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

  This was the challenge that Tim had set himself before he had even set foot in Japan: to turn Lucie and her disappearance into a cause célèbre, a problem that the most powerful men in both countries would have to confront.

  “It was a race against time,” said Tim. “On the one hand, it would be enormous PR; it would put Lucie on all the television screens around Japan. On the other, it would put the heat under the Tokyo police, because the prime minister of England was talking about it to the prime minister of Japan. I could see that a mile off.”

  Tim said, “It was as if I was a giant great earth digger, a JCB, and I had to get to a particular point—and that point was finding Lucie. And I was in a town, and if I chose I could go the proper way, all around the houses and alleys and lanes. But the place I wanted to be was over there, so I decided, ‘I’m just going to drive there directly, in a straight line. Straight across, from point A to point B. And if things get in the way, then I’ll just have to drive through them.’”

  * * *

  This determination, at times resembling a kind of excitement, would come to be held against Tim, but it was also what sustained him. Peering down at the landscape as the plane came in to land at Narita, he was stricken with confusion and anxiety. “I felt this overwhelming devastation at the prospect of finding Lucie down there. The drive into the city is just awe-inspiring, just out of this world. It’s so vast and teeming and foreign. I just looked at it and I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, what’s going to happen? What is going to happen?’” But there was an urgent job at hand: to knock the British media into shape.

  Tim checked into the Diamond Hotel, where Sophie was staying. A pack of reporters, photographers, and television crews had arrived on the same plane, and they all checked in there too. Among much of the British press, there was an uncertainty about where the story of Lucie’s disappearance would lead. It hinged on one question: What exactly does a hostess do? If hostesses were essentially call girls, then it would be a vivid, but short-lived, story, about a young woman who willingly succumbed to a world of vice and suffered unfortunate, but predictable, consequences. There would be sympathy for the family, but it would be limited; no prime minister would meet with the father of a missing prostitute. Tim’s challenge was to present Lucie as an innocent young woman—naïve perhaps, out of her depth, but in a situation in which enough ordinary British people could imagine their own daughters.

  This was something that only Tim and Sophie could do, and—given the cynicism of the British media—they were miraculously successful.

  There was much lurid reporting on the “red-light district” of Roppongi. (“Peril of Jap Vice Trap,” ran one headline in the People: “Middle class English roses who descend into twilight world of sin.”) There was plenty of cheerfully racist generalization about the Japanese male and his fancied penchant for Western blondes. (“The men can be twisted sexually because of their restricted upbringing,” a “Tokyo insider” explained to the Daily Record.) But Lucie and her family were treated with careful respect. She was styled as “the former British Airways stewardess” far more often than “bar girl Lucie.” No one questioned the family’s explanation about the nature of Lucie’s debts, or drew attention to the fact that, having entered Japan on a tourist visa, she had been working illegally. And however titillating the stories of “posh British girls selling their bodies,” it was made clear that this had not been Lucie’s situation. “Lucie’s job as a hostess was to provide company for male drinkers,” the most scabrous of the red-top tabloids, The Sun, explained with gentlemanly punctiliousness. “There is no suggestion she was involved in anything more than that.”

  Instead of the sordid moral story of a young woman’s undoing, the headlines told a much more compelling human tale, which ordinary newspaper readers could relate to personally, about a devoted and suffering family and a beloved child lost abroad.

  I Will Never Leave Without My Lucie, I Just Pray That She’s Safe. (Express)

  I’m Not Leaving Without My Sis. (The Sun)

  Family Pleas for “Cult” Woman. (The Daily Telegraph)

  “Why Us?” Agony of Missing “Cult Slave” Lucie as Hunt Goes On. (The Sun)

  “I said to Sophie, ‘If we don’t give them the story, they’ll make it up,’” Tim told me. “What we wanted to do was gain the high ground, and we gained it by giving them this personal story about Sophie and I. And we gained so much sympathy that there wasn’t a lot to be gained by trying to cut that down. We played the game: we provided detailed information, we were restrained, we were not abusive, then we went out for dinner with the hacks in the evenings.”

  To tabloid reporters used to resentment and hostility from their subjects, Tim’s relaxed charm was disarming, almost off-putting. He would always take the call, respond to the e-mail, pose for the photograph. He was more than accommodating; at times, he seemed almost enthusiastic. To the more cynical among the reporters, his helpfulness raised suspicions—was there more to this family than met the eye? But they were outweighed by the ease, and indeed the pleasure, of working with Tim.

  In all the time I knew him, there was just one occasion when he displayed straightforward pain and despair. It was during a press conference at the British embassy at the end of July, his sixth in three weeks. There had been no sign of Lucie; the police had no leads, no significant information of any kind to report. The traveling British press had flown back to London, and the turnout of local journalists was a fraction of that two weeks before.

  Tim and Sophie looked tired and grave. There were no smiles or glances between them. Tim wore socks.

  “We are all starting to feel very desperate and upset that Lucie is being kept somewhere in difficult conditions where she will be extremely upset herself,” said Tim. “And I therefore, as her father, beg of them humbly to please just release her to us again.” His voice faltered and he cast his eyes down, as if holding back tears. Sophie’s eyes glistened.

  Chanka-chanka-chanka-chanka! went the photographers’ flashes. The few cameramen in the room zoomed in on Tim’s downcast face. It was the picture opportunity that had been withheld all this time.

  Years later, I asked Tim about that moment. What was it that, after all those weeks, had broken his façade of cheerful calm?

  “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said, after a pause. “But the tears—well, we planned that in advance.”

  * * *

  Within a few days, Tim and Sophie had established a routine, gruelingly tied to the Japanese and British news cycles. London was eight hours behind Tokyo, so they would be up until the early hours calling friends and family and giving telephone interviews to the afternoon radio and television. A few hours’ sleep, and then the phone would start ringing early in the Tokyo morning for the evening and late-night news. Over breakfast, they would brief the British journalists who were staying at the hotel—there would be requests for new photographs of Lucie and arrangements to be made for interviews later in the day. At the end of morning, they would call in at the embassy, a ten-minute walk from the hotel along the green moat and gray walls of the Imperial Palace. At lunchtime they might be whisked across the city to the studios of TV Asahi or Tokyo Broadcasting System for the “wide shows,” the daytime magazine programs aimed at Japanese housewives. Afternoons were for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.

  Sophie had found the police sluggish and indifferent, but at Tim’s first meeting with them, they went to some trouble to make a good impression. A convoy of black minibuses, flanked by motorcycle outriders and with darkened windows, collected the Blackmans from the embassy. A team of Japanese television reporters chased behind in a van of their own. “There was a lot of gesticulating out of windows, a lot of lurching around corners, a lot of heavy right foot, rather unnecessarily trying to rush through the Tokyo traffic,” Tim remembered. “I didn’t see the point, really.” The destination was Azabu Police Station, 150 yards from Roppongi Crossing. Like everything to do with the Japanese police, the
headquarters of the investigation was a strange combination of the cozy, the feckless, and the sinister.

  The police station was a blank structure of nine gray concrete stories. In front, a young constable stood self-consciously on guard, a revolver on his belt and in his hands a weapon that resembled a domestic broom handle. Displayed on the front of the building was an image of Peepo, a grinning pixie who was the mascot of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Above was a bilingual banner whose English portion read, MAKE SURE AGAIN ALL THE DOORS & WINDOWS ARE LOCKED. Below were posters of wanted criminals, including gangsters, suspected murderers, and the grinning, life-sized cutouts of three fugitive members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which had released homemade nerve gas on the Japanese subway five years earlier.

  “We were astonished by a few things,” said Tim. “I expected we’d be in a much grander kind of police station. The interior of the building was like something out of the fifties. Completely bland, slightly grimy—just a worn-out, utilitarian nick.” The most striking thing of all was the complete lack of any visible technology. The police had radios, but where one would have anticipated humming laptops, there were banks of old-fashioned filing cabinets and mounds of paper. “We expected the normal monitors and all that kind of stuff,” Tim said. “We were taken into a sort of operations room, with loads and loads of little gray desks, with identical people walking round in their identical white shirts with identically rolled-up sleeves, and not a computer in sight.”

  The afternoons at the police station followed a pattern. Tim and Sophie would be led into a tiny meeting room, with two chairs facing a sofa across a low table. A young woman would bring in cups of green tea, whose yellowy hue and lukewarm temperature reminded Tim of “bodily fluids”—“I never got used to the taste, but I always drank it.” After a pause, there would be a commotion of bows and handshakes as the senior officers entered the room.

  Japanese names are not easy to remember for the newcomer; Sophie’s method of distinguishing between the senior officers was by their haircuts. There was Superintendent Mitsuzane, a smiling, reserved, bespectacled man with a pale parting, and Naoki Maruyama, a younger, spiky-haired man in the fast track of the National Police Agency, who spoke fluent English. On meeting Tim and Sophie for the first time, each would present a business card, proffered with both hands, and inscribed on opposite sides with English and Japanese. The card of Superintendent Mitsuzane bore the following thicket of information:

  Akira Mitsuzane

  Police Superintendent

  Administrator of Special Investigation

  First Criminal Investigation Division

  Criminal Investigation Bureau

  Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department

  2-1-1 Kasumigaseki

  Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100–8929

  Superintendent Mitsuzane spoke little English, and the necessity of interpretation prolonged these meetings. But they would have been drawn out anyway, as the detectives went over and over the same ground with amnesiac repetitiveness.

  They wanted to know about Lucie’s education, about her career before she came to Japan, and her reasons for coming out. The subject that seemed to obsess them, and to which they returned again and again, was that of her debts. They took copies of Tim and Sophie’s passports; there were forms to fill in and formal statements to sign. What, they asked, was Lucie’s character? Why exactly did Tim believe that a crime had been committed? Tim replied, “Lucie just isn’t the kind of person to wander off on her own. She never has done, and there’s no reason to think she would now. She went out to meet someone. She called her friend to say that she was about to come home, and she never came back. It’s reasonable to conclude that she’s being held against her will.”

  Superintendent Mitsuzane nodded and smiled distantly. But the explanation had evidently been accepted. As the presence of such a senior officer indicated, the case was being upgraded from a simple missing-person inquiry to a criminal investigation. “It was a complete transformation from the reception that Sophie had been getting the week before, when they’d been turfing her out of the police station,” said Tim. He had no doubt that the press coverage of the case, the early-morning and late-night interviews, were the reason for this change of mood.

  As they left the police station, Tim and Sophie would usually see Louise Phillips, going into an interview of her own. She seemed to be there all the time—and rather than being friendly and reassuring, their encounters with her were strained. Sophie remembered being disgusted by how well turned out Louise was—manicured and made up, even in a police station, with her best friend lost. Louise, it seemed to them, was uncomfortable with, even embarrassed by Tim and Sophie’s presence. She said that the detectives had asked her not to talk to them.

  * * *

  Dark would be coming on by the time they stepped out again onto Roppongi Avenue. The hostesses would be emerging for the evening ahead, trickling out of the Tipness gym just behind the police station. Tim and Sophie would take a taxi back to the Diamond Hotel and sit in its restaurant drinking glasses of beer. Around this time, members of the British press pack would muster in the lobby and head out excitedly in twos and threes for another night of “research”—visiting girlie bars on expenses. On the television in the corner, Tim and Sophie watched themselves, dubbed into Japanese, in the interviews they had given that morning.

  The bar of the hotel featured an automated piano that would play plonking show tunes throughout the early evening. Seated at the piano stool was the effigy of a giant white rabbit in waistcoat and bow tie, as large as a man. The rabbit’s face was sad and resigned; his whiskers vibrated to the sound of the piano. But no one else in the bar seemed to regard him as unusual or comic, or to pay him any mind at all. Tim and Sophie sipped their beer and stared at the white rabbit. Nothing could have chimed better with their sense of absurdity and despair, as they contemplated the end of a day on the wrong side of the looking glass.

  8. UNINTELLIGIBLE SPEECH

  Tony Blair met Tim and Sophie in the Hotel New Otani, Tokyo, one afternoon in July 2000. It was a moment when he was at the height of his power and popular esteem, both at home and abroad. In a summit meeting that afternoon with the Japanese prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, Blair thanked the Tokyo police for their efforts and asked that “everything possible be done” to find Lucie. Mr. Mori had been briefed on the case. “The Tokyo Metropolitan Police are doing all they can to find Lucie-san,” he said. “I want them to continue to do so.”

  Tim Blackman’s instincts had been exactly right. For Blair, with his carefully burnished image as the sincere, empathetic family man, the case was impossible to ignore; the lines he delivered to the television cameras could have been scripted for him by Tim. “It is obviously an appallingly disturbing story and every parent’s nightmare, to have their child working abroad and then disappear,” he said, standing alongside father and sister. “It’s a tragic case and obviously the family are at their wits’ end, but they’re staying here and they’re going to fight to see that their daughter’s whereabouts and what happened to her is discovered.”

  “The pressure needs to come from the top,” Tim said. “If I stamp my feet, they’ll think I’m a nuisance, but if it’s coming from the Japanese prime minister, from their boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, it’ll have far more of an effect.”

  As if in response to these high-level discussions, the Tokyo police showed signs of vigorous activity. Forty detectives were said to be working on the case; thirty thousand missing-person posters had been printed and distributed across the country. When asked, the police would provide disarmingly precise figures for the number of calls received from the public—twenty-three one day, nineteen two days later. But they would say nothing about the quality of the information or their overall progress in the case. “Please be assured,” Superintendent Mitsuzane would tell Tim, with his remote, kindly smile, “we are doing everything that we can.”

  The Blackmans had made their choice, and they had pit
ched their camp with the media. With that, they cut off permanently any relationship of trust with the police.

  One day Tim and Sophie went to the police station to pick up Lucie’s possessions, which had been removed from Sasaki House. Everything had been meticulously sorted and inventoried; everything had to be signed for. There were Lucie’s makeup and manicure kit, her self-help books, all sealed in individual plastic bags and listed in the police ledger. There was the Tiffany necklace that Jamie had given her, the emotional goodbye letter from Sophie, and the postcard that she had been writing to Sam Burman. Lucie’s diary was retained by the police, as a potential source of clues and evidence. Sophie took to wearing Lucie’s clothes, because she had brought with her so few of her own. The two sisters resembled one another so closely anyway, in build and features; now Sophie was even dressed as Lucie, and this added to the atmosphere of ghostliness and poignancy.

  Alone with the police clerk, Tim and Sophie wept as they sorted through Lucie’s possessions.

  The most painful sight of all was a toy that Lucie had had since she was a tiny girl. Its name was Pover, a childish attempt at the name “Rover.” It was a battered dog with long soft ears, which Lucie used to suck and nuzzle. Even as a young woman, Lucie never left Pover behind. He had accompanied her on all her trips with British Airways, growing mangier and more bedraggled with the years. He had gone with Lucie to Tokyo—and now here he was. “And that was a really bad sign,” said Tim. “That was a very, very bad moment. It brought home what we were facing. Because if she’d gone away anywhere by choice, this thing would have been stuck in her handbag. But it was here. It all said: ‘I planned to come back. I didn’t.’”