A half-smoked cigar, a tray of tooth-marked chocolates and maids still turning down the bed: PETRONELLA WYATT reveals how Mohamed Al Fayed led her on a macabre tour of Dodi’s flat… frozen in time 10 years after his death

The false pharaoh, as Mohamed Al Fayed was called, blew hot and cold when it came to the media.

So I wasn’t surprised when, shortly after agreeing to be interviewed by me for this newspaper sometime in 2009, I got a call from his press secretary to say it was off.

However, he suggested that I get in a taxi to Al Fayed’s flat in Park Lane and try to change his mind. Like the cat in the saying, I hesitated.

Al Fayed, the Egyptian-born owner of Harrods and father of Dodi, had an unsavory reputation when it came to women.

I hoped that changing his mind would not require any amorous effort on my part.

But it had been more than a decade since Dodi was murdered along with Princess Diana, and I was curious to see if Al Fayed, who had an extraordinary ability to shroud bitter facts in illusion, had anything new to say.

What moved him was hatred of the establishment, whose members, he believed, had laughed at him for so long, denied him a British passport and then murdered his son.

None of his people ever contradicted him, because they were largely charlatans and cowards who surrounded him in a thick herd.

Al Fayed, who died last month at the age of 94, was a bully and not averse to making threats.

What followed that day was one of the most disturbing afternoons of my life.

It started simply enough. A doorman opened the street entrance and I rang the bell at Al Fayed’s apartment. I had never met him and didn’t expect him to come to the door, but he did.

He wore a dressing gown over a gray suit and smelled of expensive ointment. I couldn’t change his mind about the interview, but he didn’t want me to leave either.

He made his purpose clear, just like the horse trader he was through and through. “Why don’t we have a romantic dinner tonight?”

My nerves reached thermonuclear levels. I had no intention of having dinner with him and said so. “How about tomorrow night?” he persisted.

‘No absolutely not. Not the rest of the week either.’ His eyebrows rose like the wings of an eagle. ‘No?’ he said. ‘Then I’ll show you something. Something few people have seen.’

This didn’t calm me down until he made it clear he wanted advice and thought I was a judicious woman.

What he hoped to show me was Dodi’s flat, which was next door. I wondered why he wanted me to look at a presumably empty apartment.

His eyes widened (Al Fayed cried very easily) and I suddenly felt sympathy for him.

With Dodi’s death gone was not only his beloved son, but also his hope of being accepted by the establishment he hated and yet longed to join – an ambition he had tried fruitlessly for much of his life to achieve.

He took off his robe and I saw that he was wearing a silver tie of extraordinary width and thickness. On such a small man it seemed absurd.

We walked down the hallway and arrived at Dodi’s apartment. To this day I still can’t quite believe what I saw.

In Dickens’ Great Expectations, the embittered Miss Havisham lives out her life in the remains of her wedding dress, preserving the moment of her betrayal in her hideous surroundings.

Al Fayed had done something even worse.

He had built an organic, living shrine to his deceased son. It was as if he expected Dodi to walk through the door at any moment and pick up the thread of his existence.

It was a denial of death, of the tragedy in Paris. Al Fayed’s pain was that of a man thrust into a situation so unbearable that he had created a world of fantasy.

In the hall there were photos in honor of the 1981 film Chariots Of Fire.

Al Fayed had helped finance the project so that Dodi, who had no discernible talents, could realize his dream of becoming a major film producer.

(Dodi was given the title of executive producer.)

The actual producer, David Puttnam, had Dodi thrown off the set after he tried to give the cast cocaine, but I listened politely as Al Fayed painted a picture of an unappreciated genius, with the qualities of Jesus Christ and Cary Grant combined.

It was awkward. Al Fayed’s fish eyes darted back and forth, searching my face for the slightest sign of dissent. Al Fayed stood on the edge. I knew I was talking to a man who had gone crazy when I saw Dodi’s bedroom.

It was decorated in muted colors and the floor was thickly carpeted. What bothered me was the feeling that it was waiting for its former resident.

A maid turned down the bed and fluffed the pillows for a man who had been dead for more than ten years.

Jardinieres, strewn with green leaves, gave it the appearance of a crypt. I saw a withered object in what looked like an ashtray. It was half a cigar, waiting for the owner to return to drink it.

Al Fayed could no more avoid lying than the rest of us can avoid blinking, but until then I had no idea the extent to which he was lying to himself.

Princess Diana was everywhere, depicted in the most horrible chocolate box paintings, probably commissioned by Al Fayed himself. They were huge – and worse, they were fantasies.

The man who had pinned his hopes on marrying his son to a princess was not defeated by the facts.

After his death he married them. One painting depicted Diana in what appeared to be a wedding dress; another with her arms, strangely elongated, around Dodi’s waist.

In the living room, more paintings and photos of the princess adorned the walls.

Al Fayed had remained silent all this time. Then he turned to me, like a viper. “If you tell anyone this…” He let the ellipse hang in the air like a noose.

I was well aware that Al Fayed was often described as cruel. His attempts to obtain a British passport were hampered by successive Home Secretaries, who must have had good reason for doing so. I didn’t say anything at all, which seemed to satisfy him.

The tour continued. There was a sweet, sickly smell in the room. It reminded me of a film set that had long been abandoned by the crew.

A tray of moldy Charbonnel et Walker chocolates sat on a table. There were teeth marks on them, as if Dodi had tried them and thrown them back in the box. The sight made me nauseous.

All the while, domestic servants rushed here and there to visit this temple built by a modern Ozymandias. Al Fayed cried. I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there.

‘What should I do with it?’ he asked. I didn’t answer.

The grotesque uselessness of Dodi’s life – the drugs; the failed relationships with models his father did not approve of; the desperate affair with Diana, which none of her friends thought would last more than a summer – was denied and ignored in this strange monument to a son.

In a way, it was as great a testament to love as the Taj Mahal, however crooked.

In these rooms Dodi had become an impresario, a hero among men and the one true love of a princess.

It was all nonsense. No one understood why Diana had even looked at Dodi. I knew the princess and it amazed me.

She had been in love with the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, but that was over and I assumed her vanity was hurt.

Al Fayed knew Raine Spencer, Diana’s stepmother, and they spent the holidays cooking in the south of France, where Dodi and Diana bonded weeks before their deaths in 1997.

Diana was not in love with Dodi, and she did not have his child. I was scared to see a painting of her cradling a baby, but that was too much, even for Al Fayed.

I turned around and saw that he was gone. I was alone in this hell. A silk tie was carefully folded onto one of the furnishings.

I recognized it as Dodi had worn it in a photo. I touched it, half expecting it to fall apart.

There was an unhealthy atmosphere in the whole place, in which living things could not survive.

I took one last look at the over 2 meter tall Diana in her wedding dress and walked out the door.