Mark Gatiss - The Vesuvius Club

Supple blinked repeatedly, as was his habit, one lid lingering over his jade-irised glass eye (the left one) as I let myself imagine him tramping into the studio in doublet and hose, all in the name of family honour.

He cleared his throat with a grisly expectoration and I realized he’d been addressing me. I snapped out of my reverie and peeped around the side of the canvas. I’ve been told I peep rather well.

«I do beg your pardon, I was absorbed in the curve of your earlobes.»

«I was suggesting dinner, sir,» said Supple, flipping a half-hunter watch from his waistcoat. «To celebrate the successful conclusion of me picture.»

«I should be delighted,» I lied. «But I feel it only right to warn you that I have a peculiar horror of artichokes.»

The Honourable Everard Supple rose from the doubtful Louis Quinze into which I’d plonked him, sending a whisper of paint-flakes to the dust-sheeted floor.

«We might try me club, then,» he suggested, brushing the sleeve of his frock-coat. «Or do you have somewhere you artistic-types favour?»

I rose and ran one of my long, bony hands through my hair. They are long, white and bony, I cannot deny it, but very fine. Waistcoat and face flecked with paint, I shrugged.

«As a matter of fact, I do,» I said. «Charming little spot in Rosebery Avenue. Come back at eight and we’ll drive over.» So saying, I suddenly turned the easel on its squeaking castors, revealing the portrait to the golden light washing through the skylight. «Behold! Your immortality!»

Supple creaked forward on his expensive boots and fixed a monocle, rather unnecessarily, into the orbit of his false eye. He frowned, cocked his head to left and right and grimaced.

«Well, I suppose you get what you pay for, eh, Mr Box?»

My name is Lucifer Box, but I imagine you know that. Whether these scribblings eventually form the core of my memoirs or are found secreted in oilskin wrappers at the bottom of a lavatory cistern years after my demise, I have no doubt that, by the time you read this, I will be most terribly famous.

I handed Supple his soft kid-gloves with as much brusqueness as I could muster. «You don’t like it?»

The old fool shrugged. «Just not sure it’s terribly like me.»

I helped him into his overcoat. «On the contrary, sir, I believe I have caught you.»

I smiled what my friends call, naturally enough, the smile of Lucifer.

Ah! London in the summertime! Hellish , as any resident will tell you. Even in those first few innocent years of the new century it smelled of roasting excrement. So it was with ’kerchiefs pressed to mouths that Supple and I entered the dining rooms I had selected. They were alarmingly unfashionable but, in the long light of dusk, the white-panelled plainness could have been called Vermeeresque. Not by me, you understand. A flypaper above the hearth twisted lazily, amber and black like a screw of ear-wax.

This place, I told Supple, was owned and run by a woman called Delilah whose crippled daughter I had once painted as a favour.

«She was not, perhaps, the bonniest thing,» I confided as we settled down to eat. «Lost both hands to a wasting disease and had them replaced with wooden ones. And — oh! — her little legs were in horrid iron rings.» I shook my head despairingly. «Ought to have been exposed at birth, her father said.»

«Nay!» cried Supple.

«Aye! But her dear mother loved the little mite. When I came to paint the portrait I did my best to make little Ida look like an angel. Prophetically enough. Though it turned out she had some pluck.»

Supple wiped soup from his pinkish lips. Sentimental old Victorian that he was, a tear sprang to his one good eye. Most probably the Death of Little Nell had been like mother’s milk to him.

«Poor Ida,» I sighed, picking idly at a chicken leg. «Grabbed from her bath-chair by a gang of dacoits and sold into bondage.»

Supple shook his head mournfully. No doubt an image of the doe-eyed cripple had flashed into his silly old brain. His fingers tightened on the fish-knife. «Go on. What happened?»

«She made a bolt for it, God bless her,» I continued. «Took off across the rooftops with the fiends in hot pursuit.»

Blink-blink. The jade glass eye regarded me steadily. «And then?»

I closed my eyes and steepled my fingers. «She got as far as Wapping before her brittle little legs gave out. She fell through the roof of a sugar merchant’s and into a vat of treacle. Of course, with those wooden hands she could get no purchase on the rim and she drowned. Very, very slowly.»

Drinking the last of an indifferent burgundy with an air of finality, I clapped my hands and turned the conversation towards more cheerful matters. Now I had Supple’s trust, it was time to betray that of others. I wanted the practice.

I regaled Supple with what I know to be an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes (not many of them true, certainly not the best ones) concerning the greatish and goodish who have paid yours truly not nearly enough to be immortalized in oils.

«You are very indiscreet, sir,» laughed the old man, cheering up. «I am glad not to have confided any of my secrets in you!»

I smiled my wide smile.

Supple, for his part, talked at length about his time in South Africa and the great adventure a young man like me might have there. He told me about his own daughter — a great joy to the old man by his account — and I nodded and smiled with the air of sagacity I like to assume for such occasions. I put on a good show of being fascinated by his colourful account of dawn over the Transvaal as I took out my watch and stared at the second hand racing over the porcelain dial. I could hear the soft action of the tiny spring.

It was midway between the fish course and the pudding, as Supple opened his mouth to begin another interminable tale, that I did the decent thing and shot him.

A stain spread across the breast of his stiff white waistcoat like poppy petals emerging through the snow. How I wish I’d had my sketch-book with me! The scene was a riot of crimson possibilities.

There, now. I’ve shocked you, haven’t I? What the deuce can Mr Box be up to? Are customers in such abundant supply? Well, you’ll just have to be patient. All good things et cetera.

Supple’s face, never particularly smashing as you may have gathered, froze in an expression of pained surprise and a little bubble of red spit frolicked over his lips. He slid forward on to the table where his teeth met the rim of his pudding bowl with a shocking crack, like the knees of an out-of-practice supplicant.

I watched smoke curl from the end of the snub-barrelled pistol I’d used, then replaced the weapon under a jelly mould — silver and shaped like a sleeping hare — where it had been until recently ensconced.

Lighting a cigarette, I re-pocketed my watch and, rising, dabbed a napkin at the corners of my full-lipped mouth (it’s a very pretty mouth — more of it later). Taking up a dessert spoon, I dug it into Supple’s left socket and carefully removed the old fellow’s glass eye. It popped out with just a little poking and lay nestled in my palm like a gull’s egg. I looked at the iris and smiled. It was just the shade of green I had in mind for a new tie and now I had a match for my tailor. What a happy accident! I slipped the eye into my waistcoat and draped the napkin carelessly over the dead man’s head.

A large and ugly mirror hung over the fireplace of the dark little room. I checked my appearance in it ( very acceptable), adjusting my stance to avoid the mottled edges of the glass, which tended to obscure the wonderful cut of my best tail-coat and pulled the tatty bell-rope that hung close by.

The doors were opened almost at once by a huge woman in a daffodil-coloured frock. Her gin-flushed cheeks, abutting a long, blotchy nose gave her face the appearance of bruised knackers in a harness.