The spiral had begun. As she used to say to Patrick Jephson, when he was her private secretary, "Stand by for a mood swing, boys." But her last oscillations spun so fast that the contrasts seem more shocking. Dodi Al Fayed appeared three days into her holiday in the South of France, summoned by his father, and the vulnerable Diana fell for the bait. Within weeks she was on a cruise alone with Dodi. The woman whose feet disappeared into the green pile carpet covered in pharaohs' heads aboard Mohamed Al Fayed's private plane and squealed over Dodi's gifts in Bulgari boxes was the same woman who, only weeks before, had driven in somber silence up Sniper Alley in the shattered city of Sarajevo to comfort land-mine victims. The woman who posed for a boatload of French paparazzi in a tiger-striped swimsuit and called the gossip columnist Nigel Dempster at the Daily Mail to cackle "we couldn't just sit in KP (Kensington Palace) all summer" was the same woman who, encountering a woman tending her son's grave in a Sarajevo cemetery, had tenderly embraced her.
"God, we heard some terrible stories," said Lord Deedes, who went with her into Sarajevo. "She very often interviewed somebody without an interpreter, and she would take some time over it. There was a widow who had lost her young husband. He had gone fishing and had hit a mine. When we went there the lady was absolutely brain-dead, but when we left she was revived. I really did think there that Diana had a healing touch. There is really no doubt.