Free William and Harry by Katie Nicholl

living room of Kensington Palace. Dressed casually in jeans and a pale blue cashmere sweater, her long legs tucked beneath her, the princess leaned in trying her hardest not to wake her son from his nap. ‘What do you mean an accident? Who is in the car, Simone? You have to tell me,’ she whispered urgently as the little boy stirred in his sleep. ‘I don’t know, Diana. I see four people in a car and a terrible crash. I don’t know who they are.’
    It was a Saturday, and according to the princess’s chef Darren McGrady, one of the few staff she had retained following her divorce from the Prince of Wales, a typical weekend at Kensington Palace. Harry was home from Ludgrove while William was still at Eton. Simone had dropped over for tea, as she often did, and the three of them had spent the afternoon watching James Bond movies. Exhausted by their day out, which had comprised one of Diana’s famous shopping trips, the twelve-year-old prince had dozed off as his mother and her friendchatted. It was dark outside by now, and Diana and Simone had worked their way through two pots of herbal tea. Over the past four years Simone had become one of Diana’s closest friends and years later would give evidence at the inquest into the princess’s untimely death. They had met at the Hale Clinic in London’s Regent’s Park, where Simone worked as a healer, and had immediately got on. They spoke on the phone daily and Simone was always in and out of Kensington Palace. ‘Simone would come over to Kensington Palace most weekends. I was in the kitchens preparing food and they would be upstairs in the sitting room. The boys were often home from school and would sit chatting with them,’ recalled Mr McGrady. Although some of the staff viewed Simone with scepticism, Diana adored her and instructed her to ‘cleanse’ the house after her divorce. She also asked her friend to teach her ‘healing’, which, according to Simone, Diana practised on her children when they were ill.
    Diana had an established coterie of spiritualists and astrologers whom she depended on for guidance and instruction including a psychic called Rita Rogers. William was also fascinated by the notion that people could see into the future, and when he was younger would often make secret calls to his mother’s psychic, begging her for a reading. Rita told him he was too young, but this did not dispel the young prince’s curiosity. Harry was also intrigued by the idea that some people were ‘gifted’. At this particular afternoon session this ‘special lady’, as Diana called Simone, had a premonition of an event that would change Harry’s life for ever. Less than a year on he would walk by his brother’s side, their heads bowed in grief, behind their mother’scoffin. It was the greyest day of their lives after the most wonderful summer.
    The bedroom door slammed shut. ‘It’s my room and no, you can’t stay in it,’ Omar Al Fayed shouted from inside the locked cabin. Harry banged his fist on the door. ‘Don’t you say that. Your mummy said we can stay wherever we want and I want this room.’ Aboard the five-star yacht there was no shortage of space. The boat had a crew of sixteen, a master bedroom with a king-size bed and its own jet skis, and everything was in place for the royal party. But according to Mohamed Al Fayed’s daughter Camilla, her younger brother Omar wanted his own bed that night and there was no way he was going to give it up for Harry. Upstairs Diana stretched out on her towel and turned the music up on her Walkman. The boys had been bickering for the best part of an hour, and still no solution had been reached to the problem of where Harry would be sleeping. William was on the upper deck quietly reading with Camilla and her sister Jasmine. They giggled about the fight going on downstairs, although it would be a whole day before their younger brother spoke to Harry again after being made to give up his room. The row aside, it had