The chambers to which Groom is referring is One Knight’s Court, Lincoln’s Inn, a private family practice specializing in high-profile divorces where he was a barrister until shortly after the club was left to him, aged twenty-nine.
On the death of his grandfather in 1992, Ned and his younger brother Adam inherited – in unequal shares – the business and title deeds to the building. A long-running family dispute is alleged to have been the reason their father, Richard Groom, was passed over. Some have suggested that this came as rather a shock to Ned’s father. There are some who believe it was a shock to Ned too.
‘I think we were all a bit surprised, at the time, when he decided to give up the law,’ says Sebastian Shaw QC, a commercial litigation barrister from Blackwell Row, a neighbouring chambers. ‘He loved the law, and he was bloody good at it, too. Bloody good. The number of cases Ned Groom won before he left the bar – celebrities, CEOs, oligarchs – was almost unheard of at his age. Juicy stuff, that – not like the dull contracts most of us deal with,’ he says, self-deprecatingly. ‘That memory, that quick wit, that single-mindedness. Anyone who ever got in an argument with the man knows he’s like a dog with a bone. Even in those days he was the most tremendous show-off. Loved to be up there in court, the centre of attention. They call politics showbusiness for ugly people – well, you can add the professional bar to that too.’ He chuckles. ‘I remember a lot of people being completely gobsmacked that he would give all that up to go off and take over what was a pretty dingy and uninspiring sort of place back then.’
Ned wasted no time in trying to shake things up. He rewrote the menus, deep-cleaned the dusty old spaces and shut the guest bedrooms entirely after an outbreak of bedbugs. He approached banks for loans, applied for planning permission to gut and refurbish the old building, the top three floors to be taken up with luxurious suites designed to attract the right sort of clientele. He decided to rename it Home: simple, elegant, modern. He repeatedly clashed with English Heritage, trying to convince them to permit his vision: a twenty-first-century club in a late-eighteenth-century shell. The drinks prices were hiked, monthly fees increased. Existing members struggled to pay and, some felt, were compelled to leave. Every time someone started telling a story about the old days Ned was said to insist the barman turn the music up a notch.
Then, in the small hours of 16 September 1993, the first news reports began to emerge of a fire in Covent Garden, smoke billowing in great grimy clouds above Bedford Street, which had seemingly started in The Home Club’s basement kitchen （a fuse box was later identified as the most likely culprit） but quickly spread to the first, then second, then third floors and prompted the evacuation of much of the street. Over the course of the next few hours, despite the best efforts of several teams of firefighters, it spread to consume the entire building, leaving it a smouldering shell.
There were those who found it a bit convenient, that fire. There were those – Private Eye’s Piloti amongst them – who found Ned’s plans for how he intended to rebuild the club just as horrifying.
There were many who found Ned’s attitude to the natural and architectural heritage of Boucher’s Island equally vandalistic. The Victorian rookery bulldozed. Acres of woodland cleared for cabins. Natural habitats destroyed. Noise pollution. Light pollution. And even those who worked for him found his methods questionable. A year on from the opening of Island Home, there are still local contractors – plumbers, builders, electricians – who claim not to have received payment. As terrible events on the island were unfolding that Sunday, former employees had begun posting on social media under the hashtag #HomeTruths about behaviour they’d witnessed or had been subjected to. The rages. The rants. The bullying. At least one person, identifying themselves on Twitter as a former member of the front of house team at Manhattan Home, claimed that in light of Ned’s temper and the way they had seen him behave, they had always suspected he was going to end up killing someone, one of these days.
Then came the news that Ned Groom had disappeared.
Chapter Three
Friday Morning