People Who Eat Darkness (34 page)

At his press conference after the meeting, Tim gave a skittish, unhappy performance, with flashes of his odd, out-of-kilter humor.

“How optimistic are you that you’ll find Lucie?” a journalist asked.

“The optimism never dies,” said Sophie, looking at her father.

Tim said, “There’s realism in the fact that she’s been missing for four months, and there’s always the possibility that she’s come to her end. But that’s something you have to cross when you come to it. Whereas before it was a fifty-fifty chance, I suppose now it’s an eighty-twenty chance that she is gone.”

“My bid would be sixty-forty,” said Sophie.

Tim gave an unnatural smile. “That’s the realism of old age against the optimism of youth.”

Christmas was approaching, a time of strain for any family divided by divorce. This year, each of the Blackmans dreaded the holiday for the way it would expose the absence in their lives. Jane, Sophie, and Rupert escaped to Barbados, and spent Christmas Day sunbathing on the beach, as far away as possible from any associations with Lucie. Tim was in the Isle of Wight with Josephine and her children. “I was trying to hold Lucie in one particular area of my head,” he said. “I was trying not to let the trauma of what had happened overwhelm everything else. I was in my late forties. I had three children of my own and four children of Jo’s to look after. Of course, Lucie was important, but I had to give time and priority to the other people I loved too.

“I used to drive from the Isle of Wight to work in Kent, an hour and a half’s drive. There was a CD of music which Lucie used to like, and I’d listen to that in the car driving back and indulge my sorrow and my thoughts of Lucie. And that’s what enabled me to be there for Jo, and for the other children, and to do my work.”

Cautiously and steadily, Tim was loosening his grip on false hopes. He was abandoning the idea that Lucie might still be alive, the faith that had compelled him for six months and enabled him to find hope in con men, charlatans, and journalists. But he could not control his anger, which now directed itself not only against Lucie’s abductor and the police but also against the system of collusion and institutional complacency that had made her disappearance possible. Two days before Christmas, he sent a furious e-mail to one of the detectives:

It is six months since Lucie went missing, and incredibly I find that week after week goes by [and] I do not receive any communication from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. I am very very upset and traumatised that the Police do not give a single consideration to how the family feels as victims, and it is disgraceful and inhumane that you do not provide any news or information to the family to help them cope with this terrible and tragic event …

It is evident that many many girls have been abducted and raped from Roppongi in the last 5–6 years (some have disappeared). These are girls many of whom are working illegally on tourist visas. Because of this, some are not able to report the crime to the Police for fear of arrest and/or deportation. This puts all the girls in danger.

However, some of these girls have reported the crime to the Police. Why has this man Obara, or others like him, been able to get away with these crimes for years, continuing to abduct and rape girls? Because the Police have not acted, and the Police have not arrested him. This makes the Police guilty of the disappearance of Lucie … and when the next girl is abducted and raped or murdered the Police and the Immigration Department will be guilty of that crime too.

*   *   *

So far, it was in Britain and Japan that Lucie’s disappearance had drawn the most attention. But with the arrest of a suspect and the emergence of victims of other nationalities, the case was soon being reported all over the world. Stories about Joji Obara popped up in Spain, Italy and Turkey, in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. One Friday in October, a thirty-five-year-old solicitor named Robert Finnigan was sitting at his desk in Sydney, Australia, when his eye fell upon an article on page 10 of the
Sydney Morning Herald
. “Fears of More Missing Women,” ran the headline.

Have Australian women fallen prey to the nightclub prowler believed responsible for the disappearance of Lucie Blackman, a British bar hostess? Newspapers have reported their fears that the main suspect in the case, Joji Obara, a Tokyo businessman, could have been involved in the disappearance of other foreign women … Australians are well represented among the foreigners working the Roppongi bar hostess trade, earning huge sums entertaining businessmen. It is believed that at least two Australians and one New Zealander contacted police through other channels to complain of being abused by Obara … The women all said Obara had lured them to his luxurious flat on the coast south of Tokyo and drugged them.

“It was lunchtime when I read it,” Robert Finnigan told me later. “And straightaway, there was a moment of recognition. I knew instantly, even though I didn’t have all the facts. It was just too similar. I wasn’t surprised or shocked, because I’d had all those years to think about it. I didn’t feel relieved. But I knew. There was an unanswered question, and this was the answer.”

The question was: What had really happened to Carita Ridgway, the beautiful young Australian woman whom Robert had fallen in love with, and lost, almost nine years before?

*   *   *

Carita Ridgway grew up in Perth, on the far coast of Australia’s immense Western Desert, one of the most isolated cities in the world. Her parents, Nigel and Annette, were creatures of the 1960s. They met when they were very young, married quickly, and soon found themselves deeply unhappy together. Annette, who was eighteen on their wedding day, was a seeker of enlightenment, a student of dreams and meditation and astrology. Nigel, who had emigrated from Britain in 1966, was a drummer in a rock-and-roll band called Purple Haze. “If I’m honest, I wasn’t really a good boy,” he told me years later, after he had remarried and become a respectable middle-aged primary-school teacher. “Not a model husband. I was easy prey for sex and booze. Not so much the booze, but the girls were always a temptation.” Their marriage finally broke up in 1983, when their two daughters, Samantha and Carita, were fourteen and thirteen. “Again, that’s something I look back on and cringe,” Nigel said. “The girls were just getting into puberty, young womanhood, and their parents split up. Not a good time. I think it affected them a lot.”

Carita had always been energetic and creative, a talented dancer who loved English literature and acting and the outdoors. After her parents’ separation, she became quarrelsome, withdrawn, and depressed. At the same time, she emerged into her teens as a beauty, with long blond hair, curved red lips, and small, even features. Annette, who was struggling to support her two daughters, did not know how to help her. Carita’s despair became deeper; she spoke of suicidal thoughts, and Annette was alarmed enough to have her committed to a psychiatric clinic. The enforced isolation from the outside world, and the attention of nurses and doctors, had a soothing effect on Carita, and for a while she seemed to be getting better. But then the hospital psychiatrist, who turned out to have a record of abusing his female patients, began taking her out for seductive lunches. He was sacked before any serious harm had been done. But by now Carita’s education, and her self-confidence, had been thoroughly shredded. “If you don’t have a strong family background, and you don’t have self-esteem, it’s almost a liability to be that good-looking,” Annette said. “It’s difficult to stand up for yourself. You get preyed on.”

Carita left the psychiatric home and dropped out of school. She lingered in Perth for a year or two but soon became bored by its smallness and familiarity. When her best friend, Lynda Dark, suggested a move to Sydney, she seized the chance; together, the two of them hitchhiked east across the Western Desert. In Sydney, she met Robert Finnigan, newly arrived from Britain. The two of them fell in love and moved in together.

Annette, like any mother separated for the first time from her daughter, worried about Carita. Her anxieties took the form of intense nightmares and, being interested in such things, she recorded the details over the course of several years. There were scenes in which Carita was attacked and violated; mysterious robed strangers imparted warnings of danger and tragedy. Then there was a dream in which Carita came to her mother and comforted her, and placed a ring on her finger. Annette wrote down these visions meticulously, and subsequent events would impart a terrible resonance to her dream journal.

The worst of all the nightmares pictured Carita sitting at a table with a group of Asian men. She appeared happy and secure. Her companions, lightheartedly it seemed, were inviting Carita to choose one of them. Only Annette could understand the true meaning of the scene and the intense malevolence of the men. “She felt that she was quite safe,” Annette said. “She had to choose one of the men. But they were so cold and calculating, and she didn’t know, and couldn’t see them for what they were. It was such a terrible, terrible nightmare. And I had these dreams but I didn’t do anything about them. I thought they were symbolic, but they were precognitive. They were literal. I still have that dreadful feeling about it.”

*   *   *

The attention she received from men disconcerted Carita. In an effort to deflect it, she dyed her blond hair auburn, but she remained outstandingly attractive. Robert Finnigan, who was serious, quietly spoken, and bespectacled, was overwhelmed by his feelings for her. He had arrived in Sydney after trailing around Southeast Asia; he and Carita had met in one of the city’s many backpacker hostels. They would be together for the next five years. “I’d wake up in the morning and she would be there next to me,” Robert said. “I just couldn’t believe it. I remember walking on Bondi Beach, with beautiful women everywhere, women from the covers of magazines. And I’d look at Carita beside me—and she was more beautiful. We were young, so you can’t be sure about these things. But I think we both expected we’d be together for the rest of our lives.”

The two of them lived in a series of cheap rented houses in Sydney, shared with other young migrants to the city. They took casual jobs, Robert on a building site, Carita in a launderette and then at a restaurant. She designed and sold T-shirts, did a bit of modeling, and acted in a student film, but the two of them lived for traveling and for the long journeys that they would make together to the Philippines, Nepal, Mexico, and America, before returning to Sydney when their money ran out. Their first year together, 1987, was Australia’s bicentennial, a round of barbecues, parties, and open-air celebrations. Then, in the summer of the following year, Carita’s friend Lynda persuaded her to go with her to Japan to work as a bar hostess.

Robert was concerned, and not only because it meant an extended separation from his beautiful girlfriend. But Lynda had worked in Tokyo before, and she insisted that there was no danger in the work itself. “Like most people, I was led to believe that it was one of the safest societies in the world, that a woman can walk around the streets at two a.m. and nothing happen to her,” Robert said. “This business of hostessing seemed a bit strange—paying someone to talk to you in a bar. But it was just one of the peculiarities of Japanese society, a bit pathetic to Westerners, but just a way for these businessmen to let off steam.”

The months of separation were uneasy for Robert. It was difficult to imagine the kind of life that Carita was leading apart from him. There were postcards; she phoned once every week or two; he sent her cartoons of Sinbad, the ginger cat they had rescued as a stray. She and Lynda were in Utsunomiya, a colorless regional city an hour north of Tokyo. They worked at two clubs, Madam Adam and the Tiger’s Lair, alongside Americans, Brazilians, Filipinas, and New Zealanders. Carita seemed cheerful enough. She quickly attracted regular customers, including one man who took her on a d
ō
han in his chauffeur-driven Ferrari. “And absolutely no monkey business either,” she wrote to her mother. “The guys just love to take Western girls out to show them off … Japanese men have about three different women each. They leave their wives at home, take their girlfriends to the club, ignore their girlfriends and chat up the hostesses.”

“I’d have been happier if she’d been teaching English or something more like that,” Robert said. “But I didn’t want to stifle Carita—sometimes you have to let people do what they want to do.” And after a few months she left the Tiger’s Lair, and Robert flew to Hong Kong to travel with Carita to Singapore and Thailand.

In 1990, she and Lynda went back for another three-month stint, this time at a club in Roppongi, where they had to “dance.” Robert did not say as much, but this probably meant topless dancing. “I think Lynda was fine with it, but Carita was a bit embarrassed,” he said. “She tried it a couple of times, but I don’t think it worked out.” By September, she was back with him in Sydney, waitressing and modeling again, and helping to support Robert as he applied to study law at the University of New South Wales.

The following year, Carita went back to Tokyo for a third time, accompanied by her sister, Samantha, who had a Japanese boyfriend. The two of them lived together in a gaijin house close to the language school where Sam was teaching. Carita was working at a Ginza club called Ayakoji, where the hostesses were expected to wear huge frilly, old-fashioned dresses with petticoats. The two sisters spent December and January of 1992 together in Japan. On Christmas Day, they ate spare ribs at the Lion restaurant in Ginza, and truffles sent from Perth by their father. On Boxing Day, snow fell over Tokyo, and at New Year they went to the countryside to stay with the family of Sam’s boyfriend, Hideki.

Robert received exhilaratingly good news: he had won a university place to study law. Carita was delighted and told him how proud she was. Sometimes, people who knew them wondered whether they were well matched, and whether Robert’s steadiness and calm were right for Carita, who had a taste for glamour and adventure, and was still only twenty-one. But if she had doubts, she did not speak of them. After five years together, it was difficult to imagine Robert and Carita apart.