Chapter Twenty-One

Crash

Listen, mate, Diana’s possibly been killed by the bloody paparazzi and you’re trying to flog me pictures of her still warm corpse.

—Piers Morgan’s diary, Sunday, August 31, 1997

SILENT SUNDAY.

The people of England went to bed on Saturday night, having just seen happy television images of a playgirl Princess leaving Sardinia with her racy new boyfriend. They rose to somber bulletins about the return of her coffin. Some were awakened by ringing telephones while it was still dark: insomniacs and night workers, who first heard the news, were calling friends and family with the cry “I just have to talk to someone.” There was a power surge beginning at around 4 A.M. as millions of kettles were turned on to “brew up” pots of tea for the TV marathon. The national anthem played every half hour. There was no precedent for such a gesture—Diana was no longer a member of the Royal Family—but then, there was no precedent for anything that was to happen in the coming week. The cancellation of the day’s football coverage was bravely borne. On the railways and in airports, the reticent British turned and hugged one another for comfort. The stiff upper lip was trembling. Soon it broke into the most astonishing collective weeping the nation has ever seen.

With the grief came a compulsion to blame. The loss of one so special and so young in circumstances so violent yet so mundane required a culprit or a conspiracy, an explanation commensurate with the scale of the shock. Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, got the tumbrel rattling within hours of her death. Standing outside his leafy Cape Town home, where he was vacationing with his children, he issued a fiery denunciation: “I always believed the press would kill her in the end. But not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case. It would appear that every proprietor and editor of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her, encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit of Diana’s image, has blood on their hands today.”

The paparazzi were truly in the crosshairs. If any representative of that nasty, foreign-sounding breed had shown his face that day in any of the shires or suburbs of England, he would have been drawn and quartered. It could hardly have looked worse for them. Of the pack pursuing Diana from the Ritz—five cars, three motorbikes, and two scooters—the first to reach the crash had a name tailored for a public lynching: Romuald Rat, aged twenty-five. It didn’t help that he was the same nearly six-foot burly photographer who had shoved against Dodi and Diana as they entered Dodi’s apartment on the Rue Arsene-Houssaye earlier that night. The Honda 650 on which Rat was riding pillion screeched to a halt twenty yards past the debris. The photographer jumped off and ran back toward the wreck. As he ran, he snapped off one picture, then two more. How could he not? The scene in the ghastly fluorescent-lit tunnel under the Place d’Alma was one of such lurid hell it demanded to be recorded. The luxury Mercedes bearing four from the Ritz was now a bundle of twisted metal facing the direction it had come from. Gray smoke from its engine mingled with petrol fumes and a metallic smell of burning. Its horn blared ceaselessly into the night, jammed by the dead body of the driver, Henri Paul, pinioned on the steering column by the impact of a direct collision with the thirteenth of the tunnel’s concrete pillars at sixty-eight miles an hour.

The Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed, and their bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones had been flung violently around as the car rebounded from the impact and hurtled spinning across two lanes into the right tunnel wall. Diana lay crumpled on the floor of the wreck, doubled up with her head wedged between the two front seats and facing the back. Her jewelry—a bracelet with six rows of pearls, a gold watch decorated with white stones—was scattered about.

Rat prided himself on knowing first aid and resuscitation techniques. He opened the rear door of the Mercedes. He saw Dodi Fayed mangled, obviously dead, his jeans ripped apart, and Diana still breathing and apparently unmarked, her body covered by a floor mat. He lifted the mat and used it to cover Dodi’s exposed genitals, then took Diana’s hand to feel her pulse. She moaned. “Be cool, doctor is coming,” Rat said to her in French-accented English. He uttered the same reassuring words to Rees-Jones, semiconscious in the front seat. The bodyguard’s nose and eye sockets had been smashed back so far that, in profile, his bloodied face looked almost completely flat.

Within two minutes of the crash, more camera flashes punctuated the eerie glow. In the car doorway, Rat was jostled by a rival French photographer, Christian Martinez, forty-three, taking pictures of Diana over Rat’s shoulder. “Get back, don’t take any more pictures inside the car,” Rat shouted. “Va te faire foutre!” Martinez snarled. “Go fuck yourself! Get out of the way! I’m doing the same job as you!”

The first doctor appeared in little more than a minute after the crash. The photographers made way for him. Dr. Frederic Mailliez, thirty-six years old, worked for the emergency call service SOS Médicins, but it was by luck he was on his way from a birthday party when he entered the tunnel, in the opposite direction to Henri Paul, saw the smoldering wreck, and called the emergency services on his mobile. “The back door was already open when I reached the car…. Ibegan examining the young woman in the back. I could see she was beautiful, but at that stage, had no idea who she was.” Diana was having difficulty breathing. Mailliez ran back to his car, grabbed an oxygen mask and tank from his trunk, and raced back to lift her head and gently fit the mask. She resisted, “moaning and gesturing in all directions.” When she cried out, he knew she was English. “She kept saying how much she hurt.” She had no obvious external injuries, beyond a gash on her forehead, and a weak and rapid pulse. Dr. Mailliez thought she had a fair chance of surviving.

A policeman fought his way to the car through at least a dozen excited paparazzi, whose flashes were going off like machine guns. Officer Sebastien Dorzee and his partner, Lino Gagliardone, heading toward Place d’Alma along Cours Albert Premier in response to a radio alert, had seen people frantically pointing in the direction of the tunnel. “There’s been a crash—get down there—it’s in the tunnel—a terrible noise like a bomb explosion—hurry up!” Gagliardone radioed for backup from the patrol car while Dorzee ran to the Mercedes, reached the rear door, and took over briefly from Dr. Mailliez. It was exactly 12:30 A.M. Dorzee recognized the Princess of Wales. Her eyes were open. She uttered something “in a foreign language”—he thought it was “My God,” in English. She turned her head and saw the lifeless Dodi just in front of her, then turned her head again toward the front where the bodyguard was writhing and Henri Paul lay dead. She became agitated, then lowered her head and closed her eyes.

At 12:33 A.M., Dorzee and Mailliez stepped aside for the Sapeurs-Pompiers—medically trained firefighters. Ten of them appeared in the tunnel in T-shirts and dark blue trousers, led by Sergeant Xavier Gourmelon. Two pompiers lifted out Dodi and began, futilely, to administer cardiac massage. As for Rees-Jones, it was impossible to extricate him right away. The car roof would have to be cut off under floodlights by a camion de desincarceration—a truck outfitted as a kind of mobile can-opener—and the disturbance was considered dangerous to Diana. They lifted the bodyguard’s head so he could breathe and put him in a cervical collar. Sergeant Philippe Boyer, attending Diana, gave her a new oxygen mask and covered her with a metallic isothermal blanket. Gourmelon heard Diana murmur, “My God, what’s happened?”

The scene around the crash was now chaotic. Blocked cars were honking, people were yelling, the Mercedes horn was still blaring. There was the pin-pon sound of sirens as police and fire brigades converged. The constant camera flashes, fast and strobelike, made movement look jerky. Some in the gathering crowd shouted insults at the paparazzi. Dorzee tried to halt the frenzy of picture taking, but Christian Martinez pushed back. “Piss off, let me do my work!” he yelled. “In Sarajevo, the cops don’t stand in our way!” (Later, Dorzee asserted that “at no time did a photographer come to lend a hand.”) Into the melee in the tunnel roared a BMW motorcycle with a young woman, clad in black leather, riding pillion. It was Mme. Maud Coujard, the deputy public prosecutor. Numerous photographers had fled on the arrival of police reinforcements; Mme. Coujard had the rest rounded up and driven off in a van for interrogation.

While the French took their time investigating nine photographers and a motorcycle messenger on suspicion of “involuntary homicide” and failing to assist people in danger, the focus of the blame in some quarters shifted to the supposedly poor French medical care. If only Diana had been tended by the superior British or American systems! She could have been saved! Five months later, two reporters for Time magazine, Thomas Sancton and Scott MacLeod, would give transatlantic weight to this xenophobic thesis, quoting American doctors in their 1998 book Death of a Princess. In 2001, Professor Christiaan Barnard, Diana’s big hope for a job for Hasnat Khan, fertilized another round of “DIANA COULD HAVE LIVED” headlines.

These “what if?” scenarios boil down to an argument about emergency systems. In Britain and the United States, the priority is to scoop up the victim and race to a hospital. The French have opted for a different system. They are proud of it, and of their emergency medical service, known as SAMU (for Services d’Aide Médicale d’Urgente), which is directly tied to the state-run hospitals. They believe that recovery is more likely if a patient in trauma is stabilized on the spot and then taken with all reasonable speed to a hospital already alerted to have appropriate teams ready to act. Their ambulances, which are equipped with state-of-the-art cardiac resuscitation equipment superior to what is found in conventional ambulances in the United States and the United Kingdom, carry a doctor trained in emergency services. A supervisor on the spot liaises with SAMU Control and with the selected hospital.

French theory and practice were put to a tough test when SAMU’s coordinator, Dr. Arnaud DeRossi, and Dr. Jean-Marc Martino, a resuscitation expert, took charge of Diana at 12:40 A.M. DeRossi consulted with SAMU Control on the best way of treating Diana while Dr. Martino examined her. He found her conscious but incoherent and confused. She struggled as he put her on an intravenous drip for the trip to hospital. Her right arm was bent and dislocated, making her removal from the car a delicate operation. By 1 A.M., he had her blood pressure and breathing stabilized and, very gently, he and the firemen extracted her from between the seats and put her on the stretcher. Alas, no sooner was she on the trolley to be moved to the ambulance than her heart stopped beating. This fact, overlooked or unknown to the critics, is inconvenient for the “rush to hospital” school. Had the French doctors precipitously removed Diana from the car, she would very likely have died on the spot. When I asked the opinion of Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, the distinguished professor of clinical medicine and cardiology at Weill Medical College, Cornell University, he commented, “Given the internal injuries reported, she might have been saved only if the seventy-mile-an-hour crash had been straight into an operating room.” As it was, it took a full eighteen minutes of CPR for her to be stabilized enough to be moved.

Inside the ambulance, Dr. Martino put Diana on a respirator. Her blood pressure dropped, so he gave her a line of Dopamine to raise it. His examination revealed a right-side chest wound that had not been obvious initially. He worried that there might be internal bleeding. He was most certainly anxious to get her to the well-equipped hospital alerted by Dr. DeRossi without delay, but he had a cruel dilemma. If the ambulance jolted Diana, he risked a repeat of the cardiac arrest.

At 1:41 A.M., Dr. Martino directed the ambulance to head for the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, situated on the Left Bank beyond the cathedral of Notre Dame and next to the Gare d’Austerlitz. It was a journey of 3.8 miles—ten minutes in normal traffic. Again, there has been criticism that she was not taken to the nearest hospital, the Hôtel Dieu. But the Hôtel Dieu hospital does not have heart or neurosurgery teams and is not equipped to handle multiple trauma. Dr. DeRossi and SAMU Control agreed that Diana’s best chance was in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. It had the key staff, and on duty that night was a doctor particularly skilled in treating Diana’s apparent injuries—Dr. Bruno Riou, a professor of anesthesiology and resuscitation, who had quickly assembled the hospital’s entire recovery team.

The police cleared all the roads. This time the motorcycle outriders that accompanied Diana were her guardians, not her aggressors. But the progress of the ambulance was agonizingly slow because of Dr. Martino’s conviction that Diana’s heart could not tolerate the slightest jolt. His fears were confirmed. Just as they reached the Botanical Gardens, within sight of the hospital, Diana’s blood pressure dropped dangerously low. Dr. Martino stopped the ambulance at 2 A.M. He increased the level of Dopamine to stabilize her again. At last, they crawled into the cobbled courtyard of the Pitié-Salpêtrière.

It was a sadly appropriate destination for Diana’s last journey alive. If the history of the Ritz hotel represents the acme of society’s glamour, the history of the Pitié-Salpêtrière represents the nadir of society’s outcasts, the sorry people that Diana had tried to embrace in her life’s charitable work. The hospital was built in the seventeenth century to house homeless women and prostitutes who were rounded up and ordered arrested by King Louis XIV. It was designed by Louis Le Vau, the master architect of Les Invalides, and is walled off from the street by an extensive square courtyard. The hospital’s imposing facade has the austere, gray dignity of four centuries of suffering. Today it houses some of the best medical expertise in Paris. Beyond the great, wrought-iron gates Diana was lifted out by two stretcher bearers, with the help of the French minister of the interior, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, and his aide Sami Nair.

As she was carried into the Pavilion Cordier, housing the Accident and Emergency Department, Nair gazed down at Diana for the first time. “She had a breathing apparatus on her face and swellings on her eyes, but she still looked beautiful,” he said later. “Her face was extremely lovely, very fresh, very serene, very young. It was very moving. She had this blond hair which made her look Raphaelesque, and the Minister said to me, ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she? She’s beautiful.’”

Inside the Pavilion Cordier, the battle for Diana’s life was frantic but controlled. X-rays revealed she was bleeding in the chest cavity, compressing her heart and right lung. They drained the blood and gave her a massive transfusion, but at 2:10 A.M. her heart stopped again. Dr. Riou summoned Professor Alain Pavie, the on-call cardiothoracic surgeon, but Riou and Dr. Moncef Dahman, the duty general surgeon, began at once to open Diana’s chest to find out the cause of the bleeding. Professor Pavie arrived and the Princess was transferred to the operating theater. Pavie enlarged the opening. Now they found a tear in the upper left pulmonary vein caused when the velocity of the crash had displaced the heart from left to right. They stitched the tear. The bleeding stopped, but Diana’s heart gave up again. For an hour they tried direct massage, adrenaline, direct stimulation, and several microvolted defibrillations.

But this time Diana’s broken heart would never mend.

         

SHE WAS PRONOUNCED DEAD at 4 A.M. but was not taken to a mortuary. After the autopsy, she was moved to a secluded room on the first floor of the Pavilion Cordier, a white cotton sheet pulled up to her neck. She would remain there for the next twelve hours.

In London, Colin Tebbutt had been wakened at 3 A.M. by a royal protection officer at Balmoral who had heard that Diana’s driver had been killed in a crash and thought it might be Tebbutt. He hastened to the office at Kensington Palace. There, Michael Gibbins, the last of Diana’s private secretaries, and a few of her retainers, including Paul Burrell, were gathered around the television waiting for news from Paris. They were watching the foreign secretary, Robin Cook, tell the world from Manila that the Princess had been injured in an accident at the same moment that the phone call came to Gibbins that the Princess had just died. Burrell began to sob. Everyone was in tears and in shock—everyone except Tebbutt. He tells me that he could not allow himself to be emotional: “I went back into policeman’s mode.” He escorted the weeping Burrell to Diana’s apartment to seal it from intruders. The butler removed from a miniature marble statue the ivory rosary beads that Mother Teresa had given her, a lipstick, and a powder compact, and put them in Diana’s Gladstone bag. There would be no more effusive thank-you notes from Diana’s writing desk with the propped-up memo sheet of words she found difficult to spell. He drew the curtains and placed Diana’s jewelry in the safe. Tebbutt shut the doors to the sitting room, the bedroom, and the dressing room and sealed them with thick parcel tape, adding a sticky label, which both men signed. Then the Princess’s two closest retainers left for Paris to secure her possessions and take care of arrangements. Tebbutt borrowed a black tie from another cop in order to make the flight in time.

In Paris, Tebbutt and Burrell were driven straight to the British Embassy in the Rue du Fauborg Saint-Honoré. As they sped through the early-morning streets, Tebbutt saw the incongruity of their situation. “There we were, a chauffeur/minder and a butler with no authority. I said to Burrell, ‘They won’t be expecting a chauffeur and butler, they’ll be expecting a Major-General and ladies-in-waiting’”—but that was in the days when Diana was still HRH.

The British Ambassador to Paris, Sir Michael Jay, greeted them at the Embassy. He looked shell-shocked from his harrowing night at the Pitié-Salpêtrière. One of his staff had fainted in the hospital corridor when the doctors, their faces etched with defeat, emerged all at once from the operating room. The Princess who was the muse of every designer in the world had nothing ready to wear for her own death. From Lady Jay’s own wardrobe, Burrell and the ambassador’s wife selected a black woollen three-quarter-length cocktail dress with a shawl collar and black shoes.

At the Pitié-Salpêtrière, a small, neat head nurse escorted the unlikely protectors of Diana’s effects through the corridors to the wing where she was housed. Outside the door of her resting place, two gendarmes stood guard. Inside, standing upright against the wall like friezes on an Egyptian tomb, were two undertakers. A sliver of daylight filtered through the slits in the venetian blinds and one wall light provided illumination. Beside Diana’s bed stood a bouquet of roses from the former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his wife. The only sound was the whirring of a large fan. The room was stuffy, and Tebbutt asked for an air-conditioning unit. When he raised the blind a little, Tebbutt could see members of the press across the way trying to get pictures. He put blankets up at the windows before he looked at Diana.

Her eyes were closed, but her unblemished face was so beautiful. Just as in life, she had sustained injuries that showed nothing on the surface. “I looked at the Boss lying there and her eyelids were fluttering [from the fan],” Tebbutt told me. “For a minute I thought she was alive.” Burrell was so distressed, he had to be held up by Tebbutt and the nurse. He handed the nurse the clothes, the shoes, and the makeup and asked her to put the rosary in Diana’s hands.

Outside the hospital gates, the world’s media was making camp. The hardy core of photographers who had managed to avoid arrest were multiplying like a virus. The vans of news crews were parked in an ever-escalating electronic vigil.

         

“Assassin! Assassin!” That’s how the amiable Sun photographer Arthur Edwards was greeted by the taxi driver he flagged down at the hospital, in haste to wire his pictures of the coffin leaving the Pitié-Salpêtrière’s side entrance, led by the royal undertakers and flanked by soldiers of the presidential guard. The insult to Edwards was wounding, given the warmth of his memories of covering the Princess since her days as Lady Di. “I was hurting, too,” he told me. “I had been sixteen years photographing Diana and now she was dead.” Other pressmen at the Pitié-Salpêtrière found themselves hissed at and spat on. A hospital official had to come out and plead with the crowd: “Behave like human beings. These gentlemen are only doing their jobs.”

In the dreadful fable of her hunted death, the band of mercenaries on Diana’s tail were lumped together. But the reality was they were by no means all the same species. Edwards, of course, was not in this category. He was from the old school of Fleet Street staff photographers—relentless, yes, but dependent on access for such bread-and-butter Royal work as the tours and the state ceremonies. And even among those to whom the title “paparazzi” unquestionably applied, there were many differences, as a canvass of even three of them reveals.

Rat was no mouse, but he behaved with tolerable decency at the crash scene. He did not take any photos of the car’s interior, though he was abused as “the fat photographer” when someone in the crowd saw him lean into the wreck to take Diana’s hand. He was checking her pulse, but the image of defilement tallied with the slimy image of the excesses of his trade. In truth, the excitable Rat was more of a glossy-mag “people” photographer than a hard-edged paparazzo. For that honor you would nominate Martinez, a stocky, crew-cut fifteen-year veteran of the game described by one French reporter as “a truculent, mean-spirited guy, always ready to punch it out.” He was a master of the kind of ambush photography that harassed Diana without mercy. Martinez (who despite his taunt to the police had never been anywhere near Sarajevo) later offered a surprisingly introspective explanation for his conduct: “Being behind a camera helps. It’s a screen and allows one to keep one’s distance.”

The career of another in the pack, Jacques Langevin, forty-three, the Sygma agency’s tough guy, was the antithesis of Martinez’s. Like the other six photographers arrested because they did not scatter with the arrival of the police, Langevin had spent half a lifetime courting danger in the pursuit of hard news. He had risked his life for his prizewinning pictures from Rwanda, Lebanon, and the Gulf War. Covering the Rumanian Revolution in 1989, he had taken a bullet in the leg. His photojournalism once got top dollar at magazines like Paris Match, Bunte, Stern, Gala, and the color magazine of Britain’s Sunday Times, but by the late 1990s there was little call for the kind of gritty foreign coverage at which he—and many of his colleagues in Paris that night—excelled. The outlets they serviced now cared only about celebrities. Langevin felt demeaned by much of this work. He had been relaxing at a dinner party in the 15th arrondissement when the call came from Sygma for him to “do the Diana job” at the Ritz. As he left for the assignment, he muttered, “Scoumoune”—Arabic for “bad luck.” He showed up at the hotel in time to snap the picture of her in the car leaving the Rue Cambon entrance. Seven minutes later, he was on his way back to the dinner party, driving through the underpass, when he happened on the accident.

What all the fifteen or so photographers in that Paris tunnel had in common was the reality of the new marketplace. Subjects and photographers alike had been degraded by the media’s inexhaustible appetite for celebrity images. Once Romuald Rat had got his shots of the crash he dialed Ken Lennox, who had become picture editor of The Sun, and woke him up in London. “He didn’t sound upset,” says Lennox. “He sounded as if he was eager to get a job over with. He said he wanted three hundred thousand pounds for the picture of Diana in the car taken twenty feet away. I could have the picture exclusively for one day. I said yes then and there, got dressed, and rushed into the office.” Even as Diana struggled for life, she was being sold as an exclusive.

In the subsequent police investigation, Martinez admitted, “It’s true, we didn’t help the wounded. Maybe it was through a sense of modesty. It shows a lot of arrogance, going to help the people that we were following just a few minutes earlier.” But he broke down during the questioning. Under the French “Good Samaritan” law, it is an offense not to assist accident victims. “I was paralyzed,” he said in the same police interview, “by the relationship between myself and the people in that car.” Some relationship. Many of these photographers had spent years effectively dehumanizing Diana. She was the “Loon”—a commodity, a paycheck. Yet it is one of the paradoxes of her fate that the people who had hounded her the most were later the most bereft. Most of their careers went south in the aftermath of her death. After two years, all of them were cleared of causing the crash—none of them had been near the Mercedes—but in dismissing all the charges Judge Hervé Stéphan said that their behavior “raised moral and ethical questions…The continuous and insistent presence of the photographers had led Dodi to make decisions that, however imprudent, were a response to being hounded.” All of them were tainted by events in the tunnel, and few ever earned big money again. Serge Benamou, forty-three, told the police he didn’t want to see the shots he got that night. “Because I took pictures and now I know the people are dead. It’s a horrible memory.” What none of the image mercenaries expected was that the convergence of the most famous woman of the century and the horrific car crash that killed her would render the paparazzi pictures unpublishable to this day in mainstream media.

The public shed no tears for the paparazzi’s hard times. Nor were people in the mood to draw fine distinctions between the cowboys and the newspaper staff photographers. The empirical evidence of Diana’s coffin escorted by her ex-husband and two older sisters and draped with the Royal Standard slowly emerging from the hold of the plane at RAF Northolt brought a collective gasp of disbelief from a nation that still had not really accepted her death. The soft whirr and click of cameras seemed already muted by shame. Edwards was soon abused again just taking pictures of the people holding vigil outside Kensington Palace. His paper, like the others, was assailed by angry readers the next day. The message: “You killed her, you bastards.”

The panic in the newsrooms was palpable. Grief and fear were in equal parts entwined. The royal reporters had all been in love with Diana to a greater or lesser degree. They had to put their human emotions on hold to write their reports while also believing in their hearts that they were the reason she died. A reeling Richard Kay locked himself in his office at the Daily Mail to begin writing nonstop memories for an early edition on the streets and the next day’s entire Diana paper. James Whitaker, on a South Pacific island holiday with his wife, spent the next seven hours on an open line to the Daily Mirror pouring out ten thousand words straight to the copytaker for a twelve-page supplement headlined “End of a Fairy-tale.” “Diana is dead,” began his report. “I can’t believe I’ve written those words, but as I do so I am crying.” The newspaper’s art director, Simon Cosyns, on a driving holiday in France, was so stunned when he got the news that he drove into a wall. Piers Morgan, who had left the News of the World to edit the Mirror, was “sweating and bursting with tension”—and not only on account of the journalistic adrenaline that had made him rush to the office. On the picture editor’s computer screen, he wrote in his diary, “I have never seen more sensational news images” and all he wanted to do was black them out. His diary records him telling the representative of the issuing agency: “Listen, mate, Diana’s possibly been killed by the bloody paparazzi and you’re trying to flog me pictures of her still warm corpse. Think about it, for fuck’s sake…Ring everyone and say there’s been a terrible mistake and these photographs are not for publication…Then if I were you, I’d turn your machines off and leave the country until it all blows over. Because if people find out what you were doing they will come and get you.” At The Sun, Ken Lennox looked at Romuald Rat’s £300,000 exclusive and ordered that every frame be deleted from the system.

There was a real fear that the vengeful spirit in the air would end up shackling the press with a privacy law, one that would not only quash photographing public figures but also hinder legitimate investigations. The fact that France’s strict privacy laws had made no difference to the fate of Diana was brushed aside by politicians baring their legislative teeth. Earl Spencer’s demand for Parliamentary action elicited 80,000 letters of support. Around the world, editorial confessions of guilt tried to keep one step ahead of the denunciations. “Forgive us, Princess” was the front-page headline in Italy’s leftist L’Unita. “We feel ashamed,” said Rome’s Il Messaggero. “Sick greed,” said a German editorial. “Nothing to do with real journalism,” fumed Spain’s conservative ABC newspaper in a call for privacy laws. “Reporter-murderers” was the judgment of Moscow’s most popular daily, Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Watching the British press organize its defense was like watching an infantry square re-form under musket fire at Waterloo. The broadcast media framed the outcries as directed at the print media; the broadsheets as directed at the tabloids; the “regular” tabloids as directed at the racier red tops; the red tops as directed at the foreign press. Papers that had been boasting their Di picture scoops professed never to use paparazzi pictures. Earl Spencer’s fusillade against the press barons was treated to sly rewrites, characterized as being just an attack on paparazzi and not on the press paymasters. And of course the paps, you understand, weren’t British. They were “foreign celebrity snappers” (The Sun); “ruthless foreign paparazzi” and “yobs with cameras masquerading as photo-journalists” (News of the World); “the equivalent of cowboy mini-cab drivers” (Daily Mail). The relief felt by the tabloids when the lab tests reported Henri Paul had three times the French legal limit of alcohol in his blood (and twice the British) was like Christmas coming early. Piers Morgan celebrated in his diary with “There is a God.” “DI DRIVER DRUNK AS A PIG” was the happy headline in the Star.

The notion that Diana had been allowed to get into a car with a driver who was drunk was an even more unpalatable truth to the British public. In fact, Henri Paul had not appeared drunk in any obvious way. If he had been rolling about and slurring his speech, any number of people would have stopped him from getting into the Mercedes as the last-minute recruit to drive Diana and Dodi. He appeared normal to most (though not all) of those who saw him that night, but the truth was that he had combined his drinks with pharmaceuticals—Prozac and Tiapride—whose labels carry warnings that taking them with alcohol can make it dangerous to drive or operate machinery.

Royal drivers are expressly required to avoid alcohol for ten hours before getting behind the wheel. Yet Henri Paul’s blood alcohol reading showed that he must have been drinking even before he was unexpectedly recalled to stand by at the Ritz at ten o’clock. He joined the bodyguards at the hotel bar and had a couple of glasses of what looked like a fruit juice, and made a joke about it being “ananas” (pineapple). But the “yellow liquid” was actually a Ricard pastis, the anise-flavored aperitif, which is considerably stronger than wine. Robert Forrest, professor of forensic toxicology at the University of Sheffield, has testified for Paget that before those two drinks Paul may have had “something of the order of four to six extra 5c Ricards” between 7 P.M., when he officially went off duty, and his recall at 10 P.M. He was in no state to go hurtling at breakneck speed into a tunnel that had been the scene of thirty-four crashes and eight deaths in the previous fifteen years. “I have never seen anyone take off like that,” one of the photographers told a German TV station of Henri Paul’s departure from the Ritz. “He was driving like a gangster.”

The irony was that even in the Coleherne Court years Diana herself rarely panicked when she was in chases with photographers. Her girlfriend Cosima Somerset remembers a James Bond–like pursuit by a motorbike when they vacationed together in Majorca in May 1996. “The man on the pillion had a camera which he pointed right up against the car window. I felt as if Diana had almost been assaulted, but she remained ice cool.” It was Dodi and Henri Paul, not Diana, who couldn’t handle it. “Why were they driving so fast to get away from photographers?” Tebbutt asks today. “A camera never killed anyone.” Ken Wharfe rehearsed the same bitter thoughts when he watched the first bulletins about Diana’s injuries. “Trevor Rees-Jones was totally focused on getting her away from the paparazzi. But that wasn’t his job. His job was to stop her taking a bullet.” The evidence is that both Diana and Dodi would have survived had they been wearing seat belts; Trevor Rees-Jones, who did survive, suffered his dreadful injuries because, though cushioned on impact by the front air bag, his failure to buckle up allowed him to be hurled sideways against the interior.

Henri Paul should never have been the driver of that car on the fatal night of August 31—if Diana had not refused police protection from Scotland Yard he never would have been. And if she had told the British Embassy she was in Paris, Sir Michael Jay would have arranged for the French police services to provide an escort car. Paul was not even a qualified limousine driver. His former boss Jean Henri Hocquet, who retired in June 1997 as head of security at the Ritz, said that on one occasion he had actually forbidden Paul to drive a guest who was in danger of missing his plane because he did not have the necessary qualifications. Of the night of the crash, Hocquet told Operation Paget that it was not surprising Paul agreed to work that night when he was off duty, because “Monsieur Paul was simply nice, and as an act of friendship and because of his good nature, he could not say ‘no’ [to the boss’s son] and would agree to drive a vehicle.”

In the years since Diana’s death, conspiracy theorists have weaved Henri Paul’s off-duty life into a web of inexplicable clues—his multiple bank accounts, his alleged habitual sobriety, his link to the French secret service, his “missing hours” on the evening of her death. But, in reality, all the supposed clues point to a dour and unexceptional truth: Paul was a depressed, lonely man—what the French call a vieux garçon, a fusty, aging bachelor who drank on his own, topped up his bank accounts with cash “bungs” from Ritz clients for whom he did favors, and, in common with half the maître d’s and security personnel of the world’s five-star hotels, was paid by low-level intelligence agents and police services to inform on VIP clients whose movements were of interest. (The other half are paid by gossip columns.) The job of a security man is an isolating position. Few people want to pal around with a guy whose role includes keeping tabs on the other personnel. Paul was Mohamed Al Fayed’s on-the-ground fixer. With little private life to interfere with his job, he was always ready to run interference. His nickname at work was “la fouine”—the snooper. The most compelling interest of his story is the window it provides into the life of a bourgeois, balding, bespectacled Frenchman in solitary middle age whose daily routine intersects with the lives of rich and powerful people who spare him not a moment’s thought. There is pathos to the sterility of Paul’s two-bedroom bachelor apartment in the middle-class Rue des Petits-Champs. There is pathos, too, in the sorrow he apparently felt at the end of an affair with a former secretary in the Ritz personnel department—not so much because he missed the girlfriend but because he had grown fond of her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. He needed a drink, the ex-girlfriend said, to lighten him up. “Il avant le vin gai”—“wine made him joyful.” On his way home at night he used to park his car near a lesbian bar in the Rue de Chabanais at the corner of his street, not for some weird sexual voyeurism but because the owner, Josiane le Tellier, was a close woman friend. It was a good place for a lonely man to sit and nurse a drink.

Henri Paul’s exposure as unfit to drive the Mercedes was as much a disaster for Mohamed Al Fayed as it was a relief for the press. Broken by loss, Al Fayed mixed his rage with the Gods with the bitterness he felt for a lifetime of exclusion. Now he had to confront not only the fact that he had lost his eldest son, but that his organization was responsible and his dreams of ascendance to the pinnacle of the Establishment were finished.

As soon as he learned of Dodi’s death, Al Fayed flew to Paris on the Harrods helicopter. Muslim law required burial before sunset, and since Al Fayed wanted the funeral in England he had to move fast. He arrived at the Pitié-Salpêtrière ninety minutes after Diana’s death, only to be told that his son was not there. He was redirected to the morgue on the Right Bank. Kez Wingfield, the bodyguard who traveled with Al Fayed, recalls him waiting forlornly at dawn in front of the morgue while someone searched for the keys. “He just stood there in shock, looking at the doors,” said Wingfield. It was a metaphor for a life of being shut out. While the world’s attention was focused on the fate of a golden princess, Al Fayed was just some sad forgotten foreigner come to claim his dead son.

Al Fayed’s relationship with Dodi had been complicated. By turns he had dominated and spoiled him, but all his hopes had been sunk in him, too. Dodi was a generous soul, his faults mostly those of good nature. He wanted everyone to have a good time and to like him. He would never have aspired to be the lover of the Princess of Wales if his father had not pushed him there. Now he was body No. 2146 in a French morgue. “I could see Dodi was at peace,” Al Fayed said later. “He looked like a little boy again. For a moment I thought that his soul had come back in his body and he would live again but the injuries to the back of his head were too severe.”

Mohamed Al Fayed’s mourning was incendiary. The need to appoint a culprit became a lifetime’s unholy war. Like everybody else, his public relations executive, Michael Cole, formerly BBC Court correspondent, initially pinned blame on the paparazzi—“Gallic kamikaze, a load of disgusting creeps”—and described Henri Paul as a “sober, model employee” who was perfectly qualified to drive the Mercedes as a chauffeur. If Paul was none of the above, then Mohamed Al Fayed himself risked having to share in the legal as well as the moral responsibility for the deaths of Dodi and Diana. Henri Paul was Al Fayed’s employee from Al Fayed’s hotel, driving a car arranged by Al Fayed’s people. It was an agonizing prospect for a grieving father, and on top of the unbearable pain there had to be the fear that he would be blamed for taking the adored Princess from them.

With Michael Cole as Al Fayed’s mouthpiece, a campaign of obnoxious brilliance began. Its aim was to convince the world that the simple explanation of a drunken driver going too fast was a sinister cover-up. Conspiracy theories bloomed. Henri Paul’s blood tests were swapped! The “accident” was set up by British intelligence agents! MI6 rode in disguise with the paparazzi! Diana was embalmed to conceal her pregnancy! Someone had flashed a bright strobe light in the tunnel to blind Paul! Two SAS soldiers on the roof of the tunnel had fired frangible bullets at the front tires! A Fiat Uno car had forced Paul into the columns! The Fiat had raced to the British Embassy! Or it was a motorcyclist! Sir Robert Fellowes was in Paris an hour before to organize the murder!

Sparing no expense, treating no reputation as inviolate, Mohamed Al Fayed’s well-financed PR machine created nothing less than an alternative universe in which fantasy was fact, doubt was certainty, suspicion was conviction, absence of evidence was proof of its suppression, and anyone skeptical of the plot was either part of it or—his words—an “arse licker.” Diana was going to marry Dodi, she was already two to six weeks pregnant, and the marriage had to be stopped to save a future king of England from having a Muslim half brother and an Egyptian Muslim as a stepfather. Who would do this? In Al Fayed’s words: “Prince Philip is the one responsible for giving the order. He is very racist. He is of German blood, and I’m sure he is a Nazi sympathizer. Also Robert Fellowes was key. He is the Rasputin of the British monarchy.”

Mohamed Al Fayed’s campaign has been unceasing through a decade of rebuttal and documentation in France and Britain. It has seeded innumerable conspiracy theories—enough to provide fodder, at one time, for 35,000 Web sites—assisted by credulous journalism, led in recent years by the Daily Express, whose publisher, Richard Desmond, is a close friend of Al Fayed’s. In February 1998, the Mirror splashed an Al Fayed interview headlined “IT WAS NO ACCIDENT.” More than 12 million viewers watched Al Fayed’s mythical exercises in self-deflection dramatized in a distorted 1998 ITV special, Diana: The Last Days; a poll the next day found 97 percent were convinced by Al Fayed. No doubt in his torment he convinced himself. In tribute to Dodi on the first Saturday after Diana’s funeral, he walked alone across the pitch of his Fulham soccer club to the lament of a Scottish piper. The crowd stood in respectful silence. His (unauthorized) biographer, Tom Bower, writes: “Few understood that Fayed’s fertile imagination was fired by these scenes of popular support.”

Near the tenth anniversary of the crash, the three-year British inquiry into Al Fayed’s charges, Operation Paget, rigorously conducted by former chief of the Metropolitan Police, Lord Stevens, disposed of every substantive allegation. So did the official French inquiry. And so did independent investigations, notably Martyn Gregory’s Diana: The Last Days. In any sequence of events of such complexity, speed, and drama, there are bound to be confusions and discrepancies. But the evidence is overwhelming that this was a traffic accident—period. Paget’s DNA tests showed that the only blood that tested positively for excessive alcohol was Paul’s and Paul’s alone. No flash in the tunnel caused him to ram the pillar; Paget’s meticulous reconstruction using 3-D lasers and computer models shows that Paul lost control before he entered the tunnel. The “flash before crash” story was the invention of François (Levistre) Levi, a pathological liar with a criminal record. The most valid of Al Fayed’s questions on the case was the mysterious Fiat Uno seen in the tunnel with a muzzled dog in the back, on which a subgenre of conspiracy theories has been built. The Fiat, gaining access from a slip road, was on Henri Paul’s right as he careened into the tunnel at a speed in excess of seventy-five miles an hour. Paul was already on a doomed trajectory, having encountered the notorious dip and slight bend in the road at this point. He swerved to the left to avoid the Fiat, brushed its left rear light, scraped the third column, swerved to the right and back again into the thirteenth pillar. The Fiat had by then driven on. It vanished. French police eventually interviewed a Vietnamese plumber and night watchman, Le Van Thanh, who they thought might be the Fiat’s owner, but it took the detective work of Paget nine years later to conclude that the French had indeed got their man—and he was not a conspirator. Thanh’s failure to own up and the swift repainting of his car in red was not for any sinister reason. It was simply an immigrant’s fear of getting entangled in French law, which punishes a driver who fails to stop at the scene of an accident. The Fiat was a complication for Henri Paul but only because he was driving too fast, the Mercedes already locked in its fatal momentum.

The most tenacious of Mohamed Al Fayed’s assertions was that Diana was pregnant. Paget’s medical evidence was conclusive: she was not. The photograph Al Fayed said showed a suggestive swelling was taken before she met Dodi. Moreover, the French nurse who supposedly entrusted Al Fayed with Diana’s dying words did not exist. Nor, except in Al Fayed’s mind, did the message: “I would like all my possessions in Dodi’s apartment to be given to my sister Sarah, including my jewellery and my personal clothes, and please tell her to take care of my boys.” For good measure, Al Fayed added: “For me, to have a message from a mother through a nurse to her children was so important because Diana lived for nearly two hours in the operating theatre. She felt she was going…I was the first person there.”

As for sinister forces organizing the crash of the Mercedes, a conspiracy would have been beyond the capacities of all the intelligence agencies and royal masterminds in the grassy knoll of Al Fayed’s imagination: preknowledge that Dodi would make the last-minute decisions he did; that Henri Paul would be the driver; that Paul would be drunk and drugged; that he would not follow the most obvious route to Dodi’s apartment; that the argumentative group of paparazzi and the supposed intervening car or motorbikes were coordinated to the last split second in their movements; that Dodi and Diana would not wear seat belts—and on and on through an infinity of variables. One understands why Mohamed Al Fayed will continue to inhabit the alternative universe; it liberates him from any possibility of blame. But that doesn’t make it real.

Prince Charles more rationally believed he knew where the finger-pointing would lead. “They’re all going to blame me,” he told his private secretary, Stephen Lamport. “The world’s going to go completely mad.” The Prince and his mother anxiously conferred in their dressing gowns in the Queen’s sitting room. They had been awakened just before 1 A.M. by Her Majesty’s assistant private secretary, Sir Robin Janvrin, who was staying in a house on the Balmoral estate. One of the first people Charles talked to in those two hours between 1 A.M and 3 A.M. when it was still not clear how badly the Princess had been hurt was Mark Bolland in London. Charles was anxious to know if his assistant private secretary had learned from the press anything more than he and the Queen had just been told. He was trying to digest the possibility that the mother of his children would return to England brain-damaged or paralyzed. “I always thought that Diana would come back to me, needing to be cared for,” Prince Charles brooded to Bolland.

Come back to me, needing, cared for. The sad tenderness of the comment reveals the complexity of Charles’s feelings. For the Prince, there could be something redeeming in having his ex-wife return to him in a condition of dependence. Until the birthday party for Camilla at Highgrove in July, things had been softening between them. When Charles’s mentor Laurens van der Post died in December 1996, Diana, immediately aware of how devastated Charles would be, dashed him off a sympathetic letter saying she knew how it felt to lose someone close. It moved him enough to call her to thank her for her understanding.

Prince Charles had even given, or pretended to give, consideration to Prince Philip’s advice, tendered in a September 1996 letter, that he clean up the situation after the divorce by ending his relationship with Camilla. Charles invited all his advisers one by one to Birkhall, where he was staying, to give their views—Fiona Shackleton, Stephen Lamport, Richard Aylard, Mark Bolland, and his personal detective Superintendent Colin Trimming—until Camilla mobilized her own forces to protect the relationship. No one can say what Charles would have done with respect to Camilla if Diana’s powers to bewitch, and with them her independence, had been curtailed by physical or mental impairment. His line had always been that Camilla was “nonnegotiable,” but there is no doubt that if Diana had come home broken, Charles would have done everything he could do to try and make her whole.

At 3:15 A.M. UK time, Sir Michael Jay called from Paris to confirm Diana’s death. The Prince went into meltdown. He was seized by a tumult of emotions—concern for the children, guilt, a terrible certainty about how crazy the public response would become. “He was in deep shock,” a friend of Camilla’s told biographer Caroline Graham. “His main concern was for the children. They were at such a vulnerable age to lose their mother. Charles is a very sensitive man and even though Diana was rebuilding her life, he kept asking himself, if he had handled things differently, she might not have ended up in the arms of a playboy, a decision which ultimately led to her death.” For Camilla, too, the news was devastating. She had just begun to come out of the shadows. Now she was cast back into them, condemned for the foreseeable future to continue uncertainly as the Prince’s mistress in private. The boys had not even met her yet and would certainly not want to meet her now. She would be even more of a hate figure to the British public. In the days ahead, she would stay well hidden at her house in Wiltshire, guarded by two officers from Scotland Yard.

At 7.15 A.M., after walking the grounds of Balmoral alone, Charles went to the boys’ rooms to perform the most awful task of his life. He woke William first. The young Prince had had a troubled night perhaps due to the hard words on the phone with his mother about Dodi. Now this terrible news meant they would never hug each other and say sorry again. Father and son went to break the news together to Harry. For the younger boy, the blow was as frightening as it was sad. At twelve, he was still a small boy beneath his manly façade. His favorite thing to do on nights in was huddle on a sofa with his mother and watch videos, just the two of them. He could not comprehend the awfulness of what had happened. He became frantic with grief when his father told him he would go to Paris to collect Diana but would not take the boys with him.

In situations of great distress, long-standing custom often prevails over emotional impulse—form over content—because it is sanctioned by the wisdom of precedent. For the young Princes, it meant getting dressed as usual and accompanying the rest of the Royal Family to church. For Charles and the Queen it meant focusing on the manner of Diana’s return. Knowing how much the British people would blame him, Charles wanted every royal courtesy and ceremony to be extended to his former wife. The Queen did not see it that way. As the night turned to day, Charles was increasingly at loggerheads with his mother. Better to wrangle over the logistics of Diana’s journey home than bring to the surface all the anger, jealousy, regret, and guilt the Royals felt toward Diana when she was alive. Charles was determined that Diana should be brought back from Paris with royal ceremony to lie in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace before a public funeral. The Queen strongly believed that they should accede to the Spencers’ request that Diana’s body should be returned to her family straight from the morgue in Fulham. The Queen’s position was that Diana, after all, was Charles’s ex-wife, not the future Queen. Her death was a private matter in which royal palaces, planes, and ceremony could have no part, a position reinforced by Prince Philip. It looked as though Charles would have to get to Paris on a commercial flight from Aberdeen. For once, the Prince of Wales fought for Diana—harder than he had ever done in her lifetime. Faced with the unanswerable truth that Diana, HRH or not, was William and Harry’s mother, the Queen by breakfast had granted Charles an RAF flight and permission to hold Diana’s coffin on his own turf in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace.

In all the discussion of what was and was not appropriate to a dead ex-wife’s rank, little consideration from the Palace was given to Diana’s mother. When Frances Shand Kydd was roused by a ringing telephone in her bungalow on the Isle of Seil in Scotland, her first hopeful thought was that it might be Diana herself, a call that would signify the end of their cold war. But it was a friend, Janey Milne, who had seen an early news flash about the accident. Frances began to throw clothes into a suitcase to go to Paris. “It seemed quite natural to go to my wounded child,” she later told her biographers Max Riddington and Gavan Naden. But before she could leave, her middle daughter, Jane, called with word of Diana’s death. Jane had heard the news from her husband, Sir Robert Fellowes, who was in close touch with Paris on behalf of the Queen from their home in Norfolk. Frances waited in vain for details from the Palace about when she would travel to bring her daughter home; in the meantime she was forbidden by Fellowes, via Jane, to talk to anyone until the death was public. The Queen never sent any message nor made any phone call of condolence to the woman who had brought Diana into the world. Frances was left out of the loop, just as she had been thirty-eight years before by Earl Spencer when their baby son John died. “It really seems somewhat ironic to me that having buried two children, for entirely different reasons, I did not see or touch or hold them when they were dead,” she said bitterly. She was not invited to retrieve Diana’s body from Paris with Prince Charles and her two elder daughters. (The young Earl Spencer, still in South Africa, was unable to get to Paris in time.)

Prince Charles’s composure at the Pitié-Salpêtrière was held together at first by the formality of the reception awaiting the royal party. They were greeted with the grave condolences of Sir Michael Jay; French President Jacques Chirac and Madame Chirac; the French foreign minister, Robert Védrine; the interior minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement; and the health minister, Bernard Kouchner. Charles thanked them all, in touchingly correct French, for their assistance. “I was moved by his humanity and by how responsive he was,” the hospital spokesman, Thierry Meresse, recalled. “His entire attitude from start to finish was one of concern for the Princess of Wales.”

The Prince went into the room alone to view his former wife in death. Meresse says that at the moment Charles entered Diana’s chamber he was still “calm and collected,” but it was “another man who emerged…a man utterly shattered by what was happening.” Trained all his life, like the Queen, to transfer the expression of emotion to something other than its cause, the Prince became agitated about a detail—the loss in the crash of one of Diana’s gold earrings (found two months later under the dashboard of the Mercedes). “No, she can’t go without her second earring!” he kept repeating distractedly. He later told Camilla that seeing Diana’s lifeless body was “the worst sight I have ever had to bear witness to. I could only think of the girl I had first met, not the woman she became, and not the problems we had been through. I wept for her—and I wept for our boys.” His face in the car leaving the hospital, with Diana’s grieving sisters beside him, is the face of a man in torment. It was suggested to Charles that the Princess could be flown from the roof of the Accident and Emergency wing, where there is a helipad. “No,” he replied firmly. “There are people who love her waiting outside.”