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

  “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 offering 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.

  The conversations went back and forth. They went on for weeks. In Tokyo, meanwhile, the Japanese police were slowly tracking down leads. Tim and Sophie alternately came and went. Adam, and the few close friends who knew about Mike Hills, told Tim that he was being conned. At the end of August, he flew back to the Isle of Wight, having failed once again to bring Lucie home. At least once every day he spoke to Mike Hills, who talked of his struggles to reestablish contact with the sex slavers. But he never again sent any money to Mike.

  One evening in the middle of September, a month and a half after their first and only encounter, Tim was driving home after a day of meetings. On a whim, he dialed Mike, not on the quad-band roaming telephone but at his home in Holland. A woman answered. Tim put on an impersonation of a Japanese speaking English.

  “Haroo,” he said. “Can I speak with Mistar Hirruz?”

  “I’m awfully sorry,” said Mrs. Hills. “He’s just popped out.”

  “He no Hong Kong?”

  “No, no, he’s here in Holland. He’s just gone down the shop. He’ll be back in a mo.”

  Tim hung up. A few moments later, Mike called.

  “I just had my wife on the phone from Holland,” he said. “She just got a strange call from someone. Sounded Japanese. You don’t … D’you know who that was?”

  “No idea, Mike, no idea,” said Tim. “Where are you, by the way? Are you still in Hong Kong?”

  “Tim,” said Mike, in tones of exasperation, “I told you before, I’m telling you again: I’m in Hong Kong.”

  Tim had bought a digital tape recorder in Narita Airport and after this exchange he began recording these conversations. But it became harder and harder to get through to Mike Hills. Eventually, he stopped calling altogether.

  * * *

  Mike was a con man, of course. His story was all lies.

  In October 2000, Tim got a call from another stranger. His name was Brian Winder, and he was the father of a twenty-four-year-old investment banker named Paul. In March, Paul Winder had been trekking across the jungles of Colombia with a botanist friend. They were hunting for rare orchids, but one week they disappeared in the area close to the border with Panama known as the Darién Gap. Nothing more had been heard from them. It was assumed that they had been kidnapped by one of the various groups of bandits, revolutionaries, and drug smugglers that operate in the lawless area. His parents were beginning to resign themselves to Paul’s death, when they got an intriguing call at their family home in Essex. The man at the other end of the line spoke plausibly of “underworld contacts” in Panama who knew the whereabouts of their son. Brian paid £5,000 to the man, who had bad teeth and a Cockney accent, but nothing had ever come of it, and no one had any idea where Paul Winder was.

  Mike Hills hadn’t even bothered to use a different name.

  The Winders had been to the Essex police and now Tim went to see them too. He made a long statement setting out the whole story and handed over his tape recordings and the collected fax and e-mail correspondence from Hills. Charges were filed and an arrest warrant issued, but Mike’s whereabouts were unclear. He seemed to have left Holland for Alicante in Spain. There was talk of extraditing him, but after a few months, Tim heard nothing more.

  To the joy of his family, Paul Winder and his friend were released by their guerrilla captors after nine months of captivity and arrived back in Britain in time for Christmas 2000.

  Tim had almost forgotten about the whole affair when he got a phone call from one of the Essex detectives two years later. A pair of traffic policemen in central London had been questioning an illegally parked motorist and asked to see his driver’s licence. When they ran the details through the computer, they discovered that Michael Joseph Hills had an outstanding arrest warrant against his name.

  Mike went on trial at Chelmsford Crown Court in April 2003, charged with two counts of obtaining property by deception. His address was given as a bed-and-breakfast in Waterloo. He pleaded guilty and said that he had needed to pay for treatment for his wife, who was dying of cancer. But the judge said that there was no evidence that this was how the money had been spent. Mike Hills’s criminal record listed convictions for deception and theft dating back to the 1970s. He was sent to prison for three and a half years.

  Before sentencing, Mike said, “At the end of the day, it was me that took the money, no one else. I’d like to be in a position to pay these people back. It would be nice.”

  Journalists called Tim about the verdict and quoted him saying the kind of things that people are expected to say in such circumstances: terrible, evil, despicable, abominable, preying on misfortune. All of this was true. “But even at the time,” Tim told me later, “I was aware that without this candle flicker of hope I would have been in a terrible state. This single thing, this safety line that I was holding on to, was actually keeping me buoyant. All the time, there was a faint possibility that this man might bring Lucie back. It kept my head above water.”

  Tim understood that there was more to it than a simple story of an evil con man and an innocent victim. He had needed Mike Hills, and, in some sense, out of grief and need, he had created him. Mike was Tim’s version of the psychics to whom Jane was so susceptible. One promised deliverance based on supernatural insights; the other offered cruder and more palpable tools—bags of cash, guns, beatings.

  “When I realized it was all lies, that was my concern,” Tim said, “that this lifeline had been wrenched out of my hands. I wasn’t concerned about the money, or whether I’d been conned. I felt no hurt about having been targeted or being the victim of a crime. Those things weren’t of any interest or importance to me at all. The only soreness I had was the soreness
of my hand, where this safety line had been wrenched out of it.”

  This was what I admired in Tim, and what was also so off-putting about him: even in confusion and grief, he had the capacity to step back and scrutinize his own situation in all its psychological complexity. How many men in his situation—humiliated, as many people would see it, by a con man—would have the courage and clear-sightedness to say, “It was money well spent”?

  “I didn’t feel angry,” Tim said. “I just felt as if I was falling into an abyss—no lifeline and no hope. Where were we going to find it now, the next bit of hope?”

  10. S & M

  Whatever the answer, it had to lie in Roppongi.

  Another family in similar circumstances would have shunned the area, repelled by the place where their sister and daughter had come to harm. But the Blackmans spent many nights there—because it seemed to be the maze where Lucie had lost her way, and also because it had worked its fascination upon them.

  August was the height of the Japanese summer. Even in the center of Tokyo, invisible cicadas whined and sneered in the trees. The air conditioners pumped out hot air, making the streets more oppressive than ever, and the neon of the lights diffused to a glow in the soft wet air. After dinner in Bellini’s on Huw Shakeshaft’s tab, Tim and Sophie and their helpers would disperse among the bars and clubs, looking for traces of Lucie.

  Tim visited Club Cadeau and One Eyed Jack’s, and one of the clubs where girls danced around a pole and stripped to their bikini bottoms. One night he dropped in at Casablanca, where Lucie had worked. “The whole thing was weird,” he said. “This cramped little room, with these fairly mediocre Western girls and very animated Japanese guys pretending to be able to speak English. It was sleazy and grim. But I didn’t relate Lucie to it, because I knew that she never related to it herself. If she’d been saying, ‘It’s really fantastic, I love it!’ I’d’ve thought, ‘What’s the girl on?’ But she never liked it, and in a strange way that was comforting.”

  The Blackmans met with an ambivalent reception from the practitioners of the water trade. Everyone recognized Tim and Sophie from the television, and there was a degree of sympathy and human concern. But Lucie’s disappearance was bringing unwelcome illumination to businesses that were accustomed to operating in the dimness of semilegality. Practices that had gone unquestioned for decades, such as the hiring of foreign girls on tourist visas, were facing uncomfortable scrutiny. Plenty of the hostesses and barmen and mama-sans would not talk to the Blackmans, and there was little sign that Superintendent Mitsuzane and his detectives were pressing them very hard either. This made Tim furious. He became convinced that there was a “conspiracy of silence” uniting the police and the bar owners. “If Lucie had gone off for an arranged meeting with a customer, someone at that club knows who it is,” he said. “They’ve got to cut across the imaginary boundary that exists between the authorities and the people who run the hostess industry.” He had a suggestion, which wouldn’t have won him any friends in Roppongi. “Gather up the people in the club—the manager, the owner, and the girls—stick them in prison for four to six weeks, and let them decide if they want to talk about it,” he said. “And then do it again until something happens.”

  Some people were scandalized by Tim’s nights out in Roppongi. Nobody would say it to his face, but among some of the Japanese journalists, and a few people at the British embassy, there were mutterings that Tim was “enjoying” himself a bit too much. Even those who were best disposed towards him were puzzled sometimes. “I like Tim, I really do, but sometimes the way he behaved was just … strange,” said one Japanese man who spent long hours of his own time helping the Blackmans. “Like, we’d be out in some hostess club, supposed to be talking to the manager or the mama-san about Lucie, and about the girls who worked there and what they knew, and could they help us. And instead of asking serious questions about his daughter, Tim would be, like, checking out the girls. We’d have a drink and he’d whisper to me, ‘Look at her!’ or ‘She’s gorgeous.’ And I didn’t know what to say.”

  * * *

  Sinister facts became evident during those nights out in Roppongi. One was the abundance of illegal drugs.

  In Japan, the penalties for possession of even small quantities of soft drugs are harsh, and they are far less a feature of youth culture than in Europe and America. But in Roppongi there were Israeli and Iranian dealers who would sell cannabis, cocaine, and even heroin. “Everybody dabbled,” Huw Shakeshaft said, and by “everybody” he meant everyone he knew: the traders and barmen and hostesses. “Barry” was the euphemism for powdered cocaine—after the throaty American singer Barry White. “Jeremy,” more puzzlingly, meant the same thing, as Huw explained. “Jeremy is Jeremy Clarkson—because he presented a program called Top Gear. Top Gear: gear. Gear: drugs. Or people would say, ‘Are you long?’ as in, ‘Do you have a “long” trading position in the markets?’” “Are you long?” meant “Have you got any cocaine?”

  The most popular substance among hostesses was shabu, known in English as ice or crystal meth, a potent amphetamine that could be snorted, smoked, injected, or even inserted in lumps into the anus. The rush it imparted could transform a stilted conversation with a dreary customer into a thrilling and hilarious flirtation. Shabu was the only thing that got some hostesses through the night. Around Tim and Sophie, people in Roppongi tended to be careful, but one night Adam Whittington, with characteristic unobtrusiveness, was drinking in a bar with Louise and a group of her friends. One of the girls—not Louise—invited him into the toilets and offered him shabu to snort; Adam declined.

  Did Lucie take drugs? Could the man she was meeting have been offering to give her something more than a mobile phone? Louise denied it, but Louise’s recollections were so hazy. Lucie’s family all agreed that she could not have been a serious user, but she had had one lethally druggy boyfriend and had worked in an environment—the City of London in the mid-1990s—where casual use of cocaine was epidemic. An early line in her diary jauntily referred to her and Louise’s shopping expeditions in Tokyo and their “never ending quest for … music (anything but Craig David), postcards & drugs!” To her friends, she had always seemed more of a boozer than a snorter, stoner, or pill popper. But, at the very least, the opportunities had been there.

  The second alarming thing was the number of stories about other Western hostesses who had disappeared or been attacked by customers. Many of them were no more than vague rumors, the usual late-night, third-hand anecdotes about the acquaintance of the sister of a friend. But there were a few well-attested cases of foreign girls who had come to grief in Roppongi.

  Three years earlier, a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian hostess named Tiffany Fordham had stepped out of a bar after a night in Roppongi and never been seen again. The case remained officially open, but the police had effectively given up. As recently as the spring of 2000, three unnamed New Zealand girls were reported to have escaped by leaping from the window of a second-floor room where they had been held and raped repeatedly by a group of yakuza.

  One night Huw Shakeshaft had introduced two friends of his, Isobel Parker, a young Australian, and Clara Mendez, a Canadian. This was during Tim’s first visit to Japan; he was in the depths of shock and funk, and the information imparted by the two women passed through him like solid objects through a ghost.

  Isobel and Clara were examples of a Roppongi phenomenon: former hostesses who had ended up marrying rich Western bankers whom they had met as customers. Both told similar stories, of dōhan with a wealthy Japanese customer who took them to an apartment by the sea, of drinking a drugged glass of wine, and of regaining consciousness hours later, naked in the man’s bed. Isobel Parker had woken up to find the man filming her naked body with a video camera. In a surge of alarm and anger, she had snatched the tape from the machine. Instead of taking it to the police, she had succeeded in blackmailing the man. In return for the video, he had paid her several hundred thousand yen.

  Ye
ars had passed, and neither girl could remember exactly where she had been taken. But they seemed to be describing the same place—a resort by the sea, with a large number of concrete buildings containing holiday apartments. There had been palm trees there, and the wind had rustled their leaves as it blew off the water.

  * * *

  One day in August, a Japanese man called the Lucie Hotline in a highly excited and agitated state. His name was Makoto Ono, and he said that he possessed crucial information that could be imparted only in person. Tim and Adam went to see him at an address in Yoyogi, close to the gaijin house where Lucie had lived. The taxi dropped them off in front of a nondescript residential building, and they took the elevator to an apartment on its upper floors. It was no ordinary apartment. One of its rooms had been fitted out with lights, cameras, and beds. Another contained banks of machines for dubbing videotape. Unsavory photographic magazines in Japanese and English lay on the tables, and there were posters of naked women on the walls.

  It came to Tim and Adam that they were inside a small pornographic-film studio.

  Makoto Ono was a short, stocky man in his early forties, dressed in T-shirt and trainers. There was nothing obviously seedy about him. He had formerly run a small computer business, he explained. Now he was a producer of adult videos. Adam and Tim attempted to remain as nonchalant about all this as Mr. Ono evidently was, but they could not stop their eyes darting towards the open door of the room with the beds and the cameras. But the rest of the studio was quiet. To their disappointment and relief, they understood that no filming was under way at the moment.

  Mr. Ono explained that, as well as being a pornographer, he was a sadomasochist. He referred to it as his shumi—his hobby or pastime. Like many Japanese hobbyists, he pursued his sadomasochistic interests as a member of a group—an S & M “circle,” whose members shared videos, magazines, and fantasies, and who sometimes held orgies together with girls rented for the occasion.