Recovering deleted contacts from cloud

A friend has inadvertently deleted all contacts from his iPhone. Since iCloud backup was enabled, everything has disappeared. He has no other Apple device. His phone was synced with iTunes (Windows) two weeks ago but a restore has not produced any contacts, probably because iCloud backup has been selected.

I have advised that there is now no chance of recovery but I thought I would double check. Is there is any way of recovering contacts which have been deleted from iCloud in rather same way that, for instance, I could recover a deleted Dropbox file?