People Who Eat Darkness (16 page)

Sophie had found the police sluggish and indifferent, but at Tim’s first meeting with them, they went to some trouble to make a good impression. A convoy of black minibuses, flanked by motorcycle outriders and with darkened windows, collected the Blackmans from the embassy. A team of Japanese television reporters chased behind in a van of their own. “There was a lot of gesticulating out of windows, a lot of lurching around corners, a lot of heavy right foot, rather unnecessarily trying to rush through the Tokyo traffic,” Tim remembered. “I didn’t see the point, really.” The destination was Azabu Police Station, 150 yards from Roppongi Crossing. Like everything to do with the Japanese police, the headquarters of the investigation was a strange combination of the cozy, the feckless, and the sinister.

The police station was a blank structure of nine gray concrete stories. In front, a young constable stood self-consciously on guard, a revolver on his belt and in his hands a weapon that resembled a domestic broom handle. Displayed on the front of the building was an image of Peepo, a grinning pixie who was the mascot of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Above was a bilingual banner whose English portion read,
MAKE SURE AGAIN ALL THE DOORS & WINDOWS ARE LOCKED
. Below were posters of wanted criminals, including gangsters, suspected murderers, and the grinning, life-sized cutouts of three fugitive members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which had released homemade nerve gas on the Japanese subway five years earlier.

“We were astonished by a few things,” said Tim. “I expected we’d be in a much grander kind of police station. The interior of the building was like something out of the fifties. Completely bland, slightly grimy—just a worn-out, utilitarian nick.” The most striking thing of all was the complete lack of any visible technology. The police had radios, but where one would have anticipated humming laptops, there were banks of old-fashioned filing cabinets and mounds of paper. “We expected the normal monitors and all that kind of stuff,” Tim said. “We were taken into a sort of operations room, with loads and loads of little gray desks, with identical people walking round in their identical white shirts with identically rolled-up sleeves, and not a computer in sight.”

The afternoons at the police station followed a pattern. Tim and Sophie would be led into a tiny meeting room, with two chairs facing a sofa across a low table. A young woman would bring in cups of green tea, whose yellowy hue and lukewarm temperature reminded Tim of “bodily fluids”—“I never got used to the taste, but I always drank it.” After a pause, there would be a commotion of bows and handshakes as the senior officers entered the room.

Japanese names are not easy to remember for the newcomer; Sophie’s method of distinguishing between the senior officers was by their haircuts. There was Superintendent Mitsuzane, a smiling, reserved, bespectacled man with a pale parting, and Naoki Maruyama, a younger, spiky-haired man in the fast track of the National Police Agency, who spoke fluent English. On meeting Tim and Sophie for the first time, each would present a business card, proffered with both hands, and inscribed on opposite sides with English and Japanese. The card of Superintendent Mitsuzane bore the following thicket of information:

Akira Mitsuzane

Police Superintendent

Administrator of Special Investigation

First Criminal Investigation Division

Criminal Investigation Bureau

Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department

2-1-1 Kasumigaseki

Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100–8929

Superintendent Mitsuzane spoke little English, and the necessity of interpretation prolonged these meetings. But they would have been drawn out anyway, as the detectives went over and over the same ground with amnesiac repetitiveness.

They wanted to know about Lucie’s education, about her career before she came to Japan, and her reasons for coming out. The subject that seemed to obsess them, and to which they returned again and again, was that of her debts. They took copies of Tim and Sophie’s passports; there were forms to fill in and formal statements to sign. What, they asked, was Lucie’s character? Why exactly did Tim believe that a crime had been committed? Tim replied, “Lucie just isn’t the kind of person to wander off on her own. She never has done, and there’s no reason to think she would now. She went out to meet someone. She called her friend to say that she was about to come home, and she never came back. It’s reasonable to conclude that she’s being held against her will.”

Superintendent Mitsuzane nodded and smiled distantly. But the explanation had evidently been accepted. As the presence of such a senior officer indicated, the case was being upgraded from a simple missing-person inquiry to a criminal investigation. “It was a complete transformation from the reception that Sophie had been getting the week before, when they’d been turfing her out of the police station,” said Tim. He had no doubt that the press coverage of the case, the early-morning and late-night interviews, were the reason for this change of mood.

As they left the police station, Tim and Sophie would usually see Louise Phillips, going into an interview of her own. She seemed to be there all the time—and rather than being friendly and reassuring, their encounters with her were strained. Sophie remembered being disgusted by how well turned out Louise was—manicured and made up, even in a police station, with her best friend lost. Louise, it seemed to them, was uncomfortable with, even embarrassed by Tim and Sophie’s presence. She said that the detectives had asked her not to talk to them.

*   *   *

Dark would be coming on by the time they stepped out again onto Roppongi Avenue. The hostesses would be emerging for the evening ahead, trickling out of the Tipness gym just behind the police station. Tim and Sophie would take a taxi back to the Diamond Hotel and sit in its restaurant drinking glasses of beer. Around this time, members of the British press pack would muster in the lobby and head out excitedly in twos and threes for another night of “research”—visiting girlie bars on expenses. On the television in the corner, Tim and Sophie watched themselves, dubbed into Japanese, in the interviews they had given that morning.

The bar of the hotel featured an automated piano that would play plonking show tunes throughout the early evening. Seated at the piano stool was the effigy of a giant white rabbit in waistcoat and bow tie, as large as a man. The rabbit’s face was sad and resigned; his whiskers vibrated to the sound of the piano. But no one else in the bar seemed to regard him as unusual or comic, or to pay him any mind at all. Tim and Sophie sipped their beer and stared at the white rabbit. Nothing could have chimed better with their sense of absurdity and despair, as they contemplated the end of a day on the wrong side of the looking glass.

8. UNINTELLIGIBLE SPEECH

Tony Blair met Tim and Sophie in the Hotel New Otani, Tokyo, one afternoon in July 2000. It was a moment when he was at the height of his power and popular esteem, both at home and abroad. In a summit meeting that afternoon with the Japanese prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, Blair thanked the Tokyo police for their efforts and asked that “everything possible be done” to find Lucie. Mr. Mori had been briefed on the case. “The Tokyo Metropolitan Police are doing all they can to find Lucie-san,” he said. “I want them to continue to do so.”

Tim Blackman’s instincts had been exactly right. For Blair, with his carefully burnished image as the sincere, empathetic family man, the case was impossible to ignore; the lines he delivered to the television cameras could have been scripted for him by Tim. “It is obviously an appallingly disturbing story and every parent’s nightmare, to have their child working abroad and then disappear,” he said, standing alongside father and sister. “It’s a tragic case and obviously the family are at their wits’ end, but they’re staying here and they’re going to fight to see that their daughter’s whereabouts and what happened to her is discovered.”

“The pressure needs to come from the top,” Tim said. “If I stamp my feet, they’ll think I’m a nuisance, but if it’s coming from the Japanese prime minister, from their boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, it’ll have far more of an effect.”

As if in response to these high-level discussions, the Tokyo police showed signs of vigorous activity. Forty detectives were said to be working on the case; thirty thousand missing-person posters had been printed and distributed across the country. When asked, the police would provide disarmingly precise figures for the number of calls received from the public—twenty-three one day, nineteen two days later. But they would say nothing about the quality of the information or their overall progress in the case. “Please be assured,” Superintendent Mitsuzane would tell Tim, with his remote, kindly smile, “we are doing everything that we can.”

The Blackmans had made their choice, and they had pitched their camp with the media. With that, they cut off permanently any relationship of trust with the police.

One day Tim and Sophie went to the police station to pick up Lucie’s possessions, which had been removed from Sasaki House. Everything had been meticulously sorted and inventoried; everything had to be signed for. There were Lucie’s makeup and manicure kit, her self-help books, all sealed in individual plastic bags and listed in the police ledger. There was the Tiffany necklace that Jamie had given her, the emotional goodbye letter from Sophie, and the postcard that she had been writing to Sam Burman. Lucie’s diary was retained by the police, as a potential source of clues and evidence. Sophie took to wearing Lucie’s clothes, because she had brought with her so few of her own. The two sisters resembled one another so closely anyway, in build and features; now Sophie was even dressed as Lucie, and this added to the atmosphere of ghostliness and poignancy.

Alone with the police clerk, Tim and Sophie wept as they sorted through Lucie’s possessions.

The most painful sight of all was a toy that Lucie had had since she was a tiny girl. Its name was Pover, a childish attempt at the name “Rover.” It was a battered dog with long soft ears, which Lucie used to suck and nuzzle. Even as a young woman, Lucie never left Pover behind. He had accompanied her on all her trips with British Airways, growing mangier and more bedraggled with the years. He had gone with Lucie to Tokyo—and now here he was. “And that was a really bad sign,” said Tim. “That was a very, very bad moment. It brought home what we were facing. Because if she’d gone away anywhere by choice, this thing would have been stuck in her handbag. But it was here. It all said: ‘I planned to come back. I didn’t.’”

*   *   *

“Dealing with the press,” Tim told me later, “it was a game. And I enjoyed it, if I’m honest: I did enjoy it. That doesn’t mean that I was enjoying the situation I was in. But we felt that if we showed great strength then everyone else would respond, because they knew that we wouldn’t give up. When I met Tony Blair, I didn’t want to be patted on the head, and told, ‘Oh poor you, how awful, never mind.’ If I was strong, I’d make a bigger demand on his resolve. That’s what you can do from a position of strength.

“What people didn’t realize was that I was in an appalling mental state. Really, I had no grip on the bits and pieces of the case. It was as if I’d lost my memory. I couldn’t understand what people were saying to me. I didn’t understand what I was doing there. In retrospect, I can see that I was seriously affected by the shock of it. With a job to do, which was to keep Lucie’s face in the media, I was able to be very lucid. Behind the scenes, I was absolutely cretinous.”

Like her father, Sophie Blackman self-consciously made the decision to be “strong”; unlike him, her resolve often manifested itself as anger or disgust. Rather than sad or despairing, Sophie appeared constantly cross, with the police, and above all with journalists, to whom she displayed undisguised contempt. Politeness, humor, charm—none of them seemed to quell Sophie’s truculence. She was so rude that it was difficult to feel sorry for her, and for Sophie, a proud and defensive young woman, this was probably the point. For she was at the beginning of the most crushing experience of her life, one that would mark her for years and come close to killing her as well as her sister.

In Japan, Sophie had a constant sensation of low-level nausea. The discombobulation of jet lag, the feeling of being at one remove from reality, never passed, and from the moment of landing she never had an uninterrupted night’s sleep. “I’d sleep an hour and then the phone would ring,” she said. “And it’d take a moment for me to realize where I was and what I was doing and what was at stake. And then the nausea. I remember that—just months and months of nausea. I’d wake up, in the crisp hotel sheets and with the cool of the air-conditioning and the darkness of the heavy curtains. And for a fraction of a second, I’d be thinking, ‘This is nice—where am I?’ For the briefest of moments I’d be content. And then I’d come to, and the phone would be ringing, and I’d be thinking, ‘Is this the bad news? Is my sister dead?’ I had that for most of a year—waves of nausea, anxiety, and fear. Knowing what happened to Lucie, to know her fate, was the most devastating, the saddest thing in my life, but it was a relief compared to the previous nine months.”

*   *   *

At this moment, in the middle of July, came another consequence of the press coverage: volunteers began to step forward, strangers who wanted to help in the hunt for Lucie.

A week after Tim’s arrival, his partner, Josephine Burr, flew out to be with him. That night they had dinner with Sophie in a Roppongi restaurant called Bellini’s, in the middle of the street where the Ghanaian men lured passersby into the strip clubs. At a nearby table sat a foreign couple: a beautiful young woman and a tall, bulky, floppy-haired man in his late thirties, who recognized Tim and Sophie from the television. He introduced himself as Huw Shakeshaft, a British financial adviser with a small independent business in Tokyo. Huw had moved to Tokyo four years earlier, and since then he had rarely strayed a mile from Roppongi Crossing. His office was opposite the Defense Agency. His apartment was on the other side of the expressway. Roppongi’s restaurants and bars were his dining room, the foreign bankers and stockbrokers who lingered there were his clients, and the hostesses in the clubs were his girlfriends. “Sir Huw of Roppongi” was what they called him; he prided himself on knowing everyone. He was a creature of the district, as naturally at home there as a monkey in a rain forest.