The saga remains a tale of two cities. In London last week Princess Diana was the renewed subject of tabloid headlines as the latest edition of a biography went on sale--an autobiography, it turns out, offering candid and often biting descriptions of her life with the royals, as divulged by her collaborator Andrew Morton. The Windsors and the Spencers were appalled, as were the British media. But however scandalized the public may have been over Morton's breach of Diana's confidence, the book flew out of London stores. In Paris there was no room for soap opera or sentiment. French investigators were focused on finding the truth about her death in shards of metal, bits of glass and scratches of paint, in dusty stacks of depositions and in the cold physics of trajectory, velocity and momentum.
Such were the preoccupations of Judge Herve Stephan as he walked with a dozen police investigators into the empty, neon-lit Place de l'Alma tunnel. They converged on the spot where, just 30 days earlier, a black Mercedes S-280 had spun out of control and crashed headlong into the tunnel's 13th support pillar, killing Diana, her companion Dodi Fayed and their driver, and injuring their bodyguard. Last Monday at 9:20 p.m., a flatbed truck backed slowly into the tunnel bearing the grotesquely gnarled black hulk that has etched itself into the world's collective consciousness as Diana's death car. With the help of a crane, workers placed the Mercedes in three separate positions: on the right lane near the tunnel entrance, where the car lost control; against the 13th pillar, which had left a cookie-cutter imprint in the car's front end; and nosed up to the right-hand wall, where the car had spun to a stop. Three cars were sent through the tunnel to act out various scenarios. Other cars were driven through the opposite lane to determine exactly what witnesses could have seen from that vantage point. But the session last week was just a warm-up for the full-blown re-enactment that will most likely start, like Diana's fatal last ride, at the Ritz Hotel. It will feature an identical Mercedes S-280 accompanied by the 10 paparazzi who are suspected of contributing to the crash by their pursuit. Judicial sources say the main re-enactment is still weeks away.
One of its main objectives will be to test the hypothesis that a second car may have been involved in the accident. In the hours after the crash, investigators found taillight fragments belonging to a Fiat Uno just inside the tunnel entrance, about 197 ft. from the main crash site. Last week police sources said that spectroscopic analysis of the paint samples taken from scratches on the Mercedes' right side showed that the paint could have come from a Fiat Uno. It may be another week before experts complete their analysis and confirm the results. But investigators were leaning toward the theory that Diana and Dodi's car may have sideswiped a smaller, slow-moving vehicle before careening out of control.