White Face by Edgar Wallace

In his rare moments of leisure Dr. Marford was wont to stand in his surgery, behind the red calico curtains which were stretched across the big window level with the bridge of his thin, aristocratic nose, and muse, a little sourly, upon Tidal Basin, its people and its future.

He had material for speculation on those summer evenings, when the light of the brazen day still persisted in the western skies, and when every dive and tenement spilt the things that were so decently hidden in the cold days and nights of winter. On such nights the sweltering heat forced into the open the strangest beings, creatures which even the oldest inhabitants could not remember having seen before and the most hardened could hardly wish to see again.