Descent into hell | 7 September 2017

It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in the imagination. It’s that of Eva Rausing’s decomposed body, wrapped in a tarpaulin on the marital double bed in Belgravia, buried under a mattress, several flat-screen televisions and a heap of blankets and duvets. When it was discovered by police forcing open the duct-taped bedroom door in July 2012 — more than two months after her husband Hans had left it there, unable to face up to his wife’s death from cocaine-induced heart failure — the only way Eva could be identified was by a fingerprint and the number on her pacemaker.

Rarely can ‘the problems of the very rich’ have been as shockingly highlighted as they were by that dreadful story. That a brilliant and gentle Swedish grandfather, who happened to come up with the idea of the Tetrapak carton, should unwittingly spawn such wealth, such misery, such tragedy. In Mayhem, Hans’s older sister Sigrid tells her side of the story; and Eva’s family is not happy about it. Eva’s father, Tom Kemeny, has said: ‘Sigrid feels a need to tell the world, like a catharsis, that she was right and somehow saved the children by removing them from the parental home.’ He has issued a statement: the book ‘offers a cold, hollow and unsympathetic portrait of our beloved daughter’.

Thankfully, it’s not the reviewer’s job to discuss who’s right and wrong in this murky story of the mayhem in a family caused by addiction. But I must say, I thought Eva was quite sympathetically portrayed: a thin, well-meaning, vulnerable person at the mercy of the terrible power of drugs, as was her husband. The most touching glimpse is this: ‘Eva once told me of her dream of running a sweetshop in Knightsbridge — the neverland of what might have been.’