She suggests that such money was chicken-feed, given her spending habits "The limit on one of my credit cards alone was £50,000. A month. The ruby and diamond earrings that she is wearing have alone, she says, been valued on Bond Street at £20,000.

The way Artsrunik tells it, her spending habits- from the funds supplied to her by ex-husbands and the other men who have passed through her life - should have provided her and Lester with the perfect alibi. During the hours before, during and after the murder, her credit card was in non-stop use - buying antiques paying for meals, buying clothes. In addition, "There was no material evidence - no blood, no DNA, nothing."

Four days after the murder, a Swat anti-terrorist team ambushed the couple. "They shouted; 'Police! Down!' Dorian likes to play practical jokes, and I thought it was a joke he had set up. I started laughing. I stopped when they laid me down and handcuffed me."

Both Lester and Artsrunik were, in their different ways, part of an exceptionally beau monde. Lester worked for media billionaire John Kluge, who was described as "formerly the world's richest man", and later continued to work for his estranged wife, former belly-dancer Patricia Kluge. As for

She chose her first husband, Maurice,. a Frenchman three decades older than her, because he could give the teenage Valentina a passport out of Communist Bulgaria. Then came a retired English army officer, also 30 years older, who bought her a house in France. Then came Edward Artsrunik, Armenian count and international insurance broker. Then came David  Conway, a shipping heir she came upon (as one does) in a St Moritz hotel. (She had gone on holiday to St Moritz with the nanny and her young son - to escape from money problems.) And  finally, Lester.

Everything about her is larger than Life. She says that she is fond of red. But you could guess that, without being told. She is elegantly dressed in shades of red from top to toe; the  living-room walls are red; the dining-room walls are red. Even in difficult circumstances, she retains her loyalty to keeping some would-be glamour. In prison ("a cross between boarding school and an East European hospital''), she says she became famous for her home-made lipstick Vaseline and red-coloured markers together. She says with a Diana-like, knowing innocence: "I have had a good life."

Nor does she seem to quarrel with her men definitively. Edward Artsrunik was scathing of her at the time of their break-up, describing her as "a terrible social climber''; but he now