People Who Eat Darkness (37 page)

“I love Mummy because she keeps the house tidy,” Lucie had written in one of her exercise books from the Granville School, in an essay titled “Why I love Mummy.”

Mummy is kind and she looks after me.

She cooks me lovely cakes and biscuits. Mummy makes a lovely pack lunch. I love Mummy she always keeps my bedroom tidy. Sometimes I don’t like Mummy she shouts at me and sometimes I cry. But most of the time she is nice she cooks me a nice breakfast and a lovely tea. I love Mummy when she wears a pretty dress. I love Mummy very very much.

Jane had lost her own mother as a child and her sister as an adult. As a mother, her greatest fear had been the death of one of her children. It had been her life’s mission to protect them. Now she was in Japan, speaking through an interpreter to policemen who seemed to be asking her to corroborate the contents of her dead daughter’s stomach.

*   *   *

Two weeks after Lucie’s body was found in the cave, her parents came to take her home. For the first time, Tim and Jane were in Japan at the same time, but they traveled there and back separately and never met or spoke to one another. Sophie and Rupert flew out with their father and then back with their mother, with Lucie in the hold of the airliner. Jane’s friend Val Burman, who accompanied her, remembered the coffin as “macabre, like something out of a horror film, a huge, big, black wooden thing.” When Tim visited the police, he was taken aback to be asked, more than once, if he wished to view Lucie’s remains. “I was surprised,” he said. “Is it a Japanese cultural thing? I didn’t need those images. I can imagine them well enough without having them implanted in my head.”

A heavy coffin, sealed and metal lined, was a necessity because of the condition of the remains.

Everyone gave a press conference. Jane, speaking at the Diamond Hotel, was as spare and searing as before. When the time came for questions, it was difficult to imagine what there was left to ask. But someone went ahead anyway and asked the default question for such situations, the question that is not a genuine inquiry so much as an invitation to dissolve into photogenic grief: Mrs. Blackman, how does it
feel
to be taking your daughter’s body home?

Jane looked at the questioner witheringly and maintained her composure.

Tim, appearing with Sophie and Rupert at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, was as long-winded and informative as his ex-wife had been pithy and reticent. He thanked the media for their help over the months and spoke in detail about his feelings over Lucie’s death, Obara’s arrest, the Roppongi “system,” and the role of the police. He also announced the foundation of the Lucie Blackman Trust, a fund that would be used to “ensure the safety of traveling children … so that Lucie’s tragic death will not have been in vain.” A flyer was handed out, bearing a photograph of Lucie and Tim embracing, and inviting donations to a Japanese bank account.

In my notes on the press conference, I wrote, “Grief takes people in different ways.”

Tim confirmed that he and his children would be visiting the cave on the beach and asked that the media give them space and time to grieve in private. The message was clear enough: please leave us alone for a while. But in making this request, Tim had also announced exactly when and where they would be going.

It was Rupert Blackman’s first visit to Japan. Throughout the whole agonizing, drawn-out period of Lucie’s absence, he had been the member of the family least involved in the case. He was still a schoolboy, and he had done all he could to avoid contact with the reporters and photographers who intermittently rang the bell of their house in Sevenoaks. But he was conscious of a deep sense of loss and of being excluded from the intense activity that absorbed his mother, father, and sister. Journalists writing about Lucie’s family got his name wrong, or left him out of their stories altogether. Many people, who knew only what they had read, were surprised on meeting him to discover that Lucie Blackman even had a brother. “The saddest thing of all is that I never really knew Lucie as a person,” he told me. “She was always just my older sister, and I was the little brother. I didn’t have the chance to build an adult relationship with Lucie, in the way that siblings do in their late teens or twenties. I was never mates with her, and I never will be.” So Rupert needed no persuading to come to Japan when the time came to take Lucie’s body home.

At Narita Airport, they were confronted by clicking photographers, trotting backwards and tripping over one another. It wasn’t the only occasion when Rupert had to stifle the urge to laugh. “That was Lucie’s spirit living through us, so we could still see the funny side of it and the absurdity of it all,” he said. “It was just ridiculous, so ridiculous. Obviously we were devastated, but what the hell can you do about it? If you don’t laugh, you cry. I remember at the press conference, just before it began, we were having a laugh about something, and Dad said, ‘No, listen—you need to look somber and sad.’”

Rupert was fascinated by Japan: the vast, orderly throngs of people on the pavements and pedestrian crossings, the sight of thousands of umbrellas keeping off the early spring rain. “I’d never been anywhere like that,” he said. “I love the respect that everyone has for one another. It’s humbling to see that. But it made it even harder to accept that this thing had happened in this city.” Towards the end of the week, the police drove them down to the beach at Moroiso, across the astonishing Rainbow Bridge, which curves in the sunlight across the breadth of Tokyo Bay.

They got out of the car above the cliff and descended to the beach down a set of rusty stairs. Rupert wanted to see the place where Lucie had lain in the sand for seven months because he wanted to feel close to her. He wanted some of the intimacy that they had never had, as a sensible big sister and little scamp of a brother, and never would have now. Rupert had flowers to leave for Lucie. They had stopped at a petrol station so that he could buy paper and a pen to leave a farewell note for his sister.

At the bottom of the steps, thirty or forty Japanese photographers and TV cameramen were waiting. Some of them were standing or crouching in readiness, with their weighty black cameras. Others had erected metal stepladders on the sand to get a better view, no more than three or four yards in front of the cave.

Rupert described it as “like a right hook,” a punch to the jaw, to descend onto the beach and find all these strangers waiting.

The three of them walked forward with their flowers, and the camera shutters hissed and whizzed. When Tim, Sophie, and Rupert were facing the cave, the photographers crept even closer behind them. Tim turned, and the cameramen paused, and something caught light in both Tim and Sophie. Sophie was swearing and screaming at the photographers, who scuttled back like crabs, and Tim was shouting too, and picking up the abandoned ladders and hurling them awkwardly down the beach. The cameramen kept shooting and filming, and Rupert watched it all, and then turned away. “There was Dad picking up these cameras and ladders, and shouting, and them all shuffling back,” he said. “And Sophie shouting too, telling them all where to go.” And there was Rupert, kneeling on the slimy sand and weeping, staring into the dripping cave that had been his sister’s tomb.

PART FIVE JUSTICE

19. CEREMONIES

Lucie’s funeral was at the end of April 2001. It would have been a grim occasion under any circumstances, and it was made doubly bleak by the palpable enmity between Jane and Tim.

It was organized by Jane and held in an Anglican church in the town of Chislehurst, twelve miles from Sevenoaks. It was a puzzling choice of venue. Sevenoaks has plenty of churches of its own, and Lucie, with Jane, had converted as a teenager from nominal membership of the Church of England to nominal Roman Catholicism. The church’s principal significance in the lives of the Blackmans had been as the venue of Tim and Jane’s wedding, twenty-five years earlier. Was this the point for Jane? I wondered. To reproach Tim, consciously or unconsciously, by tracing a link between his dead marriage and his dead daughter?

There were 260 people in the church; outside, a rabble of photographers and reporters were kept at bay behind aluminium barriers. There were flowers from Tony Blair and from the Japanese ambassador to London; the incense burned during the service was the gift of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Many of Lucie’s contemporaries from Walthamstow Hall were there, as well as former colleagues from SocGen, a contingent from British Airways in their blue cabin uniforms, and even Helen Dove, who had worked with Lucie in Casablanca. Gayle Blackman and Caroline Lawrence arrived together; at the last minute, Gayle decided that she could not face the church and had to be coaxed out of the car.

Several of those present would describe a sensation of lightness and depersonalization, almost of trance, as if they were watching the funeral at a remove from reality, as in a dream. The sensation was accentuated by the absence from the church of Lucie herself. The aura of decay about the coffin was too strong, so it was kept at the crematorium, and a large photograph of Lucie in a blue dress took its place. “That was the worst thing, that she wasn’t there,” Gayle said. “I’d written a card which I wanted to go with Lucie, and I took it to the undertaker before the service. It wasn’t a question I’d ask now, but at the time it seemed necessary to know. I asked him, ‘How bad is she?’ And he said, ‘It’s bad.’”

There was no direct confrontation between Jane and Tim, who did not speak to one another at all. But black energies crackled between them. The friends who filled the church found themselves bent to their force, like iron filings arrayed around the field of a magnet. When the members of Tim’s and Jane’s families arrived, they seated themselves on opposite sides of the aisle, as if in parody of the wedding ceremony they had attended a quarter of a century before. Jane’s seventy-four-year-old father, John Etheridge, was dying. He had heart disease and had recently had his second leg amputated. He was pushed into church in a wheelchair, a man who in his prime had been a strapping six three, now weighing little more than 125 pounds.

Even in their grief, her friends and family were struggling, mentally, for possession of Lucie. Gayle experienced a squirt of anger at the sight of a group from Walthamstow Hall, girls who had never known Lucie well or even liked her, who at various times had been her tormentors. “Jane had said no flowers, and Lucie’s friends respected that,” Gayle remembered. “But there were these girls from school, all dressed up and with their big bouquets. They were just there to be seen. You could hear them a couple of rows away, saying, ‘Oh, look, so-and-so’s here,’ and ‘Look who’s with so-and-so!’ It was disgusting. I didn’t go to the crematorium after that. I couldn’t face it.”

No one had a more acute sense of detachment than Tim Blackman, and no one was under closer scrutiny. Many of the congregation were people whom Tim had never met and did not know, but they knew him, or versions of him, from his television appearances and newspaper interviews, and from the word of friends and acquaintances: Lucie’s dad, who had worked so hard to find her, but whose demeanor and temperament remained, somehow, suspect. “I remember saying, ‘I can’t believe he’s so composed,’” said Sarah Guest, one of the British Airways contingent. “He didn’t give away his feelings at all, whereas the mum had a more normal reaction. I mean, I didn’t know the guy at all, and I think people deal with grief in different ways. But people at the funeral were quite critical.”

No one would have said so to their faces. But, among many of the mourners, a standard was being applied to those who had lost Lucie; a code of behavior was being invoked. Jane conformed to it; Tim, to the minds of people there, fell short.

*   *   *

A year and three days after she disappeared, on July 4, 2001, Joji Obara was brought to trial for the rape and killing of Lucie Blackman. The courtroom, in the towering judicial complex two hundred yards down the road from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters, was full to capacity. Obara had made seven previous court appearances and had been charged with five other counts of rape. Rather than being held day after day, Japanese trial hearings were held about once a month. So far, most of those in the Obara trial had been held in closed court so that the victims who were called on to testify—Clara Mendez, Katie Vickers, and the three Japanese women—could give their evidence in private. But this morning nine hundred people lined up for the sixty public seats, which were allocated by computerized lottery. On the stroke of ten o’clock, Obara entered the court, closely flanked by two uniformed guards.

He wore a charcoal gray suit and an open-necked shirt. He was handcuffed, and a length of heavy-looking blue rope was tied around his waist, its ends grasped by the guards who uncuffed and unknotted him after he had sat down. This was routine in Japanese criminal cases, but I found myself registering a twinge of shock at a sight so out of keeping with the gleam and modernity of Tokyo: a human being bound helplessly in ropes.

Obara was instructed to stand facing the panel of three judges as the prosecutor read out the charges of
jungokan chishi
—“rape resulting in death,” a charge similar to manslaughter but short of murder—of Carita Simone Ridgway and Lucie Jane Blackman. Defendants in Japanese criminal courts do not respond with a simple plea of guilty or not guilty but, after being reminded of their right to remain silent, are invited to comment on the charges. Obara read aloud from a piece of paper on the podium before him; his voice was clear but unexpectedly soft and lisping, almost soggy. He admitted to having been with Carita and Lucie on the nights in question, but he denied any responsibility for their deaths. His sexual relationship with Carita had been one of mutual consent. He had been entertained by Lucie in Casablanca (as “Mr. Kowa,” the lisping English-speaker whom Louise had vaguely remembered), but it was she who had asked to go out with him, not vice versa; the question of a mobile phone had never come into it. “We drank alcohol and watched videos at my apartment in Zushi,” he said. “We did not ‘play’”—and he used the Japanized English loan word
purei
—“even once that night. I did not make her consume drinks containing sleeping pills or any other drugs.”