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

  * * *

  In public, Tim had adopted a policy of icy praise for the police and their “meticulous” investigations. But privately his resentment was increasing. The crux of the problem was the telephone call made to Louise by “Akira Takagi” two days after Lucie’s disappearance. Obviously, this had come from someone who knew where Lucie was, if not the kidnapper himself. Trace the telephone number and its owner, and you would have a crucial witness. But to Tim’s fury, the police insisted that this was impossible. One day, this would be put down to technical difficulties. But the next time, the detectives would explain that a court order was necessary to scrutinize private commercial telephone records. Yes, they assured Tim, an application had been made with the court, but it would take time. “Please be patient,” said Superintendent Mitsuzane.

  By September, patience had run out, not only among the Blackmans but also among diplomats at the British embassy. The lord chancellor, Derry Irvine, happened to be visiting Tokyo. He once again raised the case with the Japanese prime minister, and he asked the justice minister to assist in tracing the telephone records. One afternoon, Tim went to the police station with Alan Sutton, the stern, white-bearded consul general. As so often with the police, the conversation slid and slithered and proved impossible to bring to its point.

  “Superintendent Mitsuzane,” Sutton began, “you told me that telephone records are not preserved. Our information is that the data is, in fact, there. Why is the telephone company not complying with the court order?”

  “Our problem is the law in Japan,” Mitsuzane replied. “Another is the question of whether they actually keep the records. We have been continuing our checks. We have been doing everything that we need to do. We will be able to obtain a court warrant.”

  Tim said, “But you told me twice that an application had already been made with the court.”

  “Regrettably, we couldn’t get the information because it was not kept,” Mitsuzane replied.

  Sutton quoted from a letter from the Japanese telephone corporation NTT, saying exactly the opposite: although it was a complicated process, mobile calls could in fact be traced through the company’s computers.

  Mitsuzane smiled. “We have not received any information from NTT.” At this, Alan Sutton lost his temper. “Perhaps you don’t appreciate the high level to which the matter has gone. Lord Irvine, the lord chancellor of the United Kingdom, has received assurances from your minister of justice. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police are expected to do their job. I will be asked by my own government about your performance. How am I to respond? The police must obtain that information. A girl’s life is at stake.”

  Tim said, “After ten weeks, I now want full information, not insults. If you don’t trust me, then who do you trust?”

  Superintendent Mitsuzane smiled. “The telephone company tells us it is not possible,” he said. “We have to comply with the law.”

  * * *

  For Lucie’s friends and family back in Britain, deprived by their distance from Tokyo of the power to provide any help at all, the strain of her continuing absence was unrelenting. While his father and sister were addressing press conferences and grappling with detectives, sixteen-year-old Rupert Blackman found himself having to return to a new term at school. Everyone knew about his sister; over the summer, Rupert himself had acquired an unspoken celebrity. Erstwhile rivals and enemies treated him with gentleness and respect, although Rupert could take no satisfaction in this. “That period was awful,” he said. “Whenever I went to bed I used to have a fag on the windowsill with the window open. I’d be looking up at the stars and thinking about Lucie. I didn’t know where she was, but maybe she was looking up at that star too. Was she even in Japan anymore? Was she out on a boat? Was she in a cult? That’s the worst thing—not knowing. Not knowing what emotion to feel. You’ve got so many emotions inside you—you’re ready to pick one of them. But you don’t know which one is correct, whether you’re meant to be mourning, or whether you’re meant to be strong, or whether you’re meant to be … anything.” Any kind of news about the case made him squirm. “I hated it when I was round at a mate’s house, and they’d flick on the telly and a documentary would come up about Lucie. It was like sitting down with your parents and watching something sexually graphic. It was the same kind of emotion, the feeling that this is not right at all.”

  Lucie’s school friend Gayle Blackman (despite the coincidence of their uncommon name, there was no blood relation between them) became fixated on the conviction that she was still alive and kept a diary addressed to her friend to show to her when she eventually came back. “I had this image that we’d sit on that bloody expensive bed she’d bought just before she left and read it together, having a laugh,” said Gayle. “Then I came to my senses. I thought, ‘You’re an idiot. You’re never going to see her again. She’s not coming back.’”

  Jane Blackman had made a brief visit to Tokyo in August. The following month, she overcame her aversion to journalists and gave her first press conference. Compared to Tim’s public style, Jane was wrenchingly straightforward and unselfconscious. “Tomorrow it will be three months since Lucie went missing,” she said. “I’m here to appeal to the women of Japan—the mothers, the daughters, the sisters, the aunts, and the grandmothers—anyone who can give us or the police those vital clues which can help us to solve this dreadful mystery. We believe that someone out there knows what happened to Lucie and we desperately want that witness to come forward. A tall, blond, slim, good-looking girl can’t simply vanish—someone must have seen her. Please, please, will a witness come forward? Her family wants her back. Her brother, sister, father, and I want her back. You, whoever you are, have had her long enough. To whoever is holding her, please, I beg you, from the bottom of my heart, please let her go now. If it is a man on his own, you’ve had her long enough. I can’t believe the Japanese people can’t help. We know you care. We know how family-oriented you are.

  “As the mother of a daughter who is like a sister to me, it’s the worst nightmare and it never goes away. I don’t sleep. My life is just on hold. I don’t function correctly. I feel as if my heart has been ripped out. It breaks my heart. My most loving daughter, so full of life that she lights up a room…” Jane trailed off. “As a family, we will never give up looking for Lucie and we will never take no for an answer.”

  But an awful prospect was presenting itself, almost worse than the idea that Lucie was dead: the possibility that no one would ever know what had happened to her, that she would forever remain one of the missing. “I think most of all is the fear that in ten, twenty years’ time, even five years’ time, I’m going to still be here, still looking,” Sophie told a Japanese journalist in Tokyo. “I’m not willing to do that. I am not prepared to give up my life because someone has taken away Lucie. I’m not willing to do that. So it’s going to be over. I hope it’s going to be over soon. But she’s not just disappeared.”

  * * *

  Jane was accompanied by the latest addition to the unofficial Lucie Blackman investigation—retired chief superintendent David Seaborn Davies, a smiling Welshman known as Dai. As a young officer in the Metropolitan Police, Dai Davies had served for several years in the Vice Squad, but he had ended his career as head of the Royalty Protection Squad—Queen Elizabeth II’s chief bodyguard. He had visited Japan three years earlier to compare notes with members of the Japanese Imperial Guard and been warmly entertained by them. The following year he retired from the Met to become an “international security consultant” with a partnership that went by the name the AgenC. Dai was an acquaintance of Jane Blackman’s brother. He was confident that, with his decades of experience and his Japanese police contacts, he would be able to bring a bit of professional rigor to the uncoordinated efforts of the family and crack open Superintendent Mitsuzane’s defensive shell. Brian Malcolm, Tim’s wealthy brother-in-law, agreed to pay him £800 a day, plus expenses—a discount of £400 a day on the AgenC’s usual rate.

 
; Dai had a neat little mustache and wore gray suits and paisley ties. He was warm and chummy and persuasive, with a self-deprecating charm. But the challenges of operating in Tokyo were far beyond anything that he had anticipated. By the time he arrived in late summer 2000, most of his contacts in the Imperial Guard had retired or moved on. Those who remained were unable or unwilling to give him useful introductions. The bodyguards of Emperor Akihito, it became obvious, moved in a different world from the detectives of Roppongi. Dismayingly, he was informed that by operating in Japan as a private investigator without a license, he faced potential arrest. And having turned up anyway, under the guise of a concerned “friend of the family,” he had no more success than Tim and Adam. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police treated him with polite disdain. The club owners and bar managers were suspicious and uncooperative. Virtually the only people who could be induced to talk to him were hostesses. Dai referred to this as a “wall of silence,” which was one way of admitting that he was completely stuck. Without any knowledge of Japanese, and without the resources to hire interpreters, he had to rely on the goodwill of local journalists and volunteers, just like everyone else on the unofficial Lucie team. “No one would agree to see me,” he told me six years later. “I used to wonder: Was I giving value for money? Was I just playing at being detective? How far could I go with the resources I had?… When you work as a policeman and you have all these resources at your disposal, it’s different—the information is found, the job gets done. But when you’re working on your own, as often as not you have to pay … I suppose with hindsight it was somewhat pretentious of me to think that as a single individual I could make a huge difference anyway. With hindsight.”

  Dai Davies got on well with journalists. He would go on to play a similar role in other highly publicized cases involving missing British citizens; the “ex-Yard officer”—or even “super-sleuth”—was regularly quoted in the newspapers or interviewed on television, “blasting” the Portuguese police investigating the disappearance of the British toddler Madeleine McCann, for example, or pronouncing on the German investigation into the disappearance of another Kent girl, Louise Kerton. His “crucial role” in the Lucie investigation was often referred to by journalists, prompting ironic reflections on Tim’s part.

  “Dai Davies, the Great Dai Davies,” he said. “It made me livid the other day when he was on TV saying, “Oh yes, I was out [in Tokyo], ‘helping’ the investigation.” We paid him forty-eight grand to be there! For him to spend nights in pole-dancing clubs talking to managers.”

  But Dai did add at least one piece of information to the pile of fragments that the Blackmans had raked together.

  In September, he tracked down a woman named Mandy Wallace, a former hostess, who had returned to her home in Blackpool after several weeks at Casablanca. She had worked there at the same time as Lucie, and she described a man who had come into the club one night in late June and sat with Lucie, a high-spending, brandy-drinking man who had left Mandy feeling vaguely uncomfortable. Dai’s detective instincts seized on this information. He persuaded a friend from the Scotland Yard Facial Imaging Team to come with him to Blackpool. There he produced a photofit, based on Mandy’s description, which was quickly sent to Tokyo and shown to anyone who might recognize it.

  It was a grotesque and horrifying image: wide, fleshy, with a coarse nose, heavy, lascivious lips, and a sprout of dense, upthrusting hair. The neck of the man in the photofit was solid with muscle; wide spectacles partially concealed expressionless eyes. It was the face of someone merciless, implacable, and alien, beyond the reach of human empathy, beyond understanding. No artist could have created a more vivid emblem of the pain of the two-month search, and the hopelessness of the searchers.

  * * *

  By October, Mike Hills had exposed himself as a fraud, the trail of the S & M circles had led nowhere, and Tim and Sophie Blackman’s private effort to find Lucie, based out of Huw Shakeshaft’s office in Roppongi, was falling to pieces.

  Partly, this was a consequence of exhaustion, despair, and the simple expense of maintaining a presence in Japan. But there was another reason—a growing hostility towards Tim among the volunteers looking for Lucie, veering at times into outright hatred.

  The man who turned most violently against him was Huw Shakeshaft himself. Huw had quickly become resentful of Tim’s presence in his office and accused him of being insensitive to its function as a place of business. He was irritated by the missing-person posters attached to its walls and about Tim’s “rude and offhand” attitude towards his staff. He was furious that Tim had given interviews there in his absence and entertained journalists at Bellini’s on his tab. But the source of his fury went deeper than this. At root, it was inspired by Tim’s demeanor, based on passionate convictions about behavior appropriate for someone in his situation.

  Tim’s articulateness and composure kept the story of Lucie’s disappearance alive long after it would naturally have faded away. But his refusal to take the role of conventional victim continued to make him an object of suspicion. Because he did not appear distraught, the reasoning seemed to go, he must not be distraught—and for a man with a missing daughter to be free of distress was immoral. “I was at this time becoming aware of the apparent lack of concern that Tim seemed to exhibit concerning this whole difficult situation, feeling that he showed none of the usual reactions that one sees or experiences when faced with extreme familial trauma,” wrote Huw Shakeshaft, in a ten-page, four-thousand-word document detailing his dislike for Tim. “He just seemed more interested in how much money we could raise for him and when his next TV interview was.”

  Other people had complaints about money and Tim’s alleged preoccupation with it. Adam Whittington’s association with the Blackmans would end in a painful argument about how much he was owed. One participant in the hunt for Lucie, who asked not to be named, recalled overhearing Tim talking on the telephone to Jo Burr and their discussions of “ways they could make money out of the situation.” “I believed [Tim] was someone in dire need of help,” wrote Huw, who had given so freely and generously when the two of them had first met. “Unfortunately I now believe, as evidenced by Tim Blackman’s subsequent behavior, that this was not the case and he was beginning to enjoy his celebrity.”

  Years later, I spent two evenings with Huw talking about the Lucie case. He spent much of the time railing against Tim. At one point I asked if he really thought that Tim had been “enjoying” his situation. “He seemed to be, when he was drunk at four or five in the morning,” he said. “You can do the level of ‘research’ you need to and still get home by one, sober … All I know is that he saw Lucie two or three times in five years, or three years, or whatever it was since the divorce. He’s a man who hadn’t taken the time out to see his own daughter. My read on him as a person—he’s very self-absorbed. If you look at how he handled the divorce and what he actually did to them, I think he’s very capable of being extremely cold … I think you can safely say he was ego-led.”

  Accusations of egotism and intemperance sounded strange in the mouth of Huw, a man whose conversation was littered with the names of Hollywood actors with whom he was acquainted, who talked freely of the heart attacks he had suffered because of overindulgence during his years in Roppongi, and who had a failed marriage of his own and a young son from whom he lived apart. But he was not alone in his judgment on Tim. In the second half of 2000, it became common to hear this kind of talk in Tokyo—usually sotto voce and accompanied by frowns and regretful shakes of the head—at dinner parties in expat apartments, at Sunday brunches in five-star hotels, and at embassy cocktail receptions. Tim Blackman, father to a missing girl, was “enjoying himself.”

  * * *

  The families of the missing are doubly burdened: first by the pain of their ordeal, and then by our expectations of them, expectations of a standard of behavior higher than we require of ourselves.

  As humans, we seek naturally to help fellow creatures in distress. But mo
st of us, whether we are conscious of it or not, expect something back—the flattery of helplessness and of need. Tim hid his pain and panic behind a screen of energetic concentration and activity, which deprived people of this comforting response. But Jane Blackman delivered it. Jane’s pain was unconstrained and heartfelt. She needed help, appreciated it warmly, and her helpers were immediately able to feel themselves to be doers of good.

  The mounting hostility towards Tim seemed to begin when Jane started visiting Japan, and this was not a coincidence. Among the volunteers in Tokyo, Tim said little about his ex-wife, but to people she trusted, Jane talked freely about the failure of her marriage, or her view of it. Huw, Adam, and Dai all came away with an uncomplicated picture of a wronged wife and a philandering husband, who had neglected his family after walking out on them. Goodwill ebbed away from Tim and towards Jane. It was as if there was a limited quantity of it available to the Blackmans, and it had to be divided between them.

  Perhaps sensing this shift, Tim gave an interview to a British Sunday tabloid, which did nothing to improve his standing among the people looking for Lucie. He talked of his pain at Lucie’s disappearance and compared it to the experience of becoming estranged from her after the collapse of his marriage. “Jane is devastated and I can understand that,” he told the Sunday People. “But I find it difficult to feel an ounce of sympathy for her. It’s the same as when I couldn’t see Lucie before. Obviously, this is worse, but Jane’s going through now what she helped put me through previously. So I am emotionally cold towards Jane’s suffering.”

  Since their brief and unhappy conversation over the telephone, Jane and Tim had not spoken; and they carefully timed their visits to Tokyo to avoid ever meeting. After Jane and Dai Davies left Japan at the beginning of October, Tim stayed at home in the Isle of Wight. Sophie had gone home too; Adam Whittington had left at the end of August. The answering machine attached to the Lucie Hotline was checked and logged by the staff of the British consulate.