People Who Eat Darkness Read online

  * * *

  Louise left the embassy. In the two nights since Lucie’s disappearance, she had hardly slept. She was in a torment of uncertainty and tension. It was unbearable to be alone, or to spend any time in the room she shared with Lucie. She went to the apartment of a friend, where other people who knew Lucie were also gathering.

  Just before half past five, her mobile rang again, and she snatched it up.

  “Hello?” Louise said.

  —Am I speaking to Louise Phillips? said a voice.

  “Yes, this is Louise. Who’s this?”

  —My name is Akira Takagi. Anyway, I’m ringing on behalf of Lucie Blackman.

  “Lucie! My God, where is she? I’ve been so worried. Is she there?”

  —I am with her. She is here. She is fine.

  “Oh, God, thank God. Let me speak to Lucie. I need to speak to her.”

  It was a man’s voice. He spoke English confidently but with a distinct Japanese accent. He was at all times calm and controlled and matter-of-fact, almost friendly, even when Louise became agitated and upset.

  —She must not be disturbed now, the voice said. —Anyway, she is in our dormitory. She is studying and practicing a new way of life. She has so much to learn this week. She can’t be disturbed.

  To her friends, Louise was frantically mouthing, “It’s him,” and signaling for paper and a pen.

  “Who is this?” she said. “Are you the one she went out with on Saturday?”

  —I met Lucie on Sunday. She met my guru on Saturday, my group’s leader.

  “Your guru?”

  —Yes, my guru. Anyway, they met on a train.

  “But she … when I spoke to her, she was in a car.”

  —The traffic was bad, so bad, and she didn’t want to be late to meet you. So she decided to take the train. Just before she got on the train she met my guru and she made a life-changing decision. Anyway, she decided to join his cult that night.

  “A cult?”

  —Yes.

  “What d’you mean, a cult? What … Where is Lucie? Where is this cult?”

  —It is in Chiba.

  “What? Say that again. Can you spell it?”

  —In Chiba. I spell it: C-H-I-B-A.

  “Chiba. Chiba. And … what is it called?”

  —It’s the Newly Risen Religion.

  “The what? What is…”

  —The Newly Risen Religion.

  The man calmly spelled this phrase out too, letter by letter.

  Louise’s thoughts were churning. “I have to speak to Lucie,” she said. “Let me speak to her.”

  —She’s not feeling too well, said the voice. —Anyway, she doesn’t want to talk to anyone now. Maybe she will talk to you at the end of the week.

  “Please,” said Louise. “Please, please, let me talk to her.”

  The line went dead.

  “Hello? Hello?” said Louise, but there was nobody there. She looked at the small silver telephone in her hands.

  A few heartbeats later, it rang again.

  With trembling fingers, she pressed the pick-up button.

  —I’m so sorry, said the same voice. —The signal must have broken. Anyway, Lucie can’t talk to you now. She’s not feeling well. Maybe she will talk to you at the end of the week. But she has started a new life, and she won’t be coming back. I know that she has a lot of debts, six or seven thousand pounds. But she is paying them off in a better way. Anyway, she just wants to let you and S’kotto know she’s okay. She is planning a better life.

  He said, quite distinctly, “S’kotto,” the characteristic Japanese rendering of the unfamiliar English name Scott.

  —She has written a letter to Casablanca to say that she will not be coming back to work.

  There was a pause. Louise began to sob.

  —Anyway, what is your address?

  Louise said, “My address…”

  —The address of your apartment, in Sendagaya.

  “Why … why d’you need to know my address?”

  —I want to send you some of Lucie’s belongings.

  Louise’s dread, which up until now had been on behalf of her friend, suddenly became personal. “He wants to know where I live,” she was thinking. “He’s going to come after me.” She said, “Well, Lucie knows it. She knows her address.”

  —She is not feeling too well now and she cannot remember.

  “Oh, I can’t remember either.”

  —Well … can you remember where your house is near?

  “No, no, I can’t remember.”

  —What about the street? Can you remember the street?

  “No, I…”

  —Anyway, I need to send her belongings back.

  “I can’t remember…”

  —If it’s a problem, don’t worry.

  “I haven’t got it on me now…”

  —That’s okay. Don’t worry.

  Louise was overcome by panic and emotion. Weeping, she handed the phone to a friend, an Australian man who had lived in Tokyo for years.

  “Hello,” he said in Japanese. “Where is Lucie?”

  After a few moments, he handed the phone back. “He’ll only speak English,” he said. “He only wants to speak to you.”

  But Louise had collected her thoughts. She realized that it was important to draw the conversation out, to try to find out where Lucie was.

  “Hello,” she said. “This is Louise again. So, can I join your cult?”

  The voice seemed to hesitate. Then it said, —What religion are you?

  Louise said, “Well, I’m a Catholic, but Lucie’s a Catholic too. I don’t mind changing. I want to change my life too.”

  —Anyway, it’s up to Lucie. It’s up to what she thinks. I will think about it.

  “Please let me speak to Lucie,” said Louise desperately.

  —I’ll speak to my guru and ask him.

  “Please let me speak to her,” Louise cried. “I’m begging you, please, let me speak to her.”

  —Anyway, I have to go now, the voice said. —I’m sorry. I just had to let you know that you won’t see her again. Goodbye.

  The cell phone line went dead for the second time.

  * * *

  Lucie disappeared on Saturday, July 1, 2000, at the midpoint of the first year of the twenty-first century. It took a week for the news to reach the world at large. The first report appeared the following Sunday, July 9, when a British newspaper carried a short article about a missing tourist named “Lucy Blackman.” There were more detailed stories the next day in the British and Japanese papers. They named Louise Phillips, as well as Lucie’s sister, Sophie Blackman, who was said to have flown to Tokyo to look for her, and her father, Tim, who was on his way there. Reference was made to a threatening phone call and the vague suggestion that she had been kidnapped by a cult. Two of the stories spoke of “fears” that she had been “forced into prostitution.” Lucie was identified as a former British Airways stewardess, but the following day’s news identified her as a “bar girl” or “nightclub hostess” in “Tokyo’s red-light district.” Now Japanese television had seized on the story and camera crews were prowling through Roppongi, looking for blond foreigners. The combination of the missing girl’s youth, nationality, hair color, and the implications of the job she had been doing had tipped the story over the threshold that separates mere incident from news; it was now impossible to ignore. Within twenty-four hours, twenty British reporters and photographers and five separate television crews had flown to Tokyo, to join the dozen correspondents and freelancers permanently based there.

  That day, thirty thousand posters were printed and distributed across the country, mostly in Tokyo and in Chiba, the prefecture immediately to the east of the capital.

  “MISSING,” ran the bilingual text along the top and, at the bottom, “Lucie BLACKMAN (British Female).”

  Age:

  21 years

  Height:

  175cm Medium Build

  Hair Colo
r:

  Blonde

  Eye Color:

  Blue

  She was last seen in Tokyo on Saturday July 1st. Since then she has been missing.

  If anyone has seen her, or has any information relating to her, contact Azabu Police Station or your nearest police station.

  The poster was dominated by the photograph of a girl in a short black dress sitting on a sofa. She had blond hair and white teeth exposed in a nervous smile. The camera looked down on her from above, making her face appear broad and childlike. With her large head, long hair, and firm chin, the girl in the poster looked like no one more than Alice in Wonderland.

  * * *

  Lucie Blackman was already dead. She died before I ever knew that such a person existed. In fact, it was only because she was dead—or missing, which was as much as anyone knew at the time—that I took an interest in her at all. I was the correspondent for a British newspaper, living in Tokyo. Lucie Blackman was a young British woman who had disappeared there—which is to say that, in the terms in which I first thought of her, she was a story.

  At first the story was a puzzle, which developed over time into a profound mystery. Lucie emerged as a tragic victim, and finally as a cause, the subject of vigorous, bitter contestation in a Japanese court. The story attracted much attention in Japan and Britain, but it was fickle and inconsistent. For months at a time there would be no interest in Lucie’s case, then some fresh development would bring a sudden demand for news and explanation. In its outlines the story was familiar enough—girl missing, body found, man charged—but, on inspection, it became so complicated and confusing, so fraught with bizarre turns and irrational developments that conventional reporting of it was almost inevitably unsatisfactory, provoking more unanswered questions than it could ever quell.

  This quality of evasiveness, the sense in which it outstripped familiar categories of news, made the story fascinating. It was like an itch that no four columns of newspaper copy or three-minute television item could ever scratch. The story infected my dreams; even after months had passed, I found it impossible to forget Lucie Blackman. I followed the story from the beginning and through its successive stages, trying to craft something consistent and intelligible out of its kinks and knots and roughness. It took me ten years.

  I had lived in Tokyo for most of my adult life and traveled across Asia and beyond. As a reporter of natural disasters and wars, I had seen something of grief and darkness. But Lucie’s story brought me into contact with aspects of human experience that I had never glimpsed before. It was like the key to a trapdoor in a familiar room, a trapdoor concealing secrets—frightening, violent, monstrous existences to which I had been oblivious. This new knowledge made me feel obscurely embarrassed and naïve. It was as if I, the experienced reporter, had been missing something extraordinary in a city that it was my professional pride to know intimately.

  It was only when she was slipping from public consciousness that I began to consider Lucie as a person rather than a story. I had met her family over the course of their visits to Japan. As a reporter of the case, I had been treated first with cautious mistrust and eventually with cautious friendship. Now I traveled back to Britain and visited the Blackman family on their home ground. I tracked down friends and acquaintances from the different stages of Lucie’s life. One led to another; those who were at first reluctant to speak were eventually persuaded. To Lucie’s parents, sister, and brother, I returned repeatedly over a period of years. The accumulated recordings of these interviews add up to several days.

  I thought that grasping the essentials of a life that ended at twenty-one would be a simple task. At first glance, there was nothing obvious to distinguish Lucie Blackman from millions of others like her: a young, middle-class woman from the southeast of England, of moderate affluence and education. Lucie’s life had been “ordinary,” “normal”; by far the most remarkable thing about it was the way it ended. But the closer I looked, the more intriguing she became.

  It should have been obvious, for we all know it from our own lives, but after twenty-one years, Lucie’s personality and character were already too various, too complicated for any one person, even those closest to her, wholly to understand. Everyone who knew her knew someone subtly different. A few years on from childhood, her life was already a complexity of allegiances, emotions, and aspirations, often contradictory. Lucie was loyal, honest, and capable of deceit. She was confident, dependable, and vulnerable. She was straightforward and mysterious, open and secretive. I felt the helplessness of a biographer in sifting and reconciling this material, in doing justice to an entire life. I became fascinated by the process of learning about someone whom I had never known, and could never have known, someone of whom I would have been oblivious had she not died.

  Within a few weeks of her disappearance, many, many people had heard the name Lucie Blackman and knew her face—or at least the version of it that appeared in the newspapers and on television, the Alice face of the girl in the missing-person poster. To them she was a victim, almost the symbol of a certain kind of victimhood: the young woman who comes to a ghastly end in an exotic land. So I hoped that I could do some service to Lucie Blackman, or to her memory, by restoring her status as a normal person, a woman complex and lovable in her ordinariness, with a life before death.

  PART ONE LUCIE

  1. THE WORLD THE RIGHT WAY ROUND

  Even later, when she found it difficult to see any good in her husband, Lucie’s mother, Jane, always acknowledged that Tim Blackman had saved their daughter’s life.

  Lucie had been twenty-one months old at the time, cared for by her father and mother in the cottage they rented in a small village in Sussex. Since infancy, she had been stricken with fierce bouts of tonsillitis, which drove up her temperature and swelled her throat. Her parents sponged her with water to cool her down, but the fevers lingered, and when one had passed another would seize hold within a few weeks. One day, Tim had come home early from work to help Jane care for the needy child. That night, he was awakened by a cry from his wife, who had gone in to look at her.

  By the time he entered the nursery, Jane was already running downstairs.

  “Lucie was motionless at the bottom of the cot, and she was clammy,” Tim said. “I picked her out and put her on the floor, and she was turning gray in front of me, just the most sickly, blacky-gray color. Quite clearly the lifeblood wasn’t being pumped round her body. I didn’t know what to do. I was cuddling her on the floor, and Jane had run down to phone an ambulance. Lucie was completely quiet, wasn’t breathing. I tried to force open her mouth. It was tightly shut, but I forced it open with two hands and held it open with the thumb of one hand and put my fingers in and pulled her tongue forward. I didn’t know whether I was doing any good or not, but I did it, and then I put her head to one side, and then I breathed into her and then pushed the air out, breathed into her and pushed it out, and she started to breathe on her own again. I was sick with anxiety and worry, and then I saw the pink coming back to her skin, and by that time the ambulance had arrived, and the ambulance blokes were rushing up the tiny, weeny stairs, these great big blokes with all this huge, noisy kit on, big beefy chaps who were as big as the cottage. And they got their stretcher out and strapped her on and carried her downstairs and put her in the back of the ambulance. And after that she was fine.”

  Lucie had experienced a febrile convulsion, a muscle spasm caused by fever and dehydration that had caused her to swallow her own tongue, blocking off her breathing. A few moments longer, and she would have died. “I knew at that moment that I could not only have one child,” Tim said. “I knew. I’d thought about it before, when Lucie was born. But at that moment, I knew that if anything had happened to her, and we didn’t have any other children, it would be an absolutely terrible disaster.”

  * * *

  Lucie had been born on September 1, 1978. Her name was from the Latin word for “light,” and even in adulthood, her mother said, she craved brightness a
nd illumination, and was uncomfortable in the dark, switching on all the bulbs in the house and going to sleep with a lamp turned on in her room.

  Jane’s labor had to be induced, and it lasted sixteen hours. Lucie’s head was positioned against her mother’s back, a “posterior presentation” that caused her great pain during the delivery. But the eight-pound baby was healthy, and her parents experienced deep, but complicated, happiness at the birth of their first child. “I was delighted, absolutely delighted,” said Jane. “But I think when you become a mother, you … I just wanted my mother to be there, because I was so proud I’d had a baby. But she wasn’t there, so it was sad as well.”

  Jane remembered little but sadness from her own childhood. Her adult life, too, had been marked by clusters of crushing, overwhelming loss, which had bred in her a dry, dark humor, alternately self-deprecating and indignantly defensive. She was in her late forties when I first met her, a thin, attractive woman with short dark blond hair and sharp, vigilant features. Her outfits were tidy and demure. Long, delicate lashes ringed her eyes, but the girlishness that they might have suggested was dispelled by a fierce sense of rightness and a scathing intolerance of fools and snobs. Pride and self-pity were at war within Jane. She was like a fox, a stubborn, elegant fox in a navy blue skirt and jacket.

  Her father had been a manager at the Elstree film studios, and she and her younger brother and sister had grown up in the outer London suburbs, a strict and rather drab middle-class life of homework and good table manners and the annual summer holiday in a gusty English seaside resort. When Jane was twelve, the family moved to south London. Before her first morning at her new school, Jane went in to kiss her mother goodbye and found her asleep after a night of headaches and insomnia. “I felt that something awful was going to happen,” Jane said. “And I said to my father, ‘She’s not going to die, is she?’ and he said, ‘Oh no, don’t be silly, of course not.’ And then I came home from school that day, and she’d died. She’d had a brain tumor. And from then on my father was distraught. He was broken, a broken man, and I just had to be brave. That was the end of my childhood.”