People Who Eat Darkness (51 page)

“To violate the dignity of so many victims, using drugs, in order to satisfy his lust, is unprecedented and extremely evil,” the chief appeal judge, Hiroshi Kadono, said. “There are no extenuating circumstances whatsoever for acts based on determined and twisted motives.”

The verdict was complicated because on a single charge—of causing Lucie’s death—Obara had once again been acquitted. It was true that the postmortem had not identified what killed Lucie, and it was impossible to know with certainty what had happened in the hours after her last telephone call. But Japanese courts could, and did, convict on circumstantial evidence.
*
It was very difficult to understand how, in the absence of any other suspect, a man could be found guilty of drugging, raping, and carving up a woman who had spent her last evening in his company—but not of killing her. Still, these new convictions were as surprising as the original acquittals; everyone I knew had expected the judges to rubber-stamp the earlier verdicts. Jane Steare, who was in court with Roger beside her, wept tears of relief. “This has been a harrowing ordeal, not just for today, but for over eight years,” she said afterwards. “But at last we have two guilty verdicts and a life sentence … Today, truth and honor have prevailed, not only for Lucie, but for all victims of violent sexual crime.”

I told Tim all of this over the satellite telephone line, and there was a silence filled with the hiss of the atmosphere. I had never known Tim to be speechless; I thought at first that the connection had been broken. I had to coax out of him the phrases that I needed for my newspaper story. “It is fantastic, and completely unexpected, and no less than Lucie deserves,” he said eventually. “It’s been such a long haul, such a merciless torture. But for the police and prosecutors to get him like this is a great achievement.”

Tim thanked me for calling him and hung up. The
Infanta
was between Morocco and the West Indies, halfway through a transatlantic yacht race. There was almost no wind; sea and air were stilled by a dense tropical heat. On board his yacht, eight thousand five hundred miles from Tokyo, Tim was becalmed.

*   *   *

Obara appealed again, to the Supreme Court. This time his lawyers directed their attention to the story told in the prosecution indictment. They wanted to demonstrate the physical impossibility of maneuvering a dead body out of the apartment in Zushi Marina, back to Tokyo, down to Blue Sea Aburatsubo, and into the cave. This argument had been made before, and rejected, in the lower courts; this time, Obara attempted to make his point by means of a bizarre experiment. He had his lawyers purchase the same model of refrigerator in which he was accused of having stored the corpse in the house at Den-en Chofu, and he spent ¥1 million on a precisely molded mannequin of Lucie. “The mannequin is very delicate, and its skin is like human skin,” his lawyer Yasuo Shionoya told me. “It weighs the same [as Lucie] and the size is the same. One of the lawyers who is about the same size as Obara tried to carry it and to put it into the freezer—it was completely impossible.” A video of the fellow’s exertions formed a central part of the appeal dossier.

From his cell in the Tokyo Detention Center, Obara continued to direct his legal battles, suing the
Yomiuri
newspaper for libel and fighting a claim for unpaid fees from the publisher of the strange book with the dead dog on the cover. Shionoya talked about the appeal with modest confidence; there would be no verdict, he predicted, until the middle of 2011 at the earliest. But then, early in December 2010, Tim, Jane, and the Ridgways in Australia each received a telephone call from the Tokyo police with unexpected news. The appeal had been rejected by the Supreme Court. The guilty verdicts and the life sentence were now confirmed irrevocably; there was nowhere left for Joji Obara to run.
*
A life sentence in a Japanese court rarely means life, but on average the term served before parole is more than thirty years. Even counting the decade he served in detention, Joji Obara is unlikely to walk free before 2030, when he will be seventy-eight years old. As a convicted criminal, he was transferred to a prison with a regime drastically different from the detention center where he had lived since 2001. He shares a cell with other convicts; he is allowed none of the books and documents that furnished his life for the past decade. Visits are allowed just once a month, and even then only from members of his immediate family. Prisoners are not barred from seeing their lawyers, but permission must be obtained for each visit and is typically granted only once every few weeks.

“Until now, Obara has been his own chief lawyer, but that is impossible for him in prison,” Shionoya told me. His legal team spent the last days before his incarceration huddled with their client, making hasty arrangements so that they could continue to manage his affairs without the daily contact to which they had grown accustomed.

The prosecutors had not appealed to the Supreme Court, and so the single acquittal, on the charge of killing Lucie Blackman, stood. Jane held fast to her view that even the partial conviction of Obara was a victory, if not for Lucie then for Obara’s victims in general. It was true, of course, and yet emotionally it hardly mattered at all. Well before the conclusion of Obara’s trial, it had become impossible for those most closely connected with the case to hold it and all its details in mind.

It was not that justice was unimportant. But it altered nothing, or nothing that really mattered. It was as if, after a frantic contest of strength between two equally determined and unyielding opponents, one had simply relaxed its grip and walked away. Lucie was still gone—and what could ever make a difference to that? Such a loss was unquenchable. What might have been consolations—arrest of suspect, trial, a guilty verdict, ¥100 million—evaporated into it like spoonfuls of water tossed into a desert. What if Obara had admitted guilt, begged forgiveness, wept out his black heart? What if he had been charged with murder, rather than manslaughter, and sentenced to hang? Imagine the most extreme vindication and retribution—nothing that mattered would be alleviated or improved by it. There was no satisfaction that could be imagined, only greater and lesser degrees of humiliation and pain. Lucie had been a unique being, a precious, beloved human creature. She was dead, and nothing would ever bring her back.

All about me

I would like a magic ring that

would make me and my sister

fairies. We could have a castle and

flying ponys and powers.

WHAT I REALLY AM. I am kind and quite sensible says mummy and daddy. I can get very cross with my sister and brother. I am very thoughtful to other people and helpful to other people. I do not like racing my work even though someone is racing me. I am not keen on playing in the playground. I hate to eat omelets and swede [rutabaga] and peas. They are all my worst. I will tell you the thing I do not like but not my worst.

It is mushy peas.

“I used to think all the time about what he did to her,” Jane said. “That was the worst thing of all—imagining Obara cutting up Lucie. My skull would want to burst with it; I thought I’d never get it out of my head. I’d hear a chain saw in a field, where someone was chopping down a tree, and I’d physically shake.” Jane had been to see a psychotherapist, and she had talked to the mothers of other murdered children in Japan as well as Britain. All were kind and sympathetic, but none of it helped. Then she was introduced to a treatment called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, widely used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a mysterious therapy that often worked dramatically for reasons that even its practitioners could not fully explain.

“What would make you feel better?” the therapist asked during his first meeting with Jane.

“Just to know that she’s safe,” she answered.

“So then he told me to think of the horrible things that Obara did to Lucie,” Jane recalled. “And then I had to follow his fingers, and he moves his fingers from side to side. And I’m thinking about it, and he’s saying, ‘She is safe, she is safe…’ Jane attended four sessions, and they were the only treatment that did any good. “Now, when I’m sitting in court, and the interpreter’s going over these terrible things that Obara did, I repeat to myself, ‘She is safe, she is safe…’ and it helps. I think that was the turning point in saving me from going mad.”

Jane said, “I don’t believe in this thing called ‘closure’ or ‘moving on.’ What do you close, and where do you move on to? You learn to live with it. But I’ll never be the same again. I can be in a supermarket and be feeling perfectly okay. And then I’ll see a little girl who reminds me of Lucie when she was tiny, and my eyes will well up with tears, and I have no control.” As the years passed, friends of Lucie had children of their own. Louise Phillips’s baby was christened Lucia, and Samantha Burman’s daughter was Grace Lucie. Jane was glad, and moved by the love of these young friends, but it was searing to be reminded of the kind of life Lucie would have enjoyed, if she had lived.

*   *   *

Jane hated everything about the Lucie Blackman Trust; in the war for possession of Lucie, it represented a devastating defeat. She hated the hypocrisy she saw in it—the good works of a father who had walked out, as Jane insisted, on his wife and children. Despite the conclusions of the British police and prosecutors, she still suspected it of concealing embezzlement and fraud. She wanted nothing to do with the trust and its work, but she still resented its existence and the way it had co-opted Lucie’s name without any reference to Jane.

She found her own consolation in Lucie’s death, in a dark fatalism that viewed her daughter as the tool of an impersonal destiny—a death, as well as a life, preordained. “I’ve told you this before,” she said, “and I’m not making it up—but I knew that I would never see her again. I arranged for her to see a medium before she went to Japan, but she wouldn’t go. When she was little, she was always so grown up—in a way, she was like my mother. And I feel that this was her destiny, Lucie’s destiny. She was born for it. She was put on this earth to stop Obara. She wasn’t meant to make old bones.”

Lucie had to die, in other words; her death had been inescapable, and Jane had foreseen it. She had been right again, and right to tell Lucie not to go to Japan. In all her sad story, from the death of her mother to her falling out with Sophie, Jane had not been wrong. Even in her choice of Tim, she had made no mistake, because the man she had married was not the husband who left her. “He was a different person,” Jane said. “The man I lived with for nineteen years didn’t exist.” It was the only way that the facts could be compelled to make any bearable sense.

She was comforted at all times by an unwavering faith in Lucie’s continued presence. Jane attended sessions with a medium, a woman named Tracy who lived in the London suburb of Penge. “I went to see her, and Lucie came through,” Jane told me. “It was like I was speaking to Lucie for an hour. She was telling me things that she did—she said, ‘Lucie’s doing this with her hair, and you used to like stroking her hair.’ And I did, I did like stroking it. Cynics would think that she’s just saying that, but there were lots of things that she said, names that people just wouldn’t know … I don’t want to talk about them, but I know it was Lucie.”

Jane said: “I do talk to her, in my mind. We went for a walk a few months ago and we saw a lovely house for sale and made an appointment to have a look. I said to Lucie, ‘If you think this is right for us, give me some signs.’ The signs are always butterflies and stars. On the front door was a little printed sign that said, ‘Gone to the Beach
.’
Well, that’s unusual, isn’t it, in the middle of the countryside? But the beach is where her body was found. Then we went inside and there were butterfly stickers all over the wall. Then upstairs there was a lampshade in the shape of a star, and in the garden there were butterflies dancing round, and a big topiary of a butterfly. So I said, ‘Okay, Lucie—thanks. We got the message.’”

Once Jane saw a healer, who told her that a robin would come to her garden. As she had predicted, it appeared a few weeks later, lolloping across the lawn. Jane and Roger fed the robin; it quickly shed its fear and became almost a pet. “That’s Lucie,” the healer said, and Jane knew that it was true.

It happened again on the day of the funeral, as Jane stepped out of the dark church into the light. Perched in a tree opposite the door was a blackbird, and as the service came to an end it fetched up a loud singing that filled the air above the graves. Lucie’s friends and family milled outside in small groups and gradually broke off and left the churchyard, while above them the blackbird trilled and fluted in the branches of the tree. “It started up as we were all walking out,” Jane remembered, “and I said to myself at once, ‘That’s Lucie.’ Everyone noticed, it was so loud. Tim even looked up at it and commented on it—‘Listen to that bird! Isn’t that bird making a lot of noise?’ I just smiled to myself.” And how sweet death would be, if it could all have ended there, with the image of a bird in a tree, pouring out its song.