The Club(13)

‘Home clubs are like that,’ Kyra explains. ‘Even if you’re nipping in for a quick drink on a Tuesday night, it feels like a house party where you know everyone. Anyway, Freddie and me have been friends forever,’ she continues, pointing to a framed photo on the sideboard of them both, obviously in their teens, on stage at Madison Square Garden. ‘That was back when I was trying to break out in the USA.’ She laughs and shakes her head. ‘That never happened, did it? Anyway, Freddie and I got on like a house on fire from the first time we met, and when he quit the band and moved over here, we had an absolute riot. Possibly too much fun actually . . .’ She winks.

‘We’ve had this tradition since he moved back to the US for his show, that once a year we go away somewhere to just hang out.’ She gives her trademark cackle. ‘Clubbing in Ibiza, a week in the Maldives if we’re feeling flush. We’ve done Vegas, a detox retreat in Hawaii – we lasted two nights on a juice fast there before we escaped to drink pina coladas . . .’ She points to another framed photo of them grinning, clutching bucket-sized cocktails in a beach bar, flushed with rum and sunburn.

‘Anyway, that night, after a drink or three, we did a few songs on the piano in the upstairs bar, and then we had a few more drinks. And he said he was going to Island Home on Thursday, he was flying himself down. Because we hadn’t had our trip yet that year and it was already October, he said that I should come.’ She gives a little shrug. ‘I didn’t have anything on, so I said yes. We didn’t really think it through, I guess.’

For someone who, if this five-floor north London townhouse is any indicator, made serious money during her recording career, with three UK number ones, two top ten UK albums and sell-out stadium shows across Europe under her belt, Kyra Highway is astonishingly modest. So self-effacing that it’s easy to overlook the scale of her success, how big a star she actually was at the peak of her career. Given her composure, it is also easy to forget how far she has come – how much she has overcome – to get here, something she details with brutal honesty in her best-selling autobiography My Way, the Highway. The abusive teenage boyfriend. The bullying at school. The sudden ascent to pop fame aged fourteen. All those jokes on Never Mind the Buzzcocks about her Birmingham accent. The paparazzi harassment. The tabloid stings. That divorce. When you think how long ago she had her first hit, how solid a presence she has been in the public consciousness since, it is hard to believe the singer is still only in her mid-thirties.

‘I did briefly question if they’d actually want me there, but Freddie was adamant Annie Spark would be thrilled – or at least if she wasn’t, then she wouldn’t cause a scene,’ Kyra recalls. ‘And he was right about that. You should have seen their faces, though, as they walked up the lawn to meet us and it wasn’t just Freddie standing there waving. My God, their expressions. The panic. Especially after they realized I’d brought Lyra too, when she hopped out of the chopper behind me.’ She half smiles at the memory, then shakes her head, grows thoughtful.

‘You know,’ she says, quietly, ‘when I think about what happened, the decision I regret most in my entire life – and if you’ve read my memoir or the newspapers you’ll know I have made some really bad ones in my time – is bringing my little girl with me. My second biggest regret is not leaving sooner. It was chaos, that Sunday morning. Really scary. Drones circling. Everybody attempting to get off the island, trying to work out who was missing, desperate to get their phones back – squeezing their way through the crowd into The Boathouse, shoving, shouting – to call their agents, their PAs, their publicists, their mums. I’ll never forget it. Wandering around the island with my daughter – the only child in the whole place – clinging to my hand and crying, people pushing past us, the two of us trying to find anyone in a position of authority, to tell them what Lyra had told me. What Lyra had seen.’





Chapter Two


Thursday Evening


Jess


This was not how Jess had envisaged her first evening on the island: babysitting a tiny gatecrasher.

There was so much to do. So much to do. That was the panicky thought that kept gripping her. Under normal circumstances someone in her job would have been in place a year in advance for a launch like this. Choosing her team, getting to know their foibles. Understanding the island and its quirks, figuring out the quickest ways from one cabin to the next.

Her tour of Island Home had been whistle-stop, conducted by a recently arrived, crumpled and quite put-out-seeming Adam Groom, the golf buggy barely stopping as they looped its woodchip paths, rattling here and there across little wooden bridges over streams and gullies, squeezing half off the track into the bushes or onto grass whenever they encountered a buggy coming in the opposite direction; Adam pointing out through the trees as they hurried by the outdoor pool, the yoga pavilion, the breakfast barn, the lake, the concrete track down to the water sports centre (not yet quite finished, not that anyone was likely to want to go paddleboarding this late in October, even if the sun was shining), the turn for Ned’s own personal residence on the island (the road up to it was clearly marked private), the big jetty where all the island’s supplies were unloaded, the staff canteen, their accommodation (a long two-storey brick building with tiny windows, adjacent to a generator) – which was where he had dropped her off, so that she could check out her room (single bed, wardrobe, sink, mirror, view of the corrugated and pine-cone-covered roof of the staff bike shed) and freshen up (there were showers at the end of the corridor on each floor) before she met her team.