Christmas Eve, 1847.
Paignton Harbour.
It’s a dark, ugly night. Darker than a whore’s arsehole, uglier than a smuggler’s prick. Black sheets of rain clatter down on the Harbourside cobbles – washing away the stink of sex, death and corruption – forcing the ladies of the night indoors.
People tell me I’m obsessed with whores. Of course I frigging am! My dead wife, Alouette, was a whore – God rest her lunatic soul – and my only daughter is a damned whore too. Believe me, my queasy obsessions are the only things that keep my rotten heart pumping.
***
My name is Thomas Thresher and my public house, the Black Dog, is within pissing distance of the Preventatives Station on Paignton Harbour. There are said to be 314 Preventatives Stations across England and Wales, and I’d wager that each one is home to a swine like the late Mr Christopher Crandall. A swollen bureaucrat with his snout in the trough. Ever since his predecessor, Burgoyne, moved to Exeter to grow fat off the wool trade with the Dutch, Crandall has lined his pockets with illicit salvage operations and shady embargoes. He has never met a smuggler he didn’t like, or encountered a bribe he wouldn’t take.
He was a beast of a man – enormous gut, thinning hair and a grisly Northern accent – thicker than winter mud. Despite his size, he had delicate hands – the kind that had never experienced hard work. I’ve encountered whores with more callouses on their hands than Crandall!
People around here laughed at him, their eyes shining with hate. Three known bastard children and a fourth inside my daughter’s belly. People grunted his name behind cupped hands while they spat in the gutter. I heard the whispers – string up the pig-man and the trough gets much deeper for the rest of us. Everyone said it, but few people around here would have the nerve to end another man’s life – no matter how repugnant he was.
That said, Crandall’s money was as good as anyone’s in this town. Everyone is welcome in my establishment – from the upstanding gentlemen of the Preventative Water Guard to the light-fingered petty thieves, flush from another afternoon picking pockets on Palace Avenue.
Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two pennies, dead by my hand and rolled into Paignton Harbour if they abused my hospitality. Last week I had a smuggler from Yeovil in here fighting over a case of salted pork. He ended the night stripped to the waist, waving a reaping hook in my face. What did I do? I took a bite out of his damned windpipe and hacked him up for fish bait.
The truth is, I’ve killed so many men I no longer remember their faces, let alone their names. I will, however, never forget the dying moments of Mr Christopher Crandall…
***
I hammer on the door to Crandall’s lodgings with the flat of my hand.
Moments later, the oak door of the cottage swings open. He peers over his spectacles at me.
“Yes?”
I wave the bottle in front of me.
“Busy, Crandall? Can I tempt you with a Christmas drink?”
He inspects the label of the bottle in my hands.
“Crikey! I’ve never tasted a Haitian rum before. My brother-in-law spent some time out there among the savages – lost his damned mind by all accounts. Come, join me in my lodgings, bar steward. It appears you and I have much to discuss.”
Crandall turns slowly – he’s a big man and has the turning circle of a Chinese war junk. He heaves his bulk up the staircase, leaving sweaty handprints on the banister from the exertion. Halfway up he pauses for breath.
“Oh, remove your boots, bar steward. Constance will have my guts for garters if another one of you bastards tramples damned cabbage into my study.”
I kick off my boots at the top of the stairs and place them outside Crandall’s study.
The floor is littered with crumpled paperwork and cruddy footprints.
“Excuse the mess. I needed to teach my chowder-headed apprentice some manners this afternoon.”
I shrug and place the bottle of rum on his desk. I clench my fists as the fury bubbles up from my gut.
His piggy eyes gleam with amusement.
“Something on your mind, bar steward?”
“You need to make an honest woman of my Mary – just like you promised.”
He gurgles with laughter. It sounds like warm blood sloshing down a rusted drain.
“I’ve promised the very same thing to a dozen girls since I’ve been in Devon. I did the same to a big-boned farm girl this very afternoon!”
“She’s with child, Crandall!” I roar.
He chuckles.
“Fuck off, bar steward! Hardly the virgin birth, is it? She’s had more sailors inside her than the HMS Venerable!”
I take a step towards him.
He uncaps the rum, raises it to his nose and scoffs. He grins – his smile as wide as the Esplanade.
“I’m not drinking this foul-smelling piss. Would you really try to poison me, bar steward?!”
He waddles to the window and empties the bottle into the rainy night, his phlegmy voice roaring wordlessly.
“You pigeon-livered piece of shit, Crandall!”
I double him over with a punch to the gut, then mount him like he mounts my daughter every Sunday night.
I pinch his snout.
“Open wide, little piggy. There’s more from where that came from!”
I spent nearly three years with the British East India Company during the First Opium War. You don’t torture a Chinese river pirate for four days without picking up a bit of the language. My rudimentary grasp of Chinese has served me well in my discussions with Mr Chung. He’s a smuggler who liked Paignton so much he never left. An extremely clever man – he insisted on selling me two vials of poison, just in case.
I empty the noxious liquid into Crandall’s gaping mouth. He writhes in agony as the poison hardens his fat veins and clogs his arteries. He moans like a Cornishman with cock-rot, then he falls silent, his ugly mouth contorted in a silent ‘O’.
I climb to my feet, nerves tingling. He looks even more obscene in death than he ever looked in life. I pity the gravedigger who has to prepare his burial place.
***
My Mary may be a whore, but she’s a smart girl. She told me that Crandall didn’t trust anyone with his private affairs – not his foppish apprentice, nor his conniving bitch of a wife.
She told me that he kept a secret key on a steel ring that had been pierced through his flabby navel. She said it reminded her of the type of ring you would find installed through the nasal septum of pigs. She told me he was constantly fishing the key out of his swampy crotch or the folds of his flab during intercourse.
I untuck his voluminous shirt and rip the steel ring out of his belly with my rotten teeth. The keys to the damned kingdom!
I rip the blanket off the strong-box in the corner of the room.
I’m not a thief – not ordinarily – but no one ever got rich running a public house. Not in this damned town.
I fill my pockets with the coins and banknotes from the strong-box. The bottom of the box is layered with straw, which I scoop up and toss on the floor of the study.
“Buggery and blazes!” I hear myself shout.
Just as that shit-sack De Groot told me!
The five solid-gold cock-rings glint under the candle light. Each one has been studded with a series of fat, little rubies – gems the size of raspberries.
The rings have been placed on a rudimentary wooden dildo and balanced on a faded velvet cushion at the bottom of the box.
The dildo looks uncomfortable, but impressive – and I’m no shrinking violet – my cock reaches the bottom of a tankard on a warm day.
I slide the first cock-ring off the wooden shaft and test it with my teeth.
“Frigging hell!”
***
De Groot rode down from Exeter on a tinker’s horse and carriage, and walked from Marldon Village all the way down to Paignton Harbourside, in search of answers about his missing brother.
The only surviving smuggler communicated to De Groot that a man matching Christopher Crandall’s description – a “grote dikke man” – drowned his brother in the icy shallows last month, his shiny boot pressed against the poor bastard’s throat. Afterwards, he ransacked the shipwrecked boat’s cargo.
The cock-rings were stolen from a diplomat in Sumatra, in the Dutch East Indies and smuggled to Europe on a Dutch East India Company vessel, where a sale was duly agreed in Rotterdam. The items were destined for the greasy-fingered Wharfinger at the Exeter Custom House, secreted amidst a wool shipment, but the smuggler’s craft ran aground due to the stormy weather and ended up shattered into pieces on Paignton Ledges.
When a bedraggled-looking De Groot arrived at my establishment he was babbling like a proper rum-gagger. I plied the hapless Dutchman with local cider, and enjoyed his lurid tales of sexual misadventures in the hinterlands of Makasar, Manado and Kupang. When he finally passed out, I slashed his throat with my boot-knife and hauled him outside, towards the same watery grave as his brother.
***
Outside, the Harbour appears empty – just like my cold, dead heart. I take a deep breath of the rotten fish-stink to rid my sinuses of Crandall’s malodorous trouser ooze.
Across town, impossibly sweet voices sing Christmas carols.
“Silent night, holy night.”
Those sweet children sound like castrated angels.
“All is calm, all is bright.”
The deep pockets of my overcoat jangle with Crandall’s ill-gotten gains as I stumble back to the Black Dog to examine my loot.
Up ahead, a pair of bored-looking mutton shunters go about their business.
I melt into the gloom like the ghost of Christmas past.
Merry frigging Christmas to me.
To Be Continued…
Things To Do In Devon When You're Dead... 