* * *
At this moment, in the middle of July, came another consequence of the press coverage: volunteers began to step forward, strangers who wanted to help in the hunt for Lucie.
A week after Tim’s arrival, his partner, Josephine Burr, flew out to be with him. That night they had dinner with Sophie in a Roppongi restaurant called Bellini’s, in the middle of the street where the Ghanaian men lured passersby into the strip clubs. At a nearby table sat a foreign couple: a beautiful young woman and a tall, bulky, floppy-haired man in his late thirties, who recognized Tim and Sophie from the television. He introduced himself as Huw Shakeshaft, a British financial adviser with a small independent business in Tokyo. Huw had moved to Tokyo four years earlier, and since then he had rarely strayed a mile from Roppongi Crossing. His office was opposite the Defense Agency. His apartment was on the other side of the expressway. Roppongi’s restaurants and bars were his dining room, the foreign bankers and stockbrokers who lingered there were his clients, and the hostesses in the clubs were his girlfriends. “Sir Huw of Roppongi” was what they called him; he prided himself on knowing everyone. He was a creature of the district, as naturally at home there as a monkey in a rain forest.
Huw had never met Lucie, but he knew all about what had happened and badly wanted to help. “If you want to find your daughter, forget about the people at the embassy, because they’re useless,” he told Tim. “You’re going to need an office, and you’re going to need dedicated phone lines. All that I can do for you.”
Huw led Tim from the restaurant to a cash machine around the corner. There he withdrew ¥200,000, the equivalent of $1,900, and handed it over on the spot. Then he took him to a bar over the road, where a British friend of Huw’s gave him ¥100,000 more.
Tim was overwhelmed. His property business had been on hold for a two weeks; he was paying more than $300 a night for the rooms at the Diamond Hotel, plus the costs of food, taxis, and telephone calls. “I was borrowing money from the bank. I was borrowing from my brother-in-law, so this was fantastic,” said Tim. “Huw was hugely generous.” As they parted, Huw gave Tim his card and told him to come to his office the following morning.
Its position was ideal, on the third floor of a building fifty yards up from Casablanca. There was a spare phone with an answering machine, which they immediately decided to use as a “hotline” for tips and information from the kind of people—such as hostesses working on tourist visas—who would not necessarily welcome contact with the police. Overnight, Huw had already put out e-mails to friends and colleagues appealing for help on the Blackmans’ behalf. One investment banker was offering his services as a driver in the evenings and on weekends. Another expatriate, working for a detergent manufacturer, suggested putting Lucie’s photograph on bottles of laundry fluid. Huw’s small staff could help with interpretation, and his girlfriend, Tania, the multilingual Russian model and hostess with whom he had been dining the night before, would act as a guide.
They all went back to Bellini’s that night and toasted the new arrangement. Huw told the restaurant manager that Tim and his family could dine there as often as they liked, and that all their bills were to be charged to his own account.
* * *
The office and the hotline gave Tim a new sense of purpose. Offers of help were coming from Britain too, and soon a team of helpers was converging on Roppongi. “We were getting these people calling all the time,” said Tim. “Most of them were well-meaning, but some of them were chancers. We weren’t in the best state of mind to distinguish between the two.” One self-styled “private detective” came out from Britain for a week, interviewed a lot of hostesses, and presented a bill for $18,000. (It was paid, like many of the expenses, by Brian Malcolm, the wealthy businessman who was married to Tim’s sister.) More useful was Adam Whittington, a young Australian barman and former soldier who had trained as a bodyguard and was a friend of Samantha Burman. Adam was small, sandy haired, and unobtrusive; he would end up spending weeks in Tokyo, conducting his own discreet enquiries. He often teamed up with two Japanese reporters, both fluent English-speakers, who gave much of their own time to the hunt for Lucie: Toshi Maeda of the Japan Times and Kentaro Katayama of the private television company TBS.
Tim gave another press conference at the embassy and unveiled the Lucie Blackman Hotline. The British airline Virgin Atlantic paid for flyers and posters to be printed, carrying the telephone number. With a base established and a team assembled, there was leisure now to draw breath and to consider the most important question of all: What on earth had become of Lucie?
* * *
“At no point back then did I allow myself to think that Lucie might no longer be alive,” Tim said. “I couldn’t contemplate that. Everything would have just stopped.” This possibility having been blocked out, there wasn’t much that could positively be said. Lucie had gone out for a meeting with a man; in her conversations with Louise that day, she had sounded happy and relaxed. The phone call from Akira Takagi was obviously a hoax, a red herring lobbed by someone who wanted to throw the investigation off the scent. But it proved that someone knew where Lucie was and strengthened the assumption that she was being held against her will. But by whom? And where?
The obvious person to start with was Lucie’s boyfriend, the American marine Scott Fraser. No one who met Scott found him to be anything but straightforward, and his alibi was unimpeachable: throughout the day of Lucie’s disappearance, he had been on duty aboard the USS Kitty Hawk. Two other interviews were of the highest priority: with Lucie’s best friend, Louise Phillips, and Kenji Suzuki, her most avid customer and number-one dōhan.
Sophie knew the password to Lucie’s e-mail account. She quickly printed out its contents and handed them to the police. The correspondence with Ken stood out. It was plain that he had developed a crush on Lucie; obvious too was the suppressed jealousy and peevishness of his last few messages. But the police assured Tim that they had interviewed Ken and eliminated him as a suspect. Louise, on the other hand, was being questioned every day. Her constant presence at the police station, and her coolness towards the Blackmans, kindled the family’s resentment and suspicion.
To the most crucial parts of the story, Louise was the only witness. There was no reason to believe that she was making anything up, but parts of her story were suspiciously vague. The details of the telephone call from Akira Takagi were strange beyond anyone’s capacity for invention, and Louise’s delay in reporting the disappearance and informing the family could be explained as the result of simple panic and confusion. But why didn’t she know more about the man whom Lucie had gone out to meet that day?
Louise and Lucie had been best friends for a decade. They worked together, ate and drank together, and shared a living space the size of a large cupboard. And—among everyone who knew her—Lucie was notorious for her garrulousness. “She couldn’t tell a story in under eighty thousand words—it was impossible for her,” said Sophie. “It was painful, the amount of detail she would give you.” Surely, with a dōhan the next day, and the promise of a mobile phone from a new and wealthy customer, Lucie would be bubbling with anticipation about the man she was going to meet. And yet Louise insisted that she had no idea who he was.
Tim and Sophie implored Louise to search her memory about the men whom Lucie had entertained before her disappearance. Ken Suzuki? No, Louise said, Ken was “a sweetheart” who could never do anything sinister. What about the old Photo Man, Watanabe? But that was even more unthinkable. Then there was the Mr. Kowa who had suggested a dōhan the week before Lucie disappeared. “Not Kowa,” Louise said. “It wouldn’t be Kowa.”
* * *
Dozens of calls began to come in to the Lucie Hotline. Many were from journalists requesting interviews; the rest were a jumble. With the help of Huw Shakeshaft’s staff, they were all assiduously translated and logged.
• Sighting of a girl at Kagoshima Airport who looked like Lucie. She was holding a small bag and got into a silver Merc
edes.
• Mumbled, unintelligible speech with laughter.
• A Japanese man saw a few Western girls in a car. A girl who looked like Lucie showed him numbers on her hands, apparently asking him to call the number she indicated. When dialed, the number was nonexistent.
• Sighting of Lucie on 1 July at 12.30 p.m. on Mt. Fuji. She was wearing a one-piece white dress.
• No information, but caller was moved by family’s devoted care for Lucie.
• Mumbled, unintelligible speech with laughter.
• Male, sounded young and embarrassed. Wants to go on a date with Sophie. Said Sophie was cool.
The calls came from every corner of the country. Each was returned and followed up, sometimes with great trouble. One tip gave the address of an apartment in the northern island of Hokkaido, where Lucie had been spotted. Adam and Tania flew five hundred miles to investigate but found the place empty and abandoned. Even when the information was detailed, it was of little help. Time and again, all over the Japanese archipelago, well-meaning and public-spirited people were noticing tall blond foreign women and wondering whether they might be the girl on the missing-person poster. But in the absence of any more precise information, what was to be done about that?
After a while, Tim and his helpers began to suspect that to many Japanese, light-haired foreigners all looked the same. One day, Sophie and Adam were on the main Roppongi road showing photographs of Lucie to passersby. Everyone was polite and sympathetic; some of the shopkeepers took posters to display in their windows. But one pair of Japanese girls reacted with electrified excitement. Yes, they said, they had seen the girl in the photograph—in fact, they had seen her just moments ago in a shop across the road. With racing hearts, Sophie and Adam ran across the street with one of the girls, who pointed through the shop window. A tall, fair European woman was standing in front of a refrigerator of soft drinks. “That’s her, that’s her!” shouted the girl. The woman turned around—and it was Josephine Burr, Tim’s partner, twenty years older than Lucie, who had been quietly and obliviously shopping for her lunch.
* * *
Jane Blackman had never had any urge to go out to Japan. For one thing, she had sixteen-year-old Rupert to look after, and she hated the idea of cameras and press conferences and questions. When reporters called, she put the phone down or closed the door in their faces. “If you are a parent, if you have a very close relationship with your child, then maybe you have some idea of what I am going through,” she said in her one public statement. “I have no desire to speak with the press about how I am feeling.” Jane was not sleeping, and hardly eating, although she continued to see her reflexology patients. She would drink brandy at breakfast to get through the morning. She kept in touch with Sophie by telephone and e-mail, although after their last disastrous exchange she and Tim did not attempt to communicate directly. From Sevenoaks, there was little of practical use that Jane could contribute. But it was unbearable to be doing nothing.
Perhaps because of her own interest in the spiritual, Jane gave more credence than anyone else to the possibility that her daughter had indeed joined a “newly risen religion,” and she spent fruitless hours learning about Japanese cults. Early on, a couple of her patients offered to put her in touch with mediums, and soon a series of psychics, healers, and channelers were calling of their own accord. “They’d say, ‘If you’ll pay for it, I’ll travel out to Japan and find Lucie,’” Jane told me. “And I remember thinking, ‘Well, if you’re so psychic, why d’you need to travel there at all?’” But in the absence of anything else to do, Jane ended up spending a lot of time with people who claimed to have supernatural gifts.
There was a man named Keith, who had “worked closely” with the Metropolitan Police on “several” missing-person cases, and Betty, a medium, healer, poet, and “vitamin/mineral therapist.” Jane drove as far as the Lake District to meet one lady spiritualist; later, she would receive tape recordings of her seances, full of moaning and crying and the honking of trumpets blown by invisible spirits. One psychic achieved his connection to the spirit world by holding a ring of Lucie’s; another dowsed over a map of Japan. Jane wrote long e-mails to Sophie setting out the information that each of them provided. It was profuse, optimistic, bizarrely detailed, and uselessly vague.
Lucie is being held in a run-down house by a sewage works.
She is on a small island owned by the yakuza.
She is in a Georgian building with servants and gaming tables.
She was taken there in a rusty green van.
She was taken there in a floating gin palace.
He captor is a man with bad skin and a scar on his right cheek.
Her captor is a Japanese woman with a single plait.
Louise knows more than she is letting on. Don’t trust her!
One of the Japanese police is bent. Don’t trust him!
They are Japanese mafia.
They are an Arab organisation.
Lucie’s hair has been cropped.
Lucie is being drugged.
Lucie is not being physically harmed.
She sailed from Yokohama.
I am getting the name Kiriashi.
Where is Okenhowa?
What is Tishumo, Toshimo or Tushima?
Look for the crossroads with the fountain and the temple nearby.
Check the phone bill.
Choose the second private detective.
The man, he keeps snakes.
On a bare shoulder, I see the tattoo of a rose.
Tim was not immune to the claims of such people. An elderly Australian dowser known as Mahogany Bob flew out from Queensland, his expenses paid by a British tabloid newspaper. He carried a pair of divining rods that were supposed to rotate and cross when the trail was warm. For several days, Tim, Sophie, Adam, and Tania drove around Tokyo with him, knocking on doors wherever the rods wobbled. They talked their way into private homes, offices, and even on board a cargo ship docked in Tokyo Bay, but with no result. Mahogany Bob grew increasingly tired, and after a few days, he announced that Lucie appeared to be dead, that there was nothing more he could do, and flew home.
Jane had the idea of flying a hypnotist out to Tokyo. The point would be to put Louise into a trance in an effort to find out what she really knew. But it came to nothing. “I feel as if I am completely losing my sense of reality with all this,” she wrote in an e-mail to Sophie. “Please let me know what is going on as I feel so alone.” But at the end of July there was still nothing to tell.
In Britain, tabloid newspaper attention was dominated by an even more wretched story: Sarah Payne, an eight-year-old Sussex girl, had disappeared on the same day as Lucie and was found raped and murdered two weeks later. In the Diamond Hotel, the journalists began to settle up their bills and check out, first the expensive television crews and then the newspaper reporters and photographers. The interest of the Japanese media was dwindling too. Tim and Sophie’s weekly press conferences drew smaller and smaller audiences. Even their calculated display of emotion failed to excite much interest.
Tim asked the Tokyo Metropolitan Police to take part in a joint press conference; they declined. He wrote to Tony Blair, asking him to send “MI6 officers or Scotland Yard CID” to look for Lucie. “You know how sometimes you have a nightmare, dreaming of some terrible thing happening to you?” Tim said. “And you know the relief when you wake up, wipe the sweat off your face and think, ‘I’m glad that was just a dream’? My situation is reversed.”
In a few days, it would be an entire month since Lucie had disappeared. It was as if she had been swallowed up by a hole in the ground. And then August came, the hottest and most torpid month of the Japanese year, and everything began to happen all at once.
9. THE FLICKERING LIGHT
Tim and Sophie were sitting in the Azabu Police Station one afternoon when a junior officer bustled in and began to speak in urgent tones to Superintendent Mitsuzane. A folder of documents was presented and gravely e
xamined. After a whispered discussion, the superintendent placed one of them on the table in front of the Blackmans. He kept the top part of it obscured; all they could see was the very bottom of the page.
It was Lucie’s handwritten signature. And yet it was not by Lucie. The signature was an attempt at an imitation of Lucie’s hand, close enough that it must have been copied from an original but not close enough to fool her father and sister.
It was late July, and the letter had just been delivered, having been postmarked in Chiba prefecture the day before. It was a word-processed, printed letter, written in English, purporting to be from Lucie and addressed to her family. “I have disappeared by my own free will and I do not wish to be found,” it said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I want you to return to England and I’ll call you there.” Tim and Sophie had no more than a glimpse of a few lines, but it was obvious that the language was stilted and unnatural, and no more Lucie’s than the signature. The other giveaway was the date at the top of the first page. It was July 17, 2000, Tim’s forty-seventh birthday. Lucie never forgot a family birthday, and yet it was unmentioned in the letter.
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