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

  Samantha Burman gathered that she had been working in “bars.” Sophie recalled talk of “waitressing.” Lucie’s latest boyfriend, a young investment banker named Jamie Gascoigne, had the impression that Emma had performed with a “dance troupe.” In a farewell letter circulated among her friends at British Airways, Lucie presented it as a plan from which she herself was rather detached. “My best friend Louise was going over there to stay with relatives and the opportunity came up for me to go too. I’ve no plans once I’m out there, maybe see the culture, learn the language or become a high class, well paid Geisha girl !!!!!! (Joke) Just a break for a few months, something different—they say a change is as good as a rest.”

  Louise, the girls explained, had an aunt living in Tokyo with whom they could stay rent-free, and this made the proposal seem safer, more comprehensible, and closer to home. It was only to her mother that Lucie explained what Emma Phillips had done in Tokyo and what she and Louise also intended to do. “She said she was thinking of going with Louise to Japan to work as a hostess to pay off her debts, and she made out that it was all going to be absolutely fine. She only knew what it involved from what Louise’s sister had told her. She said you just pour people drinks and listen to them talk, and that they like to sing karaoke. Lucie loved singing, so to her that was money for old rope.”

  But Jane was not interested in the details. Her only concern was to prevent Lucie from going to Tokyo at any cost. “She kept reassuring me that she’d never do anything silly, she’d take extra care. But I just knew that something horrible would happen to her. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I’d never even thought about Japan before, as a place. But as soon as she said it—Japan—this voice came into my head saying, ‘Something terrible’s going to happen.’ Maybe it was more a thought, not necessarily a voice—a thought that came into my head. I was inconsolable. I didn’t cry in front of her, but on my own I used to cry and cry.”

  * * *

  Jamie Gascoigne was almost as dismayed as Jane. In the few months they had spent together, he had fallen deeply in love with Lucie, and the idea of being separated from her, even temporarily, was difficult to bear. Then one night, as they were in line at the cinema, Lucie told Jamie that she didn’t want to be attached to him while she was in Japan. “I was totally gutted,” he remembered. “I slid down the wall, didn’t know what to say. We weren’t rowing, we had no arguments. Over the space of the week before we split up, she just changed. It was as if someone was telling her what to do.”

  Others were puzzled by Lucie’s behavior in the weeks before she flew to Japan, and the feeling grew stronger the closer the day approached. At home, Lucie embarked on a comprehensive spring cleaning, extreme even by her own high standards of neatness. “She went through everything, got rid of bin liners of stuff,” said Jane. “Old letters, personal stuff. She got rid of lots of clothes. It was much more than just a clear-out, because her room was tidy anyway. It wasn’t done as if she was going away for just a few months. She cleaned her room as if she was never coming back.”

  If Lucie saw less of old friends, she went out of her way to look up other people with whom she had formerly spent little time: cousins, godparents, peripheral aunts and uncles. “She did a lot of rounding up, which was a bit weird because it wasn’t how Lucie had usually been,” said Sophie. “She made a concerted effort to see lots of people before she went away. We wouldn’t think anything of it if she’d come back. But because she never did, there was something odd about it.”

  Among the people whom Lucie particularly sought out was her father. After the separation from Jane in 1995, Tim Blackman had met and moved in with Josephine Burr, a divorced mother of four teenagers from Tim’s birthplace, Ryde, on the Isle of Wight. He never lived with his family again, but he stayed in close touch with two of his children. During a period of particular acrimony with her mother, Sophie had gone to live with him in Ryde for a while, and Tim regularly drove over to Kent to take Rupert to rugby practice or for pub lunches. But of Lucie, he saw far less. The question of why and how this happened was part of the unceasing joust over the truth between Jane and Tim.

  * * *

  Jane was adamant that the decision was Lucie’s. “Lucie was very disappointed in her father,” she said. “But I never, ever, ever would have stopped him seeing the children—ever—because they’re his children. Lucie chose not to see him, but I never, ever stopped her. You can’t stop a grown child—if they’re little, maybe you can. Lucie didn’t see him for quite a few years, because she didn’t want to see him, because she was angry with him. And I suppose because we were very close, she was very protective of me.”

  There is no doubt that Lucie reproached her father for her mother’s pain—she said as much to several of her friends. But Tim also detected something subtler going on. “There was no benefit to the children in trying to explain away or justify my actions,” he said. “That would never fall on receptive ears, except to say that I was very unhappy before it happened. I took the view that time would make a difference, and things would change, and that eventually they would come and see me. And with Lucie that was happening. She’d been down around Christmas a couple of times, and waterskiing in the summer. I’d see her a little bit in Sevenoaks; there wasn’t a complete severing of ties. But it wasn’t easy. For two, three years it was very difficult.

  “This is where it gets very complicated. I know Jane very well, and I know how manipulative she can be. And she was a hundred percent vitriolic against me. There was simply no way she could have avoided manipulating the situation. Lucie would make an arrangement to come down to the island, to come and see me at the weekend. Then we’d get to Thursday that week—and, suddenly, it was too difficult to come. It’s my belief that, most of the time, it was because there was a situation at home that she couldn’t easily battle out. I was the easy sacrifice in her complicated status as eldest child supporting the devastated mother. She was stuck in a corner. And I could understand that, but it didn’t make it hurt any the less.”

  Whatever pressures Lucie felt from her parents, the imminence of her departure eased them. Jane made a point of telling Lucie that she should see her father, and in mid-April, after she went in to British Airways for the last time to hand back her uniform, they met for dinner in a pub outside Sevenoaks. She sent him a text message a few nights earlier that Tim kept on his phone long after Lucie had disappeared. Much later, when mementoes of Lucie had come to be very precious, he preserved it by copying it out exactly.

  14.04.00 00:38 xxxxxxxxxxxxx good morning! my beautiful daddy. I love you so very much & can not wait to see your smiley face on tuesday. lots of love & snuggles … lula xx

  Jane had always been a worrier, but her anxiety about Lucie’s trip to Japan, and her campaign to foil it, verged on the absurd; it had about it something of a child’s irrational fear for the well-being of a parent. The point of going to Japan for Lucie was to work off her debts, so Jane began collecting clippings from the newspaper about the grim state of the Japanese economy and casually leaving them on Lucie’s bed. When these were ignored, she made an appointment on Lucie’s behalf with a spirit medium, in the hope that wisdom from beyond the grave would prevail where her own entreaties had failed. (Lucie canceled the appointment.) Finally, hours before the flight to Tokyo, she considered the ultimate sanction—hiding Lucie’s passport. Rupert Blackman remembered his mother standing on the stairs brandishing the passport and screaming down at his sister. “But I thought, ‘If I do, she’ll just get another one, and she’ll be cross with me,’” said Jane. “And I didn’t want her going to Japan cross with me.”

  Val Burman became irritated with Jane’s flapping. “I don’t understand why you’re behaving the way you are,” she told her friend. “Anyone would think you’d suffered a bereavement.” And Jane replied, “It feels like that.”

  * * *

  Lucie didn’t completely stop being herself. In March, she added $1,500 to her debts by buying an immense iron bed
from Marks & Spencer. This gesture, so characteristic of Lucie, reassured her friends that she was at least planning to come back from Tokyo. “She called it her Princess Bed,” said Sam Burman. “It was a big double bed with a metal frame, quite an old-fashioned style. It had a lovely thick mattress and beautiful linen that all matched. When Lucie came home, that was what she wanted: to be snuggled up in her own bed. She was always talking about it.”

  She was more reticent about another new feature of her life, one that illuminated some of her recent behavior: Alex, a young Australian, who was working as a barman in the Black Boy pub. Alex was eighteen years old, three years younger than Lucie; she met him less than a month before leaving for Japan. “He had curly brown hair, and he was a bit of a surfer type,” Sophie remembered. “There was just something very vibrant about him. She really liked him, really liked him.” Years after Lucie’s death, Jamie Gascoigne had no idea that Lucie had left him for a new boyfriend, nor did their close mutual friend Sam Burman.

  Among the mysteries of that period was Tuesday, May 2, Lucie’s last night in Britain. Of her closest friends and immediate family, everyone had a different recollection of how she spent that day, and with whom. Tim Blackman was fairly sure that he was with Lucie that evening, having dinner in a restaurant in Sevenoaks with Sophie and Rupert. Sophie remembered clearly that Lucie had spent most of the evening with Alex. Jane’s memory of the last few hours with her daughter was clouded by intense anxiety but didn’t include Tim or Alex. The friends who remembered the most about Lucie’s last night were Sam Burman and her mother, Val.

  They were in no doubt that Lucie had been with them. “She was round at my mum’s,” Sam said. “And the thing that struck us the most was the fact that she hadn’t made her list of things to do. She’d got a few bits together, but she wasn’t all packed and organized like she usually was. And she was a bit sad about leaving, a bit reluctant. She kept pointing out the negatives but then talking herself back into it. It was as if she wasn’t quite convinced, but she’d done it now and there was no going back. I think because she’d made a commitment to Louise, she didn’t want to let her down.”

  Val remembers Lucie talking to her about Jane and about the atmosphere at home. “There was screaming in that house,” Val said. “There was lots of screaming between Jane and Sophie and Sophie and Lucie. If she’d stuck with it, in a few years’ time it would have righted itself and everything would have been a bit more bearable. But Lucie was the adult and Jane was the child at that time. Lucie told me it was a lot of pressure. They were arguing about her going away and I think that strengthened Lucie’s resolve. Because maybe Lucie felt she didn’t have a way out, and at that time going to Japan was a way out … She needed that break, even to the point of leaving Jane.”

  * * *

  In Sophie’s recollection of events, Alex came around to the house in the evening, and Sophie left him and Lucie together. “After I’d gone to bed,” she said, “I began to think of the things I wanted to say to Lucie before she went away, and I thought I’d write them down. I began what was meant to be a farewell note, and it became something intense. I started to say how nice it was to have grown up having a big sister to protect me and look after me, and how she had helped me in hard parts of my life. It developed into an eighteen-page letter. I remember writing it, and I was really teary—not just a bit upset, I was properly sobbing. I always find it ghastly to say, ‘It’s almost as if I was writing to her for the last time.’ But it was a painful experience. She was only going away for three months; she’d been away before. But there was something about this letter that was heartbreaking.

  “There was something very final about it. On Lucie’s trips with BA, we’d say goodbye but make plans. But when Lucie talked about Japan, I wasn’t able to picture what it would be like when she got back. I found it difficult to create in my mind an image of her return.”

  The flight to Tokyo left at noon. It was Louise’s mother, Maureen Phillips, who came for Lucie before dawn and drove the two friends to Heathrow. Lucie came into Sophie’s room in the dark and kissed her goodbye. “She gave me a card, and I gave her my letter, and said, ‘Don’t open it until you’re on the plane.’ She lay down on my bed and snuggled up. We were both quite emotional. Then she had to go. I said, ‘I love you,’ and she left.”

  Lucie was twenty-one years old when she left home for good. How loved she was by her friends and her troubled family: sibling, or even mother, to her own mother, as well as to her brother and her sister. She had flown on many aeroplanes before, but this was the first time that she had traveled so far and so directly away from everyone with a claim upon her—and to a country through the looking glass, a place as distant and as obscure as anyone who knew her could imagine. Those who cared for her were anxious. In the last weeks, Lucie—whose heart had always seemed so open and clear—had acquired mysteries. No one, except Louise perhaps, knew the whole story of what the two of them expected in Japan and what they intended. Questions were asked, but the answers brought no clarity or satisfaction. The truth about Lucie Blackman was already becoming hazy.

  PART TWO TOKYO

  4. HIGH TOUCH TOWN

  It takes fewer than twelve hours to fly from Heathrow to Narita Airport, but few single journeys bring such a dizzying sense of transition. Lucie and Louise lifted off to views of London rooftops, the fields of East Anglia, and the North Sea. By the time lunch had been served and the first film shown, they were above Siberia, where they remained for seven hours. Unimaginable volumes of empty space gaped on all sides; forty thousand feet below were expanses of tundra, churning mountain ranges blown with snow, dark rivers of vast width shining as the sun caught them. It was a journey that pitched the traveler forward through time as well as space. The two friends left at midday, flew through a long afternoon and evening, and landed at what their bodies registered as bedtime—blinking in the brightness of a Japanese morning.

  “It’s 9:13 here in Tokyo, making it 12:10 midnight behind in England,” Lucie wrote in her diary minutes after arriving. “I am sitting on a suitcase at the railway underground feeling completely overwhelmed. I am very tired … also afraid, anxious & lost & v. hot! I only hope that I will look back at this with hindsight & laugh at my innocence—of how I was so unaware of what was in store for me.”

  For all their months flying as air stewardesses, neither Lucie nor Louise had ever been to a country so immediately and intriguingly alien. The barbed-wire guard towers of Narita Airport looked out over paddies of green rice, and red, yellow, and black banners representing stylized carp fluttered from the tiled roofs of the houses. But these tokens of the Orient quickly gave way to the margins of Greater Tokyo, which overflowed the administrative boundaries of the city, sucking in satellite towns like a greedy amoeba. The railway rode high above a numb landscape of silvery-gray office buildings, low-rise apartments with metal fire escapes, and windowless love hotels with neon signs bearing names like Marie Celeste and Wonderland. Then came a sequence of bridges across broad, motionless rivers, and finally the view south to Tokyo Bay, with its islands of reclaimed land built over in glass and aluminum. In cloudy weather, the water was dark and oily and the buildings matte and dead. In sunlight, they shone silver: adamantine towers, immense goggling globes, the bristling power lines and bulbous storage tanks of power and petroleum plants, and the delicate curve of the Rainbow Bridge.

  Thirty million people inhabited this megalopolis. Apart from the fleeting green of parks, shrines, temples, and the Imperial Palace, it was unbroken until the Okutama Mountains, forty miles to the west. Look out from Tokyo’s highest skyscraper and, except on the very clearest of days, that was all you could see—Tokyo and then just more of Tokyo, gray, brown, and silver, spilling shapelessly in every direction.

  And yet the impression created by this scale and density was the opposite of chaotic. Tokyo was clean and sharply defined to the eye, with none of the blaring squalor of many Asian cities. Sealed beneath a film of indiffe
rent calm, there was a machine energy and ticktocking efficiency. For most first-time arrivals, it was an atmosphere unlike any they had encountered before; it produced a sensation not of straightforward exhilaration but of obscure excitement at mysterious possibilities. “It’s so different already,” Lucie wrote on the platform of Narita Airport Station, a few hundred yards into Japan. “The most pristine train I have ever seen has just pulled away, aboard which stood a tiny man all in navy with the most immaculate white gloves. I’ve bought my first thing—a bottle of tap water top to toe in Japanese writing … I sit here and there is a warm breeze coming from somewhere & it is gently blowing on my face. I look up and pray it is the wind of change which is going to make all my dreams come true.”

  To arrive in Tokyo was to be transformed in a way that felt almost like a physical metamorphosis. For a start, there was the debilitation of jet lag: what felt in the bones like the middle of the night was actually day, and vice versa. Even more crippling was the sudden deprivation of language: at a stroke, the foreigner was rendered not only incapable of speech or comprehension but also illiterate. The relative smallness of the people, the lower height of doors and ceilings, the narrowness of chairs, even the smaller portions of food created the illusion of having grown measurably in size, like Alice down the rabbit hole. In twenty-first-century Tokyo, people rarely stared openly at foreigners, but always one was conscious of being the object of an unaccustomed attention from the rest of the human population—not outright gawping, neither unambiguous affection nor disapproval, but simply the discreet registering of difference. In Japan, you became a citizen of a new nation—that of the gaijin, the foreigner. It was a stimulating and frequently exhausting realm in which to live. “Life here means never taking life for granted, never not noticing,” wrote the American expatriate writer Donald Richie. “It is with this live connection that the alert foreigner here lives. The electric current is turned on during all the waking hours: he or she is always occupied in noticing, evaluating, discovering and concluding … I like this life of never being able to take my life for granted.”