TEN
The Fayed nerve center in Paris, the elegant and world renowned Ritz Hotel, had sent two vehicles to collect Dodi and his party from Le Bourget airport. One was a luxury, black Mercedes 600 limousine with tinted windows, driven by Philippe Dourneau, who was under permanent contract as Dodi’s chauffeur. The other, Dodi’s personal black Range Rover, was driven by Henri Paul, the acting head of security at the Ritz Hotel. Diana had met the balding, bespectacled security chief on her previous trip to the hotel with Dodi, and she and her lover stood chatting with him for several minutes before boarding the Mercedes.
Strictly speaking, Henri Paul should not have been there. He had scheduled himself off the rota for the weekend and had planned a trip to the country. One of his oldest friends, Dominique Melo, a psychiatrist at the University of Rennes, said, “As soon as he learned Dodi and Diana were coming to Paris from Sardinia he canceled a short break that he had fixed in Lorient to see his parents.”
Trevor Rees-Jones, as bodyguard, was detailed to travel with Dodi and Diana in the front passenger seat of the Mercedes. It was noted by Philippe that Diana and Dodi did not fasten their seat belts in the back. When accompanied by her Royal Protection Squad officer, Diana had always been made to fasten her seat belt as part of a rigid overall safety routine, but a year later she had fallen out of the habit of buckling up her belt when traveling in the back seat—and the Al Fayed security men did not insist, partly, it must be said, because Dodi did not favor using a rear belt and would probably have countermanded their instructions.
Philippe was a superb driver and within minutes had shaken off the paparazzi swarm as he skillfully maneuvered the big Mercedes around the
périphérique
, the circular Paris motorway, to the Bois de Boulogne exit ramp to the west of central Paris. Their first stop, twenty-five minutes’ drive from the airport, was the Villa Windsor. Hand in hand, the couple toured the house where the Duke of Windsor had lived in exile with his American bride, Wallis Simpson. Twenty years earlier Mohamed Al Fayed had acquired a lease on the property from the French government, and had spent a fortune refurbishing it. Dodi tried to persuade Princess Diana that this was one of the houses in which they should make their home. But Diana was not overly impressed. She thought it was too gloomy.
Meanwhile, as the lovers made their brief tour of the house—admiring the five acres of gardens from the upper windows—Henri Paul had taken René, the butler, two female members of the
Jonikal
crew and the luggage to Dodi’s Paris apartment, and driven with the second bodyguard, Alexander “Kez” Wingfield, to join the others at Villa Windsor.
Just twenty-eight minutes after their arrival, according to the CCTV cameras at the villa, Diana and Dodi climbed back into their car for the short journey to the Ritz Hotel in the Place Vendôme. Henri Paul followed behind in convoy in the Range Rover. A number of paparazzi were there to take pictures, clearly having received a further tip-off about the party’s movements. When they arrived at the luxurious hotel entrance, the paparazzi were already waiting in some force, but the transfer from car to foyer was accomplished smoothly under the supervision of the acting hotel manager Claude Roulet. Shortly after 4:30
P.M.
they were once more safely installed inside the Imperial Suite.
One of Diana’s first tasks was to telephone confidant and friend, journalist Richard Kay, then royal correspondent and now diarist of the
Daily Mail.
In his report of that telephone call, Kay was able to reveal that the princess had told him, “I have decided to radically change my life.” She would complete her obligations to her charities and to the anti-land mines campaign and would then, around November, completely withdraw from public life. He was also able to confide in readers that “Diana was as happy as I have ever known her. For the first time in years all was well with her world.” Richard Kay felt able to say that Diana was in love with Dodi and that she believed him to be in love with her, and that he also believed in her.
The journalist did not speculate on why Diana intended to change her lifestyle, but others, who had for two weeks heard much discussion about Diana’s bulging figure and rumors that she was pregnant, believed this outpouring to Richard Kay was yet another hint that the princess was expecting a baby.
After making her call to London, Diana went down to the hairdressing salon by the Ritz swimming pool to have a wash and blow-dry before dinner, and Dodi went to collect the ring from Repossi’s jewelery boutique. It was no more than a hundred yards’ walk across the Place Vendôme to the boutique, but Dodi chose to drive there in the Mercedes, taking Trevor Rees-Jones with him. Kez Wingfield and Claude Roulet followed on foot and the three men waited outside while Dodi went in to collect the £130,000 emerald-and-diamond ring.
By seven o’ clock they were both ready to leave the Imperial Suite and transfer to Dodi’s apartment where they would change for dinner and where butler René had chilled wine and caviar waiting. They had already reserved a table at Diana’s favorite Parisian restaurant, Chez Benoit on the edge of Les Halles. People around them couldn’t help smiling as they watched Dodi choreograph an evening which was obviously planned as a build-up to a formal marriage proposal.
Philippe Dourneau would continue as their driver in the Mercedes 600, but for this journey they would be without the bodyguards. Lack of professionalism led to Trevor and Kez breaking one of the golden rules of personal protection. To “give the couple some time to themselves” the two bodyguards elected to travel in a separate follow-up vehicle, the Range Rover, which was being driven that evening by Jean-Francis Musa, the owner of the Etoile Limousines company which rented cars to the Ritz.
Had the two vehicles become separated, the results could have been disastrous. As it was, their journey to the rue Arsène Houssaye, near the junction of the Champs Elysées and the Arc de Triomphe, was smooth and uneventful, but on their arrival outside the apartment, where the bulk of the paparazzi had been congregating, it was utter bedlam. Trevor and Kez believed, not for the first time that summer, that the photographers must have been tipped off in advance about the party’s movements. Led by Romuald Rat, a bulky, menacing six-footer who was screaming at the bodyguards, they swarmed aggressively around the couple, shouting abuse at Dodi and Diana and thrusting camera lenses right into their faces.
Even Diana, with years of experience with photographers, was frightened by the savagery of this frenzy, each paparazzo being aware of the vast sums of money now on offer for the right pictures and allowing greed to take over from whatever professionalism they might still have retained. For Diana, celebrity had long coexisted with the mantle of royalty, but since her divorce, the media’s natural reluctance to encroach too far into royal space had, like the royal mantle itself, slipped rapidly away. Now only the celebrity remained and, no longer protected by that royal aura which she had once taken for granted, she had become vulnerable. It was a frightening new development and not one with which she could easily come to terms.
When they finally reached his luxurious apartment, Dodi was white with anger and frustration—and perhaps a hint of humiliation that the Al Fayed security was not proving as effective as he had boasted it would be. Shaken, but otherwise undamaged, they tucked in to caviar and an excellent chilled white wine, and were soon smiling again as the sheer happiness of their relationship won through.
It was here that their luggage had been brought from the airport that afternoon, and their things had already been unpacked and pressed. Soon it was time for them to change for dinner. Diana chose calf-hugging, white Versace jeans with high-heeled Versace black slingbacks and a sleeveless black top under a black Versace blazer. With this she wore a pearl necklace given to her by Dodi, gold earrings and a Jaeger Le Coultre watch.
Dodi had picked out Calvin Klein blue jeans over brown cowboy boots, a gray Daniel Hechter leather shirt, worn outside his jeans and with which he was unable to wear Diana’s latest gift of cufflinks that had belonged to her father, and a casual brown, soft suede jacket. His jewelry included a Cartier watch and a metal identity disc, engraved with “Fayed. Blood Group B Positive.” He also took with him cigars, a cigar cutter and his mobile phone, none of which was found in the Mercedes after the crash. Was some clue contained within his mobile phone’s memory of a call he made, that necessitated his phone being seized by the killers? Or were these personal items simply plundered by the rescue workers?
Just after 9:30
P.M.
they again ran the gauntlet of jostling paparazzi, whose onslaught was only slightly less hostile, and settled into the limousine. Trevor and Kez again elected to follow in the Range Rover. This time their astonishingly unprofessional decision for one of them not to travel with Diana came very close to endangering their charges.
Dodi believed that with the number of photographers currently on the streets, a quiet dinner in Chez Benoit was out of the question, and he canceled their reservation on his mobile phone. His next call was to Trevor Rees-Jones, in the backup Range Rover, to advise him that they were returning directly to the Ritz Hotel. Trevor knew that standin hotel boss Claude Roulet was outside the Chez Benoit, where he had planned to orchestrate their arrival and dinner, and that there was no one else left at the hotel to respond to such a last-minute call for extra security. They were already turning into the Place Vendôme where they could see a crowd of photographers and tourists jostling one another for vantage points outside the Ritz entrance, which already numbered over a hundred. The Ritz security cameras had noted that several of these had been there all day, observing from the edges of the crowd, but not falling into the category of tourists or photographers. Ex-Scotland Yard detective chief superintendent John McNamara, who headed the Ritz–Fayed investigation into the crash, later identified them as British and foreign intelligence agents.
As the mini-convoy pulled up, and the two bodyguards rushed forward to the limousine, the crowd closed in from all sides, flashbulbs popping. But when Trevor opened the limousine door, Dodi did not respond. He just sat there, apparently frozen. No one moved for several seconds, and any advantage they may have had of surprise was lost.
A bodyguard inside the Mercedes could have motivated his passengers to move the moment the car stopped.
When the princess, who obviously saw the situation deteriorating, did emerge, she was almost immediately engulfed. Looking terrified, she jumped over people’s legs and ran, swaying from side to side, for the Ritz front door. With luck, and sheer athletic wizardry, she made it inside and collapsed on a chair in the foyer.
Dodi, helped by Kez and Trevor, was moments behind, and blazing mad. As Trevor threw an intruding photographer back into the street the Fayed heir exploded, “How the fuck did this fiasco happen?”
Kez Wingfield, himself angry, and close, he said later, to hitting his boss, snarled back, “You never told us where we were going in time. If you had, we’d have been able to phone ahead and get it sorted out.”
Dodi had the sense to back off and turned his full attention to Diana. He guided her to the hotel’s prestigious L’Espadon restaurant, but found the princess still far too agitated to cope with the staring gaze of dozens of wealthy, but still gawking, diners. In tears, she asked to be taken up to the Imperial Suite to eat in private.
It was still their intention to return to Dodi’s flat when things quieted down. But instead of quieting down they heated up. Outside the Ritz there was a sort of madness swirling among the paparazzi. Because of the rumors now being circulated in London that Diana was pregnant, they had come from all over Europe—each hoping for another million-pound picture. The princess had been photographed in a swimsuit which revealed a slight bulge in her tummy. She had told a friend that the bump was fat and that she planned on having it removed by liposuction. But the newspapers—and the paparazzi—remained unconvinced.
Still scattered among the crowd, too, and picked up later by examination of closed-circuit television tapes, were the same British, French and American security service agents.
It was also later established that the personal secretary to the head of Britain’s MI6 had spent the weekend in Paris. No explanation has ever been offered for why the agents were mingling with the crowd outside the hotel, but Richard Tomlinson says an unusually high number of his former colleagues were in town that night. He said they included two senior officers who were there on an “undeclared” basis. “I believe either, or both of them would have detailed knowledge of events affecting Princess Diana that night,” he said.
A few minutes after 10
P.M.
, Henri Paul arrived back in the hotel. He had been called in, at Dodi’s bidding, by his night security manager, François Fendel. “Dodi is on top of the world, but he would appreciate you coming in,” Fendel told his boss. “It would help to calm things down.”
Thus, the man who had canceled his weekend off to play a central part in the lovers’ Paris visit was back in a position to influence the most crucial event of the evening. Henri Paul’s first move was to join Kez and Trevor, who were planning to eat in the restaurant bar. They chatted and Henri Paul had two drinks before going off to do his rounds. On his return, security inside the hotel had automatically passed from the bodyguards to him. Trevor and Kez remember that he in no way seemed on edge, was definitely not drunk, and that there was nothing in his behavior that caused them any alarm. From the Ritz records that night, it was shown that Henri Paul had drunk just two pastis—a spirits-strength drink taken with five parts water to one of pastis. They were the only drinks he consumed during his two hours and ten minutes in the hotel.