I got a sense, hearing people talk about the police, and hearing the police talk about themselves, that they felt hard done by. A fundamental rule—that criminals confess—was being willfully broken. Under such conditions, how could it be surprising that they struggled? The idea that cunning, stubbornness, and mendacity were to be expected from a criminal, that it was in order to deal with such people that the police existed, did not occur to many of the detectives, or not for much of the time. They were not incompetent or unimaginative or lazy or complacent—they were themselves victims of extremely bad and unusual luck: that one in a million in Japan, the dishonest criminal.
* * *
Winter in Japan is bright and bitter, but the cold keeps the vipers at bay. As he told it, this was when Superintendent Udo made a last attempt to find Lucie in the places known to have been frequented by Joji Obara. “It’s a vast area,” he said, “and there are many places where a body might be buried. I formed a team and told them to go out and not come back until they had found Lucie. In December and January, they dug in many places.” One Monday early in February 2001, twenty-two plainclothes policemen checked into an inn on the beach in the village of Moroiso, a few hundred yards from the apartment at Blue Sea Aburatsubo. Their rooms were reserved for the whole month. Every morning, they went out with shovels and picks to different spots along the coast. The local people assumed that they were employed on some municipal project or other—except that, as one local woman said, “They didn’t have the eyes of construction workers.”
On Thursday, February 8, Udo sent his deputy down from Tokyo for consultations. It was concluded that the search area had been expanded too far and that the following morning they should begin again in the most obvious place of all—the 250 yards of beach that extended beneath a cliff next to Blue Sea Aburatsubo. It was there, five days after Lucie’s disappearance, that Obara had arrived in a car with lumpy objects in the passenger seat. There, he had summoned a locksmith to break into his own apartment, from which banging noises had subsequently been heard. There, a sweating, shirtless Obara had first dismissed the police who had knocked at his door and later apologized to them, proffering the frozen corpse of his dead dog. Mr. Hirokawa, the caretaker’s boyfriend, even claimed to have seen someone resembling him in the area of the beach in the middle of the night carrying a muddy shovel. Police dogs and police officers, of course, had sniffed and prodded the area after Obara’s arrest in October. But now, in desperation, they were to go over it again.
The oblong block of Blue Sea Aburatsubo was the last structure before the road ended and the seashore began. It was a rocky coast; the cliff fell vertically to a beach strewn with large boulders and over which a cement path had been fashioned. It wasn’t a charming or attractive beach. The sky was high and blue at this time of year, and the water was so clean and clear that you could see the forms of individual stones along the bottom. But the sand on the beach was gray and sticky, and the boulders were littered with dried and broken leaves. In the summer months—in early July, for example—they shimmered with thousands of vile brown beetles, which sucked on the seaweed rotting in the cracks of the rocks.
Around a curve of the beach, about two hundred yards from the apartment building and out of sight of human habitation, a portion of the cliff had tumbled away to form a tower of stone embedded in the beach. Just behind here, and concealed from view by it, was a cave. It was the kind of hideaway where rubbish is surreptitiously dumped and where teenagers go to smoke and canoodle. In a country less tidy and disciplined than Japan, it would have been littered with beer cans and discarded condoms. It scarcely qualified as a cave at all—more of a wide crevice in the dirty rock, eight feet wide at its mouth, ten feet high at its highest point, with walls and ceiling that narrowed and sloped to a dead end. Four crumbling plastic pipes protruded from its uneven ceiling and dripped onto the floor, an ancient attempt to channel rainwater from the cliffs above.
An old bathtub was partially submerged in the sand. At nine a.m., four of the policemen loosened it, hauled it out of the cave, and began to dig. Within a few moments, they encountered an obstacle that rustled against their spades. Tugged out of the sand, it emerged as a semitransparent plastic rubbish bag, containing three lumpy objects. They were immediately identifiable as a human arm, severed at the shoulder, and two human feet. The wrist was entangled with plants and seaweed. The flesh was white and waxy with decay, but the finger- and toenails were preserved, and the men with the spades observed how neat and well shaped they were, with traces of nail polish. The officer in charge called Udo at once on his mobile phone. “He was shedding tears as he spoke to me,” Udo remembered. “He said, ‘Boss, we found Lucie.’”
The four policemen stopped digging and awaited the arrival of the most senior and most specialized detectives from Tokyo. Udo went down, along with his own boss, the head of the First Investigation Section, Akira Hiromitsu. A judge quickly issued a warrant for a full and comprehensive search, and within two hours there were forty people at the cave: local police, Udo’s Special Investigation Unit, and twenty officers from the Identification Division with cameras, sketch pads, rubber gloves, and plastic evidence bags. The news leaked quickly, and soon there were helicopters overhead, hired by the Japanese television companies, and photographers bobbing in boats a few yards offshore. An improvised marquee of blue tarpaulins was erected to conceal the mouth of the cave; all day, men in waist-length anoraks, rubber boots, and blue baseball caps came and went, with white cotton masks over their mouths and noses.
When the police had assembled, the digging resumed. The cave was scooped of its sand down to the bedrock, which was no more than two feet below the surface. The torso was the next part found, unwrapped and naked to the sand, thirteen inches down. Then two more rubbish bags, containing the second arm, two thighs, two lower legs, and what seemed to be the head, encrusted in a thick layer of concrete or cement.
Late in the afternoon, six of the searchers emerged carrying a heavy-looking blue vinyl zip-top bag, six feet long, which they manhandled awkwardly among them. It was driven first to Azabu Police Station and the next morning to a laboratory at Tokyo University Medical School. There the cement was prised away from the head, and the teeth were examined. They matched exactly dental records that had been sent from Sevenoaks. There was no doubt at all that the ten body parts on the examining table were the remains of Lucie Blackman.
* * *
Six times that weekend, senior detectives gave unattributable briefings to the reporters accredited to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters. The transcripts of these exchanges conveyed the excitement of the investigators, but also their defensiveness. “Now we have concrete evidence, his confession might not be necessary,” one of the officers told the journalists on the evening of the discovery. “Don’t you worry. The bottleneck was because we couldn’t find the body. Once the identity [of the remains] is established, we’ll have more than enough.” Japanese reporters are rarely probing or aggressive with the representatives of the institutions to which they are assigned. But even they could not skirt the outstanding question: Why had it taken so long?
Rather ingeniously, the police attempted to present it not as a failure of basic detective work but as a triumph of tenacity. “Although we have looked at the search area previously, we weren’t able to spot it at first glance,” explained one officer. “Investigators went there repeatedly whenever they had some time. It was certainly a suspicious place, and our perseverance has paid off.” Another officer of the Special Investigation Unit said, “Although we did search before, we couldn’t find the body with just four or five people. There used to be a lot of weeds and we heard about vipers there, so we weren’t able to find the body.” The most memorable explanation of all came from an officer identified in the notes of one reporter as “Mr. S.” “Detectives are like racehorses,” Mr. S explained, “in that they can’t use their instinct when they first visit a place. But as they run the course many times, they gra
dually start to shine. I thought it would be by Blue Sea Aburatsubo, without a doubt.”
The body of a missing girl had been buried in a shallow grave two hundred yards from the apartment of the only suspect, an apartment in which he had been interviewed by the police for suspicious behavior five days after her disappearance. The detectives knew that shortly before he was arrested, Obara had moored a boat at a marina a few hundred yards away; it was their assumption that he was planning to dispose of a dead body. And then there was the most extravagantly clinching detail of all—the report of the suspect, late at night, close to the cave, carrying a spade.
Police sniffer dogs had been led over the area. But it had taken a specially formed team of forty elite detectives seven months to find the body. How could a modern police force have been so inept? The detectives looked more like plodding donkeys than sleek thoroughbreds. And among some of the journalists who followed their activities, an assumption became established: they must have known from very early on where Lucie had been buried, and the scene at the cave was an elaborately staged charade.
The reasoning went like this. The police were not stupid and must surely have found the body in such an obvious place. But they needed a confession, and a believable one. The most credible confession of all, which no subsequent recantation or legal sophistry could overturn, was the kind that told the police something that only the suspect knew. They were waiting patiently for Obara to talk, as virtually all suspects did eventually. When he did talk, he would tell them about the body in the cave, which they would promptly “discover,” based on his information, thereby putting his guilt beyond any doubt. “The detectives had been to Blue Sea Aburatsubo, and they knew, they knew. I’m sure of it,” someone close to the investigation told me. “But the police must not be the ones to find the body first. They need Obara to tell them where it is because then the case against him will go smoothly. Arresting someone is easy—the difficult thing is to prove that he is guilty.”
But Obara didn’t talk, and it gradually became obvious that he never would. Faced with this, and with time running out, the police were forced to take the second-best option and dig up the body themselves.
The problem was that seven months had passed. Because of the way it had been buried, sealed off from insects and bacteria in air-tight bags beneath wet sand, much of what remained of Lucie was partially mummified rather than skeletonized. But in the coolly euphemistic language of the autopsy, “the postmortem changes were extreme,” and although the body was quickly identified, it was impossible to specify the cause of death.
Unsurprisingly, Superintendent Udo and all the detectives associated with the case insisted vehemently that they had no idea where the body had been until that day—to have admitted anything else would have laid them open to charges of perjury. But whatever the truth was, they emerged with shame. Either the police had conspired in a misguided cover-up that had resulted in the decay of precious forensic evidence; or they had achieved the same result through scarcely credible oversight and incompetence.
* * *
At home, Jane Blackman kept mementos of Lucie’s life: a copy of The Daily Express from the day of her birth, the plastic hospital name bracelet she had worn as a newborn. There were childish drawings in crayon and felt tip, and school exercise books filled with Lucie’s meticulous little girl’s hand. Here she had written about playing in her paddling pool in the back garden, and making daisy chains with Louise, and practicing the recorder with her daddy accompanying her on the banjo, and going to the hospital with her toddler brother, Rupert, after he bit his tongue.
At the very end of January, Jane had flown back to Japan at the request of the police. In retrospect, this mysteriously secret visit would add to the suspicion that they knew more than they admitted about Lucie and the whereabouts of her body. The intrigue surrounding Jane’s presence in Tokyo, a week before the scene in the cave, bordered on the sinister. Only a handful of people knew that she was in Japan. She had been checked into her hotel under a false name; even calls from her children were not connected to her room. Superintendent Mitsuzane told Jane nothing concrete about the progress of the investigation but bewildered her with bizarre and carefully prepared questions. One day she had spent more than an hour executing a detailed pencil drawing of the kind of hair clip Lucie used to wear. Another time she had been asked whether Lucie liked to eat eel. The questions about her daughter’s diet were the ones that had given Jane the most intense sensation of chill and nausea. “Did she eat eel? Did she eat battered tempura? I had a horrible feeling about these questions,” Jane said. “I couldn’t bear it. I was staying in the Diamond Hotel, with that rabbit playing the piano. Once I saw a cockroach running across the floor. I just remember crying all the time. I didn’t know why I was there.”
“I love Mummy because she keeps the house tidy,” Lucie had written in one of her exercise books from the Granville School, in an essay titled “Why I love Mummy.”
Mummy is kind and she looks after me.
She cooks me lovely cakes and biscuits. Mummy makes a lovely pack lunch. I love Mummy she always keeps my bedroom tidy. Sometimes I don’t like Mummy she shouts at me and sometimes I cry. But most of the time she is nice she cooks me a nice breakfast and a lovely tea. I love Mummy when she wears a pretty dress. I love Mummy very very much.
Jane had lost her own mother as a child and her sister as an adult. As a mother, her greatest fear had been the death of one of her children. It had been her life’s mission to protect them. Now she was in Japan, speaking through an interpreter to policemen who seemed to be asking her to corroborate the contents of her dead daughter’s stomach.
* * *
Two weeks after Lucie’s body was found in the cave, her parents came to take her home. For the first time, Tim and Jane were in Japan at the same time, but they traveled there and back separately and never met or spoke to one another. Sophie and Rupert flew out with their father and then back with their mother, with Lucie in the hold of the airliner. Jane’s friend Val Burman, who accompanied her, remembered the coffin as “macabre, like something out of a horror film, a huge, big, black wooden thing.” When Tim visited the police, he was taken aback to be asked, more than once, if he wished to view Lucie’s remains. “I was surprised,” he said. “Is it a Japanese cultural thing? I didn’t need those images. I can imagine them well enough without having them implanted in my head.”
A heavy coffin, sealed and metal lined, was a necessity because of the condition of the remains.
Everyone gave a press conference. Jane, speaking at the Diamond Hotel, was as spare and searing as before. When the time came for questions, it was difficult to imagine what there was left to ask. But someone went ahead anyway and asked the default question for such situations, the question that is not a genuine inquiry so much as an invitation to dissolve into photogenic grief: Mrs. Blackman, how does it feel to be taking your daughter’s body home?
Jane looked at the questioner witheringly and maintained her composure.
Tim, appearing with Sophie and Rupert at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, was as long-winded and informative as his ex-wife had been pithy and reticent. He thanked the media for their help over the months and spoke in detail about his feelings over Lucie’s death, Obara’s arrest, the Roppongi “system,” and the role of the police. He also announced the foundation of the Lucie Blackman Trust, a fund that would be used to “ensure the safety of traveling children … so that Lucie’s tragic death will not have been in vain.” A flyer was handed out, bearing a photograph of Lucie and Tim embracing, and inviting donations to a Japanese bank account.
In my notes on the press conference, I wrote, “Grief takes people in different ways.”
Tim confirmed that he and his children would be visiting the cave on the beach and asked that the media give them space and time to grieve in private. The message was clear enough: please leave us alone for a while. But in making this request, Tim had also announced exactly whe
n and where they would be going.
It was Rupert Blackman’s first visit to Japan. Throughout the whole agonizing, drawn-out period of Lucie’s absence, he had been the member of the family least involved in the case. He was still a schoolboy, and he had done all he could to avoid contact with the reporters and photographers who intermittently rang the bell of their house in Sevenoaks. But he was conscious of a deep sense of loss and of being excluded from the intense activity that absorbed his mother, father, and sister. Journalists writing about Lucie’s family got his name wrong, or left him out of their stories altogether. Many people, who knew only what they had read, were surprised on meeting him to discover that Lucie Blackman even had a brother. “The saddest thing of all is that I never really knew Lucie as a person,” he told me. “She was always just my older sister, and I was the little brother. I didn’t have the chance to build an adult relationship with Lucie, in the way that siblings do in their late teens or twenties. I was never mates with her, and I never will be.” So Rupert needed no persuading to come to Japan when the time came to take Lucie’s body home.
At Narita Airport, they were confronted by clicking photographers, trotting backwards and tripping over one another. It wasn’t the only occasion when Rupert had to stifle the urge to laugh. “That was Lucie’s spirit living through us, so we could still see the funny side of it and the absurdity of it all,” he said. “It was just ridiculous, so ridiculous. Obviously we were devastated, but what the hell can you do about it? If you don’t laugh, you cry. I remember at the press conference, just before it began, we were having a laugh about something, and Dad said, ‘No, listen—you need to look somber and sad.’”
People Who Eat Darkness Page 28