People Who Eat Darkness (3 page)

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).”

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 and 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.”

Jane’s mother was forty years old at the time of her death. “My grandmother looked after us during the week, and at weekends it was Daddy,” she said. “I remember him just crying all the time.” Fifteen months after his wife’s death, he married a woman in her mid-twenties. Jane was appalled. “But he had three children, and he just couldn’t function. It was terrible. The truth is that I can’t remember much of my childhood. When you’ve had a shock, and been through a time as painful as that, your brain makes you forget.”

Jane left school at fifteen. She took a secretarial course and found a job at a big advertising agency. When she was nineteen, she traveled to Mallorca with a girlfriend and stayed there for six months, cleaning cars for a living. It was before the age of mass British tourism to Spain, and the Balearic Islands were still a select and exotic destination. The famous Manchester United footballer George Best was a visitor. “I didn’t meet him, but I remember seeing him in these bars, surrounded by beauties,” said Jane. “But I was very sensible, I was very careful. I’ve got the word ‘sensible’ running through my body like a stick of rock. Everyone else might have been swinging but I wasn’t. I was just very boring.”

In Mallorca, Jane’s virtue was tested by a young man, a nodding acquaintance, who appeared at her front door one day and attempted to kiss her. “I was absolutely mortified, because I hardly knew him, and it was the middle of the afternoon. He was Swedish, I think. I hadn’t given him any provocation, and it made me very wary after that. I liked the sun and the sea, I liked being in the outdoors, but I can’t say it was a wild time, because I’m sensible. I never slept with anyone until I slept with my husband.”

*   *   *

She was twenty-two when she met Tim, and living with her father and stepmother in Chislehurst in the London borough of Bromley. He was the older brother of a friend, and Jane had already heard all about him. “People said to me, ‘That Tim’s a right one,’” she remembered. “‘A right one for the women.’”

Tim had just returned from the south of France, where he had been staying with a French girlfriend. “But he started flirting with me anyway, and I gave him one of my icy stares,” said Jane. “I think I was the first person in his life who hadn’t fallen for him just like that, so I was a challenge. But I had no confidence, if I’m honest. I had lots of very beautiful girlfriends who had men flocking round them, but at discos I was always the custodian of the handbags. Tim couldn’t understand why I hadn’t fallen for him hook, line, and sinker, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would fancy me, and I think that’s why I ended up marrying him.” The wedding was eighteen months later, on Tim’s twenty-third birthday, July 17, 1976.