And such things were a distraction that she could ill afford. She needed to concentrate on the one thing that mattered – getting Massimo. And while he stayed with his wife and his disabled son in that prison of a house in Surrey, Victoria would never be happy or secure. Yes, she knew perfectly well that he spent as little time there as he could, or so he said. He was always in Milan, or New York, or Paris, or in London with her, he said; visits ‘home’ were nothing more than duty calls. But now she thought he was lying. Adele had sown a seed of doubt. Perhaps he did still love Janet. Perhaps he valued his home life, saw it as a refuge from the hurly-burly of his professional existence. Perhaps she, Victoria, was a part of that hurly-burly from which he was glad to have some respite. Perhaps there were others like her, dotted around the world – all of them hanging on to the false promise that one day he would be theirs.

Well, if Massimo thought that she was content to be strung along and then dumped, he’d backed the wrong horse. Victoria wasn’t just some starstruck fashion bimbo. When he’d met her, she was a promising journalist. Editors always told her that she had an eye for the truth in a story. She hadn’t lost it, in all those years wallowing in the honey trap that Massimo had got her in. She could see what was going on – the lies, the avoidances. It was a shame that she had fallen so deeply in love with Massimo. It wasn’t just the sex that she was addicted to – although that was a great part of it, she thought, feeling slightly woozy at the memory of some of the things he’d done to her. It was the man himself. Everything about him – his looks, his money, the fashionable world to which he gave her access, even his dishonesty and emotional avoidance. But she would have to push that love aside for a while, if she was going to get what she wanted for the long term.

How, though, to precipitate a divorce? Of course it couldn’t appear to come from her; Adele was right about one thing. Any hint that Victoria was rocking the boat would be completely counterproductive. And Massimo wasn’t going to act; he’d have done so in the first, fine, careless rapture of their affair, when Victoria’s star was in the ascendant. Now she was a familiar part of his life, jogging along very nicely; why would he want to change things?

That left only one person in the equation: Janet. Signora Rivelli. The wife. She would have to be the one to sue for divorce. Yes, it was improbable, Victoria could see that; the woman was a devout Roman Catholic, the mother of Rivelli’s son, besides which she enjoyed the considerable material advantages of being married to the owner of a prestigious manufacturing company. The house in Surrey was rumoured to be palatial, and there were other properties all over the world. Even with the most generous divorce settlement, Janet could never have the kind of life she enjoyed as Rivelli’s wife.