People Who Eat Darkness

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  It was another hoax. But what did it mean? The police said that it contained “information that could only have been known to Lucie”—apparently detailed references to her various debts. So that meant that she was alive—didn’t it? Or did it prove only that she had been alive, and in the hands of the writer, between her disappearance and the forging of this strange letter?

  * * *

  Tim and Sophie had sworn that they would not leave Japan without Lucie. But it had become impossible to stay. It was not only the time off work, the separation from friends and family, and the financial burden of living in the world’s most expensive city. The mental pressure was unsupportable; Tim had the sensation that, unnoticed by those around him, he was silently going mad. So they agreed to work in relays of two weeks at a time; to maintain a family presence in Tokyo but to alternate, so that Sophie would leave as Tim arrived, and vice versa.

  Tim flew back to Britain with Josephine Burr on August 4. It was three and a half weeks since he had gone out to Tokyo, and thirty-four days since Lucie had gone missing. From Heathrow Airport, they took the train to Portsmouth and then the ferry to their home in the town of Ryde, on the Isle of Wight. Tim and Jo lived in a big old vicarage on a hill above the sea, full of the rowdy energy of Jo’s four teenage children. But the pleasure of being home was stifled by the horror of Lucie’s disappearance.

  The next day, a Saturday, Tim received a telephone call from a man who introduced himself as Mike Hills.

  Tim had an indistinct memory of having spoken briefly to Mr. Hills several weeks earlier. At the time he had been just one more stranger offering help and hope, although more intriguing than most. His voice had immediately identified him as a Londoner, but he lived in the Netherlands. He had explained that he had “contacts” in Japan, some of them in the “underworld,” who might be able to help Tim find Lucie. Numbed and bewildered by the parade of psychics, dowsers, private detectives, and other Lucie spotters, Tim had listened politely but given it little thought.

  But now Mike Hills was on the phone again, with a more detailed, and extraordinary, story to tell. He worked, he said, in “import/export” and did a lot of business in Japan. Specifically, he sold guns, which were purchased by middlemen in Tokyo before being sold on to the yakuza. This trade, he matter-of-factly explained, occurred with the connivance of certain government officials in Tokyo, but recently a difficulty had arisen. Business was being hampered by the large and active inquiry into Lucie’s disappearance. Questions were being asked, and investigative noses were being poked into activities that were usually ignored by the police. The squeeze was making the denizens of the Tokyo underworld unusually cautious.

  A “consignment of small arms,” for example, dispatched by Mike Hills, was stuck in a “bonded store” and could not be released because the customs officers were nervous about accepting the usual bribe. The Lucie mystery was making everyone edgy. Mike Hills’s arms-dealer friends wanted her to be found and sent home as soon as possible so that they could get on with their business. And, according to Hills, they had the wherewithal to find her. It would cost money, he told Tim over the phone, but he believed that he could help to get Lucie back.

  “It was very difficult to take in,” Tim remembered. “I’d just got back from those awful weeks in Tokyo. I was jet-lagged, and exhausted, and very, very unhappy. And here’s this Cockney bloke on the end of a phone in Holland somewhere with this staggering story. He said, ‘Look, don’t make a decision now. But let’s get together in person and talk about it.’”

  They arranged to meet the following Tuesday, in three days’ time, across the English Channel in the Belgian port of Ostend.

  The next day Mike Hills called again with stirring news. He had made inquiries with his “man on the inside”—a Mr. Nakani—who had ascertained that Lucie was indeed alive and well. She had been kidnapped and sold (by whom, it was not clear) as part of a trade in foreign women carried out by people connected to, but not a part of, the yakuza. Mr. Nakani, it seemed, knew people who knew Lucie’s captors, and there was no doubt that, with their help, she could be bought back. The whole operation would cost $50,000, some of which would have to be paid in advance. Mike Hills would be transferring the first installment of $12,500 on Monday from his own private funds, so Tim was to bring this money with him to their meeting on Tuesday as reimbursement.

  “She’s still in Tokyo,” said Mike. “They will get her back, Tim. Your daughter will come home very soon.”

  Mike Hills also sent a fax bearing a photograph of himself. It was indistinct, but it showed lined, ruined skin, a regretful smile full of crooked teeth—a grimy, likable, untrustworthy face.

  For Tim, this was a great deal of information to absorb. But there was no question of ignoring it. “We did not have a clue where Lucie was,” he said. “Then this guy comes forward and says he has information about where she might be. You would have to be pretty brave to say, ‘Well, sorry, no.’”

  Along with excitement and a strangled sense of relief, Tim felt frightened. He called Adam Whittington, the young Australian bodyguard, who had just returned to London himself, and asked him to come with him to Ostend. They took the fast catamaran from Dover. As instructed, Tim was carrying $12,500 in cash, which he had withdrawn from the bank the day before. “It was so way beyond my life experience,” said Tim. “I just didn’t know what to expect. This could have been some kind of elaborate trap. It could have been someone who wanted to bump me off because of what I was doing in Japan. It could have been anything. It was like something on TV, except that on TV you know the thing will be resolved by the time the news starts at ten o’clock, because it always is. In reality, you don’t know what the hell will happen next.”

  Mike Hills was waiting for them in the ferry terminal. “He had a dark suit on, thinning hair slicked right back,” Adam remembered. “He was about fifty-five maybe, and he looked like he’d had a hard life. His teeth were disgusting, all black, like he’d been a chain-smoker or had a disease. Tim introduced me as a friend or a cousin, and he said that we could go to a café just round the corner.”

  On the way, they passed a marina, and Mike began to talk about Tim’s great passion: yachting. “He had this shabby suit on, very down-at-heel, but he knew what he was talking about when it came to boats,” Tim said. “He talked about how he’d been skippering on a Swan 42 one time, and how they’d replaced the deck. I asked him what they’d used and he talked about teak laid on ply, crosscut teak. All very detailed, technical and accurate—no bullshit there. I got the impression he was ex–merchant navy, and very bright-eyed and sharp behind this rather tatty exterior.”

  At one point Tim commented that Mike was not what he had expected and that he did not fit the image of a wealthy international arms dealer.

  Mike smiled. “That’s the last thing I want to look like,” he said.

  The café was dim and narrow, with heavy leather chairs; its owner greeted Mike warmly. Even before the coffee had been ordered, he was talking business. The situation in Japan, it became clear, had moved on since the last conversation—faster and further than Tim was prepared for.

  Mike’s men in Tokyo knew who had Lucie and where she was. They would pay $50,000 in exchange for her, and after she had been handed over, they would administer a beating to her captors “to prevent this sort of thing happening again.” And all of this was going to happen in the next few days.

  Mike said that Tim and Adam both needed to return quickly to Japan and to have a second payment of $25,000 ready there to be paid on Lucie’s release. Secrecy was essential. Tim had too prominent a media profile, so the point of contact would have to be Adam, who should carry a dedicated mobile phone to be used only for communications with Mike and his intermediaries. Once Lucie was free and safely back home, the last payment of $12,500 would be made.

  Mike was talking as if it had all been agreed, and Lucie was all but home, as if, in just a few days, with the processing of a couple of bank transfers,
the pain and nausea of the past month would be dissolved. But Tim was still filled with doubt and confusion. Who was Mike Hills? What guarantees were there that any of this was true? From inside his shabby suit, Mike produced a copy of his passport, a water bill addressed to his home in the Dutch town of Breskens, and the name and telephone number of a friend, identified as Billy, who was said to have worked with him in import/export and who would vouch for him.

  Surname:

  Hills

  Given names:

  Michael Joseph

  Date of birth:

  26 June 43

  Place of Birth:

  London

  Tim observed that these documents did not go very far in proving his bona fides.

  “I understand your concern, but what other assurance can I give to you?” Mike asked. “I live in Holland, so the only people I can give you are here, or in South Africa, Spain … I feel like I’m applying for a bloody job.”

  Mike told Tim, “I’m sorry if this is not to your liking, but I am not going to pay all of this money on my own. I feel you should pay if not all, then a part. I think you would do the same in my place, as I am willing to use what is around me to help you … The only guarantee I give is that if you agree to the terms, and if everyone does as they are asked, there is no reason why this thing cannot be over.”

  Before handing over the money, Tim hand wrote a contract setting out the terms of the agreement, to which both signed their names.

  “What happens if things don’t go right?” Tim asked.

  “If my instructions are not carried out,” Mike replied, “I will personally rip off someone’s head.”

  Tim told me, “It was ridiculous. I was already picturing a dark street corner, and a car pulling up, and Lucie being pushed out towards us by the elbow, and a hand taking a case of money. It was as live as that. I could see the whole scenario. Lucie’s face distraught, raddled by the drugs she’d been given…”

  He reached into his own briefcase and handed over to Mike Hills the wad of 125 hundred-dollar bills.

  Young Adam Whittington was the right person to take to a meeting like this: calm, quiet, shrewd, observant. He had been a soldier, a bodyguard, and a barman, and would end up as a police officer in central London; he was nobody’s fool. On the catamaran back to Dover, Tim asked Adam whether he had made a wise decision. “Mike said all the right things,” Adam told me later. “He knew exactly what Tim was going to ask; he never hesitated at all. All the time they were talking, I was just listening to him, trying to pick faults in the story: Is he bullshitting? Is he a con man? But there was no reason not to believe him. If I was Tim, and if it had been my daughter, I would have done exactly the same.”

  * * *

  The following day, Tim and Adam boarded a flight back to Tokyo. It was less than a week since they had left; the white rabbit was still playing the piano at the Diamond Hotel. Tim went to the British embassy and told them the outline of the Mike Hills story: that an intermediary was in contact with Lucie’s kidnappers and that she was expected to be released very soon. Far from being skeptical, the diplomats responded with concern. A room was readied in the embassy compound where Lucie could be taken care of, and a doctor was put on standby. Adam rented a mobile phone and Tim faxed the number to Mike Hills. “We will not give the number to anyone else,” he wrote. “So when it goes off I will probably have a heart attack. We are very ready for this operation, Mike, so I hope you can pull it off. Could be your friend for life.”

  The only thing left to do then was to wait.

  It was a struggle to fill the time. The usual diversions—interviews with journalists and press conferences—had been strictly forbidden by Mike Hills. Tim went into Huw Shakeshaft’s office, where the volunteers were still at work, monitoring the calls on the Lucie Hotline. They were the usual mixture of the useless, the irrelevant, and the bizarre.

  • Sighting of a girl resembling Lucie on 28 July at 18.00 at the Just Co store in Nagoya. She had a perm and was holding hands with a man who was about 177cm tall. They got into an old silver car on the fourth floor of a car park.

  • A child with a message of encouragement.

  • Unnamed caller expressed the opinion that Matakado island in Ehime prefecture is a suspicious place.

  • Sighting of a girl resembling Lucie in a tent at Fujisawa beach. There were a lot of Mexicans in the area having a party.

  The Japanese police were almost completely uncommunicative. A prime ministerial secretary replied on behalf of Tony Blair, declining Tim’s suggestion that MI6 agents be sent to Tokyo. But Mike Hills was reassuring, and Tim spoke to him every day. “That was one thing that was so persuasive about Mike,” he said. “He was always available. He had one of those telephones which you could use anywhere in the world, those super-roaming quad-band intergalactic gizmos which, back then, were quite a thing. He was always phoning with updates. I never had any problem getting hold of him.” Everything was in hand, Mike said; all that was necessary was patience. But it was hard to think about anything other than the small, conventional mobile phone that Adam carried in his pocket.

  Tim and Adam passed the time in Roppongi, drinking in the Sports Cafe and dining at Bellini’s. It was there one evening that the contact telephone suddenly began to ring. Tim and Adam looked at one another. Adam fumbled to answer it. “I picked it up and said hello,” Adam remembered, “and there was a Japanese guy at the other end, starting to say something, and then, after a split second, the line disconnected. I said, ‘Hello? Hello?’ but he’d gone. Tim and I, our eyes lit up: this must be them, finally getting in contact. But the phone never rang again.”

  * * *

  After a few days without any word from the kidnappers, Tim was becoming impatient. Mike apologized. The meeting to hand over the second installment of money had not taken place as scheduled, he explained; the intermediaries for the people holding Lucie had simply not turned up. But the lines of communication were still open, and Mike offered to get hold of a recent photograph of Lucie and a lock of her hair, to prove beyond question that the story was true.

  Then, after Tim had been back in Tokyo a week, Mike called again with bad news: Lucie was no longer in Japan. The details were precise. Alarmed by the intense interest in the case, her captors had decided that the safest thing was to get rid of her. They had found three men willing to buy her. The sale had been transacted at a place called Tenkai. Soon after, Lucie had been smuggled onto a container ship called the Leo J. She was with four other young Western women, who were destined to be put on the market as sex slaves. But Mike was not ready to give up. His people had been tracking Lucie’s progress—one of them had even managed to get onto the ship and would report on its progress and the well-being of its human cargo.

  Tim put down the phone in a turmoil of irritation and confusion. Then he called a friend who contacted Lloyd’s Register and inquired about the existence of a merchant vessel called the Leo J. To Tim’s amazement, the ship really did exist.

  MV Leo J

  Gross Register Tonnage: 12,004 tons

  Flag: Antigua & Barbuda

  Manager/Owner: Mare Schiffahrtsgesellschaft MBH & Co., Haren, Germany.

  The Leo J had indeed left Osaka on August 10, then docked at the Japanese ports of Kobe, Moji, Tokuyama, and then Hong Kong. It was now on its way to Manila.

  The following morning, there was a fax from Mike containing a page of black-and-white photographs. They were almost completely indistinct, but one appeared to picture the inside of a house, and another showed three smiling Asian men seated on a train with a briefcase. “This place is Tenkai,” Mike had written below the first. Below the second: “Bag with money. They are on their way to Tenkai.”

  “My People are moveing there buts [sic] now it seems,” the attached page read. “They have paid for some answers and now they are following them up.”

  On August 24, a British businessman, who insisted on remaining anonymous, contacted the Japan Times offeri
ng a reward of £100,000 for information leading to Lucie’s safe return.

  A few days later, Mike’s source on the Leo J passed on more dismaying news: the five sex slaves, including Lucie, had been transferred to another vessel, the Aramac, which was now on its way to Australia. The rescue plan was hastily adapted—the new ship would be intercepted at the city of Darwin, and Mike would fly there himself to meet Adam. For this he would need another $10,000, to cover his own expenses and those of his “people.”

  Tim transferred the money to Mike’s bank in the Netherlands.

  Adam flew to Darwin and checked into the hotel where they had agreed to meet.

  Mike never appeared.

  At the port of Darwin, nobody could tell Adam anything about a ship called the Aramac. Tim tried calling the quad-band phone but could not get through. Eventually an e-mail arrived from Mike explaining that he was not in Australia but in Hong Kong.

  He sounded tense and exasperated. The problem was the £100,000 reward, which had once again stirred up anxieties among Mike’s people. “The Darwin end is now off thanks to the 100,000-pound offer, people [should] know the damage they can do making that kind of offer,” he wrote scoldingly. “That has changed a lot of the other people’s plans and things are not as they were before … Please before you say anything to people ask me first because we don’t want things getting hot.”

  A few more days passed. Mike called from Hong Kong to say that he was going to meet his “man on the inside” to collect Lucie.

  He called again to report that the man had been murdered in his car.

  Adam said to Tim, “He’s playing games. He’s really bullshitting us now. He’s making us go round the world; he’s not producing anything. He’s always asking for more money.”

  Rather impatiently, Mike agreed to send Tim proof that he really was in Hong Kong, as he insisted. Tim asked what had happened to the promised photograph of Lucie and the lock of her hair. They were waiting for Mike in Holland, Mike said, in a private PO box accessible only to him.