People Who Eat Darkness (25 page)

The police did go to Casablanca, interviewed its hostesses, and combed through the club’s records. Some, but not all, customers left business cards; those who were entertaining on business were given receipts with the names of their companies, of which the club kept a copy. But having harvested this information, it took an inexplicably long time to process. It was well into August, for example, before anyone called on Hajime Imura, the publisher who had entertained Lucie with his squid-fishing exploits.

Instead, the police questioned Louise Phillips over and over again. Her first full day at Azabu Police Station was July 4, the Tuesday after Lucie’s disappearance. For the next five weeks, from Monday to Saturday, she was there every day.

The interrogations took place in a ten-foot-square room containing a table at which Louise sat with two detectives and a police interpreter. They began first thing in the morning and often went on until night. From the beginning, she was struck both by the warmth and tenderheartedness of the individual officers, and their capacity for punishingly long working hours.

Every day, the police would bring lunch to Louise—several times, the wife of one officer or other presented her with a bento, a lunch box of small delicacies that she had personally prepared. The police provided an apartment for Louise to stay in and paid her a per diem allowance of ¥5,000. (Unabashed by this generosity, she would save the money up and buy herself a camera.) Louise’s confusion and anxiety frequently reduced her to helpless tears; more than once, she noticed that her female interpreter, and even the interrogating male officers, also had tears in their eyes.

But the content of the interviews did not inspire confidence. It was obvious that Louise was a key witness: Lucie’s oldest friend and closest companion, and the last person known to have seen her. The length of her interrogation might have been justified if there had been new ground to cover. But for much of the time the detectives just asked the same few questions, over and over again. Their meticulousness was impressive, sometimes awe-inspiring. But their undifferentiated interest in absolutely everything suggested to Louise that they had little instinct for what might have happened, had not begun to narrow down their investigation, and apparently didn’t know where to begin.

“They wanted to know everywhere we’d been, all that we’d done, everything about Lucie in such detail, from before we even came to Japan,” Louise said. “They were amazing. They were all working so hard. They wanted to know about Lucie’s birthmark, the birthmark she had at the top of her leg. And Lucie’s health, when she was younger. They were asking about my boyfriend, and my other friends, and all the people we lived with, and all the customers in the club. They wanted to know if any of the customers had had tattoos. But it was just the same questions, over and over again, for days and days.”

Rather hesitantly, they asked if she and Lucie were lesbians (she spluttered with laughter at the suggestion). They wanted to know in detail about Lucie’s sex life: her relationship with Scott, the frequency of their nights together, the kind of contraception they had used. “They were asking me for about a week if Lucie had ever had chlamydia,” said Louise. “Why, I never understood. Some of the questions were so random, and they went on and on for hours and hours and hours.”

“I had a good impression of Louise,” Superintendent Matsumoto told me. “Even so, we had to consider a range of possible scenarios. Could she have been part of a plot against her friend, for example? Suppose Lucie and Louise had fallen in love with the same man, and Louise wanted him for herself, and she had disposed of her friend? Or killed Lucie to steal money?” Some of the scenarios entertained by the investigators were bizarre. “We had information from people in the clubs that Lucie might be in North Korea, or that she might be a spy,” Matsumoto said. “We didn’t give it much consideration, because she had had so little money.”

The question of whether drugs might have come into it was quickly settled. “Louise wasn’t using drugs, judging from the color of her face,” Matsumoto said. “And from her physical state when she was talking with us for long hours. There were no bubbles around her mouth, as you sometimes see in drug users. She wasn’t thin, and she didn’t get tired easily. There were none of those signs.” In other words, because a person was not pallid and emaciated and foaming at the mouth, she could not be a user of illegal drugs. This was an elderly maiden aunt’s view of narcotics and their effect. Coming from a proud detective, it was comically naïve, another sign of the innocence and unworldliness of the Japanese police, who faced so little serious crime that they sometimes had only the crudest idea of what it looked like.

The detectives who took over the investigation after Matsumoto were not so innocent. One day Louise arrived in the interrogation room to see Lucie’s diary lying on the table accompanied by a Japanese translation.

“Good morning, Louise-san,” the detective began and picked up the documents on the desk. “Louise, have you or Lucie ever taken drugs in Japan?”

“No, no, never,” said Louise, shaking her head.

“Are you sure?” said the detective, leafing through the diary.

“Oh yes, I’m sure. Never.”

For most of the time, the police did not give the impression of disbelieving Louise; their motive in questioning her at such length appeared to be genuine assiduousness rather than suspicion. But now the atmosphere had chilled.

The detective asked Louise, “Why did Lucie write in her diary, ‘We have been on a never ending quest for music, postcards and drugs’?”

Louise’s mind spun over and over. “I thought, ‘If they think she’s a drug taker, it’ll look really bad.’ So I said, ‘Oh, she was looking for some paracetamol or Nurofen, something like that.’”

“You have not taken illegal drugs in Japan?” said the detective.

“No, no.”

“You are quite sure?”

“Yes.”

“Louise, you have the words ‘I am a liar’ written on your forehead.”

“He was right,” Louise told me. “I told them the whole story after that.”

By the standards of many twenty-one-year-old British women, there wasn’t so much to tell. “I mean, there were lots of drugs around, but we just weren’t really that into them,” said Louise. “Once, some of the people in our house were taking magic mushrooms, and neither of us liked the idea. Lucie said, ‘I’d hate to be hallucinating, to be out of control like that.’” The two girls had never had supplies of their own marijuana, but they had taken drags of the spliffs that were passed around the living room of Sasaki House. And Louise said that they had taken tablets of Ecstasy when they were out clubbing in Roppongi—Louise twice (once on the occasion of the fight in Deep Blue) and Lucie once. They had been planning to buy more on the evening of July 1, the night out that had never happened.

In normal circumstances, such an admission would have landed a foreigner in Japan in terrible trouble: possession of a drug like Ecstasy, even in the smallest quantities and for personal use, was a grave crime. “But I knew I had to tell the truth, and I told them the whole story,” Louise said. “I told them when, where, how much. And they were fine about it. It was more important to find Lucie. They worked so hard, they were working round the clock. I was there until late and they’d be there until a couple of hours after me. A couple of them had to take time off for exhaustion.”

13. THE PALM TREES BY THE SEA

Roppongi—at least the Roppongi of foreign hostesses and their customers—was a village; in the space of two days, everyone in its parish knew of Lucie’s disappearance. A week later, it was a headline across Britain and Japan. Two days after that, her face was on thirty thousand missing-person posters. All over Tokyo—and in London, Melbourne, Tel Aviv, and Kiev—Roppongi hostesses, active and retired, were going through the same experience as Christabel Mackenzie, of sudden, jolting reacquaintance with a memory repressed: Clara from Canada, Isobel and Charmaine from Australia, Ronia from Israel, Katie from America, Lana from Britain, and Tanya from Ukraine. Each recalled a different name: Yuji, Koji, Saito, Akira. But the experience was the same: a well-dressed, middle-aged English-speaker with an expensive car; a drive to a seaside apartment among palm trees; a single sip of a drink, then darkness, followed many hours later by dizzy, nauseated consciousness.

Some of the girls knew one another. A few had cautiously shared their stories. All of them, when they heard the story of Lucie, had the same reaction: it
had
to be him.

Almost all had chosen not to go to the police, for the same reasons—because they were anxious about their visa status, because they didn’t know exactly what happened to them while unconscious, or because they knew very well and couldn’t bring themselves to look the experience in the face. One exception was the young American woman, Katie Vickers. Her experience vindicated the decision of the others. Katie Vickers’s story is an unanswerable reproach to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.

In 1997, she had been working at Club Cadeau. For Katie, the smartly dressed middle-aged man came by the name of Koji. The drink he gave her was gin and tonic. Her first sip of it was the last thing she remembered.

Fifteen hours had passed by the time she awoke, lying on a sofa in her underwear. Koji explained that there had been a gas leak, and that he had a terrible headache too. He drove her halfway back to Tokyo, then put her in a cab, her handbag stuffed with cash and taxi vouchers.

Christa Mackenzie had come around feeling no more than badly hungover. But Katie was left reeling with nausea, which lasted for days. She staggered into Club Cadeau, her lips blue and her speech slurred. The club was owned and managed by Kai Miyazawa, the ponytailed businessman who would explain to me the secrets of the bar business. When he saw Katie, he sent her to a doctor and went with her the next day to Azabu Police Station.

The reaction of the officers on duty dismayed them. “We were not even taken into a private room or asked to take a seat, just simply left standing at the reception desk,” Katie wrote later. “The officers showed no interest whatsoever to help us or take any further action. They would not make a formal report, just wrote down some notes on a piece of scrap paper … They said they could not investigate my incident because of a lack of evidence … I was able to give an accurate description of the man and clearly describe the location. I also gave them the mobile telephone number written by ‘Koji’ himself. This I feel was sufficient evidence to at least research who the man was, and if he had any prior criminal records. I was made to feel as if I were a nuisance and just wasting police time.”

Kai even called a policeman he knew personally. “But in the end, they say, ‘Kai, these foreign women, hostesses—they all take drugs. It’s her personal problem—just forget about it.’ I tell Katie, and she’s very angry. For a week she keeps on about it, so I go and talk to them again. But again they say, ‘Forget it, forget it.’”

Katie was still living in Tokyo three years later, when Lucie disappeared. As soon as she heard the news, she went back to Azabu Police Station. A female detective recorded a few more details this time but showed no particular interest or concern. Once again, Kai called his detective friend. “But he moved jobs—now he’s in a different department,” Kai told me. “He says, ‘This is not my business.’ But now I think one hundred percent that I am right: this must be the same guy.”

*   *   *

In July, the police were considering three possible explanations for Lucie’s disappearance: a religious cult, a crime involving the trade in illegal drugs, or something to do with the yakuza (hence the questions to Louise about men with tattoos, the badge of the Japanese gangster). They were obvious and sensible lines of inquiry, given the character of Roppongi and of crime in Japan generally. But the police were being told another story, about a criminal who had been operating for years under their noses. Was it this suggestion—of willful negligence on their own part—that explained why, at the beginning at least, they refused to hear it?

Christa Mackenzie had traveled from Osaka to Tokyo to tell the police about “Yuji.” Katie Vickers related the story of “Koji.” Huw Shakeshaft’s friends Isobel Parker and Clara Mendez, who had shared their story with the shell-shocked Tim Blackman, went to them with different names but the same narrative. All four met with indifference. “It was a month before they took anything I said seriously,” said Christa. “They were so slow to pick things up. It was partly inertia—they didn’t seem interested for a while. They were saying, ‘Well, yes, but she’s probably joined a religious cult.’ Just not listening to people who told them that Lucie wasn’t that kind of person at all. But they genuinely thought it was a possibility. Or maybe they just wanted to believe it because they couldn’t be bothered to follow through on the alternative.”

The police had barely set up their investigation headquarters when the first of the fake letters arrived, signed in Lucie’s name. It was the one dated July 17—Tim’s birthday—and postmarked Chiba, and Louise recognized it immediately as a forgery. The signature was impressively accurate, but the spelling was poor. The extracts shown to Tim and Sophie had been carefully bowdlerized—in its entirety, it was violent, graphic and angry.

The detectives had forbidden Louise from taking notes, but when they were out of the room, she scribbled down a few phrases on a scrap of paper:

—Louise I love you like a sister but as a matter of fact you fuck up my plans by making me famous.

—he took me to the hotel and fucked me—fuck hostesses

—I want to be what I want to be

—Purpose of coming to Japan is for money yes that is a fact

—wanted to escape

—I begged him to call you

—Tell Scott that I love him, but I don’t want to be with him any more

—not innocent had several happenings

—fucked customers with money

—Louise you think you know me but you don’t

“It was all really hard language,” Louise said. “It was awful.” She was spending all day in the police station and going back alone to the police apartment. Her sleep was lurid with nightmares. For a few days, Christa stayed with her, but she was in the grip of her own guilt—for not going to the police earlier and because she had ignored the inner prompting to warn Lucie when she first met her. Instead of giving comfort, she and Louise compounded each other’s despair.