By the time the Land Rover was halfway across the causeway it must have been obvious they were never going to make it. Not at the speed that tide was coming in. Not with that distance still to go. At which point, what do you do? One spot about halfway across at which careful passing is possible aside, even at its broadest the road linking the island to the mainland is only ever about a vehicle and a half wide. Even at its highest, at the lowest tide, the road is only a foot or two above the level of the surrounding mudflats. There is nowhere even to attempt a three-point turn. There is no way you are going to get back to the island in reverse, blind drunk, in the middle of the night, in a borrowed and unfamiliar vehicle.
Behind you, on the island, the party is still going strong, fireworks popping and fizzing. A mile or so ahead you can just make out the silhouette of the village—the orange glow of the harbor front, a light or two still on here and there in an upstairs window. So what do you decide? Your first instinct is to keep going, to put your foot down. To take your chances at forty, at forty-five, fifty, on this unfamiliar, sinuous track in the pitch dark, the headlights illuminating just one unpredictably curved stretch of the causeway in front of you at a time, black waves already lapping across it, the road ahead rapidly narrowing, disappearing. You could sound the horn, flash your lights wildly—but even if you did manage to attract
someone’s attention, even if somebody on shore did see you or hear you and call the coast guard, what could the coast guard possibly do, given the speed things are progressing, considering the distances involved?
And then the horror becomes not just what is happening, but how easy it is, numbed and jumbled and fuzzy as you are, to imagine what will happen next. The grimly dawning realization that within minutes the water will be up to your axles, up to your headlights. That at some point, probably sooner rather than later, the engine will suck in water and choke, and the whole vehicle will grind to a halt.
And all this time, the Land Rover’s other occupant is screaming at you from the passenger seat, telling you this is all your fault, demanding you do something, flailing around, panicking.
And it occurs to you that you should call someone, call anyone, but then of course you realize your phone is still on the island; they took your phone, and even if they hadn’t, there probably wouldn’t be any reception out here anyway.
And you wonder how long you would survive out there, in the cold water, in the darkness, if you tried to swim for it, given the time of the year, and the strength of the currents, and how far you are from the shore.
And at some point it dawns on you that whatever you do now, the result is inevitable.
And at some point it dawns on you that the media are going to have an absolute field day with this.
And perhaps at that moment—but only perhaps, and only for a moment—it dawns on you that this is no more and no less than the ending you so richly deserve.
Vanity FairMurder on the Island
It was the club you’d kill to join; the launch event to which the A-list were dying to be invited. What no one could have anticipated was how tragically things were about to go wrong. In this exclusive investigation, Ian Shields cuts to the heart of the case that baffled the world . . .
The party on the island had been going on for days.
All Friday morning, all Friday afternoon, helicopters had been arriving, departing, circling. Speedboats thumping back and forth across the glittering waves. A steady stream of blacked-out SUVs making their way down hedgerowed Essex lanes, past bare brown fields and damp black
trees, through the narrow streets of the village of Littlesea. At around midday someone counted three Model S Teslas driving past, one after another.
A celebrity wedding, you might have said, if you didn’t know better. Some millionaire’s fiftieth birthday.
All Saturday afternoon, all Saturday evening, from across the water, sometimes louder, sometimes fainter, came drifting the steady doof-doof-doof of distant bass. Here and there, over the course of the weekend, in the late mornings, in the afternoons, if your eyesight was good enough or you had a pair of binoculars, you could just make out from the mainland where people had laid big blue-and-white-striped blankets on the foreshore. A head bobbing in the water. A horse kicking through the sand, its rider bouncing along in the saddle.
Now and again, in the evenings, you could make out through the trees the flicker of huge flaming Tiki torches, the front of the Manor illuminated in yellow or green or blue. There were even times, if the wind was in the right direction, when it was possible to imagine you could hear the crowd: their cheers, their whoops, their laughter. Their screams.
As well as celebrating Island Home’s grand opening, the lavish party also marked thirty years since the company’s CEO, Ned Groom—one of hospitality’s great visionaries—had inherited the Home Club in Covent Garden from his grandfather and boldly set to work transforming it from a dusty and undersubscribed private drinking den for “actors, performers, and other stage professionals” into the modishly renamed Home, the most exclusive and talked-about London nightspot of the decade (that decade being the 1990s), whose famous front-door superstars stumbled out of and straight onto the pages of the next day’s tabloids. Kate Moss had her birthday
party there several years in a row. Kiefer Sutherland and his entourage were famously turned away one night. The entire cast of Friends took over the roof terrace for their final London press junket.
It was now almost twenty-five years since Ned and his right-hand man, his brother Adam Groom, had crossed the Atlantic to launch their second club, the now-iconic Manhattan Home.
In the years and decades since, the Home Group had become a genuine global brand, a collection of eleven members’ clubs with attached hotel suites, all offering—for a hefty annual fee—the same comforting combination of down-to-earth luxury, effortfully understated cool, and absolute privacy to the chosen few. There was Santa Monica Home. Highland Home. Country Home. Cannes Home. Hamptons Home. Venice Home. Shanghai Home. There were Homes in Malibu, in Paris, in Upstate New York. Each one in a jaw-dropping setting: a former embassy (Shanghai), a grand palazzo (Venice), a deconsecrated cathedral (Cannes), a restored country pile (Country Home, in Northamptonshire; Highland Home, in Perthshire).
Even so, nothing that Ned Groom had ever attempted was on anything like the scale of Island Home. A whole island, two miles across, two and a half miles long, ninety minutes’ drive from London, complete with neo-Palladian manor, acres of woodland and miles of beaches, ninety-seven individual guest cabins, five restaurants, three bars, several gyms, tennis courts, spin studio, spa, sauna, helipad, screening rooms, stables, and heated natural outdoor swimming pool. All of it private property, accessible by land only at low tide along a twisting mile-and-a-half-long causeway. Despite the five-thousand-pound-plus-per-night price tag, before a single member had ever set foot on the sand, Island Home was booked solid for an entire year.
It was perhaps only to be expected, given the size of the place, given the ambition of what Ned Groom and his team were attempting, not to mention Ned’s legendary perfectionism, that not everything had gone quite according to schedule. First it had been due to open in the early spring, then the late spring, then the summer, then autumn.
For months, Home had been hiring staff—kitchen staff, front-desk staff, maintenance staff, waiters, housekeepers, a thirty-person events team, an eighty-person security team—and training them all in the particularities and peculiarities of working for one of the world’s most exclusive and discreet cliques, dealing with some of the world’s most particular and precious people.
For weeks, all hands had been on deck, inspecting and testing and double-checking, to make certain that the cabins scattered around the island—each one composed of vintage timber reclaimed from hundreds of historical wooden barns, huts, and sheds the design team had spent years sourcing and acquiring from as far afield as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Estonia—were ready to receive their first overnight guests. To certify that the log burners were correctly ventilated and weren’t going to suffocate anyone in their sleep. To ensure that all the lights switched on, all the toilets flushed, all the baths ran at the correct, thunderous water pressure, filling each cast-iron, claw-foot tub in under three minutes. To confirm that the winding gravel paths were clear and navigable, whether on foot or by bicycle, electric scooter or chauffeur-driven golf cart. That sudden sharp drops and deep water and other natural hazards were clearly signposted. That, by the time the first members arrived, all the paint was dry, patches of splintered wood sanded, exposed wires tucked away, and that no one was going to get electrocuted or accidentally impaled.
In retrospect, perhaps any tragedy seems to acquire a sense of inevitability.
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