People Who Eat Darkness (14 page)

*   *   *

It was Saturday afternoon when Lucie walked out for the last time. It was Monday morning when Louise went to the police and Monday afternoon when she had received the bizarre telephone call. But it was late on Monday evening, more than two days after Lucie’s disappearance, before Louise could bring herself to tell anyone in the Blackman family what had happened. This was the middle of the afternoon in Britain; Jane was at home when the call came, about to go out to the post office with a parcel of sweets for Tokyo. Even after Lucie’s safe arrival in Japan, she had remained inconsolably tense; this news, the confirmation of all her fears, pitched her into a torment of panic and dread. Sophie and Rupert were summoned home to the small house in Sevenoaks, Val and Samantha Burman immediately came over, and Jamie Gascoigne drove down from London as soon as he heard.

The information was impossible to digest. Not only that Lucie was missing but also the strange details of the phone call that Louise had tearfully recounted: a “newly risen religion,” “ training,” “Akira Takagi” and “Chiba”—whatever or wherever they all were. “It was absolute pandemonium in the house,” said Rupert Blackman, who was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy at the time. “Mum was like a headless chicken. What do you do when someone goes missing in Japan? No one knew what to do. I was there on the Internet, looking up ‘newly risen religion.’ I remember getting in touch with an old judo instructor of mine to ask for his advice, because of the connection with Japan. And then something comes over you, and suddenly it’s as if you lift off the planet, and you’re far above, looking down, and you’ve got to find this person, like the needle in the proverbial haystack. It’s very strange. I could never express what that felt like. The feeling when you’ve lost something—that’s bad enough. But when you’ve lost some
one
, it’s awful. And to lose someone in a shopping center is one thing, but to lose someone in a different continent—you don’t know where to start. You know no one there; it’s a completely different culture. It was the worst place in the world for that to happen.”

After she began to absorb the news, Jane telephoned Tim at his home in the Isle of Wight. He was sitting in his back garden, enjoying the late-afternoon sunshine. It was the first time that they had spoken since their divorce. There are two versions of the conversation that followed: hers and his.

JANE
: Tim, Tim, it’s Jane. Something terrible has happened—Lucie’s disappeared.

TIM
: Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.

JANE
: Our daughter’s disappeared in Japan. Can’t you … Won’t you go out and bring her home?

TIM
: I’m sure that the Foreign Office and the police are on to it. There’s nothing much we can do that they can’t.

JANE
: But, Tim …

TIM
: Look, I’m in the middle of a barbecue. Bye.

JANE
: Oh, Tim, please …

TIM
: Fuck off.

He hangs up.

JANE
: Lucie’s gone missing! You’ve got to do something!

TIM
: Whoa, hang on, slow down. Is that Jane? Slow down, Jane—what’s happened?

JANE
: Our little girl’s gone missing in Japan! You must go and bring her back!

TIM
: What do you mean, gone missing? What’s happened exactly? Try to calm dow—

JANE
: You bastard! I told you: she’s gone missing, you shit. You’re not going to go, are you?

TIM
: Jane … I … I can’t decide in eight seconds. It’s a lot to take in. Tell me what’s happened again. I’m just having a barbec—

JANE
: You fucking bastard! Something terrible has happened to your own daughter! You just don’t give a shit about anyone, do you?

She hangs up.

So it was Sophie who announced that she would fly to Tokyo the following day; Jamie Gascoigne would go with her. “We know that she’s in Chiba, so I’ll go there and find her,” she told her mother. “If she’s been kidnapped by a religious cult, then I’ll offer myself in her place. I’ll bring her home.”

*   *   *

Sophie and Jamie were twenty and twenty-three years old, and neither had ever traveled so far from home before. For seven days, they were alone in Japan. Even while Jamie was Lucie’s boyfriend, Sophie had never liked him much; it was her mother’s idea that he accompany her. They spent a fruitless week shuttling between the British embassy, where they were shown anxious, but helpless, concern, and Azabu Police Station in Roppongi, where they were met with remote indifference.

Louise had already filed a report on Lucie’s disappearance, a single piece of paper in a room of filing cabinets. But they did learn something about Chiba, which was not only a city of nine hundred thousand people but also the name of a prefecture of five million more, an area as large as Kent and Greater London combined. They also learned that “newly risen religion” was a direct translation of the Japanese term used to describe New Age cults, and that there were several thousand of them.

Jane, in Sevenoaks, was nearly incoherent with anxiety, but Sophie talked every few hours to her father, Tim. They discussed the dilemma faced in many such situations: whether to go public or not. Someone must know what had happened to Lucie. Someone must have seen her on the day she vanished. The only way to reach such witnesses was with a public appeal for information. On the other hand, if she had been taken by a kidnapper seeking a ransom, then a demand for payment, and the opportunity for negotiation, would eventually follow. If the abduction had been carried out for purposes other than money—rape, for example—then her captor might be facing his own dilemma over what to do with his living captive. Either way, a hue and cry in the media could panic the abductor into irreversible action. “There was a risk that if we went public, Lucie could wind up dead,” said Sophie. “There was also the danger that if we kept it out of the news, then any chance to find her would be lost.”

The police wanted nothing to do with journalists. The embassy said that the choice lay with the family but gave the impression of agreeing with the police. Sophie had arrived intending to march up to the front door of Lucie’s abductor and compel him to hand her over by the force of her sisterly will. But immediately things had become complicated. There were so many pieces that had to be manipulated and lined up in sequence, like a Rubik’s cube: police, embassy, media, even Sophie’s bickering parents. Each one had to be dealt with in precisely the right way, even when their interests collided.

Sophie’s sleep was disturbed by jet lag and anxiety. One night she dreamed that she was trapped inside a video game, which was also a Hollywood film. Sophie was an action hero, a James Bond or Bruce Willis, out to save the world before time ran out. But instead of defusing the bombs, saving the hostages, and killing the terrorists, she had to motivate the police, keep on good terms with the diplomats, engage the journalists, and mediate between her parents, before somebody out there, the unknown and faceless villain, murdered her sister.

*   *   *

“We had a choice,” Sophie said. “Get all that we could from the police and stay away from journalists, or keep the case high profile, put pressure on the investigation, but learn nothing from the police at all. And we chose the media.” In fact, the decision was taken out of the Blackmans’ hands. In London, without consulting the family, Louise Phillips’s sister, Emma, had gone to
The
Daily Telegraph
. Within a few days the story was in all the British papers; the confusion of the reporters was evident.

Fears were growing last night that former British Airways hostess Lucie Blackman is being held as a sex slave by an evil Japanese cult. (
The
Sun
)

Police fear that Lucie Blackman, 21, may now be forced into prostitution as “bait” for the weird group. (
Daily Mirror
)

Police are investigating whether Lucie Blackman was abducted by one of the customers at the late night members’ club Casablanca, where the 21-year-old was paid to talk to drinkers. (
The
Independent
)

Lucie Blackman’s fate could lie in the hands of the Japanese “mafia.” (
Sevenoaks Courier
)

For journalists in Tokyo, it was a troublesome story. The Japanese police bluntly refused to comment. The British embassy had little to say either, although it said it more politely. The club managers and foreign hostesses in Roppongi were defensive and wary; those who could be persuaded to speak articulated only puzzlement and concern. Sophie Blackman’s response to media inquiries was one of truculent contempt. The mystery of the missing stewardess was intriguing but not compelling: all over the world and every day, people disappeared, often for uninteresting reasons. Lucie would quickly have been forgotten if it hadn’t been for her father, Tim, who landed in Tokyo the following Tuesday, ten days after Lucie had gone missing, and immediately did one of the things that he would come to do best: he held a press conference.

*   *   *

In Britain, just as in Japan, powerful conventions govern the way that people under the load of unbearable stress are expected to behave in public. We like our anguished victims to be passive, confused, and broken; where those characteristics are absent, suspicion flourishes.

The way that the Blackmans presented themselves in Tokyo was the opposite of conventional.

A Japanese family, deprived of their daughter in sinister circumstances, would shuffle before the cameras with downcast eyes. Their words would be halting and few. They would express love for their child, anxiety for her safety, and appeal to the good nature of her abductors to give her back. There would be tears, and even apology, or something close to it, for “causing inconvenience” by their plight. The journalists’ questions, too, would be conventional. What was your daughter’s character? What is your message to the kidnapper? The unhappy family would shuffle off again, and little more would be heard from them. Responsibility for dealing with the press, for solving the mystery—responsibility for everything, in fact—would be entrusted without question to the police.

In Britain, there is a little more room for the expression of individual anger and resentment, but only within limits. An unspoken code governs people in the situation of the Blackmans, as strict in its way as old formalities of mourning. Before encountering Tim and Sophie in Tokyo, I had had no idea of its existence. It was their indifference to the conventions, from the very beginning, that made them so obvious.

Tim’s first press conference was in the British embassy the morning after his arrival in Tokyo. The room was packed with people, cameras, and television lights; every seat was taken and there were reporters standing in the aisles. The embassy press secretary sat at a table on a podium alongside Tim and Sophie Blackman. She made a brief introduction, in those tones of exaggerated softness and poignancy which are reserved for public discussion of tragedies concerning the young. Then Tim spoke. He was a tall, solid man in his late forties, with direct blue eyes and a head of thick, reddish-blond hair. He was confident, articulate, almost brisk. “V. composed,” I scrawled in my notes, “impressively so—no lump in throat, no obvious emotion. Big sideburns.”

Yes, said Tim, in answer to the first question, he had met the police yesterday, immediately after his arrival. His impression was that they were following all available leads. Yes, Lucie had kept in touch with him by telephone while she was away and sounded happy. Asked about the telephone call from “Akira Takagi” and the suggestion that Lucie had joined a cult, he was confidently dismissive. “Lucie is a Roman Catholic,” he said. “She did not take a great interest in religion generally, and the thought that she might suddenly become interested in a religious cult over a Saturday afternoon is very unlikely.”

Lucie did have debts, he acknowledged, but nothing out of the ordinary—a “managed” overdraft and credit-card bill of a few thousand pounds. He and Sophie were in Tokyo, he explained, to assist the police and the media. “Lucie is a very noticeable young lady on a Japanese road or sitting in a Japanese car,” he said. “A member of the public who may have seen her walking, or with someone driving through a gateway, may come forward and provide us with the vital clue we need.”

His answers were prompt and efficient; as a provider of information he could not be faulted. But—from the point of view of the photographers and reporters and TV cameramen—that was not his role. Occasionally, in press conferences and in conversations over the telephone, Tim would pause before delivering an answer. The pause would extend and lengthen until it filled the room with tension. At these moments, one had an inkling of great, gaping emotion held in check. But a silent pause cannot be quoted, cannot be photographed. And then Tim would answer in his steady, emphatic, matter-of-fact, almost ironic voice. He was articulate but never gave the impression of being overprepared. He didn’t refer to notes. From time to time, he would glance sideways at Sophie; sometimes, they would exchange a smile. He seemed at home on the podium, even relaxed. The next day, the less scrupulous papers would pepper their stories with phrases like “frantic dad Tim,” “distraught sister Sophie,” and “fighting back tears.” They were lies. It was hard to imagine a calmer or more focused pair.

One British reporter raised his hand to ask about Lucie’s current boyfriend. Tim said that he didn’t know him but understood that he was a foreigner and had been interviewed by the police. The same question was put to Sophie, who had said little so far. The embassy press secretary had earlier advised that Sophie not attend the press conference, fearing that the media would attempt to provoke from her a distraught reaction. If so, the media were disappointed. “Of course she mentioned him, she’s my sister,” Sophie replied with a curling lip. “She said she’d met a chap over here, she had started dating, and that’s all you need to know. The details of what she said are none of your business.”