“He done her wrong' motif,” said Kenneth, screwing up his eyes at the canvas before him. “What sordid minds policemen have!”
“Blackmail,” said Courtenay, looking round for an ashtray, and finally throwing the stub of his cigarette out of the window. “Seventy pounds and a seedy stranger were the main subjects of my policeman's discourse. I was regretfully unable to throw light.”
“I object!” Kenneth said. “I won't have seedy strangers butting in on a family crime. It lowers the whole tone of the thing, which has, up to now, been highly artistic, and in some ways even precious. Go away, Murgatroyd: no one wants any tea.”
“You speak for yourself, Master Kenneth, and let others do likewise,” replied Murgatroyd, who had come into the studio with her usual purposeful tread, and was ruthlessly clearing the table of its load of impedimenta. “Well, Miss Tony, so you're back, I see. Where's Mr Giles?”
“He wouldn't come in. He says Kenneth will have to go to the funeral, by the way.”
“There's others could have told him that. And a decent suit of blacks,” said Murgatroyd cryptically.
“Be damned to you, I won't.”
“That's quite enough from you, Master Kenneth, thank you. You'll be chief mourner, what's more. Don't put any of your nasty wet brushes down on the tablecloth, and not that smelly turps neither.”
“Kenneth,” said Leslie Rivers, “could I have the sketch?”
He glanced down at her, his brilliant, slightly inhuman gaze softening. “You can.”