Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VZ8Q2929ACV30V9E19NEW

The call came through at half one in the morning: unresponsive male, disused Tube infrastructure, Camden. The uniforms had cordoned off the access point behind a shuttered fish-and-chip shop on Chalk Farm Road, a rusted service door that looked like it hadn't moved in decades. Quinn had to shoulder it open herself. DS Aldridge was already down there, standing at the edge of the portable floodlights with his hands in his jacket pockets, studying the body with the particular expression of a man who had already made up his mind. "Cardiac," he said, before she'd even reached him. "Male, late forties. No obvious trauma. Paramedics are ninety percent on it." Quinn crouched at the perimeter of the scene, not touching anything yet, just looking. The abandoned platform stretched away into the dark on both sides of the lights, tiles cracked and greened with damp. The air carried the particular smell of old stations — rust, clay, stagnant water — but beneath it something else. Something burnt. Not electrical. Organic. The man lay on his back between the platform edge and the far wall. Expensive shoes. Wool coat. His right hand was palm-up at his side, fingers slightly curled, as though he'd been holding something when he fell. His face showed no distress. No clutched chest. No contorted last expression. He looked like someone had simply switched him off. "Who found him?" "Transit maintenance crew. Registered complaint about a blocked utility duct and came down to check." Aldridge pulled out his notebook. "Except — and this is where it gets a bit odd — the duct they were called about is two stations north. They'd been sent the wrong address." "Wrong address." Quinn stood, moved along the edge of the tape in a slow arc. "So the person who made the maintenance call knew this platform, knew how to get someone official down here fast." "Or it's an admin cock-up." She didn't answer that. Along the far wall, past the floodlit radius, she could make out the faint outline of tables. Not furniture that had always been there — the legs were folding, portable, the kind used at market stalls. Three of them, all empty, pushed back against the tiles. She took out her torch and walked toward them. "Been some sort of gathering here," she said. "Squatters, probably. Camden's full of—" "Squatters don't use folding tables." She moved the beam slowly. The floor was gritty with dust that had been disturbed recently, footprints overlapping in multiple directions, too many to count or individualise. At the far end of the row of tables, something had been scrawled on the floor in a medium she couldn't identify from standing height. She crouched again. Not scrawled. Burned. Small, precise shapes burned into the stone floor at intervals, roughly in a circle perhaps three metres across. Each mark was different. Each was deliberate. She'd seen marks like this before — not on any case file, not in any training manual. Three years ago, she had seen something similar in the flat where Morris had died, and she had photographed it and the photographs had come back from the lab as inexplicable heat trauma to the surface material and she had closed that particular note in the file and not reopened it. "Aldridge." She kept her voice level. "What's the civilian doing still here?" He glanced toward the platform entrance. A woman sat on an upturned transit crate twenty metres back, a uniform standing beside her. Curly red hair, round glasses pushed up on her forehead. A worn leather satchel sat between her feet, thick with the spines of books pressing against the sides. "Found her in the corridor beyond the platform. Maintenance crew nearly tripped over her. She says she got lost." "In a sealed disused Tube station." "She said she heard something and followed a group in through the service entrance." Quinn walked toward her. The woman looked up as Quinn approached, and her expression did something complicated — a calculation happening just under the surface, the specific kind of alertness that people deployed when they were trying to appear less alert. She was in her mid-twenties and her freckled complexion had gone pale under the fluorescent wash of the portable lights. "Eva Kowalski." Quinn read from the uniform's notepad without looking at the woman. "Research assistant." "That's right." "British Museum." "Yes." "And you followed strangers into an access corridor of a decommissioned station at midnight because you heard something." "I was curious." Quinn looked at the satchel. "What's in the bag?" "Books. Research materials." "May I?" A pause — very brief, but it was there. "Of course." Quinn unclipped the satchel without ceremony. She moved the top books aside. Standard archival texts, two in languages she didn't recognise. A cloth-wrapped cylinder that turned out to be a set of rolled paper documents covered in dense text and hand-drawn diagrams. And at the very bottom, lodged in the corner under everything else, a small compass in a brass casing. She turned it over. The face was covered in fine etched markings — not directional notations, not any cartographic convention she knew. The needle swung loosely and then stopped, pointing not north but back toward the circle of burned marks on the platform floor. Kowalski said nothing. Quinn held the compass up. The needle held its bearing with complete steadiness, indifferent to orientation. "This doesn't point north." "It's broken." "Broken needles float. This one has a destination." Quinn wrapped her fingers around the casing. The verdigris caught under her thumbnail, old and genuine, nothing faked. "Who else was here tonight?" Kowalski tucked a curl of red hair behind her left ear. "I already told the officer. I don't know anyone who was here. I followed strangers in." "And the man who died." "I never saw him before." Quinn turned the compass over, studying the sigils etched into the brass. She looked back at the circle burned into the stone floor, and then at the empty folding tables, and then at the dead man's open right hand. His palm showed a faint reddish mark at its centre — circular, like something hot had been pressed against it briefly. She hadn't seen it from a distance. Aldridge hadn't mentioned it. The paramedics had called cardiac and moved on. She walked back to the body. Crouched. Brought the torch beam low across the palm. The mark was there, clean and deliberate, the same diameter as the compass casing she still held. "Aldridge." She kept her eyes on the dead man's hand. "Pull the cardiac ruling. I want a full pathology consult before anything goes in the report." "Quinn, it's two in the morning and the paramedics are—" "Pull it." She stood, the compass still in her hand, and looked back at Kowalski across the platform. The woman had replaced her glasses on her nose and sat very still, watching Quinn with an expression that had graduated from calculation to something closer to wariness.