AI The body lay between the rails, and that was the first thing wrong with it.
Quinn ducked under the barrier tape and stepped onto the track bed, her torch cutting through the dust hanging in the tunnel air. Camden Deep had been closed since 1941, a wartime station sealed and forgotten, which raised the obvious question of what a City banker in a three-piece suit was doing down here with his throat opened.
"You can smell that from the platform." DC Barry Iles stood beside the tent the forensics team had half erected, his notebook out, his face set in the expression he wore when he'd already solved something. "Copper. Lots of it. Your basic knife job, guv. Victim's name is Gerald Prewitt, investment something. Wallet was on him, cards intact, watch gone. Rolex, apparently. Wife confirmed."
"Watch gone, wallet intact."
"Robbery gone wrong." Iles gestured at the tunnel mouth behind them. "Kids have been breaking in here for years. Urban explorers, that lot. Prewitt must've wandered down on a dare, or met someone. Wrong place, wrong blade."
Quinn crouched beside the body. The blood pooling under Prewitt's head had dried wrong. Not tacky, not brown. Dry, flaking, dark as old brick. She'd seen enough scenes to know blood kept its colour for hours in the cool underground. This looked days old.
"What time did the wife report him missing?"
"Last night. Elevenish."
"So he's been dead, what, under twenty-four hours?" She pointed her torch at the flaked pool. "That's not yesterday's blood."
Iles leaned over her shoulder. "Underground dries things out. Different conditions down here."
"It's damp, Barry. There's water dripping off the ceiling."
She moved the beam along the body. The suit was immaculate. Pristine, even. No dust on the knees, no grime on the soles of the brogues. A man didn't walk a quarter mile through an abandoned Tube station, across gravel and pigeon muck and a century of filth, and arrive with polished shoes.
"Body was carried," she said.
"Carried. Down two maintenance ladders and along a live-ish tunnel." Iles blew air through his nose. "Who'd bother?"
"Someone who wanted him found here. Or someone for whom here was convenient."
She stood and turned a slow circle with the torch. The platform edge was crumbling tile, adverts for Bovril still clinging to the curved wall in faded fragments. Old news. Her light snagged on something newer, chalk marks on the platform wall. A series of symbols, angular, deliberate, drawn at adult shoulder height.
"Greek," she murmured.
"Gang tags." Iles was already losing interest . "Tunnel kids."
"Tunnel kids with a working knowledge of Etruscan?" She photographed the marks with her phone. "That one's not a tag. That's a boundary marker."
"A what?"
She didn't answer. She wasn't sure where the word had come from. Lately, words came to her like that, unbidden , correct. Ever since Morris.
The body's left hand drew her eye next. The fingers were curled , stiff, around nothing. She lifted the sleeve gently . The wrist, where the missing Rolex should have sat, bore no tan line. Prewitt had never worn a watch on that wrist. She checked the other one. There it was, a pale band of skin, faint but clear.
"Barry. The Rolex. Which wrist does a right-handed man wear his watch on?"
"Left. Usually."
"Prewitt wore his on the right." She showed him the tan line. "So whoever told the wife the watch was taken, and whoever she saw wearing it, they've staged the wrong wrist. The watch was taken off his right arm, where it always was, but the killer told the wife it was stolen as if it were an afterthought. Which means the watch mattered. It wasn't loot. It was the point."
Iles frowned at the corpse. "Or Prewitt wore it on the right because he was odd."
"Bankers are creatures of habit. Look at the parting in his hair, the fold of his pocket square. This man had a system for his cufflinks."
Quinn rose, knees cracking, and walked the track bed in widening arcs. The gravel told a story if you let it. Foot traffic, recent, lots of it. Not one set. Dozens. The stones were scuffed and displaced in overlapping patterns, some leading deeper into the tunnel, some towards it, as though a queue had passed through. A queue of people with somewhere to be.
"Barry, when did kids last break in here?"
"Couple of months, I think. BTP moved them on."
"So why is the dust on that maintenance door disturbed from the inside?"
The door sat recessed in the tunnel wall, thirty feet past the body, paint peeling, padlock rusted solid. Rusted everywhere except the shackle, which gleamed. Fresh metal, freshly oiled. Quinn gripped it and pulled. The lock sprang open in her hand.
"Guv, wait, we should call it-"
She pulled the door.
Beyond it was not a service cupboard. Stairs descended, new concrete against old brick, lit from below by a string of bare bulbs wired with professional care. The air that rose to meet her smelled of wax, dried herbs, and underneath it, something mineral and cold, like a stone held in the mouth. A market's worth of smells, layered and recent.
"What the hell is that?" Iles had his radio halfway to his mouth.
"Put it down, Barry."
"Guv-"
"Who ran power into a sealed station? Who ran it past a corpse?" She started down the stairs . "And who chalked Etruscan ward marks on the platform to keep something in, or something out?"
The stairwell opened onto a lower hall she hadn't known existed. Stalls stood in rows, abandoned mid-trade. A brass scale still held a scattering of black powder on one pan. Folded cloth covered tables shaped for wares. On the nearest stall, arranged with a shopkeeper's pride, sat a row of small brass compasses, each face etched with marks that matched the chalk on the platform above. One needle spun as she approached. It didn't point north. It pointed at her.
She didn't pick it up. She noted the verdigris on the casing, the craftsmanship, the price tag written in a hand she'd seen before, on evidence bags, three years cold. Morris's handwriting. She stared at it until her eyes watered, then looked away before Barry could see.
At the hall's far end, a second exit yawned, and on the floor before it, half under a fallen banner, lay a wristwatch. Gold. Rolex. Quinn crouched without touching it. The crystal was cracked. The hands had stopped at 3:17, and dried blood, fresh blood this time, brown and honest, clotted the links of the band.
"Body up top's a decoy," she said quietly . "Prewitt didn't die up there. He died down here. Someone moved him, staged him, kept the real scene clean."
"Why stage a robbery?"
"Because a robbery makes us look at street kids and drifters. It makes us look anywhere but at a market selling things that shouldn't exist, under a station that shouldn't be open." She straightened. "Seal the tunnel. Nobody comes down here without me. Nobody touches the watch."
Her radio crackled before Iles could answer. Dispatch, voice tight. Another body, they said. Found at a closed station under Holborn. Same wounds. Same dried, ancient-looking blood.
Quinn looked at the compass row. Every needle had swung to point past her now, east, towards Holborn.
"Barry," she said. "You were right about one thing."
"What's that?"
"The robbery theory." She clicked off her torch, and the market lights flickered , one string at a time, going dark in sequence, as though something were moving along the wires. "Something was definitely taken."
Behind the far stalls, in the black between bulbs, something moved with it.