On a cold, grey afternoon in late February, I go with Sara Canning to the Creggan housing estate in Derry, where, almost a year ago on the night of 18 April, 2019, her partner, the young journalist Lyra McKee, was shot dead while observing a riot there. Before we leave, I ask Sara if she is sure she wants to revisit the site. “This is my city,” she replies, “and I am free to go where I want; they are not going to take that away.”

“They” are the New IRA, who remain a palpable presence in Derry despite the public backlash directed at them after they admitted responsibility for Lyra’s death. The Creggan is their turf, a sprawling housing estate on a hill above the Bogside and the Free Derry wall. These estates were on the frontline of the Troubles in Derry and, alongside the civil rights murals that mark the beginning of the Troubles, there are now others eulogising the IRA’s “Men of Violence”, and a sculpture of Easter Lily, the symbol of Irish republicanism, now stands near the Free Derry wall. Fifty years after the Troubles began in this city, local youths are once again being recruited to the cause of violent Irish republicanism. Recently, there has been an attendant rise in punishment shootings of those accused of drug dealing and joyriding.

In Nando’s, it was like a meeting of the Northern Irish branch of the UN – and Lyra was the common denominator

“The vast majority in Creggan are amazing people,” says Sara. “They don’t want all this, they don’t want to live in the past.” History hangs heavy here, though, and prospects for the young are bleak. In 2017, a survey of Derry residents between the ages of 13 and 21 found that 95% saw no future for themselves in the city. In the Creggan, that pessimism is most acute.

We turn left into Fanad Drive, a nondescript street with council houses on one side and tall railings on the other. A forlorn bunch of flowers is tied with a cotton scarf to the base of a nearby lamppost. On a gable wall, an anti–PSNI (Northern Ireland’s police force) mural erected by Saoradh – widely assumed to be the political wing of the New IRA – looks over the site where Lyra McKee was shot dead. It is eerily quiet. As the late afternoon light fades, I remember something Sara said earlier: “I can’t be there when it is pitch dark like it was that night.”

Lyra McKee had moved from Belfast to Derry in early 2019, to be with Sara Canning. The pair met on the dating app Plenty of Fish, on St Patrick’s Day the previous year, and had quickly fallen in love. “We hit it off right away,” Sara told me when I first spoke to her last December. “There’s a meme about lesbian dating: let’s get the small talk out of the way and you can tell me about your deepest trauma and how it still affects you. That was us, really.”

Sara Canning (right) in a selfie taken with her partner Lyra McKee. Photograph: © Sara Canning

Three months into their relationship, Sara’s father died in Altnagelvin hospital, a trauma that bonded them even more deeply. “I remember telling him: ‘Daddy, I’ve met someone and she’s amazing.’ He didn’t really like the whole gay thing, but was accepting enough and they hit it off. It was the first time my da ever had a conversation with anybody I went out with.”

In a piece for a Belfast newspaper, written not long after the couple had met, Lyra McKee wrote: “Derry is such a beautiful city. I have fallen in love with it… Here’s to better times ahead and saying goodbye to bombs and bullets once and for all.”

****

Early evening on 18 April last year the couple were at home in their pyjamas – Sara making halloumi fries and Lyra lying in bed, nursing a sore arm from driving back from Belfast – when they received a message on their group chat that Sara’s friend Sinead was going up to a riot in Creggan. “Immediately, Lyra was like, ‘Will we go, will we go?’” recalls Sara. “And I was, like, ‘Nah, we’re in for the night, we’re in our pyjamas.’ And she said, ‘Well, that’s easy rectified.’” Sinead picked them up and they drove up the hill, parking the car on Creggan Heights.

They arrived just before 10pm to find the street crowded with teenagers but also older people and even a few parents with their young children. All of them had come to watch the rioting that had broken out after a police raid earlier in the day. There had been trouble the previous summer and, as Sara tells me, people would go up to their friends’ houses to watch the rioting, to watch it from their front door. “It might seem mad to outsiders, but that’s what people did in Derry. The attitude was, ‘It’s just another riot.’”

That was about to change. At a crossroads about 50 yards down the street, two vehicles, a lorry and an Audi, had been set on fire by rioters and youths were lobbing bricks and petrol bombs over them at two stationary police Land Rovers. The police were not responding. Sara points to a nearby garden wall, where the three of them stood for a while, before moving down the street towards the crossroads to try to get a better look at what was going on. When Sara heard “popping noises” coming from the burning Audi, she insisted they move back up the hill where it was safer. Lyra, who had not experienced rioting firsthand, having grown up in a protective family environment in Belfast, had, says Sara, “gone straight into reporter mode” as soon as they arrived, taking phone snaps and speaking to a policeman on the scene.

They found a spot behind another police Land Rover. Police CCTV footage of Lyra shows her standing behind a bunch of people, holding her phone aloft to take a photo of the burning vehicles. “We were standing there for a wee while, just watching,” Sara tells me, “when I heard a roar from the crowd down at the bottom. She mimics a long, guttural cheer – “Yeeoooooooooow!”

The sound was made by youths on the other side of the crossroads greeting the appearance of a man carrying a handgun. On phone footage circulating online, taken from just a few yards away, you can hear people cheer as he raises it to fire. Sara did not hear the gunshot that killed her partner. “I turned to Lyra to tell her we needed to move because I thought the crowd were going to rush the police. And, she wasn’t there. She was on the ground.” Then, it was pandemonium.

Sara Canning photographed at the Derry City Wall with the Creggan and Bogside behind her, March 2020. Photograph: Laura Davison/The Observer

Initially, Sara thought Lyra had been hit by a stone. “It was all split-second stuff, totally unreal. Lyra was lying close to a Land Rover on her right side. It started to move a bit and I started screaming for it to stop because she was so close to it. And then I put my hand to her head and I realised it was really bad.”

Minutes later, the police Land Rover, with Lyra inside, drove through the burning vehicles and sped off towards Altnagelvin hospital on the other side of the River Foyle. “They couldn’t take me with them,” says Sara, “because there were too many of them in the back and they were all medically trained and working on Lyra.” She was left standing in the road, bewildered and helpless, as people milled around her. “I was covered in blood and shouting at the police: ‘What do I do? What do I do?’” Only eight minutes had passed since the couple had arrived in the Creggan.

She and Sinead drove to the hospital. When they arrived, Sara recalls, “People were saying, ‘There’s been a wean shot, a 12-year-old. And I was thinking: ‘What! As well?’ Then, I realised it was Lyra they were talking about. She was wearing a pair of trackie bottoms, a baseball jacket and a new pair of trainers she’d got for her birthday. She definitely didn’t look her age.”

****

That same night, 70 miles away in a terraced house in north Belfast, Nichola McKee Corner, was watching television with her husband when she received a call to tell her that her youngest sister, Lyra, had been hit on the head and was being taken to hospital. Her initial reaction was one of pure astonishment. “I said: ‘What do you mean hit on the head? Where?’ That’s when I was told she had been at a riot and I was like: ‘A riot! What do you mean a riot? Our Lyra’s never been to a riot in her life.’”

The final tweet posted by Lyra McKee before she was shot and killed. Photograph: PA

While Nichola recounts the dreadful events of that night, her grief is still raw, her words faltering from time to time as she relives the moments when her life was altered irrevocably. We are sitting at her dining table, while her husband, John, watches the rugby on the sofa, casting solicitous glances her way each time she falters or falls silent. Their daughter is curled up beside him. It is a warm and welcoming household, but one still steeped in sadness and loss. Every so often Nichola gets up to search for poems Lyra wrote as a child or to show me photos from a bulging family album. A deft pencil drawing of Lyra hangs on a wall and, on a nearby cabinet, several candid snapshots of her with her nieces attest to a time when things were whole, unbroken.

Nichola tells me that after she put the phone down from that first phone call, she and John started preparing to drive to Derry. “We didn’t immediately sense anything bad,” John says quietly. “There was no sense of panic or anything at that point.” Nichola decided to dial Lyra’s number. “I was expecting her to answer and, when somebody did, I said: ‘Are you all right, wee love? Has the doctor seen you yet?’ But, it wasn’t her.”

She pauses for a long moment. “I was told: ‘She’s in with the doctors now and they’re working on her.’ I just said: ‘We’re leaving now.’”

As they set off, Nichola received another phone call to tell her that Lyra had been shot and that it was not looking good. She shakes her head slowly and stares at her hands. “I just started screaming. John had to pull the car over. I couldn’t breathe. I got out of the car and I was just screaming and screaming. Just screaming out there on the road.”

After that, the night unfolded with a terrible inexorability. The couple drove to Nichola’s mother’s house, where they woke her up and told her that her youngest daughter had been shot. Together, the three of them drove back to their house, where other family members had agreed to meet them. As they were turning into their street, Nichola received another call, this one from a police officer. “I remember saying to him: ‘We’re just getting ready to leave now, but, before we do, can you tell me, is my sister still alive?’ There was a silence and then he said: “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but your sister has passed away.’” Her eyes well up with tears. “It was,” she says, “like the whole world collapsed at that moment. And then to have to drive up there to Derry, knowing what we did.”

They left Belfast soon afterwards, a small family convoy moving northwards in the darkness. When they reached the Glenshane Pass high up in the Sperrin Mountains in County Derry, a dense fog came down, slowing their progress. “It was scary and unreal,” says Nichola, “so thick you could barely see anything. And, all the time, you know what’s waiting ahead of you. It was a nightmare and it still is. It’s our nightmare and it never stops.”

****

Lyra McKee turned 29 a few weeks before she was killed. When photographs of her appeared in the media in the days that followed, she looked much younger, like a quizzical, slightly nerdy teenager. The news of her murder spread across the world and she was celebrated as a young journalist and LGBT activist whose campaigning life and tolerant, progressive outlook stood in direct contrast to the violent nihilism of those that had taken it in such a reckless manner. The senseless murder of a journalist, and one so young and promising, struck a deep chord.

Across Northern Ireland, Lyra McKee was mourned and celebrated in equal measure on social media and in impromptu street vigils, many of them organised by members of the LGBT community. For an older generation, her killing reawakened memories of the dark days of the Troubles: the indiscriminate violence and the justifications that inevitably followed. The next day, Saoradh, issued a statement on their website claiming that “Lyra McKee was killed accidentally” by a republican volunteer defending people from an “incursion” by “heavily armed crown forces”.

A few days later, a group of Derry women who were friends with Lyra McKee staged a protest at Junior McDaid House, the Derry headquarters of Saoradh, placing their handprints in red paint on the wall of the building as Saoradh members and dissident republicans looked on. There were shouts of “nobody wants you” and “murderers” from a crowd of onlookers.

On Good Friday, the day after her murder, a public vigil was held for Lyra McKee in the Creggan. It was attended, to the admiration of many locals, by the DUP leader, Arlene Foster, as well as Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald. Sara Canning walked beside them, carrying a rainbow flag, the symbol of LGBT pride. Earlier, the director of the Rainbow Project in Belfast, John O’Doherty, had written: “We are devastated at the loss of our friend Lyra McKee: a remarkable person, a professional and committed journalist and a hero to many in the LGBT community.”

At Lyra McKee’s funeral, left to right: Arlene Foster, leader of the DUP, Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Fein and Michelle O’Neill, deputy leader of Sinn Fein. Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

As her family and friends gathered for her funeral service at St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast, they were joined by politicians from across the spectrum, including the Irish president, both British and Irish prime ministers, leaders of the respective oppositions and several local politicians, including Arlene Foster and Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill. At that point, the Northern Ireland assembly had been in suspension since January 2017, as a result of bitter divisions between the DUP and Sinn Fein.

The priest, Father Martin Magill, praised the politicians’ show of unity, but also asked the question that was in many people’s minds. “Why in God’s name does it take the death of a 29-year-old woman with her whole life ahead of her to get to this point?” His words drew a sustained standing ovation from those inside and outside the cathedral.

In 2014, aged 24, Lyra had written and published Letter to My 14-Year-Old Self, a powerful personal account of what it was like to come out in a rigidly intolerant society, where homosexuality is still viewed by many people, including several proudly homophobic DUP politicians, as an abomination. “Life is so hard right now,” she wrote, ostensibly addressing her younger, more fragile and uncertain self, but also every young person struggling in secret with their sexuality. “Every day, you wake up wondering who else will find out your secret and hate you. It won’t always be like this. It’s going to get better.”

The often revealing, personal thrust of Lyra McKee’s writing lent her best pieces a lived authenticity that was deeply affecting, particularly for those of her generation and younger who identified with her struggles and, through reading about them, often found their own reserves of courage. She was someone, who, as the Rainbow Project’s John O’Doherty put it, used “her own coming out story to empower others to live as their most authentic selves”.

It became clear after her death that she did more than that. “I was overwhelmed with stories from people I’d never met,” recalled Sara Canning. “At her wake, one young guy was breaking his heart telling us how she had helped him on social media when he was suicidal about being bullied. Lyra had personal experience of that. He had posted something and she had DM-ed him right away and then, afterwards, kept an eye on him.”

In death, Lyra McKee became an icon, a symbol of a young Northern Irish demographic that she herself had identified: the ceasefire generation. In January 2016, in a piece published on the webiste mosaic.science.com, she wrote: “The Ceasefire Babies was what they called us. Those too young to remember the worst of the terror because we were either in nappies or just out of them when the Provisional IRA ceasefire was called… We were the Good Friday agreement generation, destined to never witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace. The spoils just never seemed to reach us.”

The article, “Suicide of the ceasefire babies”, was an elegy of sorts for all those who had died by their own hands in the aftermath of the Troubles. In it, she revealed the remarkable fact that more people in Northern Ireland had taken their own lives in the first 16 years of peace than had been killed in the 30 years of conflict. One of them was her best friend, Johnny, who had lived at the end of her street in north Belfast and, like her, was gay. We were, she wrote, “the neighbourhood’s resident freaks”.

Johnny had first tried to take his own life aged 16. She recalled how she and her friends had watched over him on the night he was released from hospital. “It never occurred to us, as we took turns to keep an eye on Johnny that night, that it didn’t matter what we did. He would just keep trying until he managed it.”

These articles, in their deft merging of the deeply personal and the social-political, announced Lyra McKee as a singular millennial voice and helped secure her a two-book deal with Faber, which, on 2 April, will publish Lost, Found, Remembered, a collection of her essays, journalism and book extracts. It includes the only complete chapter from The Lost Boys, the book she was working on when she died, an investigation into the mysterious disappearance of several young men during the Troubles.

It is inevitably a slim volume, and, as such, a memorial of sorts for a life cut short, a gifted writer silenced just as her voice was finding its true range. “The sad thing is that Lyra was still evolving as a writer and was definitely destined for great things,” says Susan McKay who wrote a piece about McKee’s murder in the New Yorker last July. (A native of Derry and author of Bear in Mind These Dead, about the legacy of the Troubles, McKay was a friend and mentor to McKee.) “She already had a unique take on things insofar as her interests somehow bridged the ceasefire generation and the Troubles, all the unresolved issues of the aftermath.”

Lyra McKee’s mother, Joan Lawrie, and Lyra’s sister Nichola McKee Corner receive a posthumous award for Lyra for outstanding journalism, May 2019. Photograph: Shutterstock

****

Lyra McKee was born in 1990 and grew up on Cliftonville Road in north Belfast, close to an area known as “Murder Mile” because of the frequency of the sectarian killings carried out there. The youngest child of six, she was doted on by her mother, Joan, and her older sister Nichola, 15 years her senior. “Lyra was the baby of the house, the centre of attention,” recalls Nichola. “My mam was very, very protective of her. I remember when she was out playing on the street on her roller skates, she was only allowed to go up to the lamp-post about two houses away.”

Nichola tells me that her mother is in hospital and that the family are extremely concerned about her condition. “It’s all taken a big toll on mammy. They were so close, Lyra and her. Even after she went up to Derry in February last year, Lyra would come back to see her and look after her. She would quiz the doctors to find out stuff. And she could relay it all back to you. She triple checked things with other people.”

Last week Nichola announced her mother’s death in a Facebook post: “It is with the greatest sadness that I share this. My mother, Joan Lawrie, passed away peacefully in hospital on 10 March. She is now at peace with her beloved daughter Lyra McKee.”

Nichola said the death of her sister had had a profound effect on her mother. “They killed her the day they killed her precious baby girl,” she said.

As a child, Lyra suffered from hearing difficulties and struggled to keep up at school. A turning point came in Primary 4, when her teacher, Mr O’Neill, read the class Roald Dahl’s story The Twits, which, Nichola says, “brought reading alive for Lyra for the first time”. Inspired, she wrote her first story, “Laura Sees a Fairy”, for one of Nichola’s daughters. Aged nine, she was given Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by her grandmother, and, like many of her generation, remained an obsessive fan of the series into adulthood. Many of her friends attended her funeral service wearing Harry Potter T-shirts.

Her confidence took a knock when she failed to pass the 11-plus, and, in Letter to My 14-Year-Old Self, she recalled how she was bullied relentlessly at secondary school when a friend she had confided in broadcast that she was gay. “They make your life hell. They laugh at you, whisper about you and call you names. It’s not nice. And you can’t ask an adult for help because if you did that, you’d have to tell them the truth and you can’t do that, they can never know your secret.”

In 2006, aged 16, she won a Sky young journalist award for her piece on youth suicide. Grinning, she told BBC Newsline: “It’s given me a big confidence boost. It’s shown me what I can do... This is my vocation.”

Her teenage years at Belfast Metropolitan College are recalled fondly as a turning point in A Letter to My 14-Year-Old Self. There, she bonded with a small group that she described as her “first real friends in semi-adulthood”. Gavyn Anderson, whom she nicknamed Skinny Ginger Boy was one of them. When I meet him in a cafe close to St Anne’s Cathedral I am struck immediately by his resemblance to McKee. “Everyone says that,” he says, smiling.

Like Lyra, Gavyn had childhood problems with hearing and was bullied at school. Later, both of them had dropped out of Queen’s University Belfast, Gavyn because “the classes were way too big”, Lyra because she found it “too big and scary”. They bonded, one senses, out of a shared experience of being excluded. “Belfast Met was the best place for both of us,” he tells me. “We fitted in and made friends there. I wasn’t that confident when I met her and I didn’t really know anyone.”

She first noticed him, he says, when he was sitting at a desk, “drumming away with two pens” to a marching song playing in his head. “I’m in the Orange,” he informs me cheerfully, referring to the Orange Order, an organisation not known for its tolerance of difference. “Of course, she was immediately interested. Though we were from different backgrounds and had pretty different views, we hit it off straight away. Over time, we just bounced off each other.”

Once, for a joke, he gave her a union jack flag for a Christmas present. When she unwrapped it in front of the class, the whole place fell silent. “I think Lyra was a wee bit taken aback for a moment, but she immediately wrapped it round her and started marching up and down outside the class. Then she came back in and said, ‘Anybody got a lighter?’ The whole place cracked up.”

Lyra’s friends Gavyn Anderson, left, and William Ennis: ‘Lyra didn’t adhere to the normal rules of conversation.’ Photograph: Laura Davison/The Observer

Gavyn was brought up as Free Presbyterian, which is about as fundamentalist as it gets in Northern Ireland. “We changed each other,” he says. Did he know Lyra was gay? “Well, I remember her coming out to our wee group,” he says, nodding, “but we all kind of knew anyway.” Gavyn tells me he is “very supportive of equal marriage”.

He seems, I say, pretty progressive for someone “in the Orange”. He nods his head. “I probably wasn’t that progressive when we met, to tell the truth. Lyra definitely has a lot to do with it.”

Later, I meet up with another friend of hers, William Ennis. He tells me that when he first met Lyra she asked him, “Do you know my friend Gavyn Anderson? He’s a Protestant as well.” He cracks up laughing at the memory. “She didn’t adhere to the normal rules of polite conversation,” he says.

William is a socialist, a political blogger and member of the Progressive Unionist Party, and first encountered Lyra in 2014, when she had an online spat with him about his politics. They agreed to meet and quickly became friends. He recalls being struck initially by the sheer diversity of the people she gathered around her. “We’d meet in Nando’s, her restaurant of choice,” he says. “There’d be a guy who worked in tech, someone whose relative had been shot by the IRA, a trans activist and me. It was like a meeting of the Northern Irish branch of the UN – and Lyra was the common denominator.”

Often, he says, the talk would turn quickly and combatively to local politics. “What struck me from the start was that she actively sought out people with opposing views. That’s rare here, but she wanted to hear every perspective, and she went about that in sometimes alarming ways.” How so? “Let’s put it this way, she had friends and contacts on the loyalist side who were so far to the right that I wouldn’t have had anything to do with them. Not only that, she met some of them by doorstepping them. Alone. At night. She was fearless like that and maybe a bit naive, but it worked for her somehow.”

Earlier, Sara Canning had told me: “It was amazing that Lyra achieved what she did because, underneath, she was in severe anxiety a lot of the time, a ball of nervous energy. She was like one of those ducks that seems calm and unruffled on the surface, but underneath, its legs are going like mad.”

Lyra’s close friendships crossed generational as well as political lines. “It didn’t matter to her if you were a 100 years old or two years old,” says Ruth Dudley Edwards, the 75-year-old political journalist and writer, who, as she puts it, was “recruited into Lyra’s menagerie” in 2013 despite disagreeing strongly with the younger writer on many subjects. “Age and differences didn’t come into it with Lyra. She had a great hunger to learn and she thought it was worth listening to people who had been around a bit. She was greedy in the best possible sense for other people’s experience, but also incredibly caring. She would often ring me up to see if I was getting my work done sufficiently. She was like my mother at times.”

Is it any wonder that no one will come forward to help the police? Silence, of the kind Lyra sought to break, prevails

The pair would meet, whenever Lyra was in London, and often lock horns. “We’d have big disagreements from time to time. I thought her impulsiveness interfered with her judgments, and I’d tell her so. She didn’t take criticism too well, which is not a good trait for the job she had chosen. At other times, she was like an overenthusiastic child – eager, utterly impulsive.”

Dudley Edwards puts me in touch with a middle-aged engineer and entrepreneur called Stephen Lusty, who first met Lyra when she pitched him a startup idea she called Newsrupt, a platform for investigative journalists where editors could bid for stories. “I was blown away by her,” he says. “She looked about 12, but her presentation was perfect and she had this enthusiasm and all these ideas. I later realised it went hand-in-hand with a lot of anxieties.”

Like William Ennis, he attests to her “extraordinary generosity of spirit” and her loyalty. “She could be a pain in the ass, at times, ringing you at all hours and firing questions at you that, you’d find out later, she had also asked everybody else. But, she’d also be there for you, whenever you hit a low ebb, 100%. That was just how she lived her life and it makes what happened even more heartbreaking.”

****

In many ways, Lyra McKee was a mass of contradictions: confident yet often uncertain, anxious yet fearless, thin-skinned yet tough. In her anxieties and her obsessions, her constantly connected online life, her LGBT activism, her inclusive politics and her often soul-baringly personal writing, she was emblematic of her millennial generation. It is a still emerging demographic, increasingly non-binary on political as well as gender lines, and as such, is one that could yet shape the future of Northern Irish politics, shifting the discourse away from the old tribal loyalties that have for so long held sway. She is, and will remain, an icon for them.

In her obsessive interest in the Troubles and the long fallout from them as well as in the tenacity with which she sought to break the silence and uncover the secrets that attend the missing, the lost and the banished, she seems to me to have been exceptional in her generation. Understandably, many young people in Northern Ireland do not want to look back at the recent past. She did. It is why she sought the advice of older journalists and writers, and befriended ex-political prisoners and doorstepped shady paramilitary figures.

Three days after the shooting, new graffiti on the Free Derry wall in the Bogside. Photograph: George Sweeney/Shutterstock

Though too young to have experienced the worst of the Troubles, Lyra McKee instinctively understood how the shadows cast by the violence would linger as long as there are unanswered questions about the dead and the disappeared. In this context, her death seems even more tragic. In her work, she sometimes referred to Lost Lives, a profound book of remembering that chronicles every death in the Troubles and, in doing so, shows that the majority of those killed were innocent civilians, people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In circumstances that echoed many of those indiscriminate killings, she has been added to their number.

In the days following her death, the words “Not in Our Name, RIP Lyra” appeared on the Free Derry wall with a heart drawn beside them. Soon after, those words were painted over by dissidents and the wall now bears their imprint. Weeks later, pro-dissident graffiti appeared on a wall on the corner of Sara Canning’s street – “Me and my friends had a few drinks and went out and painted over it,” Sara tells me.

Now, on Fanad Drive, close to where she was murdered, a Saoradh mural topped with an Irish tricolour looks down on the spot. Around the corner, graffiti proclaims the innocence of the man recently charged with her murder (he is currently out on bail). A few weeks ago, a large group of his supporters congregated noisily outside the courthouse for his hearing, while Nichola McKee, Sara Canning and other family members and close friends sat in silence inside.

The threatening graffiti, the murals, the paramilitary marches, the punishment shootings all still loom large over life in the Creggan. Is it any wonder that no one will risk coming forward to help the police? The stakes are simply too high. Silence, of the kind that Lyra McKee sought to break, prevails as it did throughout the darkest of times.

****

Last summer, on a visit home, I took the bus from Armagh to Newry through several rural villages and small towns where Ulster flags and emblems of the Orange marching season proclaimed loyalty to another unyielding vision of the future. At several of those same villages along the way, young people climbed on board draped in rainbow flags and wearing rainbow T-shirts, some with their faces painted in the same bright colours. They were on their way, one of them told me, to Pride in Newry, where around 50,000 people had gathered to celebrate difference that day. They were young, excited and chatty, utterly unaware, it seemed, that, not that long ago, their presence might have provoked outrage, even aggression, in these same parts. Changed times indeed, I thought: another vision of a possible Northern Irish future of tolerance and inclusivity.

Sara Canning (front centre left) marches with protesters through Belfast city centre demanding same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA

One might conclude that these were Lyra McKee’s people, which, in many ways, they were. But, as I write this, I think of something Sara Canning said of the young men throwing stones and petrol bombs at the police on the night in the Creggan just before the darkness descended. “When we got there and Lyra saw the demographics of the crowd, it tied into her interests. Her mind was taking it all in for the story probably already forming in her head. These young lads were part of the ceasefire generation, too, and younger. Where were the dividends of the Good Friday agreement for them?” That their story will not be written, at least by her, is another of the many cruel ironies that attend her death.

If one were to search for the abiding spirit of Lyra McKee, it resounds powerfully in her now famous TEDx talk from 2017, How Uncomfortable Conversations Can Save Lives. Online, you can view it in full and see how she wins over an audience who seem initially bemused and intrigued by her diminutive presence and easygoing delivery. As the talk shifts to the illuminatingly personal and she relates her experience of growing up gay in Belfast, the attention shifts accordingly. Then, comes the pay-off, which is pure Lyra.

“If any of you are uncomfortable with the thought of someone like me, please come up to me after this event and talk to me. I won’t bite your head off, I won’t call you a homophobe. We’ll just have a conversation, and I’ll show you that I’m human just like you. If you are comfortable with the thought of someone like me, have a conversation with someone who isn’t and try to change their mind. Because you could be saving a life.”

At the end, she received an ovation and was called back out by the crowd. “I went to find her and she was with Ana Matronic from the Scissor Sisters,” recalls Nichola, smiling. “The first thing she said was: ‘Do you think it was all right?’ I was, like, ‘Are you serious? Of course it was all right. They loved you.’ She didn’t believe in the reaction. It actually shocked her.”

Afterwards, Nichola tells me, Lyra received an email from a mother and her daughter. “The mother had struggled with her daughter coming out, but listening to Lyra speak had helped them rebuild the gap that had opened up between them.”

In that same talk, Lyra had told the audience: “In the LGBT community, we have a saying that we tell people. We tell them: ‘It Gets Better’… It gets better for those of us who live long enough to see it get better.”

And for Lyra McKee it did get better for a short, beautiful time of great hope, promise and love. In a living room in a terraced house in Belfast, I find myself telling her heartbroken sister that, through her words, and the manner in which she lived her life, Lyra lives on. “She does. She does,” Nichola says, quietly. “But I would give anything for her to be flying in through the door now and giving me a big hug.”

• Lost Found, Remembered by Lyra McKee is published by Faber on 2 April (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free p&p on orders over £15