Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VXRCBFX8RYJP96QZ9D2FJ

The call had come in at 02:14, and Quinn had been awake for all of it — not because of any detective's instinct, but because sleep had stopped being reliable sometime around the third anniversary of Morris's death. She'd been sitting at her kitchen table with cold tea and a crossword she couldn't finish when her mobile lit up the darkness. Abandoned Underground infrastructure, the report said. Body discovered by a maintenance contractor who'd then promptly vomited on the platform and was now being interviewed in a Transit Authority van somewhere above ground. Suspected cardiac event. Low priority. Quinn had pulled on her coat anyway, because it was her name on the out-of-hours rota and because low priority was exactly what people said when they hadn't looked closely enough. The entrance was unremarkable — a steel maintenance door set into a brick arch on the canal side of Camden, the kind of threshold Londoners had learned not to see over a century of layering new city over old. It took three different keys from the Transit Authority liaison to get it open. The door gave a long, reluctant groan, and the smell hit her immediately: damp stone and old metal and something underneath that she had no ready name for, something faintly acrid and sweet at once, like burnt copper. She pulled on gloves and descended. The staircase was narrow and the walls wept moisture. Her torch found graffiti she didn't recognise — not the usual tags, but symbols, concentric and layered, cut into the brick rather than sprayed. Old work. She ran her gloved finger along one without thinking, then pulled it back. The platform opened up below with the particular grandeur of Edwardian construction left to rot: vaulted ceilings, decorative tilework still holding its pattern under decades of grime, two parallel tracks gone orange with rust. And light. That was the first wrong thing. The scene-of-crime team had brought portable floods, yes, but there was other light too — a low amber glow emanating from sources Quinn couldn't immediately place, distributed along the platform at intervals like lanterns, except there were no lanterns. She filed that and kept moving. The body was at the north end of the platform, and DS Farrer was crouched beside it, notebook open, expression performing the studied neutrality of a man who very much wanted to be in bed. "Quinn," he said, by way of greeting. "Farrer. What have we got?" "White male, late thirties, no ID on him yet. No visible trauma. SOCO thinks cardiac, maybe a substance event — there's residue on his hands we can't place yet. The contractor found him face down." He stood up, knees clicking. "Contractor says he had no idea anyone was using this space. Says the door was secure when he arrived." Quinn crouched where Farrer had been. The man was slight, dressed in clothes that were well-made and old-fashioned in a way that wasn't quite costume — a long dark coat, boots that had been resoled multiple times. His face was turned toward her, and it wore an expression she'd learned to read: not pain, not surprise. Release. She looked at his hands. The residue was a fine grey-white powder in the creases of his palms and the pads of his fingers. Not chalk. Not plaster. Something with more weight to it. "What's the residue on?" she said. "Both hands. Some on the knees of his trousers." "So he was kneeling." "Could've fallen forward kneeling." "Could've," she agreed. She stood and swept her torch in a slow arc. The amber light sources resolved, on closer inspection, into small glass vessels set into recessed alcoves in the wall — filled with something that burned without visible flame. She'd taken them for emergency lighting at first glance. They weren't. She looked at Farrer. "You logged those?" "The alcove things? SOCO's getting to them." "They're not Victorian infrastructure, Farrer." He looked mildly annoyed. "How d'you know?" She didn't answer him, because she'd found the next wrong thing. The platform was not empty. She had thought initially that what lined the far wall were transit equipment boxes — the kind of battered metal caging that stored track maintenance kit. But her torch found edges that were too deliberate, arrangements that were too considered. Tables. Shelves. Some of them bare, items cleared in haste by the look of it — the dust displaced, ghost-rings where objects had stood. Some still held things she needed to look at more carefully and wasn't going to do so in Farrer's company until she understood more. She moved toward them, keeping her stride measured. The evidence bag was already tagged and waiting beside the body, collated by SOCO's preliminary sweep. She crouched again and went through it piece by piece. A fragment of cloth. A key that fit no lock she knew. And there — near the bottom of the bag, separated in its own smaller evidence sleeve — a compass. Small. Brass. The casing had gone green-grey with age, a fine verdigris eating into the metalwork in a pattern that was almost decorative. She held it up in her torchlight. The face was etched — not worn, deliberately etched — with markings arranged around the cardinal points like a diagram she'd seen somewhere before and couldn't immediately place. The needle was still. Pointed not north, not anywhere the compass should be pointing, but directly downward, as if dragged by an invisible weight beneath the floor. "That was in his left coat pocket," Farrer said from behind her. "Compass. Probably a hobby thing. City exploring type." Quinn looked at the compass. She thought about the door, with its three locks, secure when the contractor arrived at two in the morning. She thought about the tables with their cleared surfaces and the alcoves with their impossible light and the symbols cut into the brick at the entrance. She thought about a man kneeling on a stone floor in a room that shouldn't exist. "Farrer," she said. "When did Transport say this station was last in active use?" "Nineteen-thirties, thereabouts." "And this space. The platform specifically." "Same." "Then explain to me," she said, standing and turning, "the fresh footprints." He stared at her. She watched the moment arrive in his face when he stopped seeing a derelict platform and started actually looking at one. The dust on the platform was not uniformly old. In the patches furthest from the body, in the spaces between the vacant shelves and the wall, it had been disturbed recently and repeatedly — overlapping prints, back and forth, dozens of them. Small ones. Large ones. Boots, shoes, something else she couldn't categorise without a closer look. This was not an abandoned platform. This was a room that had been used and used and used, and had been emptied very recently. "Right," Farrer said carefully. "That's—" "Get uniforms to seal the entrance," Quinn said. "Nobody in or out without my say-so. And bag the compass separately. In a new bag, not that one. Label it." "Quinn—" "The residue on his hands." She looked back at the body, at the coat, at the resoled boots that had walked a long way to end up here. "That's not a substance event. That's effort. He was here for something specific, and somebody didn't want him to have it." Farrer was writing in his notebook, the model of compliance, but she could hear the gentle scepticism in his silence. She let him have it. She turned back to the alcoves and the bare shelves and the ghost-circles in the dust, and she moved toward them with her torch in one hand and the clear evidence sleeve in the other, the brass compass catching amber light through the plastic, its needle still pointing steadfastly down. She found the girl in the deepest recess, behind a shelf that had been pulled partially across the alcove as a screen. She was sitting with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around a leather satchel, a pair of round glasses on her nose and curly red hair loose around her face, freckles stark against white skin. She was shaking — fine, continuous trembling, the kind that came from cold or shock or the effort of keeping very still for a very long time. Quinn crouched to her level. She kept her voice level and clear. "I'm Detective Quinn, Metropolitan Police. You're safe. What's your name?" The girl's green eyes moved to the compass in the evidence sleeve. Then they moved to Quinn. "My name is Eva Kowalski," she said. Her voice was steadier than Quinn expected. "And before you do anything else, I need you to understand that whatever you think you're looking at — you're wrong about all of it." Quinn looked at this young woman with her satchel and her shaking hands and her too-steady voice, and she made the only reasonable professional determination available to her. She was not wrong. But she was not, she suspected, the only one who wasn't. She sat down on the cold stone floor beside Eva Kowalski, took out her own notebook, and said: "Start from the beginning."