I would give everything I own to see my father Freddie Mercury again

When Mary Austin - Freddie Mercury's former fiancée, closest friend and primary beneficiary - denied he had fathered a child and insisted he never kept diaries, the news shocked the woman I had been working with for four years to set his record straight and reveal his truth. That woman, who I call "B" to protect her privacy, was conceived with the wife of one of Freddie's close friends in June 1976, was born in February 1977 and was raised by her mother and stepfather, initially in London.

In 1978, when B was not yet a year old, the family relocated to Europe. In 1985, when she was eight, the family returned to live in London, a short walking distance from Freddie's three London properties in Kensington's Stafford Terrace, Phillimore Gardens and Logan Place. In 1991, when B was 14, the family moved to France. By then, Freddie had bought his own apartment in Territet, a suburb of Montreux, Switzerland.

Father and daughter would rendezvous there away from prying eyes throughout the final months of his life, until he returned to Garden Lodge in Kensington to die. These and many more mind-blowing facts are explained in great detail in my book about Freddie's secret relationship with his biological child. Love, Freddie, published this Friday, is the rock'n'roll equivalent of the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb.

Now a 48-year-old mother-of-two, B's incredible story rewrites everything we thought we knew. How do I know she is telling the truth and that she really is Freddie's daughter?

In May 2023, I travelled to Montreux and stayed for several days. I went to view Freddie's notebooks and other documents and to see items of personal memorabilia.These were just a small sample of her vast archive containing thousands of items of Freddie's dating back to the 1970s.

In the photographs, some of them Polaroids - which she declined to share in the book because they are private family mementoes - the man beside her is very clearly Freddie. The selection of the many cards he wrote her are signed "Dad" and "Your Papa".

In video footage, she can be heard calling him "Daddy", to which Freddie responds affectionately. In them, father and daughter can be seen playing games, singing and performing music together, getting ready to go out, dressing up in silly costumes and decorating the Christmas tree.

Yet all evidence aside, she bears a striking resemblance to her legendary parent, sharing his eyes, jaw, cheeks and nose, his hands, skin tone and hair texture. The likeness is utterly unmistakable.

I hadn't seen Freddie since 1986, when Queen performed what turned out to be their final tour with their lauded lead singer at the helm. He would turn 40 the following month. Unbeknown to all, including Freddie, he had five years left to live. Now after 37 years, it was as though he were standing right in front of me.

Freddie's daughter was devastated by Mary Austin's preemptive denial in August. As far as she knew, from all that her father had told her and from what he wrote in the private notebooks he gave her, Mary knew about B from the moment the child was born.

If Freddie had in fact kept his most sensational secret from the only woman he had ever loved, this not only sheds new light on the couple's relationship but begs questions as to why he hid the truth from her. It also makes an already extraordinary story even more tantalising.

The received narrative, echoed in Oscar-winning 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody starring Rami Malek, is that Freddie and Mary were engaged to be married until he came out as gay, after which she remained in his life as his closest friend, confidant and business manager. But Freddie never came out. According to him, he and Mary never separated, either, but remained a couple for life: committed and devoted to one another despite Freddie's confession that he had impregnated another woman.

This is how Freddie describes it in his 17 notebooks. He wrote them between June 1976 and July 1991 and gave them to his daughter four months before he died. Thirty years later, in December 2021, she shared them with me.

Mary Austin begs to differ. In her impassioned rebuttal, she flatly denies being the custodian of such a secret. Freddie's daughter refuses to engage in a slanging match. He would, she says, have hated that more than anything.

"What Mary said was astonishing to me," she says. "As far as I was concerned, it was an established fact that Mary knew everything. I had never doubted it. I still don't. So I was surprised as well as devastated by her words."

Did B know about the notebooks before Freddie gave them to her?

"I did not," she says. "I certainly saw him write in them. He tended to carry a notebook around with him. But I didn't know at that point what they were. I had no idea that he was writing about his life, or about our life together. He told me he was dying only a few days before he gave them to me. At 14, I was unable to get my head around the situation. I was used to him telling me about his childhood and sharing his memories.

"To me, I suppose, he was like any other parent. Sometimes a bit boring. A child switches off. All those years ago, I did not realise the significance of the notebooks. It was only later that I came to appreciate their importance: that they are the official record, as written by Freddie himself, of his whole life."

Austin and others have denied the existence of Freddie's notebooks on the grounds that they never saw him write them. "Can they swear they were with him 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, or that he was never by himself in a room?" B asks.

"Of course they can't. To be clear, they were not formal diaries, dated by the day and week. They were simply large, leather-bound notebooks that he carried around with him. They are packed with facts, thoughts, lyrics and the inspiration behind his songs.

"As time ticked on and his circumstances changed, he began to write them specifically to me, so that I would come to know about the life he'd lived before I was born."

For 34 years, says B - since her father's untimely death at the age of 45 - friends and associates of the man still revered as rock's greatest frontman have had free rein with his truth. As a result, his story has been embellished, diminished and corrupted. Those who deny her existence, she says, should remember Freddie was a very complex man.

"Are they absolutely sure he never hid anything from them? Because Freddie knew very well how to keep his secrets. He could be more deceptive than most when he wanted to be, and was better than anyone at hiding things. He compartmentalised his life brilliantly in order to keep his private life private. He built strong barriers and walls to protect those he cared about.

"When he fell ill, with HIV then full-blown AIDS, he hid it from the other Queen members for another two years. When they did become aware, they lied about it in order to protect him. They've admitted this publicly."

Freddie was also very good, she reveals, at making people keep promises: "A promise, to him, was sacred. As far as he was concerned, a promise has no expiry date. It is our duty to take the promises we make to our graves and beyond. Some people will never go back on promises they made to him."

She continues: "Freddie never saw my birth as an error. Yes, I was conceived by accident, with the wife of one of his close friends, while that friend - who would become my beloved stepfather - was away on business. He was certainly not proud of the circumstances of my conception. Everybody makes mistakes and he certainly made a few. His paternity was revealed to only a handful of people, with various degrees of confidence, for obvious reasons, such as possible media intrusion and his intense desire to protect the privacy of his loved ones.

"But the most important reason was that, had he revealed my existence publicly, it would have exposed his unfaithfulness to Mary, who would then have been humiliated as the deceived common-law wife. It would have revealed that he had slept with a married woman, who would then be reviled as the cheating wife.

"Also, her husband - Freddie's friend - would have been pitied and ridiculed as the deceived husband. He was not at all proud of it." Whether people choose to believe her or not, she insists: "I am Freddie Mercury's illegitimate child."

If she were looking for inheritance and money, she reasons - which, to be clear, she is not - she would have instigated legal proceedings many years ago. "Freddie made testamentary dispositions privately.

"Everything was done legally. He had strong reasons for doing things the way he did. His wishes must be respected. The financial arrangements in my favour are clearly explained in the book. I want for nothing - not that money means much to me. I would give everything I own to see my father again for just a few minutes more. To watch him hugging his grandchildren and playing the kind of games with them that he used to love playing with me. But no amount of money can buy this."

For more than three decades, the truth of Freddie's life has been revised and rewritten. Few have ever spoken in his defence.

"I would like to ask them, Mary and the band," says B, "is this really the impression you have of your friend and bandmate? Did you really never see Freddie smiling or laughing, or being happy, caring and thoughtful?

"When he died, I was not yet 15. As well as being grief-stricken by the loss of him, I was confused by the many conflicting reactions to his death. Many snarled that he got what he deserved; that his whole life had been about debauchery. That he was a pervert, a deviant, a criminal. Where were his friends? Why didn't any of them speak up to defend him, as he was not here to speak for himself? True, his bandmates did - though without much success. But where were the others?"

Since Freddie's passing, Queen's drummer Roger Taylor and guitarist Brian May have gone the distance to keep Queen music alive and deliver his songs to new generations. "Because of them, my father transcends time and death. I thank them with all my heart," she says. "It means that Freddie the musician is mostly preserved. I cannot say the same about the man. This is what led me, in my own mid-life, to speak. The exceedingly difficult decision to do so took a long time. Since then, every step has been painful."

Freddie Mercury's daughter has given her heart to give her father his voice back.

"He was the most wonderful, caring, thoughtful and loving man I could ever have had the honour of knowing and being the daughter of," she adds. "He was so much more than most people could ever have imagined. This is the Freddie I knew."

• Love, Freddie: Freddie Mercury's Secret Life And Love, by Lesley-Ann Jones (Whitefox, £22.99) is published on Friday (Sept 5). Watch / stream Freddie Mercury: A Secret Daughter? on Channel 5 from 9pm on Saturday