Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VS74RDRVK93TM6H8AP3VP

The rain came down in sheets, hammering the Camden pavements into a slick black mirror that threw the streetlights back at everything. Quinn ran. Her boots hit standing water and sent it spraying against the legs of her trousers, soaked through already, but she kept her eyes locked on the figure thirty metres ahead of her. He was fast. Younger than she'd expected when she'd first clocked him outside the Raven's Nest — early twenties, hooded, carrying a satchel strapped tight across his chest as though whatever was inside it mattered more than his own ribs. She'd been watching the bar for six days. Six days of cold takeaway coffee and a notebook that was getting fat with observations that didn't quite fit together, and then tonight he'd come out through the side door — not the main entrance, the side door, the one she hadn't put on her original sketch of the building — and moved north with his head down and his pace deliberate, and every instinct she had told her to follow. "Police! Stop!" He didn't stop. Of course he didn't stop. He cut left down a narrow passage between two shuttered shops, and Quinn went after him, her shoulder catching the brick as she cornered. The alley stank of wet cardboard and something else beneath it, something she couldn't name, faintly chemical and sweet. Her torch beam slashed across the walls. He was already at the far end, vaulting a low bollard with the kind of ease that suggested he'd run this route before. She gained on him crossing the main road. A taxi blared its horn as he ran straight through a gap in traffic and she followed half a second later, close enough to read the heel of his trainer as it disappeared around another corner. Her radio crackled against her hip. "Control, this is Quinn, I'm in foot pursuit, suspect heading north from the junction of—" She glanced up at a street sign, chest heaving. "Hartland Road and Camden Road. Request backup." Static. Then: "Copy, DI Quinn. Units en route. ETA eight minutes." Eight minutes. He'd be long gone. She ran harder. He ducked down a staircase she almost missed entirely — it sat behind a chain-link fence that had been pulled back just enough for a body to squeeze through, the metal glistening under the rain and folded aside with the familiarity of regular use. She registered it in her peripheral vision and wrenched herself to a stop, backtracking three steps. The fence. The staircase beyond it, descending steeply, swallowed by dark. A sign on the gate was half-eaten by rust, but she could make out the words: ENGINEERING ACCESS — LONDON UNDERGROUND — AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. Her torch swept the steps. No movement. The sound of his footsteps had vanished. Quinn stood at the threshold, rain running off the hood she hadn't bothered to put up, coursing along the channel of her collarbone and soaking into her shirt. She listened. From somewhere below came a sound that wasn't quite silence — a low murmur, the suggestion of voices, something that might have been music or might have been something else entirely, resonating through the concrete and iron like a pulse. She pulled out her phone. No signal. She tried the radio again — just hiss. The fence swayed in the wind. The staircase yawned. She'd been down rabbit holes before. Literally and figuratively — during the Ashworth case, during the mess in Bermondsey two years back that had cost her three weeks of sleep and a formal complaint from her superintendent. She knew the shape of situations that were bigger than they looked on the outside. DS Morris had known it too, for all the good it had done him. She pushed the thought away. The suspect had the satchel. The satchel had come out of the Raven's Nest through a door that didn't officially exist in any floor plan she could source. That was enough. That had to be enough. Quinn unclipped the strap on her holster, left it unclipped, and went through the fence. The steps were steep and unevenly worn, each one lower on the left side than the right, and she kept one hand on the wall as she descended. The sound grew. It separated itself out as she went deeper — voices, real ones, dozens of them layered over each other, and beneath them a persistent low hum she felt more in her sternum than her ears. The air changed too, warmer against her wet skin but threaded through with something dense and odd, like incense mixed with engine oil, like burnt sugar and iron. A glow appeared below. Not electric light — or not entirely. Something yellower, that moved in ways fluorescent strips didn't. She stopped on the final step. The abandoned station opened up before her, and it was not empty. The platforms had been transformed. Stalls ran the length of them on both sides, crammed against the curved tiled walls, overflowing with objects she couldn't immediately categorise — bottles and jars in colours that had no business being that saturated, rolls of something that looked like fabric but moved when no one touched it, cages that she initially thought were empty until she looked more carefully. A crowd moved between the stalls, perhaps eighty or a hundred people, though people felt like the wrong word for some of them once you started paying attention to the details. Lanterns hung from the old signage brackets along the vault of the ceiling. Voices haggled in languages she recognised and several she didn't. Her suspect stood fifteen metres away on the platform, handing the satchel to a man behind a trestle table. He hadn't looked back. Then someone else moved at the edge of her vision and she tracked it automatically, the way eighteen years had trained her, and she saw a face she recognised. Tomás Herrera. The former paramedic. He stood at a stall halfway down the platform, examining something small in his palm, the Saint Christopher medallion at his throat catching the lantern light. He looked up — not at her, at the stall holder — and said something she couldn't hear from this distance. Quinn didn't move. Her back was against the tiled wall of the stairwell entrance, one step below the platform level, still half in shadow. The weight of her badge in her breast pocket felt both very present and very useless. Eight minutes for backup. No signal. One exit that she knew of, and eighty-odd people — at least — between her and whatever her suspect had just handed over in that satchel. She looked at Herrera. She looked at the crowd. She looked at the exit behind her, the rectangle of dark stairwell at her back, the rain visible as a faint suggestion somewhere far above.