‘I’m sure Mr Rivelli has interests in all your major areas of organised crime. Child slavery, drug smuggling, arms dealing, people trafficking, you name it.’

‘But he’s such a public figure.’

‘So was General Noriega.’

‘Come on, John.’ Christine shivered. ‘You’re frightening me.’

‘That,’ said John, ‘was the general idea.’

Victoria spent a lot of time in the pool, lying on her back watching the swallows whizz over the house, or resting her arms on the edge, looking over the trees and villas towards Saint-Tropez. Oh, the peace was heaven, and the expectation that Rivelli would be there any day now. That’s what Dave kept saying: any day now. He was just tying things up in London, sorting out a few loose ends before he took a good long holiday, just the two of them at Le Mûrier.

Could it be that it had all worked out just as she had planned? Janet had sued for divorce, got her settlement – more than Victoria had hoped, but Rivelli would manage, he always did. Rivelli was free, and he believed he was going to be a father. Yes, she could follow the way his mind would work. He was angry with her at first – he’d cut off her credit card, even booted her out of the penthouse, tried to cut her out of his life. But now, thanks to some clever moves and a few frantic minutes in a toilet, the unplanned masterstroke that completed the picture, he was coming back, and he was grateful. She’d freed him from Janet, she would give him a child to replace the dud back home, and she had proved that she could be trusted to keep her mouth shut.

Because there was more, much more, that Victoria could tell about Massimo Rivelli if she chose to open her mouth. She hadn’t been his mistress for ten years for nothing. She’d overheard late-night phonecalls, she’d been present at business meetings in nightclubs with unsavoury-looking characters who really didn’t look as if they had much to do with the garment industry. Why, even Dave, good old Dave who drove them around and tended to odd jobs around Le Mûrier, had other uses about which Victoria was quite able to guess. There were reasons why Dave and his wife no longer lived in London, why it was more convenient for them to live in comparative obscurity in the south of France.