Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WG59STTCQXME9TT9R8QBR

The call had come in at quarter past two in the morning — a body in the tunnels beneath Camden High Street, reported by a pair of urban explorers who'd since been separated into two squad cars and were presumably still hyperventilating. Quinn had driven herself, which she always did when the address felt wrong. This address felt very wrong. She ducked under the police tape at the top of the maintenance stairwell and started down, her torch cutting a white column through the dark ahead of her. The tiles on the walls were Victorian, cream gone the colour of old teeth, and the air carried that particular underground smell — stone and rust and the ancient breath of the city. Not the Northern line. Not any line she could name on a map. She'd checked before leaving the car. DS Callum Bright was waiting at the bottom, a younger man with the kind of face that photographed well and thought even better of itself for it. He had his own torch and a tablet under his arm and he looked too awake for three in the morning, which Quinn had always found suspicious in a person. "Quinn." He fell into step beside her. "Nice of you to join us." "What have we got?" "Male, mid-forties, no ID. SOCO's already been through. One blunt force wound to the right temple, consistent with a fall — there's a pillar about two metres from the body. Looks like he lost his footing, went down hard." Quinn said nothing. She kept walking. The platform opened up around them and she stopped. Whatever this place had been, it wasn't derelict in any ordinary sense. Derelict stations had pigeons and sodden newspapers and the long quiet of abandonment. This one had tables. Or rather, it had the ghost of tables — crude wooden structures collapsed against the far wall like tired soldiers, several overturned, one with a leg snapped clean. Tarps had been strung between the support pillars. Most had been torn down, but the fixing points remained: hooks driven into the Victorian ironwork with some precision. There were crates stacked near the old ticket booths, some broken open, their contents removed or scattered. Glass glittered across the platform tiles. "Busy place," Quinn said. "Yeah." Bright consulted his tablet. "Urban explorer community apparently knew about it. Theory is our victim was part of a group using it for — parties, maybe? Raves? We found candles. Someone had been living rough near the far end." Quinn crouched beside a collapsed table. She pressed two fingers to the wood, feeling the grain, then lifted them and rubbed the residue between her fingertips. Not damp rot. Something powdery, with a faint alkaline bite. She didn't say anything about that. "Where's the body?" Bright led her to the far end of the platform, past the remains of a tarp partition. A SOCO tech was still working the periphery. The victim lay on his back beside a concrete support pillar, one arm thrown out, one folded beneath him at the kind of angle that made Quinn's shoulder ache in sympathy. Mid-forties was generous — the man looked sixty, with a weathered face and hands that had done hard work for a long time. He wore a coat that had once been expensive. There was blood at his right temple, dried to a dark crust against grey stubble. Quinn stood over him for a long moment, then turned to look at the pillar. The blood smear was there — a single horizontal streak at roughly head height. She angled her torch. Then she crouched and looked at the floor beside the pillar. No scuff marks. No drag from a stumbling foot, no palm print where a man would instinctively reach out as he fell. The concrete dust was undisturbed except for her own approach and the earlier SOCO work. "He fell," she said. "That's what it looks like," Bright agreed, coming to stand beside her with his arms folded. "Show me where they found him. His exact position." Bright gestured: the body had been approximately two feet from the pillar's base, left side, slightly angled away. "A man falls and strikes his head on a pillar, Callum, he goes down beside it. Toward it, or directly beneath the point of impact. He doesn't land two feet away on the opposite side. That's not a fall. That's someone positioned after." Bright's expression shifted — not agreement, not yet, but the beginning of recalculation. "Okay. But the wound—" "Could have been inflicted elsewhere and the body moved. SOCO will need to check the site more carefully." She stood. "What else did they recover?" "Candles, like I said. Broken glass — looks like bottles. Couple of rucksacks, personal effects, nothing remarkable. And this." He held out an evidence bag. Quinn took it and turned it in the torchlight. Inside was a small brass compass, no bigger than a pocket watch. Old, from the look of it — the casing had a greenish patina, verdigris crawling into the engraved lines on the face. Not compass points engraved there, she noted. Not N and S and E and W. Something else. Symbols. Careful and precise and not any alphabet she recognised. "That was near the body?" "In his coat pocket. Outer breast pocket. Still fastened." She looked at it for another moment, then handed it back. "Check whether it works." Bright blinked. "Whether it—" "Compasses work, Callum. That's their function. Check whether this one does." She left him holding the evidence bag and walked back toward the platform's centre. The overturned tables were clustered in a pattern she hadn't registered from the entrance. Not random — not the chaos of a fight or a flight. Tables positioned around a central area, then overturned away from it, as though whatever force had knocked them had originated centrally and moved outward. She stood at the notional centre and looked at the floor. The tiles were old, and some were cracked. But three of them, arranged in an uneven triangle beneath her feet, were scorched. Not sooty — not the residue of a candle or a brazier. Scorched through, the glaze cratered, the way ceramic looked when something very hot had happened very fast. She was still staring at it when she heard the voice. "You shouldn't be standing there." Quinn turned. A young woman was being guided toward the platform by a uniformed officer — mid-twenties, short, curly red hair that was half-escaped from whatever had been holding it, round glasses slightly askew on a freckled face. She wore a satchel across her body, the leather worn pale at the strap, and she was looking at Quinn's feet with an expression that mingled urgency with the desperate social embarrassment of someone who very much didn't want to be causing a scene. "Ma'am, this witness was found in the eastern tunnel—" the officer began. "It's all right." Quinn stepped off the triangle of scorched tiles. "Who are you?" The young woman tucked a curl behind her left ear. "Eva Kowalski. I was — I heard the police radios. I was in the area." "At three in the morning." "I work odd hours." She met Quinn's gaze and her chin lifted slightly. "The man who died — I didn't know him. I want to be clear about that. But I know what this place was. And I don't think he fell." "We agree on that much." Quinn tilted her head. "What do you think this place was?" Kowalski glanced at the uniformed officer, then back at Quinn, making some internal calculation. "A market," she said carefully. "A very particular kind of market. For very particular kinds of goods." Quinn looked at her steadily. At the satchel full, by its apparent weight, of books. At the careful way she'd watched where Quinn was standing. "And the markings on that floor?" The young woman pushed her glasses up with one finger. She hesitated again — that same weighing, that same private arithmetic. "Residue," she said at last. "From something opening. Or closing." Bright was calling from the far end of the platform. Quinn didn't move. "Ms. Kowalski." She kept her voice level, the same tone she used when she had all the time in the world, which she didn't. "The compass we found on the victim. Do you know what those symbols on the face are?" The silence lasted four seconds. Quinn counted them. "Protective sigils," Eva said quietly. "And if you've found one here, Detective, the question isn't what happened to that man." She looked at the scorched tiles, then back up, her green eyes steady behind the smudged glass of her lenses. "The question is what got out." From across the platform, Bright called again. "Quinn — you need to see this. The compass needle — it's not pointing north." Quinn held Eva Kowalski's gaze for a moment longer. Three years ago, in a warehouse in Bermondsey, DS Morris had looked at her with that same expression — not fear exactly, but the specific face of someone standing at the edge of something enormous. She hadn't understood it then. She was beginning to understand it now. "Stay here," she told Eva. And then she walked across the platform toward her colleague, toward the evidence bag, toward a needle pointing at something the maps didn't show.