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.