‘Not every one,’ she said firmly. ‘Not me.’

Ali had finished his royal progress and was settling at one of the tables. Fran edged nearer, trying to observe him without looking too interested.

He played for very high stakes, and when he lost he merely shrugged. Fran gulped at the sums he tossed away as though they were nothing. She noticed, too, that once play started he forgot about the women at his elbow. One minute he was flirting madly with them. The next they didn’t exist. Her annoyance grew.

It grew even more when play stopped and he turned on the charm again, clearly expecting to take up with them where he’d left off. Worse still, they let him.

‘You see that?’ she muttered to Joey. ‘Why doesn’t one of them spit in his eye?’

‘You try spitting in the eye of a hundred billion,’ Joey said. ‘See how easy it is. Why must you be such a puritan, Fran?’

‘I can’t help it. It’s how I was raised. It’s not decent for one man to have so much-so much-just so much.’

She’d been going to say ‘so much money’, but Sheikh Ali had so much of everything. From the moment of his birth it had all fallen into his lap. His father, the late Sheikh Saleem, had married an Englishwoman and remained faithful to her all his life. Ali was their only son.

He’d inherited his little principality at the age of twenty-one. His first act had been to cancel all deals with the world’s mighty oil corporations, and to renegotiate them, giving Kamar a far larger slice of the profits. The companies had raged but given in. Kamar’s oil was of priceless quality.

In the ten years since then he’d multiplied his country’s wealth more than ten times. He lived a charmed life between two worlds. He had apartments in both London and New York, and he commuted between them in his private jet, making huge, complex deals.

When not enjoying the high life in the west he returned to his domain to live in one of his palaces, or to visit Wadi Sita, a top secret retreat in the desert, where he was reputed to indulge in all manner of excesses. He never contradicted these rumours, nor even deigned to acknowledge them, and because no journalist had ever been allowed to glimpse the truth the stories flourished unchecked.