A carpet of spring bluebells has sprung up around Loudham Hall in Pettistree, Suffolk.
Aside from the occasional dog walker, the 2,300-acre estate, once the home of British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, who died when his superyacht, Bayesian, sank off the coast of Sicily in a freak storm last August, is eerily quiet.
Ewes and lambs idle under shady trees and pink blossoms scatter over the gardens of quaint, ivy-clad cottages dotted around the estate.
A herd of cows – Mike’s beloved Red Poll cattle – grazes contentedly in one of the fields.
Locals say his widow, Angela Bacares Lynch, has decided to keep them in his memory. ‘She is adamant they’re going to stay as a memorial to Mike, as long as they’re still living at Loudham Hall,’ Ray Bowler, secretary of the Red Poll Cattle Society, tells the Mail.
This grand, 16th-century farmhouse was once the cherished family home of Mike, 59, Angela, 58, and their two daughters, Esme, 21, and Hannah, 18, who perished with her father on the yacht.
But with Mike and Hannah gone, Angela and Esme aren’t here as much as they used to be, preferring their London house, a £7.2 million Georgian terrace in Chelsea, which is closer to Esme’s studies at Imperial College.
The gates to Loudham Hall are firmly shut. Inside lies a mausoleum of memories – a life filled with family dinners, raucous celebrations, love and laughter. Now it is little more than a poignant reminder of what has been lost.
The scene could not be more different in Porticello, Sicily, this weekend. The fishing village, home to just a few thousand, is a hive of activity, with hundreds of journalists and TV crews expected to descend for a front row seat. For it is here, over the coming weeks, that the wreck of Bayesian, which has lain undisturbed since it sank to the depths in the early morning of August 19, will be raised from the seabed.
Entrepreneur Mr Lynch (right), 59, and daughter Hannah (left), 18, were among seven people who drowned when the Bayesian sank off the coast of Porticello, near Palermo
The ‘Bayesian’ sailing boat sank at dawn on 19 August off Porticello, near Palermo, after a tornado hit the area
Domina Zagarella, the four-star luxury hotel where the survivors – including Angela herself, who escaped the wreck with painful lacerations to her feet – stayed alongside the crew after the disaster, is fully booked until mid-May.
A worker at La Strummula restaurant says the 30 guest houses in the area have no vacancies for the rest of the month. Meanwhile, restaurants are preparing new menus – not only for the media but for curious tourists, among them divers, hoping to witness the ghoulish spectacle from underwater. And what a spectacle it will be.
It’s been eight-and-a-half months since Bayesian went down, struck by powerful winds – up to 110mph – during a violent thunderstorm in an otherwise placid harbour, and she lies, keeled over on her right side, at a depth of 164ft (50m).
The £30 million vessel, which Lynch, the founder of cybersecurity company Darktrace, bought in 2014, boasts an 184ft (56m) hull and an astonishing 237ft (72m) mast. Footage shot by Italian navy divers shows the yacht still intact. Like a ghost ship, it’s as if it could resurface and resume sailing at any moment.
Sources involved in the salvage operation tell the Mail that getting it out of the water is a ‘delicate’ and ‘challenging’ feat, involving floating cranes, laser drones and an underwater saw. The first crane, a 700 sqm barge called Hebo Lift 2, arrived on Thursday, while the second, the Hebo Lift 10, one of Europe’s largest floating cranes with a lifting capacity of 2,200 tons, is expected tomorrow.
‘It will be a two-phase salvage operation, extremely complex,’ explains Giovanni Rizzuti, the Lynch family’s lawyer in Italy.
Phase one involves sending down a drone to scan the site. The underwater saw will then be used to detach the huge mast which will, a source says, ‘be left on the sea bed and recovered later’.
Phase two involves attaching two ‘slings’ around the hull before the larger crane is used to right the yacht and pump out water as it is slowly raised. Sources say the operation will take several weeks – significantly longer than the 16 minutes Bayesian took to sink.
His wife Angela (pictured together), the yacht’s registered owner, was among the survivors of the wreckage
With an estimated 18,000 litres of fuel still on board, it is imperative there are no leaks; nor do the team – up to 80-strong – want to risk damaging the hull.
For though the Dutch-based recovery crews are experts in underwater salvage – the same company was involved in the retrieval of the Costa Concordia – there’s more at stake here than simply bringing up a boat.
A criminal investigation is underway, focusing on Bayesian’s captain, New Zealander James Cutfield, as well as chief engineer Tim Parker Eaton and nightwatchman Matthew Griffiths, both Britons, for their roles in failing to prevent the disaster.
All three face possible charges of culpable shipwreck and manslaughter, of the seven people – six passengers and one crew member – who lost their lives that night. They deny all allegations.
No one, not even experienced maritime experts, seems able to explain what happened, with speculation ranging from portholes left open, to watertight bulkheads not lowered, to an electrical blackout just before the ship went down.
The yacht’s designers, The Italian Sea Group, who declared the vessel ‘unsinkable’, have said they will be taking legal action against some media outlets after questions were raised about its safety.
And so, once it is out of the water, Bayesian will be transported to the Sicilian harbour of Termini Imerese, where Italian authorities will commence a meticulous inspection to find out what, truly, went wrong.
A veil of secrecy surrounds the details of this inspection, as it does the raising of Bayesian itself. Though the yellow cranes, just 300m offshore, will be clearly visible to anyone in Porticello and the surrounding resorts, a security perimeter has been erected – on land, at sea and in the air – to prevent bystanders getting too close.
Loudham Hall in Pettistree, Suffolk, the 2,300-acre estate where Mike Lynch lived with his family
A source says Angela Lynch is in close contact with the salvage team, who are keeping her well informed, but neither she nor Esme are expected to travel to Sicily.
Though technically Angela owns the yacht – due to a legal controversy in which Mike was embroiled for 12 years, it was her company, Revtom, which bought it – the £20 million salvage operation is being funded by insurers.
She could, of course, have paid for it – the Lynch family wealth is estimated at £850 million – but this was not a bill a grieving widow should have to cover. She has other financial burdens on her mind, after all. Before his death, Mike faced an arduous legal ordeal, which saw him spend 13 months under strict house arrest in the US and endure a 12-week trial, with the prospect of 20 years in prison for fraud.
The charges related to the 2011 sale of his software firm, Autonomy, which he sold to American tech giant Hewlett Packard for £7.4 billion. The deal turned Mike – once dubbed ‘Britain’s Bill Gates’ – into one of the UK’s richest men, but within a year HP accused him of artificially inflating the price.
Although a criminal judge in San Francisco cleared him of fraud – the very decision Mike was celebrating with close friends and colleagues aboard Bayesian last August – the opposite result was reached in UK civil proceedings, with HP alleging it was owed up to £3 billion in damages for ‘wrongdoing’.
After Mike’s death, there was speculation it might not pursue the claim, out of respect for Angela and Esme. But last September, in a decision branded ‘heartless’ by her closest friends, the company CEO confirmed it would be going ahead.
All that remains is for the judge in the case, Mr Justice Hildyard, to determine the amount of damages the Lynches must pay. A source close to the family says they’re ‘expecting a judgment quite soon, before the summer’, and will, if it is anywhere near the amount HP is claiming, almost certainly appeal.
Damages of this magnitude would be catastrophic, potentially forcing Angela to liquidate substantial portions of their assets and sell off business interests and properties – possibly even their beloved Loudham Hall – to meet the claim.
In the months ahead, she and Esme will also have to sit through Mike and Hannah’s inquests – an unimaginably distressing task.
Divers will descend on to the 500-ton, £30million Bayesian (pictured) to start preliminary preparations, beginning by wrapping slings around her hull
At a pre-inquest hearing last month, Suffolk’s senior coroner, Nigel Parsley, confirmed these cannot take place until the criminal investigations – by British and Italian authorities – have concluded.
For now, at the family’s four-storey London home, Angela is keeping a low profile. Though her physical wounds may have healed, her grief is vast and all-consuming. Friends say she’s wracked by ‘survivor’s guilt’.
Esme, meanwhile, has valiantly continued her studies, despite the trauma of the past eight months. Her LinkedIn profile shows she is now in her fourth year of a physics degree at Imperial.
An inner circle of friends, confidantes and lawyers surrounds them both, keeping them up to date with the progress of the investigation and shielding them from intrusion.
One of them, Susannah Gurdon, a friend who holidayed with the Lynches, including aboard Bayesian, has paid tribute to the ‘united, vibrant, loving family’ of four that was torn apart last summer.
Myriad questions, she says, confront them daily. ‘Why do some people die young, like Hannah? Why does somebody get cut off in the prime of life, like Mike? [There are] those sort of big “why” questions, life questions.
‘And then there are sort of the nitty-gritty. Why did the boat go down? Why were they trapped?’
They are not the only ones to wonder such things, for the ripples of this tragedy are felt far and wide – among not only the families of the victims but those who, like Angela, escaped.
The HEBO Lift 10 was sailing to Sicily, where the 184ft (56m) Bayesian went down last August after a freak storm
Speaking exclusively to the Mail this week, the family of Recaldo ‘Rick’ Thomas, Bayesian’s chef, say the raising of the yacht will be ‘difficult’ for them to witness. His was the first body to be recovered – not on board, like the others, but from the sea.
Rick, 58, was a respected chef, popular among high-profile superyacht owners, who’d secured a four-month stint aboard Bayesian. He had, his family say, 50 special recipes up his sleeve for the guests on board – including a warm apricot salad that Angela adored.
Devastatingly, he never got the chance to cook them. ‘Rick died doing his job in terrible conditions – securing the flooding galley while encouraging the guests to hurry up to the top deck,’ says James Healy-Pratt, partner at British firm Keystone Law, which is representing his family, based in the US and Antigua.
‘The Thomas family demand justice as well as equal treatment. They know only too well that he was the only crew member to lose their life that night. They want legal spotlights to shine into the secretive world of superyachts and their designers, owners and managers. They want to know why Rick died, they want to prevent future similar deaths and to obtain fair compensation.
‘They will leave no stone unturned in their desire to get very public justice.’
As Bayesian was UK-registered, all seven of the victims’ families have secured British legal representatives, who spoke at last month’s pre-inquest hearing.
Among them are the relatives of Jonathan Bloomer, the 70-year-old Morgan Stanley International chairman, and his wife Judy, 71. from Sevenoaks, whose three adult children, James, Elizabeth and Helena, were robbed of both their parents.
As were Sabrina and Sophia Morvillo, whose father, Chris Morvillo, a Clifford Chance lawyer from New York, and mother, Neda, also lost their lives that night.
Greg, Chris’s brother, is still coming to terms with their loss, as he told a TV documentary in November – but has vowed to uphold a promise he made to look after their daughters. ‘They’re old enough that they don’t need a guardian,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to be there for whatever they need.’
The British tycoon and his daughter died when the Bayesian superyacht sank with 22 people on board
Others scarred by the tragedy prefer not to talk about it, focusing on moving forward with their lives as they process the trauma of what happened. Like Charlotte Golunski, 35, on board with her husband and one-year-old daughter, who spoke about holding her baby ‘afloat with all her strength’ amid the ‘fury’ of the sea.
And Ayla Ronald, 36, the London-based lawyer travelling with her partner, who posted a sunset photo from the yacht the evening before it sank, and sent a chilling text to her father that read: ‘There are deaths, [but we] are alive’.
Back in Suffolk, where the lush green farmland is a world away from the high seas, locals are still mourning the loss of a man many thought of as one of their own.
Masood Sharif, 58, who has lived in Pettistree for 19 years, remembers Mike as ‘a hero’ who was always ‘happy as Larry’ when he saw him around the village.
Carolyn and Colin Reed, who live in a cottage on Loudham Hall estate, miss exchanging daily greetings with the businessman when he passed them in his car.
Estate workers once employed by Mike have been ‘looked after’ financially, another local tells the Mail, in a gesture typical of their late boss’s generosity.
‘He was very well respected by them,’ says Ray Bowler. ‘He was always very considerate and he loved his Red Polls and always liked to chat. ‘This was his escape as much as anything.’
In the difficult weeks and months ahead, he hopes Angela might visit more. Though it holds painful memories, she, too, may find solace here, surrounded by the bluebells and Mike’s beloved cows.
Additional reporting: Stephanie Condron and Silvia Marchetti
