Free Killing the Emperors by Ruth Dudley Edwards

What’s he got to do with this? Hasn’t she got enemies closer to home?’
    ‘Well, of course she’s got enemies, Jim,’ said Amiss, pushing his almost untouched plate away. ‘We’re talking about Jack. But Sarkovsky’s the only serious one who comes to mind at the moment. Although I don’t like Sir Nicholas Serota and I doubt if he liked what she said about him in the culture debate in the House of Lords last week, he has a thick skin and plenty more pressing enemies than Jack Troutbeck. Besides, even Jack never suggested he was a criminal. Well, except culturally.’
    ‘So tell me about this Sarkovsky.’
    ‘You begin, Ellis.’
    ‘We had dinner with Jack some weeks back, when you were away. She was rather worked up about the iniquities of the contemporary art world.’
    ‘In other words,’ said Amiss, ‘she did a lot of ranting.’
    ‘Eventually, it turned out that this new obsession had been inspired by her relationship with Sarkovsky.’
    ‘Her relationship? What sort of relationship?’ asked a startled Milton. ‘I thought she and Myles were still an item.’
    ‘Well, yes, when she isn’t off having dalliances. Or him off adventuring in the Middle East. Which is where he is at the moment.’
    ‘She described Sarkovsky as her walker,’ said Pooley. He paused and considered. ‘No, she said she was his walker, but then modified it to trophy.’
    ‘As in trophy wives?’ asked Milton.
    ‘No and yes,’ said Amiss. ‘In such matters apparently he likes tall blondes half his age with big chests. He swaps a wife from time to time when she reaches what he considers her sell-by date. But being uneducated and sensitive about it, he was attracted by the idea of an intellectual trophy. Brain-candy, I guess. He met Jack at some social gathering where she was holding forth about the wonders of Western civilisation and presumably thought her the answer to an ignoramus’ prayer.
    ‘What with Jack being a baroness and the head of a Cambridge college, she enhanced his status just by being seen with him. But he also wanted her to educate him about culture.’
    Milton was bewildered. ‘Why would she do that? Isn’t she too busy to be a tutor?’
    ‘The bait was luxury, Jim. Extreme luxury. You know our Jack’s a sybarite. She loves travelling in extreme comfort. And staying in the best suites in the most expensive hotels. She said we’d get the idea if we thought of a tutor on the Grand Tour with a rich, vulgar, and doltish spendthrift. They went to Venice on the Orient Express so she could introduce him to Byzantine art and architecture as well as to the Renaissance.’
    ‘And by private plane to Rome so she could teach him some classical history,’ contributed Pooley.
    ‘And cruised around the Greek islands in his yacht so she could tell him about the origins of democracy and recite Byron at him.’
    ‘I can see the appeal of all that,’ said Milton. ‘Do you want any more of that pizza, Robert?’
    ‘No, no. Have it. What an appetite you’ve got tonight.’
    ‘I’m busy.’ Milton reached across and cleared Amiss’ plate. ‘I live alone. I forget to buy anything. I get hungry. Married blokes have wives to force them to eat, I seem to remember. Divorced ones don’t.’
    ‘It’s not quite that simple, Jim. Ellis and I don’t exactly have wives wearing pinnies and cooking up a storm. I imagine we can both see the attractions of a fully-staffed yacht as well as the next man. And according to Jack it was opulent in the extreme. She said rather apologetically that Sarkovsky was in the second eleven on Planet Oligarch, seeing as how—unlike Roman Abramovich, of whom he was madly jealous—he didn’t own a football team and has only one yacht, which shamingly doesn’t double as an aircraft carrier or have an escape capsule. It does, of course, have the obligatory helicopter pad—a convenience she took to. And she waxed pretty eloquent about the virtues of the butler and the chef on duty on