People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo--And the Evil That Swallowed Her Up

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  Conflicts were inevitable in a house of teenage children; very often, they were between Jane and Sophie. In these battles, it was Lucie who served as the peacemaker; to some people she seemed more even than a sister to Jane. “In that house she actually became like the mother figure,” said Val Burman, a friend of Jane. “When Sophie used to scream and shout at Jane, it was always Lucie who would be the one to sort the problems out. She grew up quickly after Tim left. She became the mother, and Jane was the child.”

  * * *

  Lucie didn’t have the slim build or sharp features to qualify as straightforwardly beautiful, but the first thing that everyone remembered about her was the way she looked. Meticulous grooming was central to Lucie’s idea of herself. Friends used to smile at the way she would do her hair and apply makeup for a walk to the shops or a morning jog. When she laughed, she would throw back her long hair and her shoulders would shake. With her height and her hair, Lucie stood out among her contemporaries; to Jane, she “lit up the room.” “I was mesmerized by her the first time I saw her,” said Val Burman. “I loved to hear her talking. She had a wonderful way with words. She could talk about anything, and you wanted to hear it. She could tell a story about a cube of sugar.” The stream of words was punctuated by the darting movement of her fingers with their flashing, highly polished nails. “She was all hair and nails—it was as if she was talking with her hands,” said Caroline Lawrence. “And people would notice her. That hair … I can remember being in the Dorset Arms in the town, waiting for her. There was a window, and she was crossing the road, and—I’m not joking—literally the whole pub just stopped and looked at her. Even the girls were looking at her. Just because she was this tall, blond bombshell strutting across the road.”

  Lucie loved new clothes and shopping for them. Like Jane, she loved the coziness of a home and took pleasure in her neatly ordered possessions. It was this fondness for luxury and comfort, as much as any other reason, that made life as a student unappealing to Lucie. She duly passed her exams and stayed on into the sixth form to take A levels, but, unlike most of the clever girls of Walthamstow Hall, she made no attempt to apply for university. She worked for a while in a pizza restaurant after her exams, later as a teaching assistant at a local private school. Then, through a family friend, she got a job at Banque de Société Générale, or “SocGen,” a French investment bank in the City of London.

  Lucie worked as an assistant to the dealers, inputting orders as they were called out from the trading floor. The traders were young, competitive, highly paid men; the atmosphere was fast-paced and aggressive. As a young, blond new arrival, Lucie was an immediate object of male attention. The men called her “Baps,” in reference to her full bosom. She was only eighteen, but she thrived on the excitement and the atmosphere of flirtation. She loved the clothes and jewelry and the champagne after work in the City bars. “Everyone else was at university and we were working,” said Caroline Lawrence, who had also left Walthamstow Hall to take a job in London. “We weren’t earning a lot of money, but to us—seventeen, eighteen years old—we were rich. Lucie liked SocGen—the first taste of life outside Sevenoaks, in with all the City boys. We thought we were so grown up taking the train up there every day. I’d see her, in the rush hour, giving herself a French manicure, standing up. A French manicure is not like a normal manicure. You paint the nails a natural color, and then you have to paint the white tips. It’s not easy at the best of times, and she could do it standing up. On a train.”

  The acquisition and disposal of money was the function of the City, and Lucie liked that too. She bought herself a car, a black Renault Clio, to make the predawn journey from Sevenoaks to London every morning in time for the opening of the financial markets. On weekends, she shopped in the Lakeside Shopping Centre in Thurrock; once, on a whim, Lucie and a friend visited Rigby & Peller, corsetieres to the queen, and purchased ten of their famous made-to-measure bras. But her salary, about $24,000, was a fraction of that of the men with whom she worked, and it was at SocGen that Lucie first went into debt. Credit cards, store cards, overdrafts, and hire purchases were a part of life for many workers in the City, but Lucie found it hard to get used to the idea. “I was infinitely more in debt than she was,” said Caroline Ryan, who worked with her in the City. “But Lucie was a worrier. If she went a few pounds overdrawn, she wouldn’t know what she was going to do.”

  Lucie worked for a year at SocGen but eventually grew restless there. The job in itself led nowhere, and a love affair with a younger trader at the firm ended badly, leaving her tearful and unhappy. Lucie liked the idea of traveling, but only if she could do it with a guaranteed degree of comfort and style. “That was Lucie’s character,” said Sophie. “She never had any interest in backpacking. You can’t take a hair dryer and you don’t wear makeup. Lucie liked to have manicured nails, and nice hair, she’d wear little-heeled shoes. She took care of her appearance, and that didn’t fit with backpacking and grimy hostels. She didn’t want that, but she did want to see different cultures, and people, and eat interesting food, and to do it in a way that was comfortable for her.” The solution came after a year of working in the City, when Lucie successfully applied to work as an air stewardess for British Airways.

  Here, on the face of it, was the perfect job for Lucie—pretty, personable, and with a decent command of conversational French. She began in May 1998 with a twenty-one-day training course in which she learned, among other lessons, how to deliver a baby, how to employ handcuffs, and how to deal with an onboard bomb (place it at the very back of the cabin, next to the exit, and wrap with wet cushions to absorb the blast). For the first eighteen months at the airline, she worked the short-haul routes to British and European cities; her first flight was the forty-minute hop to the island of Jersey. “I kept telling myself that planes are safer than crossing the road, that the journey to the airport is more dangerous than being on the plane,” said Jane Blackman. “But when she made her first flight I felt sick to my stomach.” Lucie was under instructions to telephone her mother after every flight; as long as she worked for British Airways, Jane would scan the departures and arrivals on Ceefax and relax only when she knew that her daughter’s plane was safe and stationary on the ground.

  * * *

  Perhaps it was a consequence of her teenage illness, and those months of inactivity, but Lucie as a young woman was obsessed with method and technique, and with disciplining and ordering her life. She would write out lists of jobs to be done and tasks to be achieved, like incantations to keep inertia at bay. She collected books of self-help and self-improvement, and circulated them among her friends: guides to debt management, tummy flattening, and the boosting of self-esteem. A page from Lucie’s diary records her preoccupations at the beginning of 1999 with fitness, beauty, health, and money.

  NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS!

  (1) GO TO THE GYM 3–4 TIMES PER WEEK.

  (2) TRY + DO 2 OTHER ACTIVITIES AS WELL.

  (3) STOP USING BOTH PHONES.

  (4) FROM MARCH START PUTTING MONEY AWAY.

  (5) STICK TO RULES.

  (6) SPEND MORE TIME WITH W+G//H + J.

  (7) SLEEP MORE.

  (8) LEARN ITALIAN.

  (9) SAVE ALL OF COMMISSIONS.

  (10) SCRUB AND TAN EVERY OTHER DAY.

  (11) LOTION ON DAYS IN BETWEEN.

  (12) DRINK MORE WATER.

  Resolution 5 referred not to rules in general, but to The Rules, a popular American guide to dating and romance that Lucie strove to live by. The Rules set out a kind of emotional crash diet, a return to traditional, prefeminist modes of courtship, in which sustained and energetic wooing was required of a man before he could expect any reward. In another diary, Lucie recorded her own summary of The Rules.

  (1) Keep cool.

  (2) Let him do all the work, the calling—everything.

  (3) Keep your cards close to your chest—if he wants to know how you feel, he’ll ask.

  (4) Keep chat light.

&nbs
p; YOU ARE NOT FALLING FOR HIM!!

  Men were drawn to Lucie, and from her mid-teens she was rarely without a boyfriend. But, like the resolutions to save rather than spend and to talk less on the phone, the reticence and cool demanded by The Rules went against Lucie’s nature. “When Lucie met someone, she’d give her all, and she had her heart broken a few times,” said Sophie. “She wore her heart on her sleeve: ‘this is what I am, this is what I’m like, take it or leave it.’ And they’d take it for a while and then leave it.” Lucie’s friends became familiar with the pattern by which she met a new “chap,” became rapidly besotted with him, only for one of them to lose interest. “She’d be madly in love,” Sophie said, “and then about two months later she’d be repulsed at the mention of his name. She wanted very much to meet someone, settle down, have babies, and live in the countryside. And that meant she had to go through a lot of frogs.”

  There was Jim, who incurred the loathing of Lucie’s female friends for the unforgivable act of dumping her on her eighteenth birthday. There was Robert, who lived above the local pizza restaurant and who deserted her for one of her best friends. There was Greg, who worked for SocGen; the split with him precipitated her departure for British Airways. And then there was the most glamorous and dangerous of them all: Marco—beautiful, wild, Italian, and doomed.

  It was Sophie who first spotted Marco, when she was working as a barmaid at the Royal Oak Hotel in Sevenoaks. She identified him immediately as Lucie’s type—tall, strapping, “gorgeous.” “Marco really was handsome,” Sophie said. “He had a history of working as a model. He was thirty—Lucie always had older boyfriends. On paper he was a real catch, and Lucie was pretty smitten with him. Then it turned out that everything on paper was complete bullshit.”

  At British Airways, Lucie had ten days off a month and she spent most of them with Marco. They went clubbing at the Ministry of Sound and Club 9 in London, and drinking in the Sevenoaks pubs the Vine, the Chimneys, and the Black Boy. Marco suffered from severe colds and spent long hours recovering from them in bed. During evenings out with Lucie, he frequently vanished for short stretches with one friend or another. “It just didn’t click what was really going on,” said Sophie. “It was so stupid and naïve of us.”

  Her friends found him vain and standoffish, but Lucie was becoming more and more serious about Marco. One weekend, he dropped her off at Heathrow and drove away in her car, with the promise that he would pick her up on her return the next day. But when she landed, Marco wasn’t there. “He didn’t pick her up, he didn’t turn up at all, and Lucie was in a bit of a state,” said Sophie. “She couldn’t get hold of him. She didn’t know where her car was, she didn’t know where he was, she didn’t know anything. Eventually, she rang a member of his family, his cousin or something. The cousin said, ‘I was hoping this wouldn’t happen again. This is what Marco does, you see. What exactly has he told you?’ It turned out that he was a complete lying bastard.”

  Marco, it transpired, had never been a model. Moreover, he was a heavy user of cocaine. The disappearances in the pub, the susceptibility to “colds,” and the long hours of recovery—suddenly, they made sense. In a rage, Sophie went to Marco’s flat. He was in bed, stupefied after an extended binge of drugs and booze. The keys of Lucie’s Renault Clio were on the table beside him. Sophie picked them up, gave Marco a valedictory punch, and stormed out to retrieve the car. Its door and back panel were scraped and dented by a collision.

  Lucie was as caring and protective of her car as she was of her hair and fingernails: that was the end of her and Marco. Her unhappiness was intense but short-lived. Then, a few months later, came jolting news. Marco had committed suicide—or, according to another version of the story, had died of an accidental overdose of drugs. Whatever the truth, Lucie’s handsome ex-boyfriend was dead.

  3. LONG HAUL

  It was becoming obvious that the life of an air stewardess wasn’t for Lucie. By early 2000, it felt like a trap that she must urgently escape. To her colleagues, this was difficult to understand, for she had recently achieved the ambition of every British Airways cabin crew member: promotion from the short-haul jets that flew from Heathrow to the intercontinental flights out of Gatwick. The long-haul destinations were more exotic, more glamorous and, above all, better paid. As a junior flight attendant, Lucie’s basic salary was paltry—an annual £8,336* before the deduction of tax. The same amount again came from the “allowances” that were added to her pay depending on the destinations, and the nature of the flights on which she worked. Flights that were very early, or long, overnight flights, and flights that required an unusually fast turnaround—all of these earned a bonus. There were allowances for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, based on the cost in local currency of a three-course meal in a five-star hotel. It was assumed as a matter of course that most employees would settle for a much cheaper meal and pocket the difference. So the least desirable flights were short hops within the United Kingdom; the most rewarding were the expensive cities of Asia and the Americas: Miami, São Paulo, and the most lucrative of all, Tokyo.

  Having moved to long haul, Lucie could expect to earn about £1,300 a month after tax. But however much she worried about money, she continued to edge deeper and deeper into debt. Lucie’s scribbled accounts of expenditure and income for the end of 1998 listed a monthly payment of £764.87, more than half her income, on her Diners Club credit card account alone. Then there was the £200 monthly payment for her Renault Clio, a £47 payment for a bank loan, £89.96 for her Visa card, £10 for a Marks & Spencer credit card, as well as £70 in rent to Jane, a £32 gym membership, and a £140 mobile phone bill. By the time she had bought the makeup and shampoo and clothes that she needed for work, Lucie was spending a few hundred pounds more than she earned every month, and the interest on all her debts was making them harder to repay by the day.

  She was tired and ill. The long overnight flights were bound to be draining, but they were not even fun. British Airways had fourteen thousand crew members; most of the time, Lucie stepped on to a flight with people she had never met before and would not see again. The occasional pleasure of working alongside a friend did not compensate for the monotony of repeatedly pouring tomato juice into plastic cups and offering the choice of chicken or beef. “One hotel room is much the same as another in any country,” said Sophie. “She might be in Paris in the morning, Edinburgh in the afternoon, and she might be in Zimbabwe the following day. But she’d be stuck in the hotel, constantly jet-lagged and really not able to go out and enjoy the life and culture and food because she was knackered. Towards the end, she was quite unhappy—tired, miserable, she never saw the same people twice.”

  There was something almost sinister about the depth of Lucie’s exhaustion. “She’d sleep for fifteen hours on end,” Sophie remembered. “She felt awful, began to be really unwell.” It was beginning to resemble that alarming period eight years earlier, when she had been laid low for so many months by the postviral malaise. It was in this atmosphere of anxiety and exhaustion that Lucie began to talk about going to Japan.

  The idea first came up late in 1999 or early in 2000; nobody remembered quite when or how. But it was clear that it had originated with Louise Phillips.

  Louise was the closest of all Lucie’s friends. The two had known one another since they were thirteen. Physically, they were a contrast: Louise was slim, small, dark haired, with a sheen of that fashionable prettiness that Lucie lacked. She, too, was a girl without a father; he had died suddenly of cancer when she was twelve. And the two friends’ mannerisms, their mode of talking, their love of makeup and nail varnish marked them out as a pair; even their names were similar. Jane thought of them as “soul mates.” Tim was more down-to-earth: “Louise could babble for England, just like Lucie,” he said, “so they babbled all the time and found one another hysterically funny.”

  Their closeness was obvious in the trajectory of their careers; at each stage of her life, Lucie followed a path earlier marked out
by her friend. Louise left school at sixteen and went to work for an investment bank in the City, as Lucie would two years later. Louise joined British Airways as a stewardess; Lucie followed. And it was on Louise’s initiative that the two of them went to Tokyo to work off the debts that had become such a burden to Lucie.

  Later events tainted perceptions of Louise, particularly among Lucie’s friends and family. It was difficult to separate those feelings of suspicion and mistrust from the way Louise was regarded before Japan. But Samantha Burman, the daughter of Jane’s friend Val, was wary of her. “She’d been Lucie’s friend a lot longer than I, so I didn’t say anything. But Lucie felt that Louise was the prettier one and Louise was the more confident one, that she was the uglier friend, trying to live in her shadow. I don’t think Louise did anything to change Lucie’s feeling about that.”

  The two of them had been working since they left school. They had often talked about taking a break to travel together, along the familiar backpackers’ route through Thailand, Bali, and Australia. But Lucie had no taste for budget travel, and no money, in any case, for travel of any kind. It was Louise’s older sister, Emma, who told them about Tokyo, where she had lived two years earlier. There, she promised them, they could live in an exciting and unusual city and also earn a great deal of money. What exactly Emma had been doing in Tokyo was vague to Lucie’s other friends; it seemed to vary depending on who was being told the story.