Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WSFR2J4Z2SC2MKZ7NEG02

The service tunnel smelled wrong. Not the usual cocktail of mildew and stale urine that haunted every decommissioned stretch of the Underground. This was something older. Copper and ozone and a sweetness that sat at the back of the throat like rotting fruit. Detective Harlow Quinn ducked beneath the police tape strung between two rusted maintenance pipes and let her eyes adjust to the portable halogen lights her team had set up along the platform edge. The abandoned station yawned around her — vaulted ceilings blackened with a century of soot, tiled walls where the station name had long since been chipped away, and rails thick with dust that hadn't seen a train in decades. Camden's underworld in the most literal sense. "Glad you could join us, guv." DC Pryce stood near the far wall, his notebook open, pen cap between his teeth. Young. Eager. The kind of officer who still ironed creases into his crime-scene coveralls. He gestured toward the body with his pen. "Patrol got the call around half two. Kids exploring the tunnels found him. Paramedics confirmed death at the scene. They didn't stick around long." Quinn pulled nitrile gloves from her coat pocket and snapped them on. "They say why?" "Said the place gave them the creeps." Pryce shrugged like this was a failing of character rather than instinct. She crouched beside the body. Male, mid-fifties, dressed in what had once been expensive clothes — a grey herringbone coat, silk-lined, with hand-stitched buttonholes. His shoes were Italian leather, though the soles had been worn through to paper thinness and repaired more than once. A man clinging to old money or old habits. His face held an expression Quinn had seen only twice before in eighteen years. Not pain, not fear. Astonishment. The kind reserved for the moment between comprehension and oblivion. She'd seen that face on DS Morris. Three years ago. A warehouse in Rotherhithe. The memory threaded through her ribs like cold wire, and she pressed it flat. "So what's your read?" She glanced up at Pryce. "Drug deal. Has to be." He flipped back a page in his notebook. "This area's got history. We've had reports of unauthorised access to the old station for months. People coming and going, moving goods. Probably fentanyl or something worse. Victim meets a dealer down here, deal goes sideways, dealer legs it." He tapped the bruising around the dead man's throat. "Ligature marks. Strangled with something thin — wire, maybe a cord." Quinn said nothing. She studied the marks. They encircled the neck in a near-perfect ring, evenly distributed, no deviation in depth or angle. No signs of struggle — no skin fragments under the man's fingernails, no defensive abrasions on his hands. A man being strangled with a wire fought. He clawed. He twisted. This one had simply stood there. She lifted his right hand. The fingers were curled around something. Rigor had locked them in place, but she could see the edge of it — brass, green with verdigris, small enough to sit in a palm. "Did forensics log this?" Pryce leaned in. "Log what?" "He's holding something." She angled the hand toward the light. A disc of brass, its surface etched with symbols she didn't recognize. Not letters. Not numbers. Geometric shapes nested inside one another with a precision that made her eyes slide off them if she looked too long. A thin needle under a cracked glass face, seized in place, pointing not north but toward the tunnel's deeper reaches. "Compass of some kind," Pryce offered. "Cheap antique? Maybe he was a collector." Quinn turned the dead man's wrist. No watch. No rings. No wallet in his pockets — she'd checked. But the coat's interior lining had a hidden pocket, sewn shut and then cut open again with a blade. Inside: nothing. Whatever he'd carried there, he'd carried it close to his chest and someone had taken it. "A collector wandering an abandoned Tube station at two in the morning." Quinn straightened. Her knees popped. "No ID, no phone, no wallet, but an expensive coat and a compass that doesn't point north." "Could've been robbed." "Could've been. Except the shoes." She pointed. "Ferragamo. Even in that condition, they'd fetch two hundred at a consignment shop. And look at his watch pocket." The tiny pocket on the waistcoat still held a chain — actual gold, from the colour of it — that terminated in an empty clip. "They took whatever was on this chain. Took whatever was in the hidden pocket. Left the gold chain, the shoes, the coat. Left the compass in his hand. This wasn't a robbery, Pryce. They took specific things." Pryce chewed the inside of his cheek. "Targeted, then. Someone who knew what he was carrying." "Better." Quinn turned in a slow circle, scanning the platform. The halogen lights threw long shadows across the tile work. Decades of abandonment, and yet — she crossed to the wall nearest the body. The tiles here were different. Not chipped and filthy like the rest. Cleaner. Arranged. She ran her fingers along the grout lines and found what she was looking for: fresh mortar. Someone had re-laid these tiles, and recently. The pattern they formed was deliberate, geometric, echoing the symbols on the compass face. She crouched and pressed her ear to the wall. Nothing. But she could feel something — a faint vibration, deep and rhythmic, like a pulse in the brickwork. Not a train. The nearest active line was four hundred meters east, and this wasn't mechanical. "Pryce, grab me an evidence bag for the compass. And get someone from Heritage down here." "Heritage? For what?" "This station isn't on any of the decommission records, is it?" He hesitated. "I assumed it was." "You assumed. Pull the plans. I want the original layout, every renovation, every access point." She stood and walked the length of the platform, counting paces. Sixty-three from the body to the tunnel mouth. At the thirty-first pace — dead center — she found scuff marks on the concrete. Not the aimless scuffs of foot traffic. A pattern. Concentric circles scratched into the floor, the outermost nearly a meter in diameter. Inside the innermost ring, a dark residue. She crouched and sniffed. Wax and something herbal — sage, maybe, or something that wanted to smell like sage but carried a bitterness beneath it. The scratches were fresh. The wax was still soft at the edges. She stood and looked back at the body. Thirty-one paces. The dead man faced the circles. He'd been watching whatever had happened here, compass in hand, and someone had killed him for it — or during it, or because of it. "This isn't a drug deal," she said to no one. "With respect, guv." Pryce appeared at her elbow, evidence bag in hand. "We've got a dead body in a dodgy tunnel, ligature marks, no ID. If it walks like a duck—" "Ducks don't rearrange tilework." She took the evidence bag and walked back to the body. She worked the compass free from the dead man's grip with careful, practised movements, the brass cold and heavy in her palm. Up close, the engravings were even stranger. The needle trembled when she held it level, then swung hard toward the tunnel's far end and held. She rotated. The needle didn't follow magnetic north. It tracked something else entirely, something deeper in the tunnels, with the fixed certainty of a hunting dog pointing at quarry. She sealed it in the evidence bag and held it up to the light. The verdigris on the casing was uneven, thick in crevices, worn off high points, the kind of patina that took years to develop. But the glass face was new — replacement, recent. Someone had been maintaining this instrument. Using it. "I want a full search of these tunnels. Every branch, every maintenance shaft, every bricked-up doorway. And Pryce—" She fixed him with a look. "Keep this off the morning briefing board." "Off the—" "You heard me. This goes to me directly. No one else." He stared at her, pen frozen above his notebook. "Is this about Morris?" The name landed between them like a dropped glass. Quinn's jaw worked. She adjusted the worn leather watch on her left wrist, an unconscious habit she'd never managed to break, and looked back at the body on the ground. The astonishment on the dead man's face. The same expression. The same impossible, frozen wonder. "Just run the plans," she said. Pryce held her gaze for one more second, then closed his notebook and walked toward the service tunnel's exit, his footsteps echoing against the vaulted ceiling until the sound thinned to nothing. Quinn stood alone on the platform. Alone with the body and the scrubbed tiles and the concentric circles scratched into forty-year-old concrete. She held up the evidence bag. Inside, the compass needle held its bearing — aimed into the dark throat of the tunnel, steady and absolute, pointing at something she couldn't see but was beginning, with a sickening certainty, to believe was there. She pulled her torch from her belt and aimed the beam down the tracks. The light reached maybe twenty meters before the tunnel bent and swallowed it. From that darkness came the faintest movement of air, warm and wrong-smelling, carrying that sweetness, that copper, that ozone. Three years she'd waited for something to connect back to Morris. Three years of dead ends and sealed files and colleagues who told her to let it go, that he'd surprised a vagrant, that it was a tragedy but a mundane one. Three years of knowing they were wrong and having nothing to prove it. She looked at the compass one more time. The needle hadn't moved. It pointed into the tunnel with mechanical insistence, and she felt the pull of it in her sternum, a gravity she recognized from every case that had ever mattered — the particular weight of a thread begging to be followed. Quinn clicked off her torch. Pocketed the evidence bag. And walked back toward the body to start again from the beginning, because that was what you did when nothing added up: you went back to where the numbers broke, and you counted again, slower this time, until the pattern revealed itself. Behind her, deep in the tunnel, something that was not a train moved through the dark.