Isobel shrugged. ‘Just go there with an open mind, that’s all,’ she advised. It wasn’t up to her to shatter his faultless image of Diantha. And, anyway, she wasn’t sure enough of her own suspicions to make an issue out of it.
But she was as determined as he was to find out.
He had been gone for less than two minutes before she was printing off her second lot of copies. His car was only just turning off the driveway when she was calling a taxi for herself. The Christophoros mansion was much the same as most of the houses up here on the hill. She was greeted by a maid who showed her into a small reception room, then hurried off to get the daughter of the house.
Diantha took her time. Needing something to do, Isobel reached into her bag to search out a hair-band and snapped her hair into a pony-tail. Leandros would see this as her donning her tough-lady persona, but she didn’t feel tough. Her nerves were beginning to fray, her stomach dipping and diving on lingering nausea. She didn’t know if she had done the right thing by coming here, wasn’t even sure how she was going to tackle this—all she did know with any certainty was that Diantha had to be faced, whether guilty or innocent.
The door began to open and she swung round as Diantha appeared looking neat in a mid-blue dress and wearing a thoroughly bland expression that somehow did not suit the occasion, bearing in mind that Isobel could be a jealous wife come here to tear her limb from limb.
Indeed Diantha looked her over as if she were the marriage breaker in this room. ‘We will have to make this brief.’ There was a distinct chill to her tone. ‘My father is on his way home and he will not like to find you here.’ Then she really took the wind out of Isobel’s sails when she added smoothly, ‘Now you have seen the truth about Leandros and myself, can we hope that you will get out of our lives for good?’
Isobel’s fingers tightened on the shoulder strap to her bag. ‘So it was you who sent the photographs?’ she breathed.
Diantha’s cool nod confirmed it. It seemed a bit of a letdown that she was admitting it so easily. ‘Though I must add that anything I say to you here I will deny to anyone else,’ she made clear. ‘But you are in the way, and I am sick of being messed around by Leandros. Two weeks ago he was promising me he would divorce you and marry me, then I am being sidelined—for business reasons, of course; isn’t it always?’
‘Business reasons?’ Isobel prompted curiously.
‘The lack of a pre-nuptial agreement between the two of you put Leandros in an impossible situation.’
It was like being in the presence of some deadly force, Isobel thought with a shiver. Diantha was calm, her voice was level and Isobel could already feel herself being manipulated by the gentle insertion of the word pre-nuptial. Before she knew it Lester Miles’ warnings about the power of her own position came back to haunt her. She was seeing Leandros’s sudden change from a man ready to sever a marriage to a man eager to hang on to that marriage.
‘I have to say that I am seriously displeased at being forced to lie about our relationship while he sorts out this mess,’ Diantha continued. ‘But a man with his wealth cannot allow himself to be ripped off by a greedy wife. Nor can he afford to risk our two family names being thrown into the public arena with a scandal you will cause if you wish to turn your divorce ugly. But you mark my words, Kyria Petronades, a contract will appear before very soon, mapping out the details of any settlements in the event of your marriage reaching a second impasse.’
‘But you couldn’t wait that long,’ Isobel inserted. ‘So you decided to cause the feared scandal and get it out of the way?’
‘I am sick of having to lie to everyone,’ she announced. ‘It is time that people knew the truth.’
‘About your affair in Spain with my husband,’ Isobel prompted.
‘A relationship that began long before you left him, if you must know the truth.’ Her chin came up. ‘He visited me in Washington, DC.’
Isobel remembered the Washington trips all too well.
‘Our two weeks spent in Spain were not the first stolen weeks we managed to share together. I have no wish to hurt your feelings with this, but he was with me only yesterday, during siesta. We have an apartment in Athens where we meet most days of the week.’
‘No photographic evidence of these meetings?’ Isobel challenged.
‘It can be arranged.’
‘Oh, I am sure that it can.’ And she removed the printouts from her handbag and placed them down on the table that stood between them. Believing she knew exactly what she was being presented with, Diantha didn’t even deign to look.
‘You are nothing but a lying, conniving bitch, Diantha,’ Isobel informed her. ‘You manipulate people and adore doing it. Chloe was manipulated to get you to Spain. My mother-in-law has been beautifully manipulated by your ever-so-gentle eagerness to please and offer her up an easier alternative to me as the daughter-in-law from hell.’
‘You said it,’ Diantha responded, revealing the first hint that a steel-trap mind functioned behind the bland front.
Isobel laughed. ‘Leandros extols you for your great organisational skills—not a very appetising compliment to the woman he loves, is it?’ she added when Diantha’s spine made a revealing shift. ‘Apparently you know how to put together a great party.’ She dug her claws in. ‘As for me, well, I struggle to organise anything, but he calls me a witch and a hellion and claims I have barbs for teeth. When we make love he falls apart in my arms and afterwards he sleeps wrapped around me. Not like this.’ She stabbed a finger at the photograph. ‘Not with him occupying one side of the bed while I occupy the other.’
Black eyelashes flickered downwards, her face kept firmly under control. Now she had drawn her attention to the photographs, Isobel slid out the other one, and its enlarged partners in crime. ‘Thankfully, Leandros still has all his fingers.’ She stabbed one of her own fingers on the missing one splayed across Diantha’s stomach. ‘If he stood behind you like this, the top of your head would reach no higher than his chest, not his chin. You are short in stature, Diantha—let’s call a spade a spade here, since you wish to talk bluntly. You are not quite this slim or this curvaceous. And when you cut, shave and paste with a computer mouse it is always advisable to make sure you fill in the gaps you make, like the yacht rail here, which seems to stop for no apparent reason. A good manipulator should always be sure of all her facts and you forgot to check one small detail. This is my job.’ She stabbed at the printouts. ‘I am a professional photographer. I dealt with computer photography almost every day of my working life. So I know without even bothering to enlarge the bedroom scene that the folds of the sheet don’t quite follow a natural line.
The slight shrug of Diantha’s shoulders and indifferent expression surprised Isobel because she should have been feeling the pinch of her own culpability by now. But she just smiled. ‘You are such a fool, Isobel,’ she told her. ‘I have always known what you do for a living, and these photographs were always meant to be exposed as fakes. Indeed it is essential that I did so to allay a scandal. I merely intended to expose them myself for what they are, then suggest that you probably did these yourself as a way of increasing your power in a divorce settlement. For who else is better qualified?’
She believes she has everyone tied up in knots, Isobel realised in gaping incredulity. She is so supremely confident of her own powers of manipulation that she has stopped seeing the wood for the trees!
‘There is only one small problem with your plan, Diantha,’ Isobel said narrowly. ‘These photographs may be fakes, but I have no reason to want a divorce.’
‘But does he want you or is Leandros merely protecting his business interests?’
‘Oh, yes, I want her,’ a smooth, deep voice replied.