People Who Eat Darkness (6 page)

Having moved to long haul, Lucie could expect to earn about £1,300 a month after tax. But however much she worried about money, she continued to edge deeper and deeper into debt. Lucie’s scribbled accounts of expenditure and income for the end of 1998 listed a monthly payment of £764.87, more than half her income, on her Diners Club credit card account alone. Then there was the £200 monthly payment for her Renault Clio, a £47 payment for a bank loan, £89.96 for her Visa card, £10 for a Marks & Spencer credit card, as well as £70 in rent to Jane, a £32 gym membership, and a £140 mobile phone bill. By the time she had bought the makeup and shampoo and clothes that she needed for work, Lucie was spending a few hundred pounds more than she earned every month, and the interest on all her debts was making them harder to repay by the day.

She was tired and ill. The long overnight flights were bound to be draining, but they were not even fun. British Airways had fourteen thousand crew members; most of the time, Lucie stepped on to a flight with people she had never met before and would not see again. The occasional pleasure of working alongside a friend did not compensate for the monotony of repeatedly pouring tomato juice into plastic cups and offering the choice of chicken or beef. “One hotel room is much the same as another in any country,” said Sophie. “She might be in Paris in the morning, Edinburgh in the afternoon, and she might be in Zimbabwe the following day. But she’d be stuck in the hotel, constantly jet-lagged and really not able to go out and enjoy the life and culture and food because she was knackered. Towards the end, she was quite unhappy—tired, miserable, she never saw the same people twice.”

There was something almost sinister about the depth of Lucie’s exhaustion. “She’d sleep for fifteen hours on end,” Sophie remembered. “She felt awful, began to be really unwell.” It was beginning to resemble that alarming period eight years earlier, when she had been laid low for so many months by the postviral malaise. It was in this atmosphere of anxiety and exhaustion that Lucie began to talk about going to Japan.

The idea first came up late in 1999 or early in 2000; nobody remembered quite when or how. But it was clear that it had originated with Louise Phillips.

Louise was the closest of all Lucie’s friends. The two had known one another since they were thirteen. Physically, they were a contrast: Louise was slim, small, dark haired, with a sheen of that fashionable prettiness that Lucie lacked. She, too, was a girl without a father; he had died suddenly of cancer when she was twelve. And the two friends’ mannerisms, their mode of talking, their love of makeup and nail varnish marked them out as a pair; even their names were similar. Jane thought of them as “soul mates.” Tim was more down-to-earth: “Louise could babble for England, just like Lucie,” he said, “so they babbled all the time and found one another hysterically funny.”

Their closeness was obvious in the trajectory of their careers; at each stage of her life, Lucie followed a path earlier marked out by her friend. Louise left school at sixteen and went to work for an investment bank in the City, as Lucie would two years later. Louise joined British Airways as a stewardess; Lucie followed. And it was on Louise’s initiative that the two of them went to Tokyo to work off the debts that had become such a burden to Lucie.

Later events tainted perceptions of Louise, particularly among Lucie’s friends and family. It was difficult to separate those feelings of suspicion and mistrust from the way Louise was regarded before Japan. But Samantha Burman, the daughter of Jane’s friend Val, was wary of her. “She’d been Lucie’s friend a lot longer than I, so I didn’t say anything. But Lucie felt that Louise was the prettier one and Louise was the more confident one, that she was the uglier friend, trying to live in her shadow. I don’t think Louise did anything to change Lucie’s feeling about that.”

The two of them had been working since they left school. They had often talked about taking a break to travel together, along the familiar backpackers’ route through Thailand, Bali, and Australia. But Lucie had no taste for budget travel, and no money, in any case, for travel of any kind. It was Louise’s older sister, Emma, who told them about Tokyo, where she had lived two years earlier. There, she promised them, they could live in an exciting and unusual city and also earn a great deal of money. What exactly Emma had been doing in Tokyo was vague to Lucie’s other friends; it seemed to vary depending on who was being told the story.

Samantha Burman gathered that she had been working in “bars.” Sophie recalled talk of “waitressing.” Lucie’s latest boyfriend, a young investment banker named Jamie Gascoigne, had the impression that Emma had performed with a “dance troupe.” In a farewell letter circulated among her friends at British Airways, Lucie presented it as a plan from which she herself was rather detached. “My best friend Louise was going over there to stay with relatives and the opportunity came up for me to go too. I’ve no plans once I’m out there, maybe see the culture, learn the language or become a high class, well paid Geisha girl !!!!!! (Joke) Just a break for a few months, something different—they say a change is as good as a rest.”

Louise, the girls explained, had an aunt living in Tokyo with whom they could stay rent-free, and this made the proposal seem safer, more comprehensible, and closer to home. It was only to her mother that Lucie explained what Emma Phillips had done in Tokyo and what she and Louise also intended to do. “She said she was thinking of going with Louise to Japan to work as a hostess to pay off her debts, and she made out that it was all going to be absolutely fine. She only knew what it involved from what Louise’s sister had told her. She said you just pour people drinks and listen to them talk, and that they like to sing karaoke. Lucie loved singing, so to her that was money for old rope.”

But Jane was not interested in the details. Her only concern was to prevent Lucie from going to Tokyo at any cost. “She kept reassuring me that she’d never do anything silly, she’d take extra care. But I just knew that something horrible would happen to her. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I’d never even thought about Japan before, as a place. But as soon as she said it—Japan—this voice came into my head saying, ‘Something terrible’s going to happen.’ Maybe it was more a thought, not necessarily a voice—a thought that came into my head. I was inconsolable. I didn’t cry in front of her, but on my own I used to cry and cry.”

*   *   *

Jamie Gascoigne was almost as dismayed as Jane. In the few months they had spent together, he had fallen deeply in love with Lucie, and the idea of being separated from her, even temporarily, was difficult to bear. Then one night, as they were in line at the cinema, Lucie told Jamie that she didn’t want to be attached to him while she was in Japan. “I was totally gutted,” he remembered. “I slid down the wall, didn’t know what to say. We weren’t rowing, we had no arguments. Over the space of the week before we split up, she just changed. It was as if someone was telling her what to do.”

Others were puzzled by Lucie’s behavior in the weeks before she flew to Japan, and the feeling grew stronger the closer the day approached. At home, Lucie embarked on a comprehensive spring cleaning, extreme even by her own high standards of neatness. “She went through everything, got rid of bin liners of stuff,” said Jane. “Old letters, personal stuff. She got rid of lots of clothes. It was much more than just a clear-out, because her room was tidy anyway. It wasn’t done as if she was going away for just a few months. She cleaned her room as if she was never coming back.”

If Lucie saw less of old friends, she went out of her way to look up other people with whom she had formerly spent little time: cousins, godparents, peripheral aunts and uncles. “She did a lot of rounding up, which was a bit weird because it wasn’t how Lucie had usually been,” said Sophie. “She made a concerted effort to see lots of people before she went away. We wouldn’t think anything of it if she’d come back. But because she never did, there was something odd about it.”

Among the people whom Lucie particularly sought out was her father. After the separation from Jane in 1995, Tim Blackman had met and moved in with Josephine Burr, a divorced mother of four teenagers from Tim’s birthplace, Ryde, on the Isle of Wight. He never lived with his family again, but he stayed in close touch with two of his children. During a period of particular acrimony with her mother, Sophie had gone to live with him in Ryde for a while, and Tim regularly drove over to Kent to take Rupert to rugby practice or for pub lunches. But of Lucie, he saw far less. The question of why and how this happened was part of the unceasing joust over the truth between Jane and Tim.

*   *   *

Jane was adamant that the decision was Lucie’s. “Lucie was very disappointed in her father,” she said. “But I never, ever, ever would have stopped him seeing the children—ever—because they’re his children. Lucie chose not to see him, but I never, ever stopped her. You can’t stop a grown child—if they’re little, maybe you can. Lucie didn’t see him for quite a few years, because she didn’t want to see him, because she was angry with him. And I suppose because we were very close, she was very protective of me.”

There is no doubt that Lucie reproached her father for her mother’s pain—she said as much to several of her friends. But Tim also detected something subtler going on. “There was no benefit to the children in trying to explain away or justify my actions,” he said. “That would never fall on receptive ears, except to say that I was very unhappy before it happened. I took the view that time would make a difference, and things would change, and that eventually they would come and see me. And with Lucie that was happening. She’d been down around Christmas a couple of times, and waterskiing in the summer. I’d see her a little bit in Sevenoaks; there wasn’t a complete severing of ties. But it wasn’t easy. For two, three years it was very difficult.

“This is where it gets very complicated. I know Jane very well, and I know how manipulative she can be. And she was a hundred percent vitriolic against me. There was simply
no way
she could have avoided manipulating the situation. Lucie would make an arrangement to come down to the island, to come and see me at the weekend. Then we’d get to Thursday that week—and, suddenly, it was too difficult to come. It’s my belief that, most of the time, it was because there was a situation at home that she couldn’t easily battle out. I was the easy sacrifice in her complicated status as eldest child supporting the devastated mother. She was stuck in a corner. And I could understand that, but it didn’t make it hurt any the less.”

Whatever pressures Lucie felt from her parents, the imminence of her departure eased them. Jane made a point of telling Lucie that she should see her father, and in mid-April, after she went in to British Airways for the last time to hand back her uniform, they met for dinner in a pub outside Sevenoaks. She sent him a text message a few nights earlier that Tim kept on his phone long after Lucie had disappeared. Much later, when mementoes of Lucie had come to be very precious, he preserved it by copying it out exactly.

14.04.00 00:38 xxxxxxxxxxxxx good morning! my beautiful daddy. I love you so very much & can not wait to see your smiley face on tuesday. lots of love & snuggles … lula xx

Jane had always been a worrier, but her anxiety about Lucie’s trip to Japan, and her campaign to foil it, verged on the absurd; it had about it something of a child’s irrational fear for the well-being of a parent. The point of going to Japan for Lucie was to work off her debts, so Jane began collecting clippings from the newspaper about the grim state of the Japanese economy and casually leaving them on Lucie’s bed. When these were ignored, she made an appointment on Lucie’s behalf with a spirit medium, in the hope that wisdom from beyond the grave would prevail where her own entreaties had failed. (Lucie canceled the appointment.) Finally, hours before the flight to Tokyo, she considered the ultimate sanction—hiding Lucie’s passport. Rupert Blackman remembered his mother standing on the stairs brandishing the passport and screaming down at his sister. “But I thought, ‘If I do, she’ll just get another one, and she’ll be cross with me,’” said Jane. “And I didn’t want her going to Japan cross with me.”

Val Burman became irritated with Jane’s flapping. “I don’t understand why you’re behaving the way you are,” she told her friend. “Anyone would think you’d suffered a bereavement.” And Jane replied, “It feels like that.”

*   *   *

Lucie didn’t completely stop being herself. In March, she added $1,500 to her debts by buying an immense iron bed from Marks & Spencer. This gesture, so characteristic of Lucie, reassured her friends that she was at least planning to come back from Tokyo. “She called it her Princess Bed,” said Sam Burman. “It was a big double bed with a metal frame, quite an old-fashioned style. It had a lovely thick mattress and beautiful linen that all matched. When Lucie came home, that was what she wanted: to be snuggled up in her own bed. She was always talking about it.”

She was more reticent about another new feature of her life, one that illuminated some of her recent behavior: Alex, a young Australian, who was working as a barman in the Black Boy pub. Alex was eighteen years old, three years younger than Lucie; she met him less than a month before leaving for Japan. “He had curly brown hair, and he was a bit of a surfer type,” Sophie remembered. “There was just something very vibrant about him. She really liked him,
really
liked him.” Years after Lucie’s death, Jamie Gascoigne had no idea that Lucie had left him for a new boyfriend, nor did their close mutual friend Sam Burman.

Among the mysteries of that period was Tuesday, May 2, Lucie’s last night in Britain. Of her closest friends and immediate family, everyone had a different recollection of how she spent that day, and with whom. Tim Blackman was fairly sure that he was with Lucie that evening, having dinner in a restaurant in Sevenoaks with Sophie and Rupert. Sophie remembered clearly that Lucie had spent most of the evening with Alex. Jane’s memory of the last few hours with her daughter was clouded by intense anxiety but didn’t include Tim or Alex. The friends who remembered the most about Lucie’s last night were Sam Burman and her mother, Val.