Sophie and Jamie were twenty and twenty-three years old, and neither had ever traveled so far from home before. For seven days, they were alone in Japan. Even while Jamie was Lucie’s boyfriend, Sophie had never liked him much; it was her mother’s idea that he accompany her. They spent a fruitless week shuttling between the British embassy, where they were shown anxious, but helpless, concern, and Azabu Police Station in Roppongi, where they were met with remote indifference.
Louise had already filed a report on Lucie’s disappearance, a single piece of paper in a room of filing cabinets. But they did learn something about Chiba, which was not only a city of nine hundred thousand people but also the name of a prefecture of five million more, an area as large as Kent and Greater London combined. They also learned that “newly risen religion” was a direct translation of the Japanese term used to describe New Age cults, and that there were several thousand of them.
Jane, in Sevenoaks, was nearly incoherent with anxiety, but Sophie talked every few hours to her father, Tim. They discussed the dilemma faced in many such situations: whether to go public or not. Someone must know what had happened to Lucie. Someone must have seen her on the day she vanished. The only way to reach such witnesses was with a public appeal for information. On the other hand, if she had been taken by a kidnapper seeking a ransom, then a demand for payment, and the opportunity for negotiation, would eventually follow. If the abduction had been carried out for purposes other than money—rape, for example—then her captor might be facing his own dilemma over what to do with his living captive. Either way, a hue and cry in the media could panic the abductor into irreversible action. “There was a risk that if we went public, Lucie could wind up dead,” said Sophie. “There was also the danger that if we kept it out of the news, then any chance to find her would be lost.”
The police wanted nothing to do with journalists. The embassy said that the choice lay with the family but gave the impression of agreeing with the police. Sophie had arrived intending to march up to the front door of Lucie’s abductor and compel him to hand her over by the force of her sisterly will. But immediately things had become complicated. There were so many pieces that had to be manipulated and lined up in sequence, like a Rubik’s cube: police, embassy, media, even Sophie’s bickering parents. Each one had to be dealt with in precisely the right way, even when their interests collided.
Sophie’s sleep was disturbed by jet lag and anxiety. One night she dreamed that she was trapped inside a video game, which was also a Hollywood film. Sophie was an action hero, a James Bond or Bruce Willis, out to save the world before time ran out. But instead of defusing the bombs, saving the hostages, and killing the terrorists, she had to motivate the police, keep on good terms with the diplomats, engage the journalists, and mediate between her parents, before somebody out there, the unknown and faceless villain, murdered her sister.
* * *
“We had a choice,” Sophie said. “Get all that we could from the police and stay away from journalists, or keep the case high profile, put pressure on the investigation, but learn nothing from the police at all. And we chose the media.” In fact, the decision was taken out of the Blackmans’ hands. In London, without consulting the family, Louise Phillips’s sister, Emma, had gone to The Daily Telegraph. Within a few days the story was in all the British papers; the confusion of the reporters was evident.
Fears were growing last night that former British Airways hostess Lucie Blackman is being held as a sex slave by an evil Japanese cult. (The Sun)
Police fear that Lucie Blackman, 21, may now be forced into prostitution as “bait” for the weird group. (Daily Mirror)
Police are investigating whether Lucie Blackman was abducted by one of the customers at the late night members’ club Casablanca, where the 21-year-old was paid to talk to drinkers. (The Independent)
Lucie Blackman’s fate could lie in the hands of the Japanese “mafia.” (Sevenoaks Courier)
For journalists in Tokyo, it was a troublesome story. The Japanese police bluntly refused to comment. The British embassy had little to say either, although it said it more politely. The club managers and foreign hostesses in Roppongi were defensive and wary; those who could be persuaded to speak articulated only puzzlement and concern. Sophie Blackman’s response to media inquiries was one of truculent contempt. The mystery of the missing stewardess was intriguing but not compelling: all over the world and every day, people disappeared, often for uninteresting reasons. Lucie would quickly have been forgotten if it hadn’t been for her father, Tim, who landed in Tokyo the following Tuesday, ten days after Lucie had gone missing, and immediately did one of the things that he would come to do best: he held a press conference.
* * *
In Britain, just as in Japan, powerful conventions govern the way that people under the load of unbearable stress are expected to behave in public. We like our anguished victims to be passive, confused, and broken; where those characteristics are absent, suspicion flourishes.
The way that the Blackmans presented themselves in Tokyo was the opposite of conventional.
A Japanese family, deprived of their daughter in sinister circumstances, would shuffle before the cameras with downcast eyes. Their words would be halting and few. They would express love for their child, anxiety for her safety, and appeal to the good nature of her abductors to give her back. There would be tears, and even apology, or something close to it, for “causing inconvenience” by their plight. The journalists’ questions, too, would be conventional. What was your daughter’s character? What is your message to the kidnapper? The unhappy family would shuffle off again, and little more would be heard from them. Responsibility for dealing with the press, for solving the mystery—responsibility for everything, in fact—would be entrusted without question to the police.
In Britain, there is a little more room for the expression of individual anger and resentment, but only within limits. An unspoken code governs people in the situation of the Blackmans, as strict in its way as old formalities of mourning. Before encountering Tim and Sophie in Tokyo, I had had no idea of its existence. It was their indifference to the conventions, from the very beginning, that made them so obvious.
Tim’s first press conference was in the British embassy the morning after his arrival in Tokyo. The room was packed with people, cameras, and television lights; every seat was taken and there were reporters standing in the aisles. The embassy press secretary sat at a table on a podium alongside Tim and Sophie Blackman. She made a brief introduction, in those tones of exaggerated softness and poignancy which are reserved for public discussion of tragedies concerning the young. Then Tim spoke. He was a tall, solid man in his late forties, with direct blue eyes and a head of thick, reddish-blond hair. He was confident, articulate, almost brisk. “V. composed,” I scrawled in my notes, “impressively so—no lump in throat, no obvious emotion. Big sideburns.”
Yes, said Tim, in answer to the first question, he had met the police yesterday, immediately after his arrival. His impression was that they were following all available leads. Yes, Lucie had kept in touch with him by telephone while she was away and sounded happy. Asked about the telephone call from “Akira Takagi” and the suggestion that Lucie had joined a cult, he was confidently dismissive. “Lucie is a Roman Catholic,” he said. “She did not take a great interest in religion generally, and the thought that she might suddenly become interested in a religious cult over a Saturday afternoon is very unlikely.”
Lucie did have debts, he acknowledged, but nothing out of the ordinary—a “managed” overdraft and credit-card bill of a few thousand pounds. He and Sophie were in Tokyo, he explained, to assist the police and the media. “Lucie is a very noticeable young lady on a Japanese road or sitting in a Japanese car,” he said. “A member of the public who may have seen her walking, or with someone driving through a gateway, may come forward and provide us with the vital clue we need.”
His answers were prompt and efficient; as a provider of information he could
not be faulted. But—from the point of view of the photographers and reporters and TV cameramen—that was not his role. Occasionally, in press conferences and in conversations over the telephone, Tim would pause before delivering an answer. The pause would extend and lengthen until it filled the room with tension. At these moments, one had an inkling of great, gaping emotion held in check. But a silent pause cannot be quoted, cannot be photographed. And then Tim would answer in his steady, emphatic, matter-of-fact, almost ironic voice. He was articulate but never gave the impression of being overprepared. He didn’t refer to notes. From time to time, he would glance sideways at Sophie; sometimes, they would exchange a smile. He seemed at home on the podium, even relaxed. The next day, the less scrupulous papers would pepper their stories with phrases like “frantic dad Tim,” “distraught sister Sophie,” and “fighting back tears.” They were lies. It was hard to imagine a calmer or more focused pair.
One British reporter raised his hand to ask about Lucie’s current boyfriend. Tim said that he didn’t know him but understood that he was a foreigner and had been interviewed by the police. The same question was put to Sophie, who had said little so far. The embassy press secretary had earlier advised that Sophie not attend the press conference, fearing that the media would attempt to provoke from her a distraught reaction. If so, the media were disappointed. “Of course she mentioned him, she’s my sister,” Sophie replied with a curling lip. “She said she’d met a chap over here, she had started dating, and that’s all you need to know. The details of what she said are none of your business.”
The photographers were crouching, lurking at the bottom of the podium, their lenses angled upwards. They were waiting for the shot that would make the following day’s papers: a finger brushing away a tear, a face crumpled with anxiety and despond, even just the clenched hands of father and daughter. But there was nothing of the kind. As the press conference came to an end, I realized that there was something else about Tim that was disconcerting, something about his appearance. In most ways, it was conventional enough: he wore a blazer, dark trousers, and tasseled leather shoes … Then I spotted it.
As the lights and cameras were being dismantled, a Japanese reporter I knew approached with a frown on his face. “What was your impression of Mr. Blackman?” he asked. “And why was he not wearing any socks?”
* * *
“I’m a yachtsman,” Tim told me years later. “So I rarely wear socks, unless I have to. And it is very hot in Tokyo at that time of year.” As for the emotional dynamics of that press conference: “We decided early on that there’d be no simpering and crying. None of that.”
Tim was born in Kent in 1953 and went to school in the Isle of Wight. His father, who also loved boats, was a stern man. Tim, the youngest of three children, was, by his own reckoning, “a complete pain.” “I was the youngest, the little one, very irreverent, and my father at the time seemed very strict and growling,” he said. “I never knew where to stop. I expect they would describe me today as a bit hyperactive.” At school, Tim played the four-string banjo in a successful bluegrass band. It performed at music festivals and even pressed an LP, which “rocketed into obscurity.” With no urge to go to university, he enjoyed himself for a few years, earning the reputation as a cocky flirt, which was the first that Jane knew of him.
By Tim’s account, the marriage was troubled from close to the very beginning and became more and more miserable as the years passed. Its final years, and the first few years after its collapse, were ones of professional strain as well as personal unhappiness, with the slow failure of the family shoe shops and then the disastrous collapse of Tim’s property company. But by 2000, he had resurrected the business, become the contented partner of Josephine Burr and stepfather to her four teenagers, and rebuilt his relationship with his own children, including, eventually, Lucie.
The idea that Lucie would go to Japan emerged gradually, over several conversations. Tim knew that she was unhappy at British Airways and that the long-haul schedule was making her ill again. He knew, too, that she had debts: Lucie asked him directly if he would pay them off. “I helped her manage them,” he said. “I gave her bits and pieces, but I wasn’t really in a position to write out a check for five thousand pounds, and I’m not sure that’s something you want to get into the habit of doing. Of course, I live with the idea that if I’d paid her debts she wouldn’t have gone to Tokyo. But I don’t know that for a fact, and I’m not going to beat myself up about it, because there’s no way out if you get into that trap. It’s not going to make any difference to anything.”
Before her departure, Lucie made no mention at all of hostessing. “I assume Lucie thought I would disapprove, and I would have done. Because it was unseemly. It was not what her intellect was for. I’m a man, and I know that, however safe this business was supposed to be, males leer at females. But it was a good while before she told me the full story. In retrospect, I was the typical gullible dad.”
There were regular telephone conversations with Lucie after she had left and the odd postcard. At first she was homesick and fed up. Everything was expensive, and she struggled to make ends meet. Tim urged her to come home, but Lucie wouldn’t abandon Louise. After a few weeks, she described to him the job she was doing. “She said it was a bit strange but quite good fun: Western girls pouring drinks, including three or four British girls, and then these funny Japanese people. She said they all talked like this: hwah-hwi-hwah-hwi-hwor. Then afterwards, the girls would have a few beers and cycle home. And she told me she’d met a lovely U.S. marine, this chap Scott. She’d prattle on happily, about this and that. By that time it was obvious she was beginning to enjoy it all a lot more.”
Then came the telephone call from Jane. Whichever version of it one accepts, it is clear that Tim reacted to the news of Lucie’s disappearance with greater calm and detachment than his ex-wife. “I’ve been asked so many times what I felt at that moment,” he said. “And I don’t know what I felt. It was all rather unreal. There was Jane on the phone, screaming, calling me every name under the sun. And there was I, sitting in the back garden, listening to the blue tits in the trees.”
And then, within a matter of hours, before anything had become clear, Sophie was on her way to Tokyo to offer herself as a sacrifice for Lucie. Tim knew nothing about Japan. Like his son, Rupert, he telephoned anyone he knew who had some experience or knowledge of the country—business contacts, the friends of relatives. A Japanese acquaintance of his brother told Tim that a single British girl missing in Tokyo would not be likely to command the serious attention of the Japanese police. “I heard this kind of thing from more than one person,” Tim said. “And that is when I did start to panic. Just the realization that you’re completely in the hands of very, very distant foreign agencies, and absolutely dependent on them to resolve this life-and-death problem. And I was being told that it’s not likely that they’d do it.”
At around this time, the calls started coming from journalists. “Jane was giving the conventional response to phone calls at two in the morning—two words with lots of f’s,” Tim said. “I was different. Journalists started ringing me up, so I told them what I knew. Suddenly I found the story starting to build. So I thought, ‘If we’re going to have an effect on things out there, people have got to know she’s missing.’
“Then Sophie would ring from Tokyo and say, ‘I’m totally stuck. The police are hardly talking to me.’ It dawned on me, if we could whip up a huge amount of interest in the UK, it could make a difference. I announced that I’d be traveling out to Japan myself—that produced more interest.” Tim was discovering the power that an individual, at the right moment, can exert over the media, the power of creating headlines. He made another important discovery too.
At the end of July, on the southern island of Okinawa, the Japanese government was to host the summit meeting of the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized countries. Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac, and Bill Clinton would all be passing through
Tokyo on their way to Okinawa; Tony Blair would be there too, preceded a week before by his foreign minister, Robin Cook.
“I knew about the G8,” said Tim. “And I thought, ‘If there’s this summit out there, the whole world and his mother will be watching Japan, and this will help us. If we can get people back home interested, if we can get the electorate concerned about Lucie and what’s happened to her, then any politician, including the prime minister, is going to be duty bound to ask questions—otherwise it looks like he’s a crap bloke.’”
This was the challenge that Tim had set himself before he had even set foot in Japan: to turn Lucie and her disappearance into a cause célèbre, a problem that the most powerful men in both countries would have to confront.
“It was a race against time,” said Tim. “On the one hand, it would be enormous PR; it would put Lucie on all the television screens around Japan. On the other, it would put the heat under the Tokyo police, because the prime minister of England was talking about it to the prime minister of Japan. I could see that a mile off.”
Tim said, “It was as if I was a giant great earth digger, a JCB, and I had to get to a particular point—and that point was finding Lucie. And I was in a town, and if I chose I could go the proper way, all around the houses and alleys and lanes. But the place I wanted to be was over there, so I decided, ‘I’m just going to drive there directly, in a straight line. Straight across, from point A to point B. And if things get in the way, then I’ll just have to drive through them.’”
* * *
This determination, at times resembling a kind of excitement, would come to be held against Tim, but it was also what sustained him. Peering down at the landscape as the plane came in to land at Narita, he was stricken with confusion and anxiety. “I felt this overwhelming devastation at the prospect of finding Lucie down there. The drive into the city is just awe-inspiring, just out of this world. It’s so vast and teeming and foreign. I just looked at it and I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, what’s going to happen? What is going to happen?’” But there was an urgent job at hand: to knock the British media into shape.
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