Then, somewhere quite nearby, they heard the sound of a helicopter preparing to take off.
Vanity Fair
MURDER ON THE ISLAND
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 39
It was the helicopter that woke her up, according to Lyra Highway.
‘I could hear the noise, going right over our cabin, really low, shaking stuff. And I was wondering if Freddie was leaving in his helicopter, how were me and Mama going to get home? And I was lying in bed thinking about that when I heard all the shouting.’
A thoughtful child, Lyra is strikingly similar in appearance to the photographs of Kyra at her age that appear in her mother’s memoir. Throughout Kyra’s interview she has been a polite presence, asking if she can have a biscuit, asking if she can have another biscuit, asking if she can play something on her iPad, turning the sound on it down when asked to do so. Likewise, throughout Lyra’s interview, Kyra is present, making sure the pre-agreed, carefully worded questions are adhered to, ensuring her daughter is not getting upset or anxious and that, as promised, she is allowed to tell the story in her own words. Just as she did to Annie Spark that Sunday morning on Island Home. Just as she did to the police, that afternoon, with her mother and a lawyer present, in a quiet room in The Manor.
‘It was two men shouting,’ she recalls. ‘One of them was definitely Keith Little, I know his voice. I went to the window – Mama was still asleep, she’s hard to wake up sometimes – and opened the curtains and I could see him, coming out of his cabin, with a suitcase under his arm stuffed with things, but the suitcase wasn’t closed, and all his things were falling out, and he kept stopping to pick up dropped things and every time he did, he would drop something else. It looked like his hands were hurting him and someone I couldn’t see kept shouting at him to hurry up. And Keith kept shouting back for him to stop shouting.’ She thinks for a moment, choosing her words carefully. She glances over at her mother, who encourages her to go on. ‘And to shut the eff up. And then Keith came around the back of the . . .’
‘Of the Land Rover,’ Kyra prompts.
‘Of the Land Rover,’ Lyra continues. ‘And he opened the back door and sort of poured his stuff in. And then someone started beeping the horn. And then he shouted something again and he climbed in and they drove off with the wheels skidding, like in a film, so fast that I thought they would crash. But I didn’t hear a crash.’ As far as can be established, it was the last time any human being saw Keith Little, or heard Jackson Crane, alive.
Asked if her daughter found the experience traumatic, Kyra Highway says she has so far shown few signs of it. At the Home Group’s expense, Lyra has been seeing one of Harley Street’s most highly respected child psychiatrists ever since. Of course, says Kyra, they have had several conversations, about death, and dying, and where people go afterwards. ‘She understands that there was an accident, and that is why people must never drink alcohol when they are driving, and you must never get into a car with someone you think might have been. But she doesn’t know all the details, about the rest of it,’ she says, lowering her voice.
The body of Adam Groom was discovered by a cleaner inside a Louis Vuitton trunk in an upstairs lounge of The Manor at 11 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, 31 October, exactly twelve hours after the man who murdered him, Keith Little, drowned in a waterlogged car on the causeway – driven by Jackson Crane, the man last seen, dishevelled and screaming barely coherent threats, being led out of the ballroom by Groom just a few hours before that.
It was a murder so savage that one expert described it, at Adam Groom’s autopsy, as a crime of fury. A merciless, senseless, sustained and brutal attack. A catalogue of horrifying details. The cord drawn back and forth across his neck so frequently, so forcefully, that his windpipe was not just crushed but severed in places. The inner membranes of his eyes ruptured by the internal pressure of his strangulation. The missing nails on his fingers, torn away as he’d tried to protect himself. The autopsy description of Keith Little’s hands likewise lingers in the imagination, his fingers and palms lacerated almost to the bone.