People Who Eat Darkness (15 page)

The photographers were crouching, lurking at the bottom of the podium, their lenses angled upwards. They were waiting for the shot that would make the following day’s papers: a finger brushing away a tear, a face crumpled with anxiety and despond, even just the clenched hands of father and daughter. But there was nothing of the kind. As the press conference came to an end, I realized that there was something else about Tim that was disconcerting, something about his appearance. In most ways, it was conventional enough: he wore a blazer, dark trousers, and tasseled leather shoes … Then I spotted it.

As the lights and cameras were being dismantled, a Japanese reporter I knew approached with a frown on his face. “What was your impression of Mr. Blackman?” he asked. “And why was he not wearing any socks?”

*   *   *

“I’m a yachtsman,” Tim told me years later. “So I rarely wear socks, unless I have to. And it is very hot in Tokyo at that time of year.” As for the emotional dynamics of that press conference: “We decided early on that there’d be no simpering and crying. None of that.”

Tim was born in Kent in 1953 and went to school in the Isle of Wight. His father, who also loved boats, was a stern man. Tim, the youngest of three children, was, by his own reckoning, “a complete pain.” “I was the youngest, the little one, very irreverent, and my father at the time seemed very strict and growling,” he said. “I never knew where to stop. I expect they would describe me today as a bit hyperactive.” At school, Tim played the four-string banjo in a successful bluegrass band. It performed at music festivals and even pressed an LP, which “rocketed into obscurity.” With no urge to go to university, he enjoyed himself for a few years, earning the reputation as a cocky flirt, which was the first that Jane knew of him.

By Tim’s account, the marriage was troubled from close to the very beginning and became more and more miserable as the years passed. Its final years, and the first few years after its collapse, were ones of professional strain as well as personal unhappiness, with the slow failure of the family shoe shops and then the disastrous collapse of Tim’s property company. But by 2000, he had resurrected the business, become the contented partner of Josephine Burr and stepfather to her four teenagers, and rebuilt his relationship with his own children, including, eventually, Lucie.

The idea that Lucie would go to Japan emerged gradually, over several conversations. Tim knew that she was unhappy at British Airways and that the long-haul schedule was making her ill again. He knew, too, that she had debts: Lucie asked him directly if he would pay them off. “I helped her manage them,” he said. “I gave her bits and pieces, but I wasn’t really in a position to write out a check for five thousand pounds, and I’m not sure that’s something you want to get into the habit of doing. Of course, I live with the idea that if I’d paid her debts she wouldn’t have gone to Tokyo. But I don’t know that for a fact, and I’m not going to beat myself up about it, because there’s no way out if you get into that trap. It’s not going to make any difference to anything.”

Before her departure, Lucie made no mention at all of hostessing. “I assume Lucie thought I would disapprove, and I would have done. Because it was unseemly. It was not what her intellect was for. I’m a man, and I know that, however safe this business was supposed to be, males leer at females. But it was a good while before she told me the full story. In retrospect, I was the typical gullible dad.”

There were regular telephone conversations with Lucie after she had left and the odd postcard. At first she was homesick and fed up. Everything was expensive, and she struggled to make ends meet. Tim urged her to come home, but Lucie wouldn’t abandon Louise. After a few weeks, she described to him the job she was doing. “She said it was a bit strange but quite good fun: Western girls pouring drinks, including three or four British girls, and then these funny Japanese people. She said they all talked like this:
hwah-hwi-hwah-hwi-hwor.
Then afterwards, the girls would have a few beers and cycle home. And she told me she’d met a lovely U.S. marine, this chap Scott. She’d prattle on happily, about this and that. By that time it was obvious she was beginning to enjoy it all a lot more.”

Then came the telephone call from Jane. Whichever version of it one accepts, it is clear that Tim reacted to the news of Lucie’s disappearance with greater calm and detachment than his ex-wife. “I’ve been asked so many times what I felt at that moment,” he said. “And I don’t know what I felt. It was all rather unreal. There was Jane on the phone, screaming, calling me every name under the sun. And there was I, sitting in the back garden, listening to the blue tits in the trees.”

And then, within a matter of hours, before anything had become clear, Sophie was on her way to Tokyo to offer herself as a sacrifice for Lucie. Tim knew nothing about Japan. Like his son, Rupert, he telephoned anyone he knew who had some experience or knowledge of the country—business contacts, the friends of relatives. A Japanese acquaintance of his brother told Tim that a single British girl missing in Tokyo would not be likely to command the serious attention of the Japanese police. “I heard this kind of thing from more than one person,” Tim said. “And that is when I did start to panic. Just the realization that you’re completely in the hands of very, very distant foreign agencies, and absolutely dependent on them to resolve this life-and-death problem. And I was being told that it’s not likely that they’d do it.”

At around this time, the calls started coming from journalists. “Jane was giving the conventional response to phone calls at two in the morning—two words with lots of
f
’s,” Tim said. “I was different. Journalists started ringing me up, so I told them what I knew. Suddenly I found the story starting to build. So I thought, ‘If we’re going to have an effect on things out there, people have got to know she’s missing.’

“Then Sophie would ring from Tokyo and say, ‘I’m totally stuck. The police are hardly talking to me.’ It dawned on me, if we could whip up a huge amount of interest in the UK, it could make a difference. I announced that I’d be traveling out to Japan myself—that produced more interest.” Tim was discovering the power that an individual, at the right moment, can exert over the media, the power of creating headlines. He made another important discovery too.

At the end of July, on the southern island of Okinawa, the Japanese government was to host the summit meeting of the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized countries. Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac, and Bill Clinton would all be passing through Tokyo on their way to Okinawa; Tony Blair would be there too, preceded a week before by his foreign minister, Robin Cook.

“I knew about the G8,” said Tim. “And I thought, ‘If there’s this summit out there, the whole world and his mother will be watching Japan, and this will help us. If we can get people back home interested, if we can get the
electorate
concerned about Lucie and what’s happened to her, then any politician, including the prime minister, is going to be duty bound to ask questions—otherwise it looks like he’s a crap bloke.’”

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.