People Who Eat Darkness (20 page)

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 d
ō
han 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.

Years 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.

Until ten years ago, he had been a member of a circle run by a man named Ryuji Matsuda, a wealthy businessman from the neighboring port city of Yokohama. He had first met him at a session where like-minded hobbyists pooled resources to hire a few girls (often university students working for pocket money), trussed them up in leather and ropes, and photographed them in a room fitted out as a “dungeon.” He had immediately been alarmed by Matsuda, who was what Japanese, borrowing the English word, referred to as a “maniac.” His sexual appetites were extreme, and they repelled the more moderately sadistic Ono. All the members of the circle bragged about their exploits—or fantasies—but there was something chilling about the way Matsuda talked. “I have a daughter myself,” Ono said, turning to Tim. “It’s a hobby for me, but there is still a line that should not be crossed.”

Matsuda’s favorite fantasy was to take sadistic sex to its ultimate conclusion. He would abduct a woman, he said, a big, blond foreign woman with large breasts, and film the scene as he tortured her to death in his private dungeon.

“As a man,” he used to ask Ono, “don’t you long to do one big thing, just once in your lifetime?”

“That was ten years ago,” Ono said. “Such a childish plan. What kind of a person would do such a thing?”

Ono had fallen in with a new circle of more gentlemanly sadists and cut his ties with the Matsuda group. But he had stayed in touch with one of its remaining members, a man named Akio Takamoto. Like most members of the Matsuda group, he was outwardly a highly respectable figure, a fifty-two-year-old senior manager for Fuji Film, whose head office was a few hundred yards from Roppongi. In mid-July, the week after news of Lucie’s disappearance, Takamoto had contacted Ono in a state of excitement and anxiety.

“He came to this office, very upset,” Ono recalled. “He was jabbering away, saying, ‘I must speak to Matsuda.’ He kept saying, ‘He did it. Finally, Matsuda did it.’ Then he said, ‘Perhaps there is a video, so we should go together to his place and steal it.’”

With a chill, Ono suddenly understood. His friend Takamoto believed that the braggart Matsuda had finally enacted his fantasy and kidnapped Lucie Blackman.

Matsuda had recently acquired a new “dungeon,” Takamoto told him, a secret den where he could indulge his enthusiasms. But rather than showing it off to his S & M chums, he had refused to take anyone there, which Takamoto found suspicious. And once, Takamoto remembered, while elaborating on his kidnap plan, Matsuda had suggested a method of confusing the police—by making out that the missing victim had joined a religious cult.

Ono couldn’t deny how likely it seemed. “There’s something about Matsuda,” he said. “He’s the kind of person who would think nothing of killing. He treats women like dolls.” After Takamoto had left, Ono went straight to Azabu Police Station and told them the whole story. The detectives listened with interest, took down the names and addresses of everyone he mentioned, and told Ono that they would need to speak to him again.

Takamoto returned to see Ono the following week, full of agitation; again, he expressed his conviction that Matsuda had killed Lucie. Then two weeks passed, and there was no further word from Takamoto, and no word from the police. One morning Ono got a phone call from another acquaintance. Takamoto’s wife had been in touch with this man, reporting that her husband had failed to come home from work the night before. Did Ono have any idea where he might be?

Ono did in fact know something that few others did, including Takamoto’s family: the respectable Fuji Film executive had a “dungeon” of his own, a small rented apartment a few train stops from his house.

Ono left his porn studio early that afternoon and went to the place.

It was a single room on the second floor of an old and decaying wooden building, the cheapest kind of apartment. Ono knocked, but there was no reply. He tried the door, which opened on to a tiny entryway. A pair of Takamoto’s shoes lay side by side, so he must be at home. Ono slid open the paper door that divided the entryway from the apartment room. The first thing he noticed was a strong smell, of cars and latrines. The room was cluttered with piles of books, magazines, and videotapes, and Ono glimpsed the screen of a computer. Then he saw a pair of pale legs beside a cupboard.

It was Takamoto, obviously dead. He was hanging by a rope attached to a wall-mounted hook. He was not dangling but slumped against the wall, his feet trailing the floor; and he was naked from the waist down. The smell was petrol from an overturned can, which had soaked into the tatami mats on the floor, and excrement, apparently human, that was drooling out of Takamoto’s mouth.

Ono stepped shakily outside and telephoned the police.

There was one other detail that he immediately registered in the few seconds he was in the room. On the walls, distinctive with their blue borders and white lettering in English and Japanese, were several missing-person posters bearing the smiling face of Lucie Blackman.

*   *   *

Within an hour or two, twenty police officers were on the scene, both uniformed and plainclothes. Ono talked to them at length over the next few days.

They told him that, based on his information, they had summoned Takamoto for questioning just three days earlier, on August 5. It was a Saturday, and the police had not wanted to embarrass him by asking him to be absent from work. Takamoto had told them his fears about Matsuda. The next day he had paid the paltry rent—¥20,000 a month—on his sex den. On Monday, he had said goodbye to his family and gone to work as normal. Sometime between that afternoon and the following day, he had died.

The magazines and videos in the apartment were pornographic; the computer, which was new, contained files of hard-core pornography downloaded from the Internet. Most of the images were of white women in postures of humiliation. The neighbors confirmed that the quiet bespectacled salaryman came by the apartment most days in the early evening, although they had no idea who he was or what he was up to. Rather tentatively, the police concluded that it was an accidental death caused by autoerotic asphyxia, the practice by which a masturbating man temporarily cuts off the supply of oxygen to his brain to intensify the sensation of orgasm. This dangerous game has caused many deaths over the years, although distraught families often prefer to announce publicly that the death was a suicide.