S

The green neon of The Raven's Nest bled across the wet pavement like something wounded, and Quinn was already moving when the man bolted. She'd clocked him the moment she stepped out of the unmarked car on Brewer Street — olive skin, short curly hair dark with rain, a Saint Christopher medallion catching the light as he turned his collar up — and something in the way he catalogued her, the precise flicker of assessment before the decision to run, told her everything she needed to know. Guilty men didn't hesitate. They just moved. So did Quinn. "Herrera!" She hit the pavement hard, her boots sending up shallow sprays of water. "Metropolitan Police — stop!" He didn't stop. He never stopped. In her eighteen years she'd only ever seen three people actually stop when she shouted that, and two of them had been drunk. Tomás Herrera was not drunk. He took the corner onto Wardour Street without breaking stride, his long legs eating up the distance with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd spent years running toward emergencies rather than away from them. A former paramedic. She'd read his file three times. He knew how bodies worked, how far they could be pushed, where the margins were. She suspected he was calculating her pace even now, measuring the gap between them with clinical precision. Quinn kept her jaw set and pumped her arms, ignoring the burn beginning to build in her thighs. The rain had intensified in the last hour, turning from drizzle to something with genuine intent, and Oxford Street was a chaos of umbrellas and late buses and tourists huddled under awnings who parted around them like water around two thrown stones. She was faster than she looked. People always underestimated that. The gap closed by half a metre before the lights changed and a black cab lurched forward between them, horn blaring. Quinn slapped the bonnet with her palm without slowing, vaulted the white line, and caught a glimpse of Herrera's face as he looked back — not panicked, not quite, but recalculating. His warm brown eyes found her through the rain-broken dark and something shifted in his expression. Surprise, maybe. He'd expected to lose her by now. She watched him make a decision. He turned north. Toward Camden. The realisation sat strangely in her chest as she followed, matching him turn for turn through the narrowing backstreets, past shuttered restaurants and the sour perfume of overflowing bins, past a group of students who pressed themselves flat against a wall and filmed them both on their phones. Herrera wasn't running blind. He had a destination. She'd been a detective long enough to know the difference between panic and navigation, and what she was watching was navigation — quick, confident, purposeful. He was leading her somewhere specific, or leading her away from somewhere she wasn't meant to find. She pulled her phone with one hand and thumbed a message to DC Asante: NB Camden, need backup, following Herrera on foot. She didn't wait for the read receipt. She shoved the phone back into her jacket and leaned into the run. Euston Road was a wall of headlights and diesel and spray. Herrera barely paused at the kerb, timing the gap between a lorry and a night bus with the kind of split-second calculation that made Quinn's stomach tighten. She followed anyway. The lorry's horn ripped across the dark and the driver's window came down briefly with a stream of abuse she didn't have the breath to respond to. On the other side, Herrera was already pulling away. The terraced streets north of the interchange were quieter, the rain heavier, the orange of the sodium lights turning every puddle into hammered copper. Her leather watch chafed against her wrist as she ran, an old friction she'd learned to ignore. Her breathing was controlled, rhythmic, the product of early mornings she'd never quite managed to stop keeping after Morris died, as though discipline was the one thing she could still offer up to the universe in exchange for a shape of order that made sense. DS Morris. Three years now, and the case file still sat in her bottom drawer, re-read so many times the paper had softened at the folds. She shook the thought loose. There was only Herrera and the rain and the widening gap between them. She'd almost lost him entirely when she saw the medallion catch the light — Saint Christopher spinning as he ducked down a staircase she hadn't registered from street level, the kind of entrance that blended seamlessly into the derelict shopfront above it, boards over the windows, a padlock that was clearly decorative. The steps led down beneath the pavement, below the road, below the drainage pipes and the substrata of a city built on itself over centuries. Quinn stopped at the top of the stairs. The rain hammered her shoulders, her closely cropped hair plastered flat within moments of her slowing. She pressed her back against the brick and peered down. Twelve concrete steps, angled steeply, disappearing into amber half-light below. What had once been emergency lighting, maybe, reduced now to a sickly glow that was just about sufficient to confirm the steps existed. At the bottom: the sound of movement, voices, and beneath that something else she couldn't categorise. A low, resonant hum, not mechanical, that she felt in the back of her molars. Her hand moved to the radio at her hip. She thought of Asante, who was maybe fifteen minutes out. She thought of protocol, of reasonable grounds, of the seventy-page report she'd have to write if she drew her weapon without justification. She thought of Herrera's files: the revoked medical licence, the patient records that didn't correspond to any NHS admission in the system, the names in his phone that intersected, again and again, with the clique she'd been building a case on for eight months. She thought of Morris. She looked back up at the street — empty, slick, indifferent, the rain falling straight and relentless as accusation. No backup yet. No witness. Just her and the decision and the hum vibrating somewhere behind her teeth. She'd been a detective for eighteen years. She'd learned, in those years, that there were places the job took you that the handbook hadn't mapped, and that the only thing more dangerous than following was not following, because at least if you went in with your eyes open you had some chance of seeing what was there. She descended. The steps were damp underfoot and the air changed immediately — warmer than it had any right to be, carrying the smell of tallow and something medicinal and sweet, beneath it the older, mineral smell of deep underground. The hum grew as she moved, resolving slowly into something closer to sound than vibration, a layering of voices and movement that the narrow stairwell magnified and distorted. At the bottom, another door. This one solid iron, set into the tile of what had clearly once been a Tube station — she could see the curve of the original architecture beneath the modifications, the familiar terracotta of an older station long since closed. A man sat beside the door on a wooden stool. He was compact and entirely still, the way people only managed when stillness was deliberate and trained, and he held one hand loosely open on his knee, in the palm of which rested a small pale object she couldn't identify from this distance. He looked at Quinn's hands. At her jacket. At her face. She looked back at him with the expression she'd spent years calibrating: level, certain, utterly un-intimidated. "Name," he said. Not a question. "Detective Harlow Quinn. Metropolitan Police." She kept her voice measured, quiet, the way she'd learned to be quiet in rooms where noise would cost more than it bought. "I'm in pursuit of a suspect who came through this door. I need to go through." The man turned the pale object over in his palm once, twice. He said nothing for a long moment. "No token," he said finally. "No entry." She held his gaze. Through the iron door came the unmistakable layered sound of a crowd — dozens of people at least, maybe more, the acoustics of a large underground space shaping their voices into something collective and strange. Herrera was in there. The evidence she'd spent eight months building towards was in there. Eight months, and before that three years of Morris's absence sitting in her chest like scar tissue around a splinter. She reached into her jacket pocket for her warrant card instead, held it up flat, let the amber light catch the crest. "I don't think you understand what I said," she told him, and her voice was quiet and entirely serious, the way it got when she meant every syllable. "I'm going through that door."