Michael Todd was in typically confident mood at a black tie reception at the Grosvenor House hotel in Mayfair this month. Amid the hundreds of guests of the Community Security Trust, the chief constable of Greater Manchester stood out as a professional at the top of his game.

Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP who was a fellow guest at the dinner 13 days ago, said there was no hint of anything troubling one of Britain’s most highly regarded police officers. “He was extremely ebullient. He gave me the thumbs-up sign and a big wink,” Mercer recalled. “I told him what a great job I thought he was doing up in Manchester. He grinned with pleasure and then invited me to come up to visit the counter-terrorism unit. He was obviously in great shape.”

Yet within a week Todd was parking his Range Rover in the village of Llanberis at the foot of Snowdon in north Wales and embarking on a reckless climb towards the 3,560ft summit.

He set off at 4pm on Monday into the teeth of the winter’s worst storm with darkness drawing in. An experienced walker who had made the climb before, he would have known the likely consequences of undertaking such an ascent in freezing conditions with winds gusting to 80mph.

As he climbed, he sent text messages from his BlackBerry. One of those who received them, a civilian employee of the Metropolitan police, was so disturbed she contacted Manchester police. She is described by police sources as a close friend rather than a lover.

Mountain rescue teams were called and a search began. It was hampered by the conditions and by a false triangulation reading from his mobile phone signal, which led the searchers first to scour an area on the Menai Strait, 14 miles to the north.

Their efforts were in vain. At 2.45pm on Tuesday a group of climbers found some of Todd’s effects a few hundred feet from the summit. His body was discovered nearby soon after, at the bottom of a scree slope known as Bwlch Glas.

The coroner’s inquest, which opened on Thursday, reported that Todd had no fractured bones and his internal organs were intact. The only visible injuries were “superficial” cuts. He ruled out a fall from height as the cause of death.

Blood alcohol readings showed that Todd was just over the drink-drive limit; other analysis indicated that he could have been drunk several hours earlier. A half-empty bottle of gin was found near the body, which was fully clothed, though his outer jacket was nearby.

The coroner withheld a cause of death pending further tests.

Whether Todd died of hypothermia, which can be accelerated by alcohol, or some other cause, his text messages and the foolhardiness of his climb suggest that suicide was at the least on his mind.

In the aftermath of his death, affairs with women in Manchester and London were exposed. There were reports that Todd’s distress had been triggered by a forthcoming tabloid newspaper sting and a wronged husband visiting Todd’s wife at the family home in Nottinghamshire. Were such personal problems really enough to drive an outwardly tough-as-teak policeman to kill himself?

Former colleagues find his apparent suicide baffling. “We knew there was a trail of women,” said an insider from Scotland Yard, where Todd was an assistant commissioner for three years. “But surely there must have been something more to cause him to take that long walk alone up the mountain.”

Investigations last week by The Sunday Times have, however, revealed a sensitive man who had previously threatened suicide over crises in his love life. A previously unknown lover of Todd’s discloses that he told her he would kill himself if she made their affair public. She describes a man who hid his frequent depressive episodes behind a cheerful exterior. It was while forging his career in the Metropolitan police that Todd met Tracy Clarke. After spells with Essex and Nottinghamshire police, he moved to London in 1998. He met the then 28-year-old Clarke when she was working for the Met’s internal complaints department. As a deputy assistant commissioner, Todd was learning how to chair disciplinary boards for errant cops.

She remembers flirting, but it wasn’t until February the next year that he asked her for dinner at a tapas bar near her southwest London flat. After the meal they strolled by the Thames and he admitted he was still with his wife, Carolyn. They had married when they were both young. She lived with their three children in Halam, Nottinghamshire. Todd stayed during the week in a police house in Colindale, north London. It was an arrangement that continued when he moved to Manchester.

Clarke was also aware of his reputation as a “shagger”. She wanted more. “I wanted to see what his intentions were,” she said last week. “It wasn’t an extramarital fling; it was an intimate relationship. There was a lot of chemistry. He found someone he could open up to.”

As their relationship developed, his vulnerability moved and, on occasions, alarmed her. “I really feel that Michael’s job was his medication for depression; it was his absolute anchor,” she said. “Job pressure he could handle – but he couldn’t deal with the emotional side.”

Clarke recalls that his mood would change when they talked about his childhood and marriage. “Even his closest friends weren’t aware of the effect of his mum leaving him when he was nine years old.” He told her his mother went off with a neighbour and his daughter, leaving Todd and his brother Stephen with their father.

Clarke became alarmed when, early on in their relationship, Todd admitted to having suicidal thoughts and wondered who would care if he followed through with them. She reminded him of his children. “You don’t think of that when you are in the grip of depression,” he replied.

Clarke says she urged Todd to get professional help. “He would not entertain [it]. I said it was private and confidential, but he said he would see himself as weak.” In summer 1999, under stress from a corruption investigation – she was later cleared – and concerned by the uncertainty surrounding the affair, Clarke ended it. They remained in contact and Clarke hoped he would leave his wife. He did, briefly, but chose not to reignite the affair.

Every so often Clarke would ask if things were fine. Only occasionally would the veil slip. In one e-mail from Todd, dated March 1, 2000, he wrote: “Back in the land of the living for a day. Not pear-shaped again! . . . Like British Rail used to say, ‘We’re getting there’. A mix of good and bad really.”

Her concern for him came to a head during an employment tribunal she brought against the Met, which she thought was restricting her promotion after officers found out about her affair with Todd. He was concerned that she would name him at her hearing in April 2001. Late one night she received an anguished phone call. “[When he called] I asked him what was wrong. ‘I need to know, are you going to name me?’ I said I didn’t know.” It was then that he became really distressed.

Clarke had experienced Todd in this mood before but now something was different. He said he was in his car with some paracetamol. Clarke recalls asking how many and Todd’s response was disturbingly precise: “Two boxes of 500 but one of them wasn’t full.” She said she would not name him and he pulled back from his threat. She lost her tribunal.

When Clarke left her job in the Met as an intelligence researcher last August and moved abroad with her new husband, Todd agreed to give her a reference. Speaking this weekend from her new home, she said of the apparent suicide: “I’ve been expecting it ever since that call . . . He really couldn’t see that he could have weathered the storm and the thought of an exposé would have crucified him.”

Todd certainly continued to risk exposure. On moving to Manchester in 2002 he kept up his ladies’ man act. Last week a series of affairs, with fellow police officers and a journalist, were alleged. Only one has been confirmed by the other party involved.

In 2005 he met Angie Robinson, chief executive of the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce, at a business function and they kept up a relationship until last year.

Police sources said last week that a tabloid reporting team was known to be in Manchester investigating Todd’s private life. Other unconfirmed reports suggested that Robinson’s husband had driven to Halam last week to tell Carolyn Todd of their spouses’ affair.

By now Todd had more to lose if he were exposed. He had built an excellent reputation in Manchester. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on America, he was one of the first to spot the fact that Al-Qaeda was targeting Muslim men in the provinces as potential recruits to terrorism.

He halved the number of burglaries in Manchester and cut overall crime by 20%, while increasing detections. They were the sorts of figures that made home secretaries sit up and take notice, and Todd was widely regarded in the Home Office as a serious contender to succeed Sir Ian Blair as Met commissioner.

“He said he never wanted to come back as commissioner,” said Lord Stevens, who was Todd’s boss when he was at Scotland Yard. “But because of his accomplishments and his talents and who he was and his real feel for policing generally, I think he would have been one of the contenders without a doubt.”

Was it the prospect of losing this chance that drove him to make his doomed walk up Snowdon? Or was there another reason? Yesterday it was announced that Manchester police had asked their West Midlands counterparts to examine Todd’s private life to ensure it had no impact on his work conduct.

We will never know what was in his mind, but the testimony of those close to him suggests that such a man would have been devastated by the blow to his career and his pride that exposure would have brought. “He was a very proud man,” said Stevens. “He was very proud of being a police officer, of what he had achieved in policing. Whoever’s given him an indication that something might go against his reputation, he’d find that very difficult to handle.”

His family are left to try to rebuild their lives. Carolyn Todd issued a statement suggesting she would have stood behind her husband. “I loved Michael very much and the last time I spoke to him he told me that he loved me too,” it said. “We had been married for 27 years and eight months. The whole family is struggling to come to terms with his death.”

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