‘I’ll have to remember that when I negotiate my next contract.’

She lifted her glass and her cool, green eyes appraised me over the rim. ‘What business would that be?’

‘What else but insurance? I’m a money man at heart.’

She smiled. ‘I doubt that. Are you married?’

‘Not at present.’

‘You sound as though you’ve been burned. You were married?’

I hooked over a chair with my foot and sat down. ‘Twice. My first wife died and my second divorced me.’

‘I’m sorry to hear about the first, and surprised at the second.’

‘Surprised?’

‘I can’t see how a woman in her right mind would let you get away.’

I thought she was joking but she seemed serious enough. Abruptly she put down her glass and walked across the kitchen to open the lid of a big deep freezer. I played it lightly and said to her back, ‘There was nothing to it. I didn’t wriggle off the hook – she threw me back.’

‘Why? Were you tomcatting?’

You ask some damn personal questions, Jill Salton, I thought, then reconsidered. Come to that, so did I. Perhaps this was her way of giving me a taste of my own medicine. ‘No,’ I said. ‘She didn’t like bigamy. I was married to the insurance industry.’

She took some packets to a counter and switched on an oven, then began to prepare the food. From what I could see, millionaires didn’t eat any better than the rest of us – just the same old frozen garbage. ‘Some women are fools,’ she said. ‘When I married David I knew what I was getting into. I knew he had his work and it would take up a lot of his time. But there’s a certain type of woman who doesn’t understand how important a man’s work can be to him.’ She paused with a knife upheld. ‘I suppose it means as much as having a baby does to a woman.’

‘You’re not the liberated feminist type, then. When were you married?’

‘Four years ago.’ She got busy with the knife. ‘Believe it or not, I was still a virgin at twenty-four.’

She was right – I did find it hard to believe. I wondered why the hell she was telling me all this. My acquaintanceship with beautiful young heiresses was admittedly limited, but I’d come across a handful in the way of business and none had felt impelled to tell me the more intimate details of her life. Still, statistically, anything can happen given a long enough period of time, and maybe she’d get around to telling me about the quarrel with her husband.

She said, ‘David was exactly twice as old as I was, give or take a couple of weeks. My family said it would never work.’

‘Did it?’