"I always imagined there was a big, dark mess in his head to do with his childhood that he never came to terms with," Lindsey Carlos Clarke began. "But it was probably even worse than I expected. I mean, lots of people get sent away to school. Bob hated every moment of, and everything about it. He wrote endlessly tear-stained letters home: 'Get me out of here, this is so awful.'
"His mother, Myra, didn't want Bob to be sent away to school. In fact, she thought it was the most terrible thing. And then she had Andrew, who was eight years younger than Bob. So Bob went away to school, gets home and finds somebody in his nest. He never got over it, never. He used to do terrible things to Andrew - terrible, terrible torturous things. You know, nail him into a box and roll him down a cliff. Wished he was dead."
"I said to him once, not long after moving into this [current, Chelsea] house, 'You can have your girls in your studio but don't you ever, ever bring one of them back here.' The beach house was supposed to be pure as well, but that didn't last long... It was about secrecy. He said to me, 'I don't enjoy sex unless it's secret.'
"I told him, 'I want to change the shape of how we operate.' Loads of people change their lives. He said to me, 'But I'm not a drunk, and I'm not violent and I don't take drugs...' I said, 'Well, what about the addiction to other people? To the degree where you practically sleep outside their front door and endlessly surround them with poems and presents?' I think he was amoral - I don't think he understood. Everything had to be a risk."
Lindsey was his second wife.
He became convinced he would be sued for failing to gain clearance to use his models' images, and he was distraught that Lindsey had threatened to leave him. "The fact of the matter was," she told me, "he was living in the basement. All I said to him was, 'I can't live like this.' And he just said, 'Don't bully me.' I could never get any communication... I said to him, 'Bob, I cannot go to my grave like this.'"
Like this, meaning what exactly?
"Unloved, unfucked, unspoken to, un... just robotic. I said to him, 'What do I do in your life that you couldn't pay somebody to do?' He said, 'Oh, don't be ridiculous. People our age don't have sex.' I looked at him and I said, 'That's not quite what I mean.' I found it very difficult to have a conversation with him on anything at all."
His one constant love, daughter Scarlett, wasn't enough to keep him seeking a way out.
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"In January he just started to behave very oddly. I used to come down in the morning and take him a cup of tea and he'd already be up and dressed and sitting absolutely rigid on the bed, almost hyperventilating, and saying, 'I can't go on like this.' He'd say, 'I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't breathe. I think I'm going to do something terrible.' I knew exactly what he meant, and I'd say, 'Well, shall we not do that today, shall we do something else?'
"I started to come down quite early in the morning and find the front door here open, and I didn't know where he was. I would remember things he said in the past, like he would ask, 'How fast would I have to drive my van into this wall in order to kill myself?' I'd be in my pyjamas, and I'd be racing round these streets thinking, 'Where are you? Where are you?' I'd see the van and see him sitting in it and I'd tap on the window and he'd look at me absolutely like he didn't know who I was."
Lindsey and his doctor persuaded Bob to go to the Priory for psychiatric care. After a fortnight, there were signs of improvement. "They said to me he was responding to treatment, and he was going to be all right," she remembers. She hoped to get him working again as soon as possible in a new studio. "And then it was the last Friday night. I took him some food in, and I said goodbye to him. There's this corridor where you walk down to this crossover point where the rooms are. I remember standing at the end of it and looking back and seeing him standing there, and I remember he said goodbye to me and I just had that very odd feeling: I don't think he looks much better to me.
"And Saturday morning came and I got some lunch together and picked Scarlett up from Clapham [their daughter, then 14, back from boarding school]. It was about two o'clock and the doorbell went and there were three policemen on the doorstep and I immediately thought, 'Oh my God, I've been caught, haven't I, putting on lipstick in the camera. Oh God, on the mobile.' All the things we do in the car. Absolutely thinking it's me. There were two men and a woman and they stood there for quite some time. Then she said, 'What relation are you to Robert Carlos Clarke?' and I knew immediately."