He was orphaned by one of the world's worst terrorist atrocities. Then he lost his brother. But Steven Flannigan seemed to be coping - until he went out for a drink with friends. Amelia Hill reports

When 26-year-old Steven Flannigan is laid to rest in a pretty Lockerbie graveyard tomorrow afternoon, his remains will join those of his brother and sister. Had the bodies of his parents not been destroyed when Pan-Am 103 crashed into their terraced bungalow with the force of a meteorite on the night of 21 December 1988, his would be the last of five corpses in one grave. As it is, only two coffins had to be disturbed last week to make space for the last of the Flannigan clan.

Steven is the final member of a family wiped out in brutal increments by a domino run of disasters that began the night a strange, whistling wind was first heard above Lockerbie that winter's evening. The body of his 10-year-old sister was eventually found in the 30-foot crater gouged out of Sherwood Crescent, but his parents, blasted into pieces too tiny to recover, were never found.

Steven, 14, was lucky. He had braved the wet, windy night to take his sister's Christmas present - a new bicycle - to be checked over by a neighbour just minutes before the whining wind turned into a roll of thunder which grew louder and louder as the doomed airplane fell.

That night, 270 people aged from 82 to two months were murdered, their torn bodies thrown by the vicious force of the bomb across the countryside for over five miles in all directions. Among the dead were 11 locals killed as they pottered around their houses, putting up Christmas decorations and looking forward to the festivities ahead.

It has forever linked Lockerbie with tragedy in the public's mind and Steven came to symbolise the nightmare for everyone involved. Labelled the 'Orphan of Lockerbie', the quiet, unassuming child was left to rebuild his life without a single possession or memorial of his family for consolation.

Steven did have one comfort: his 19-year-old brother, David, had also survived the crash. After an argument with his family some weeks before, David had been living with a friend in Blackpool. Kate, his mother, had rung her neighbour, Marjory McQueen, just the day before to tell her how the family had arranged a reconciliation and that David was coming home on Boxing Day. She could not have been more happy.

But the reunion never took place and it was McQueen with whom David sat the next day, after a panicked, high-speed journey up the M6, desperately trying to take in the disaster that had devastated his life. 'Eventually he stumbled outside to the crater that had been his home,' McQueen remembers. 'He returned carrying this tiny, plastic watering can, the sort of thing you might buy for 50 pence at Woolworths. All fluorescent pinks and greens, and completely untouched. He bought it in and put it down carefully next to his chair. Then he said "That's all that I can find of my family". This stupid little thing had lain there untouched, while his family were literally bombed into oblivion in a blast so fierce that cast-iron fences streets away melted into puddles, and that was all that was left. It broke my heart.'

But soon the boys did have something left to them. Reports differ and the precise amount was never verified but between them, the two young men were awarded around £2.1 million in compensation. Steven sensibly invested his share, but David, who called it 'dirty money', spent his as quickly and destructively as he could.

Five years and eight days later, David was dead. His new life of fast cars, drugs and drink had taken its toll and on 29 December 1993, he died from heart failure in a cheap hostel in Thailand.

'It was awful when the news of David's death came seeping into the village. It just seemed so horribly unfair that anything more could happen to the remains of a family that had been through so much and to Steven in particular, who was trying so hard to make a new life for himself,' said McQueen, now a local councillor but still living in the same house, 200 yards from Sherwood Crescent, where she sheltered dozens of traumatised villagers that night while her doctor husband combed the nearby hills, checking shattered bodies for signs of life.

Steven, who was still living with foster parents in Lockerbie, displayed astonishing strength. He chose the wild rock music for his brother's funeral and the gravestone epitaph: 'Lived to the Limit'. But how can one small boy survive such sustained violence at the hands of fate? A few months after burying his brother, the gentle, intense 19-year-old who had planned to become a fitter with British Gas, started an affair with his foster mother. When they were found making love by her distraught husband, it shattered his surrogate family and gave Steven the excuse he needed to flee the town which, for him, contained only ghosts.

In a strange twist, Steven decided to become a jumbo jet pilot. He travelled to Florida, won his private licence and returned to Glasgow with a new friend, John Boyce, an ITN cameraman 15 years older than him who was to turn his life around. Neither man could suspect that, less than six years after their homecoming, John would be keeping watch at Steven's bedside as he lay dying.

But for now, life was continuing apace and things were looking up. In 1996, he fell in love with 29-year-old Lisa Gregory during a visit back to Lockerbie and when she became pregnant, he moved back to live with her, just one mile away from the street where his life had been first been ripped apart a few years earlier.

Before long, however, the relationship disintegrated. Some suggest that Steven had taken to denying his ghosts with the help of alcohol but friends reject this claim. Whatever happened, before Luke was born in October 1997, Steven had already seen his third opportunity to be part of a family trickle through his fingers and had escaped to Wiltshire, where Boyce and his wife welcomed him with open arms.

Under Boyce's fatherly hand, the curse that had blighted Steven's attempts to shrug off the nightmares of the past began to lift.

He was a devoted father who regularly visited his son and was on good terms with his ex-partner.

In the charming village of Bradford on Avon, no one knew him as the 'Orphan of Lockerbie', nobody knew about his millions and nobody whispered about betrayed husbands.

For the first time, Steven's attempts to create a new family succeeded. Perhaps because he had lost so many, the sincere, confident and sociable young man worked hard on the people he had left. Before long, the 25-year-old had built a circle of close friends on whom he relied and confided.

When Boyce and his wife, Jo Shard, moved to Ashe Cottage in the hamlet of Heywood to start a guesthouse 18 months ago, Steven became a partner in the business and moved in with them, designing an extension for the ivy-covered cottage that included a room for his son.

'Steve had recovered from two tragedies in his life,' Boyce said last week. 'The first one that he had to come to terms with was colossal but he and David coped with it by drawing immense strength from each other. David's death was the lowest point in Steve's life but he somehow managed to pull himself through that and then, over several years, forged a new life for himself with lots of new interests and a very large circle of friends.'

But fate had not finished with the Orphan of Lockerbie yet. On Thursday 17 August, visitors staying at the guesthouse asked Steven to show them the local pub and he agreed, sitting with them in the cosy snug room until late and entertaining them with stories of his recent visit to Lockerbie - which he still referred to as 'home' - for his son's third birthday, and the barbecue he was planning for his own birthday the following weekend, which friends would combine with a final push on the extension in time for Luke's first visit in two weeks' time.

'He was absolutely like he always was,' said Tony Elderkin, manager of the Royal Oak and a close friend of Steven. 'He'd bought me some haggis back from Scotland and after the visitors had gone, we sat together until almost 1am, watching the golf.

'He was just learning to play and was hugely enthusiastic - he was due to play the next day and was careful not to drink too much because he didn't want to spoil his game.'

At 12.50am, Elderkin saw Steven out of the pub. 'I said to him, "I'll see you on Thursday if not before" and he agreed. I watched him as he walked down the path and then went back inside. I never saw him again.'

It is a mystery what was going through Steven's mind after Elderkin turned away. Some inevitably whisper that it was suicide, suggesting that the recent marriage of Gregory to another man had triggered despair which revived his dreadful past, but others who knew him well angrily reject this.

Whatever the truth, the bare facts are clear: Steven headed back to the cottage using an unsigned route familiar to locals which cuts across the busy, twin-track Westbury-Trowbridge rail line. The banks of the line are loose gravel, piled three-feet high and pitted with deep potholes. He fell across the lines.

It is for the coroner to decide how long Steven lay on the cold track but whether he sat by the line for nearly two hours beforehand confronting his nightmares or whether he slipped trying to cross the line and knocked himself unconscious is as yet unknown.

What is known is that at around 3am, two drivers of a slow-moving maintenance train saw someone lying motionless in front of them on the track with their limbs chaotically splayed.

It was too late to stop the train but its momentum was so slow that, despite being whisked to the Royal United Hospital in Bath within half an hour of the collision, it took Steven two days to die. Surrounded by 20 friends, he never regained consciousness and at 3pm on Sunday 20 August, the last victim of the Lockerbie tragedy eventually gave up his battle for life.

'It's wretched, wretched. He had everything to live for,' said Martyn Wilmott, Steven's closest friend after Boyce and the man who was to play golf with him the day of his accident.

'For three unnatural accidents to obliterate a family of five is almost too much. It's hard to believe life can do this to anyone. I find it very hard to bear.'

amelia.hill@observer.co.uk