The Flying Squad

Lady's Stairs was a crazy wooden house overlooking and overhanging the
creek between canal and river. You saw it from the lock that marked the
place where canal ended and the broad, muddy estuary began, a sagging
barn of a place, supported on huge wooden piles, with a dingy facade
which had once been painted white, and then not painted again. It was
streaked and blurred by nature to strange neutral shades that would have
rendered it invisible but for the fact that it was wedged between a high
warehouse on the one side and the barrel-roof of an ironworks on the
other. Beneath the main rooms the creek ran, rising to within a few feet
of Li Yoseph's sitting-room in flood-time.

Lady's Stairs, whence it took its name, has vanished. Once this dark and
oily waste had been a pleasant backwater to the Thames, and there was
still evidence of its one-time pastoral character. Stock Gardens was a
slum that ran parallel with the canal; Lavender Lane and Lordhouse Road
were no less unsavoury; and where the tenements raised their ugly heads,
and the squeals of playing children sounded night and day, was still
called The Meadows.

Li Yoseph used to sit in his little room and watch the colliers tie up
at Brands Wharf at high tide, and see the barges towed slowly towards
the lock. He found cause for satisfaction that, by craning his neck
through the window, he could also see the big Dutch steamers that went
down Thames River to the sea.

The police had nothing against Li Yoseph. They knew him to be a fence
and a smuggler, but they had no positive evidence, and did not expect to
find more on this fatal visit of theirs than they had upon previous
visits.

All the neighbourhood thought Li was rich, and knew for certain that he
was mad.

He had a habit of holding lengthy conversations with invisible friends.
As he shuffled through the streets, a strange-looking creature with his
big yellow face as hairless as a child's, yet wrinkled and creased into
a thousand criss-crossing lines, he would be talking and gesticulating
and smiling dreadfully to his unseen companions. Mostly he spoke in a
foreign language which was believed to be German, but was in fact
Russian. He confessed to an acquaintance with fairies--good fairies and
bad; he saw and conversed with dead men, who told him the strangest
tales of unknown worlds. And he was a seer, for he foresaw the future
surprisingly.