People Who Eat Darkness (43 page)

22. CONDOLENCE

“Lucie’s funeral meant that she was no longer missing,” Sophie Blackman said. “That period of limbo was done with; we didn’t have to keep looking for her anymore. But it was the burial of her ashes—that, to me, was when I understood that her life was over. More so than her funeral. The burial was her death to me.” It came close to being the death of Sophie too.

Four years separated the cremation and the interment of the remains. They were marked by a destructive, stubborn argument among the surviving Blackmans about what should be done with Lucie’s ashes. At first, Tim had suggested scattering them from his boat into the waters of the Solent, where the family used to go sailing when Lucie was a child. Rupert preferred a burial place somewhere close to Sevenoaks, where it would be accessible to all the members of the family. But the heat and bitterness in this debate were between mother and daughter. Sophie desperately, achingly, wanted the ashes to be divided among the four members of the family. She wanted to be able to recapture her visit to the cave in Moroiso, when, for the first time since Lucie’s death, she had felt close to her sister in spirit. “I would like to have some of Lucie’s ashes placed in a beautiful, delicate silver trinket box which I can keep in my life,” she wrote in a passionate letter addressed jointly to her mother, father, and brother. “I am not ready to sacrifice Lucie to the earth. I want to have her with me a little while longer. Somewhere I can talk to her every day. And perhaps in my future, when I have my own family, or my own house, I can bury her at the perfect place where I can be with her forever.”

But Jane was immovable. In 2002, she had been named by the court as administrator of Lucie’s estate, which gave her the final say in all such matters, an authority that she was determined to wield. At one point, she placed the ashes in a household safe bought specially for the purpose. Her fear, although she stopped short of spelling it out, appeared to be that Tim or Sophie might steal Lucie’s remains. The strength of these feelings had much to do with the aspect of Lucie’s death that haunted and horrified Jane the most—the dismemberment and destruction of her body. “Lucie had been cut up,” she said. “There was no way that her ashes were going to be divided too. I felt very strongly about that. I didn’t want half of my daughter.” The interment of the ashes was arranged for March 23, 2005, at St. Peter and St. Paul Church in the village of Seal, a mile from where Jane lived.

Since she was a teenager, Sophie had always had ferocious quarrels with her mother. It was as the mediator of these squabbles that Lucie had become so precious to both of them. At the age of fourteen, Sophie had left home and moved in with the family of a friend for several months; she had dropped out of school halfway through the sixth form. When Lucie went missing, Sophie was studying to be a cardiac technician, the specialist who monitors pacemakers and tests people’s hearts. She flew to Tokyo expecting to spend a few days there at the most. In the end, she lived in the Diamond Hotel for weeks. In between visits to Japan, she returned to London and resumed the life of a medical trainee. But with Lucie’s sudden, violent absence, the elements of Sophie’s life shifted and resettled in patterns that cut her off from the consolation of human contact. Some friends, she found, avoided her, at a loss for what to do or say; these, she despised. Others displayed an exaggerated, stifling wish to comfort and support; them, she rejected. Sophie’s pride and defensiveness, manifested so often as aggression and contempt, drove away many of those who might naturally have helped her.

She got along far better with Tim, but he had long been an absent father, living hours away in the Isle of Wight with his large new stepfamily. “I isolated myself, quite happily,” she said. “And really, truly, the only person in my life who has ever been consistent or reliable was Lucie. I got myself in a situation where the more depressed I became, the fewer and fewer people I could turn to. I ended up on the day of Lucie’s burial with no one.”

It was agreed from the beginning that it would be a private ceremony for the four members of the immediate family. But journalists somehow got wind of it, and so to avoid the inevitable scrum of reporters and photographers, the burial was brought forward at the last minute from four o’clock to one. Jane’s seething conviction that Tim had tipped off the press added to the awkwardness of the whole day.

It was a short and very simple service. Almost five years after her death, Lucie’s urn was buried in a plot in Seal churchyard, overlooking the fields and low hills of west Kent. Rupert placed in the grave a CD of songs that he had written and recorded for Lucie. Sophie had had two silver plaques made, engraved with the opening lines of Lucie’s favorite poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” by W. B. Yeats. The first line she placed in the grave with Lucie:

I know that I shall meet my fate

The second Sophie kept with her and resolved to carry with her wherever she went, for the rest of her life:

Somewhere among the clouds above

After the service, the four Blackmans went for a late lunch. They drove to the Rendezvous, a restaurant where, as a younger and happier family, they had celebrated Lucie’s birthday. It was the first time that Tim and Jane had been in such close proximity since soon after their divorce. Tim ordered champagne and was surprised to find the occasion “reasonably okay—it was really quite convivial. The children could never resist quips and laughs.” Jane even found her ex-husband’s presence less unbearable than usual. “Everyone was civil to one another,” she said. “Tim told me I looked nice. I wouldn’t have chosen to spend the day like that, but we did it for the sake of Rupert and Sophie.” But for Sophie, it was a moment of horror and hypocrisy. Beneath a cheerful exterior, her emotions were writhing within her heart.

“It was fucked up. It was weird,” Sophie said, and four years later, her voice broke as she spoke of it. “Because everyone was trying to be nice to each other, playing the game of let’s pretend that we’re a happy family, sitting in a restaurant—and we’d just buried Lucie. It was weird, this pretense of everyone being united, when actually there was nothing between us anymore, there was nothing that related us. Even now, I find it very upsetting. It made no sense. What was most glaringly obvious was how Lucie’s death had changed the relationships between all of us, and how as a brother and a sister, and a mum and a dad, we were just four strangers sitting round a table.”

It was Sophie’s pride that caused her to conceal her feelings and to set her unhappiness as a challenge to her friends and family. “The only small sign I put out that I was not really okay,” she said, “was that I invited everyone to come back to my flat. After wanting to run away from that awful lunch, I then extended my time with them. And that was me saying, ‘Don’t leave me quite yet. I’m not ready.’” The Blackmans had a few more drinks and cups of tea at Sophie’s, then said their goodbyes. Sophie’s flatmate, Emma, who worked as a flight attendant, was going out—so, on the night of Lucie’s burial, she was to be alone. “I didn’t say, ‘Please stay, I really need you to be here,’” Sophie recalled. “It’s true that I should ask people to help me when I need it. But the test I laid down for people was whether or not they could see that for themselves. Surely, if they knew me, they wouldn’t even have to ask—they would just be there.

“So I was very alone. The burying of Lucie’s ashes was the most significant day of all for me. For me, that was the end of her life—I would never see her again, and I didn’t feel in a position to get through it.”

Over the past year, Sophie had been prescribed a series of antidepressants. She had tried several different drugs; none had helped very much. But now, in between shots of neat vodka, and after carefully and neatly disposing of the empty packets, she laid out her collection of pills.

“I was sitting there on my own, getting obliterated. I don’t clearly know what I was thinking. I don’t remember making a decision about what I wanted to do. But at some point I took every tablet I could find. I can remember doing it in handfuls. I was popping them out of the packets and taking them in handfuls and handfuls. People say, ‘Wasn’t it just a cry for help?’ But it wasn’t. I just wanted to die. I didn’t want to be alive. I didn’t see the point.”

*   *   *

Emma and her boyfriend returned home to find Sophie asleep on the sofa in what they took to be no more than a vodka stupor and lifted her into bed. The next day, Emma left at dawn for two days of flying. Recollections differ about what happened next. Tim had the idea that it was Emma’s mother who raised the alarm, but Sophie remembered coming to groggy consciousness and phoning for an ambulance herself. Either way, it was early on Friday morning, more than twenty-four hours after she took her overdose, that the ambulance took her to the hospital, where her life was saved.

Rupert was the first to get the news of what had happened. He rushed to the psychiatric clinic to which Sophie had been transferred and was appalled to see her shuffling and mumbling and rubbing her hands together compulsively, more like a zombie than the scathing, energetic sister with whom he had had a boozy meal just two days earlier. Tim drove over from the Isle of Wight and had Sophie transferred to a private clinic, where she was briefly committed under the Mental Health Act. He was struck by the pallor of her skin and by the way that, even after the drugs had been flushed from her system, she still seemed to be hallucinating. Jane was the last to be tracked down. When she visited the hospital she saw for the first time the scars on Sophie’s arms where for several months she had been cutting herself.

After a few days, Sophie was discharged into her father’s care and went to the Isle of Wight to live in the old vicarage with Tim, Jo, and her children. She spent ten weeks there, calmly and happily, and finished the dissertation required to complete her degree in clinical physiology at the City of Westminster College. When the results were published that summer, she was awarded a first-class degree.

The following year, she was admitted as a residential patient at Cassel Hospital in Richmond-upon-Thames, which specialized in treating people with severe psychiatric problems related to their families. She spent nine months there. She didn’t see Jane again.

*   *   *

“You might think that a disaster like Lucie’s death would draw everyone back together,” Tim said. “In fact, even in a happy family, people often unravel after something like that. They blame one another, they withdraw from one another. When things have already broken up, as in our case, the pain makes you less able to cope. So it becomes even more difficult to deal with the strain and stresses which were already there.” One summer day in 2006, Tim visited Sophie in the hospital with news that would add to the pressure on the Blackmans: Joji Obara had offered him half a million pounds and he had decided to accept it.

This approach had first been made in March 2006, in the form of an e-mail from one of Obara’s lawyers. The offer was for a one-off cash payment of £200,000; in return, Tim would promise not to make a statement to the Tokyo District Court. Jane received a similar proposal and responded with contemptuous rejection. But Tim entered into a brief e-mail correspondence on the subject—although not, he insisted to me at the time, with the intention of accepting any money. “Here I was, almost in direct contact with Obara,” he said. “I wanted the opportunity to engage with him. I wrote back, pretending to negotiate—first, to see how far it would go, and second, to raise his hopes and then dash them in a pathetic effort at having a stab at him … I was just playing … There is no agreement, there is no money [that has been paid], and there is no forgiveness.”

But Obara’s lawyers were keeping copies of the e-mails, and they were taping and transcribing their telephone conversations with Tim. When these were published the following year, they suggested that he was more eager to accept the money than he admitted. “I have received the offer from the accused,” Tim wrote. “I am prepared to consider it and prepared to consider the condition.” He asked for £500,000: Obara made a counteroffer of £300,000; and for this Tim agreed to a series of statements to be delivered to the court. “The accused has shown contrition and expressed sorrow at Lucie’s death,” he promised to say. “As Lucie’s father and as a Christian, I am able to forgive the accused, and … our relationship is resolved. I hope that he will rehabilitate himself into the community.” A few days later, however, Tim abruptly withdrew from the negotiation.

He explained in a telephone call to one of Obara’s middlemen, which was duly recorded, transcribed, and published, “I am informed by the British police, who talked to the [Japanese] prosecutors,” Tim said, “that they are not happy for me to receive money and then go to court.”

Carita’s mother, Annette Ridgway, had been approached with a similar offer, which she too had rejected. All three parents went to Tokyo the following month and described the effect on their lives of the loss of their daughters. “The terrible, terrible acts played out on my beautiful girl are acts of a disgusting creature, a filthy animal preying on beauty and vulnerability,” Tim told the court. “These are acts of depravity by a monster which has grown unchecked for decades in a hothouse atmosphere without law or control.”

This monster has shown not a single tear of contrition, shame, or guilt for the perversion or crime against humanity. Instead there are only lies and denial; from denial at the start, of even knowing Lucie, to denial in her death. Quite simply, my beautiful daughter would be alive today if she had not been preyed upon by this creature …

These despicable crimes against us must receive the absolute maximum penalty, and longest possible sentence. The eyes of the world believe the charge should be murder—the sentence death. I concur. Any sentence less than the maximum permissible will not deliver the deserved justice and would be a dishonorable insult to Lucie’s life and Lucie’s death.

But over the next six months, Tim resumed his exchanges with Obara’s team. At the end of September, he traveled to Tokyo and met them in the New Otani Hotel. The timing was no coincidence: in October, Obara’s lawyers would begin their closing arguments in his defense. Just five days before, ¥100 million, which at the time was worth $850,000, was wired to Tim’s bank account in the Isle of Wight.