Constantine Niarchos had it all: a personal fortune of a billioin pounds, romances with Koo Stark and Kerry Kennedy. He had even climbed Mount Everest. So why was he found dead, with enough cocaine in his system to kill 25 men? Andrew Anthony investigates.

It was 20 degrees below freezing, and night-time, when a multimillionaire from Mayfair set off into the Death Zone. That comically forbidding phrase may evoke the virtual drama of a computer game, but it is used by mountaineers to describe the territory more than 8,000 metres above sea level, where the body ceases to function properly and begins rapidly to die. The depleted atmosphere at this altitude means that oxygen masks are essential, although they cannot compensate for the inhuman conditions. The air is supercooled, like dry ice, yet any exertion causes intense perspiration, and a constant intake of liquid is needed to combat the encroaching threat of dehydration.

To climb the remaining 800 metres to the mountain's summit and return to camp before hypoxia - oxygen deficiency - takes its lethal toll, it is necessary to start out after 10pm. That way, the downward section, when exhaustion has set in, is completed in the relative safety of daylight. The slow-motion ascent can take up to 12 hours; just over a metre a minute. Along the way, somewhere out in the darkness, on either side of a narrow ridge, are sheer drops of between 2,500 and 3,500 metres. It's a journey that is completed by as many as 50 people a year these days, but it is still a daunting challenge.

Inching upwards through the night, as the wind brought warning of an approaching storm, the 37-year-old man was in the process of transcending his earthly concerns: the private insecurities and public perception, the tortured family history, the domestic complications, the destructive habits. At about 8am the following day, he arrived at his destination, removed his mask for a moment and drove a flag into the frozen snow. It was the first Greek flag ever planted in this, perhaps the most exalted few square feet of land on Earth.

On that mid-May morning, earlier this year, Constantine Niarchos could rightly feel that the whole world lay before him. He had realised a life-changing ambition and was filled with a profound sense of accomplishment, a sensation with which he was far from familiar. Although his personal fortune was valued at up to £1 billion, the troubled son of the late Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos rarely felt confident of his own worth. In the language of the therapy courses he intermittently attended for drug addiction, he suffered from chronic low self-esteem. But on that day, he was high, 29,028 feet high, having scaled the peak of Mount Everest, the pinnacle of the planet.

Just two weeks later, in the early hours of 1 June, Niarchos went in pursuit of a different kind of high, an immediate chemical upswing rather than a strenuous physical ascent. Unfortunately, he could set about hedonism with the same doggedness with which he approached the Himalayas. At about 4am, he was found unconscious in a bathroom of his flat in Grosvenor Square, London.

Despite efforts to revive him, Niarchos was pronounced dead shortly after his arrival at St Mary's Hospital in West London. At the inquest into his death, he was said to have ingested enough cocaine to kill 25 men. It emerged that he had eaten the drug. What was it that took a man, a man of unimaginable wealth, from such a rarefied height of achievement to the sordid depths of one of the largest overdoses ever recorded, and in so short a space of time?

Precisely what happened in the period between Niarchos's descent from Everest and that fatal night in Mayfair is obscured by secrecy and rumour. For decades, the Niarchos family have sought to protect theirprivacy while at the same time maintaining a conspicuously high profile. Yet despite their visible and frequently problematic lifestyles, they have successfully managed to restrict access to their lives to a coterie of trusted, and mostly super-rich, friends.

Very few people who know the family were prepared to talk on the record about their dealings. And so sensitive are the Niarchos employees that a staff member I spoke to at the company office in London refused to acknowledge that Constantine had worked there, even though he was, in title, in charge of the operation.

In the immediate aftermath of the death, there was speculation that Niarchos had rushed too quickly down the mountain, thereby placing excessive stress on his heart. However, according to Jon Tinker, of Expedition Outfit, the company that organised the climb, this theory is not based on fact.

'No, Constantine came down in reasonable time and was then picked up from Pheriche, the highest nearby village, by helicopter. This was always the plan and is by no means unusual practice for wealthy climbers. He was in good health and was looking forward to seeing his wife.' In Tinker's account, Niarchos was not admitted to hospital in Kathmandu, as some rumours suggested. He stayed a couple of days in the Nepalese capital, then flew out. It seems that he went first to London. A porter in his apartment block recalls seeing him for a few days after the Everest visit.

He is then said to have gone to America. One report has him back at the health camp in Arizona where he trained for the Himalayan expedition. Another places him in New York with his wife, the Brazilian artist Sylvia Martins. And yet another locates Niarchos in Hawaii. It's possible, of course, that he did all three. He was a ceaseless traveller and, for reasons that will become evident, was guarded about his movements.

Wherever he was, he returned to London once more on the Bank Holiday Monday of 30 May. His plane arrived early and, as a consequence, he decided to take a taxi rather than wait for his chauffeur. It seems he was alone in his flat on the top floor of 33 Grosvenor Square, a few yards from the American Embassy, for around four or five hours. At this point, he was joined by a woman named Michelle von Lutken de Massy, the former wife of a nephew of Prince Rainier of Monaco.

In the evidence she gave to the inquest, de Massy told of how Niarchos had telephoned her at a dinner party in a state of anxiety. He was wheezing and sounded strange, so she apologised to her hosts and went immediately to Grosvenor Square.

Niarchos's apartment building, whose entrance is actually in South Audley Street, is a physical representation of a closed world. The block, with its discreet grey façade, is imposing but characterless, as if it was specifically designed to discourage curiosity. It looks as if it might house gem companies or representatives of off-shore banking operations, but, in fact, there are only residential homes, usually second or third or fourth homes. Inside, porters wait to welcome tenants who may never arrive.

'He looked nervous when he opened the door,' de Massy recalls. 'But then he gave me a big hug and a big smile and he calmed down for a while. We looked at the pictures from Everest and he talked about the climb and I told him how proud I was of him.'

The pair snorted a few lines of cocaine, not a particularly excessive amount, and continued talking. Periodically, Niarchos would fall into silence, from which de Massy would attempt to rouse him with funny stories.

They listened to music, watched TV and talked of old times. After a while, Niarchostook out a bag containing about an ounce of cocaine and, frustrated with the dampness of the drug, placed a lump in the microwave. Retrieving the hardened powder, he tried cutting it up, and little bits sprayed around the room. His impatience piqued, he broke off a chunk about the size of a 50p piece and started to eat it.

By now, restless and paranoid, he moved from room to room, followed by de Massy, who was worried about his increasing agitation. At one stage, he drew all the curtains and retired to one of the bedrooms.

'He said to me,' de Massy remembers, '"Michelle, just leave me alone." I said: "OK." Then I left him for 15 minutes. When I went back to the sleeping quarters, there was a light on in the bathroom and there he was on the floor and I thought: "Oh my god."'

His eyes were open and blood was running from his nose. It's an image that haunts her every morning when she wakes. On top of the pain she feels at the loss of her closest friend, she also regrets a newspaper interview she gave shortly after his death in which she was portrayed as the millionaire's 'mistress'. It was seen by Niarchos's friends as grossly uncaring to his widow, who is still said to be in a state of shock.

De Massy says she doesn't know what happened to Niarchos in those missing two weeks. He telephoned her from abroad in the early hours of 30 May, but, she says, he didn't say where he was calling from. However contorted his travel plans, Niarchos, says de Massy, was straightforward in other ways.

'He was the kindest, most thoughtful guy I ever met. He had a huge heart and huge capacity to give love. He was always there if I had a problem. It's so sad, because there was much more to Constantine than drugs.'

Indeed, this is true. It's tempting to reduce his life and death to the familiar story of the spoilt rich kid who walked a little too far on the wild side - another trashed Euro, one more debauched socialite. But there was an appealing complexity to his character, to which his friends unfailingly testify, forged during a dysfunctional Greek upbringing that Oedipus himself would not have envied.

Constantine Niarchos was born in January 1962, the third son and fourth child of Stavros and Eugenie Niarchos. He was named after his godfather Constantine, the deposed King of Greece. Stavros, along with his great rival Aristotle Onassis, revolutionised Greek shipping in the post-War years. They recognised that oil transportation by sea would be an enormous growth business in the modern industrial age and bought fleets of larger and larger tankers.

Both men strengthened their hold on Greece's merchant shipping when they married the Livanos sisters, daughters of Stavros Livanos, a long established Greek shipowner. Niarchos's marriage to Eugenie Livanos in 1947 was his third. It was said that he originally wanted to marry Eugenie's younger sister Tina but that Onassis beat him to her.

In the Fifties, he positioned himself at the centre of European society, financing cruises for members of archaic and obscure royal houses. His yacht was the largest private schooner on the open seas, while his Mystere aeroplane established Niarchos as one of the first members of the jet set.

He also built up one of the world's great art collections, featuring works by Goya, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Renoir, and amassed properties in Paris, London, New York, the Cote d'Azur, the Bahamas, and a rose-coloured villa in St Moritz with a glassed-in pool. And then there was Spetsopoula, his own private island, 50 miles south-west of Athens, a playground, complete with imported sand, for famous friends and well-connected hangers-on.

A workaholic himself, he seemed to find the company of feckless aristocrats a corrective to his own middle-class background as the son of a former corner-shop proprietor-turned-mill owner. Along with Onassis and Prince Rainier, he reglamourised Europe's upper classes, bringing to St Moritz and Monte Carlo a fashionable materialistic gloss they had not enjoyed since the turn of the century. But underneath the stylish surface, the sports cars and casinos, the ennui and corruption that is the enduring birthright of European nobility was only deepened by the infusion of new money.

The tensions between his bourgeois sense of family life and the excesses of the fast lane in which he lived were something that the five-times married Niarchos seemed unable to resolve. His children, in particular Constantine, lacking the consuming interest of maintaining a business empire, were even less prepared to deal with the conflicting cultures. Furthermore, at a crucial stage in their lives, they also suddenly lacked a mother.

It was on Spetsopoula on 4 May, 1970 that the Niarchos family suffered a blow from which it would never recover. Five years earlier, Niarchos had left Eugenie to marry Charlotte Ford, heiress to the American motor empire. The marriage, which was precipitated by Ford's pregnancy, lasted little more than a year, before Niarchos returned to Eugenie - the Greek Orthodox Church had not recognised their Mexican divorce.

The Ford episode might have been just another of Niarchos's many affairs were it not for the daughter, Elena, it produced. On that spring evening in 1970, Niarchos telephoned Ford and asked that Elena be allowed to come to the island for a holiday. It is not clear if the invitation included Elena's mother. Eugenie was said to be very fond of Elena, but she would not have wanted to share her home with Ford.

In any event, Eugenie went to bed and swallowed 25 Seconal pills. When Niarchos found her in a coma, he did not call a local doctor but instead had a company physician helicoptered out from Athens. It was three hours before the doctor arrived. Eugenie was long dead. However, the doctor refused to sign a death certificate, due to the severe bruising he found on Eugenie's body and neck.

A police investigation followed, which led to Niarchos's being arrested for involuntary murder (the Greek equivalent of manslaughter). After a protracted legal wrangle, the charge was eventually dropped. Niarchos always insisted that the bruising was the result of his efforts to revive his wife. For her part, Eugenie left a note, written in English. 'For the first time in all our life together,' she wrote, 'I have begged you to help me. I have implored you. The error is mine. But sometimes one must forgive and forget.'

The suspicion that hung over Niarchos was in no way lifted by the fact that his offer to invest $200 million in Greek shipyards and refineries was ratified by the Greek government, then a military junta, just over a week after Eugenie was buried.

During the course of the inquiry, Constantine, who was eight years old, was sent to live with his aunt, Tina, who, now divorced from Onassis, was married to the Duke of Marlborough and lived in England. From there, he went to board at the Dragon preparatory school in Oxford. His fellow pupils were aware of the rumours about Stavros and, no doubt, young Constantine knew what they were thinking.

Old Draconians have differing memories of the pudgy boy with a lisp. One recalls him as calculating figure who was prone to fits of violence. 'He had the reputation as the hardest kid in the school for a while and if he had a fight, he'd really try to hurt you.'

Another recalled that Constantine drew a strict line between day boys and boarders, tending to treat the boys who returned to their mothers each night with 'contempt'. If so, it wouldn't take Penelope Leach to explain his motivation. As the former pupil conceded: 'If anyone had an excuse for behaving badly it was Constantine.'

He was said to carry a flick knife and a can of mace, for fear of being kidnapped. Another Draconian recalled a story which seems to detail Niarchos's early ability to conceal aspects of his personality, a talent that he would fully utilise in later life. 'We were in the same French class. He was a nice boy, not one of the lads, shy and quite sweet. One day a master intercepted a note containing precociously lewd suggestions about one of the female teachers. Everyone had to take a handwriting test to see who had written the note. We were all completely surprised when the author turned out to be Constantine.'

In 1971, in a move that few outside Greece could credit, Stavros Niarchos married Tina, his dead wife's sister. Only three years later, Constantine's new stepmother died in circumstances that again were not fully explained. Initially it was thought that she, like her sister, had taken a drug overdose, although it later transpired the cause of death was edema of the lung. But Stavros needlessly aided the inevitable gossip by waiting 24 hours after he discovered her body to announce her death. In the space of four years, the pre-teen Constantine had lost two mothers. What he made of these familial complications he learned to keep to himself, although years later, he would say that his father 'broke Eugenie's sprit'.

In 1975, he started school at Harrow. Stavros appears to have kept his son at a distance in England, where during the holidays he now stayed with his older brothers Philip and Spyros. He was unhappy at Harrow and he left by mutual agreement with the school in 1977. There was speculation that drugs were the cause of his departure, but Brian Hoban, who was headmaster in that period, told me that it was simply a matter of Niarchos not fitting in.

He then attended Gordonstoun, where fellow pupils included Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, but was expelled after five months. Prince Andrew's private bodyguard detective sergeant Peter Prentice, instigated a search of all the students' rooms when Briony Hough, daughter of the author Richard Hough, was found with a small amount of cannabis. Hidden in the leg of a chair in Constantine's study was a further bag of the drug. Five other students were also expelled.

The newspapers went to town. Niarchos was called 'Britain's wealthiest schoolboy', reputed to be on £200 a week pocket money. The story ran that Constantine had been summoned to Greece by his father and 'thrashed' for bringing shame on the family name. To the press, Stavros complained: 'Constantine was not the boy who pushed the drugs, and only his name has been revealed. Because he is the son of a rich man, his name has been stigmatised throughout the world.'

The problem child was subsequently accepted by Millfield, after, it was said, much persuasion by his father. There, in the slightly more liberal atmosphere, he seemed to settle. 'It was a fairly open culture,' says a former student. 'We had all heard the stories about Constantine when he arrived, but he came across as a likeable, bright guy, although perhaps a little too hot to deal with on a regular basis. He didn't build any barriers, and made friends easily, but he was slightly troubled. You had the feeling he was going to fizz brightly for a short period of time.'

He finished his studies without further incident and moved to America, where he took a degree at Georgetown University in Washington DC. At weekends, he would socialise in New York with a set that revolved around people like the playboy arms dealer, Adnan Kashoggi. It was among this group that he met Michelle de Massy.

A tall, blonde Norwegian, who did the customary stint of modelling in the Eighties, she has had her own drug problems down the years, and all the fun of the past has now hardened on her face into something like indelible regret. 'We were the youngest of the crowd so we became friends,' she remembers. 'We were teenagers. He was shy, timid, very polite, but when he got to know people he was very warm. We hung out at Studio 54 and Xenon. It was the early Eighties, a great time.'

Another friend recalls the era with less warmth. 'We thought no one could touch us. Everywhere we went, there was a red carpet and we had access to everything, including a non-stop supply of cocaine. I remember once we even bought top-quality coke from the police. It was crazy, we did anything we wanted to. We were out of control.'

If his father had bankrolled the European socialites of the Fifties, the son finally had to foot the bill in the Eighties. Drawn to Manhattan's boomtime renaissance, the new generation of rich kids showed little of the sophistication that helped gild their parents' moral shortcomings. Instead, their crass behaviour earned them the title of Eurotrash. The novelist Jay McInerney once said that cocaine was the ultimate metaphor for the Eighties. Niarchos's relationship with the drug was all too literal.

By February 1986, he was reported to have checked into the Betty Ford clinic. His reputation as a wastrel could now be officially added to the wildman legend he had fashioned the year before in St Moritz. In the early hours of Christmas Day, 1984, Constantine broke into the hotel suite of the Aga Khan. The 22-year-old had developed an antipathy towards the Muslim spiritual leader because he thought that, during a stay on Spetsopoula, the Aga had wooed an Austrian model, Pilar Goess, away from his brother Spyros. Finding the two together in St Moritz, he showered them with bank notes and shouted: 'Here, take this if you love money so much!'

While the anecdote confirms a certain trust-fund boorishness, it also points to a rather becoming anti-materialism, or at least a lack of respect for wealth. Niarchos was no Marxist, and he was as locked into his highliving social set as gold ingot in a Swiss vault, but he did seem aware of his privileges and that there were other, perhaps more valid, worlds beyond his own.

De Massy recalls Niarchos upbraiding a minor aristocrat at a party. 'This guy had been laughing at someone's accent because it sounded Cockney, and Constantine stood up and told the guy what a dreadful snob he was, and how it was you did that counted, not how you said it.'

It was not an East Ender, of course, but Alessandra Borghese, a member of the Italian black aristocracy, the papal lineage, to whom the 25-year-old Niarchos was married in November 1987. Stavros was violently opposed to the match and, much to Constantine's humiliation, he was proved right when it ended in divorce after just seven months. Borghese accused her husband of 'violent rages' and sued for an £80 million settlement. Eventually she received £80,000, which she donated to charity.

With relations between himself and his father at an all-time low (Stavros was in the habit of answering 'Who?' when his youngest son's name was mentioned), Constantine played the playboy in London, where he was nominally in charge of the family's shrunken shipping empire - the bulk of Niarchos wealth had shifted to art, property and various other investments. He was a regular at the European haunts patronised by the idle rich: Tramp in London, Le Club Privé in Paris, Jimmy'z in Monte Carlo. His name was linked to a string of the usual suspects, including Koo Stark, Trinny Woodhall and, briefly, Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Bobby Kennedy.

One girlfriend from that time remembers Constantine's attempts to impress his father by avoiding drink and drugs and concentrating on work. A short man, with an icy manner, Stavros could be a tyrannical father. The incident with his wife Eugenie and its coverage in the press had turned him from a slightly removed character into a man obsessed with protecting the family name from the glare of the outside world. It's hard, also, not to see a trace of vanity behind Stavros's determination to create an aura of untouchable mystique.

Either way, upholding that impregnability placed considerable pressures on his family. He demanded absolute loyalty and agreement from his children. The eldest two sons fell into line, but Constantine, said to be the smartest of the brothers, demonstrated a sense of filial duty that was invariably met with a cool response. 'Stavros was a controlling character,' says the ex- girlfriend, 'Onassis without the charm.'

After periods of abstinence, Constantine's cocaine binges would invariably start up again. 'You need a sense of purpose, like a proper job and a secure, loving relationship if you're going to beat addiction,' says one of his fellow addict friends. 'Constantine had neither.' His estrangement from any kind of stable reality was only increased by the knowledge that he could escape to anywhere he wanted in the world at any time - with the one proviso that he wrote and asked his father's permission.

'He had to check everything with Stavros,' says another girlfriend. 'He was in awe of the man, completely terrified of him.' The old man plainly had an unshakeable hold over his sons, but it was not primarily a question of money. According to the same woman, Constantine was indifferent to his inheritance. He liked to spend money, but its potential withdrawal was not something that worried him. 'No, there was a psychological fear that his father was able to inspire in Constantine. Basically, he knew that his dad might have killed his mum. Imagine a man who was powerful enough to do that.'

De Massy, by contrast, thinks the bond between father and son was more emotional than outsiders wanted to believe. 'It's not true what people say, he was on very good terms with his father. He sat by his father's bed for the three months before he died.'

Stavros died in 1996, leaving his £7 billion fortune to be divided between a charitable trust and his three sons and daughter Maria (his daughter Elena, by Charlotte Ford, was left out of the will). The following year Constantine married Sylvia Martins, an abstract artists six years his senior. They began going out in 1992 and, by all accounts, she proved to be a mature influence as Niarchos moved into his thirties. 'She is incredibly creative,' says another ex-girlfriend of Constantine, 'very much a mother figure.'

He also discovered mountaineering, and through it a personal discipline that gave shape and meaning to what could have become a limitlessly dissolute life. In his fellow climbers, he also found a group of people who, notwithstanding the financial chasm between them, accepted him as one of their own. 'He didn't have to pretend to be somebody he wasn't,' says one girlfriend. 'These guys didn't give a shit who he was.'

As the mountaineer David Breashers once wrote: 'The stresses of high-altitude climbing reveal your true character; they unmask who you really are. You no longer have all the social graces to hide behind, you cannot play roles. You are the essence of who you are.'

Constantine climbed Mont Blanc and around the Alps, before moving on to the Himalayas, where he scaled Choyu, an 8,200 metre peak in Nepal, in preparation for Everest. Technically, the world's tallest mountain is not especially difficult to climb. It is the altitude and weather that provide the greatest hazards. Nonetheless, it requires high levels of fitness, commitment and determination. The dangers are ever present. On the Niarchos expedition last spring, a 22-year-old City trader named Michael Matthews progressed too slowly, became lost and died. Before a climb, Niarchos would stop drinking, smoking and taking drugs, and go into intense training for two months. He was in excellent condition on Everest, and was the first of the group to make it to the summit.

'He was very strong,' says Tinker. 'He relished the discipline needed for the early starts and he did his research. No one can carry you when you're climbing, you have to do it yourself, and he had become a very competent climber. You get to know someone well up a mountain, and he never offered a word of complaint. He was a serious, motivated climber. He was a fine man. He spoke our language.' Tinker dismisses rumours circulating on the Internet that Niarchos may have used steroids on the climb. 'I was cheek-by-jowl with him. You would notice something like that.'

From the outside, it looked as if the tearaway had grown up and settled down. But a quiet, meditative lifestyle and a billion pounds were never destined to go together. In his wife and mountaineering, he had established two reliable bases, but they were points from which he continued to venture out and lose himself in the epic chaos that his kind of money can create. Martins tended to stay in New York, but Niarchos's business was in London. Although close, they led independent lives. In a similar fashion to his doomed attempts to impress his father with a sober approach to business, Constantine would quickly reacquaint himself with cocaine after each climb.

One former lover says that it may not have been a depression, or a particular personal problem, that drove him over the edge in May. 'Sometimes after a high - and he must have been on a massive high after Everest - you want to keep it going. You don't want to come down. Perhaps that's why he took so much cocaine that night.'

Another explanation might be that he experienced a dreadful anticlimax. He had achieved his goal, so what could he aim for now with all his time and money? The escalating intake of drugs may have been a vain attempt to elude the emptiness he saw before him. Alternatively, he may just have been out of practice, his body having grown unused to that degree of abuse, and simply miscalculated.

'He was a paradox,' says his friend, the artist Alexander de Cadenet. 'On the one hand getting fucked up, on the other hand determined enough to go climbing. He represents a very current idea of the distributed self: a different person in different situations. My personal experience with him was of an incredibly kind, generous, considerate man who would sit and talk about art and philosophy for hours.'

Photographs of the man capture something of the psychic division. His fleshy features were sweetly boyish and his thinsmile appeared shy and tentative. But there was a distracted quality reflected in his eyes: unsated, lost, ruined. De Cadenet wanted to get below the surface in an X-ray portrait he planned to make of Niarchos. 'It would have represented him completely independent of family status and socioeconomic background. Constantine was very excited by the idea.'

The skull portrait may have got under Niarchos's skin, but it would not have shed any light on an extraordinary interior life. Like his father, he was a serial womaniser. And, like his father, generous with it. 'He was so gullible,' says a friend. 'If a woman told him a hard luck story, he'd offer to buy her a flat. He became smitten with one young woman, not realising that she was a call girl. When he discovered the truth, he begged her to withdraw from the business, offering to cover the money she would lose. He even arranged a meeting with her pimp and offered to buy him out. But the woman still refused.'

Another friend recalls him handing out £50 notes to a large family of children of a drug dealer. 'They'd never seen anything like it. It was like Christmas.'

All the same, his friends say that he was seldom flash with his money. Rather, it gave him pleasure to give it to people. The porter at Grosvenor Square, where he would often throw sumptuous parties, remembers him as friendly and meticulously polite.

'In all the years I worked for him, he only snapped at me once. Then he apologised immediately and gave me 20 quid. Don't believe what you read. There was nothing nasty about him. The only person he was silly to was himself.'

Just how silly is underlined by the fact that his overdose in May was not his first. Some months before, he had collapsed and fallen through a window. A friend got him to hospital, where on coming round he seemed entirely unaffected by the experience, smiling and joking as if he had twisted his ankle in a slapstick accident. The inexplicable conundrum is that even while he looked to be enjoying life more than ever before, he was all too ready to throw it away.

'Had he lived,' says De Cadenet, 'he would have wanted to do substantial things.' In the end, he did not leave much behind, apart from a mixed bag of mem