FOR MUM AND DAD

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Richard Lloyd Parry

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published in 2011, in slightly different form, by Jonathan Cape, Great
Britain, as People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2012

All materials from the notebooks, schoolbooks, and journals of Lucie Blackman are
reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Lucie Blackman.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parry, Richard Lloyd.
People who eat darkness : the true story of a young woman who vanished from
the streets of Tokyo—and the evil that swallowed her up / Richard Lloyd
Parry. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-374-23059-3 (alk. paper)
1. Blackman, Lucie Jane, 1978–2000. 2. Obara, Joji—Trials, litigation,
etc. 3. Murder—Investigation—Japan—Tokyo. 4. Young women—Crimes
against—Japan—Tokyo. I. Title.

HV6535.J33 T664 2012

364.152'3092—dc23
2011047019

Designed by Abby Kagan

www.fsgbooks.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 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 tempera-
ture 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 run-
ning 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
24 PEOPLE WHO EAT DARKNESS
one hand and put my fingers in and pulled her tongue for-
ward. 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 swal-
low her own tongue, blocking off her breathing. A few mo-
ments 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 mo-
ment, I knew that if anything had happened to her, and we
didn’t have any other children, it would be an absolutely ter-
rible 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 “poste-
rior presentation” that caused her great pain during the delivery.
 THE WORLD THE RIGHT WAY ROUND 25
But the eight-pound baby was healthy, and her parents experi-
enced 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 child-
hood. Her adult life, too, had been marked by clusters of crush-
ing, 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 in-
tolerance 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.”
26 PEOPLE WHO EAT DARKNESS
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 cry-
ing 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 child-
hood. 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 care-
ful. 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 nod-
ding 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
 THE WORLD THE RIGHT WAY ROUND 27
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
fl irting 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 girl-
friends who had men flocking round them, but at discos I was
always the custodian of the handbags. Tim couldn’t under-
stand 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 eigh-
teen months later, on Tim’s twenty-third birthday, July 17,
1976.
Tim managed a shoe shop in the nearby town of Orping-
ton, a relic of the dwindling chain of businesses that his father
had once owned across the southeast. But the shop failed, and
Tim found himself claiming the dole for six months. He ended
up supporting his young family with odd jobs for friends and
as a freelance painter and decorator. “We were living hand to
mouth,” he said. “They were very tricky, very tricky times in the
early 1980s, and we didn’t know where the next fifty pounds
was coming from. But we were in this lovely place with our
baby, this Laura Ashley–style cottage, and it was a very beauti-
ful life. I loved that time when Lucie was little.”
In May 1980, less than two years after the first baby, Jane
gave birth to Sophie, and, three years after that, to Rupert. Tim
found a business partner and moved from decorating into
property development; in 1982 the family moved a few miles
north to the genteel commuter town of Sevenoaks, in Kent.
Here, their period of hardship at an end, Jane was able to create
28 PEOPLE WHO EAT DARKNESS
for her own family the childhood she had always wanted for
herself, an idyll of flowers and pretty dresses and the laughter
of little children.
The house where they lived, which Jane christened Daisy
Cottage, overlooked a private prep school— Granville School,
or the Granville School, as it insisted on being known. It was
the fulfillment of all her fantasies, a place of such self-conscious
tweeness that everyone who went there remembers it with a
smile. The girls, as young as three years old, wore a uniform of
blue-checked dresses and gray woolly bobble hats; at the spring
festival, they put rings of flowers called chaplets in their hair.
The school curriculum included the study of curtsying and
maypole dancing. “Our bedroom looked directly over the
playground,” remembered Jane. “It was so perfect—at play-
time, Lucie would come and wave to me and I could wave
back.” It was a school out of the past, out of the pages of an
illustrated children’s book. “Like living in la-la land,” said
Jane, “not like the real world at all.”

From the beginning, Lucie was a grown-up, conscientious girl

with a childish earnestness that made adults smile. When Jane
gave her peas to shell, she would examine each one individually,
rejecting any that displayed the smallest sign of imperfection.
She loved dolls and would sit alongside her mother breast-
feeding a plastic baby as Jane breast-fed Sophie. “She was so
meticulous and tidy and neat,” said Jane. “Like me from an
early age.” Sophie, by contrast, was “stroppy” and prone to
tantrums, which her older sister gently and skillfully defused.
The two sisters shared a big old-fashioned bed, and one Easter
Sunday they spent the entire day living underneath it, taking
their meals there, reading their picture books, and tending to
their toys.
Lucie’s school exercise books suggest how successfully Jane
created for her children a world of innocence and delight.
 THE WORLD THE RIGHT WAY ROUND 29
Name: Lucy Blackman
Subject: News

Monday 20th May

To-day Daddy is going

to collect me from
school and we are
going to go home and
I am going to get
my Laura Ashley dress
and it is bluey
gray and it has
little flowers and then
I am going to in to Tescos
home and wear and
I am going to get Gemma
a preasnt but I don’t
know what to get her
for her birthday treat
and she is having
four friends that is
me and Celia and
Charlotte and another
frend in her school
and I will be the
only one from Granville

friends friends friends friends

And from another exercise book:

Name: Lucy Blackman

Subject: Experiments
30 PEOPLE WHO EAT DARKNESS
Light

I used a large mirror.

I looked at myself.
I saw my reflection.

I closed one eye.

I saw myself with one eye closed.

I touched my nose.
I saw myself with my right hand on my nose.

I clapped my hands.
I saw my hands clap.
MIRROR
MIRROR

I used a large mirror.

I put the mirror at the side.
I saw the world the right way round.

“Because my childhood was sad I always wanted to have a

wonderful, happy family life,” said Jane. “I’d put their slippers
down the front of the stove so they’d be warm when they
came home from school. When Rupert used to play rugby, I’d
take a hot-water bottle and a flask of hot tea when I met him
from school. My biggest fear was losing them. Even when they
were little. I had these leather reins with a little picture of a
bunny rabbit on them, these reins that I used to make Rupert
wear. I’d have him on reins, and to the girls I’d say, ‘You hold
hands,’ and in the supermarket if I lost sight of one of them I
would feel . . . It was the worst thing for me, loss, because of
what had happened to me. That was always my biggest fear—
 THE WORLD THE RIGHT WAY ROUND 31
losing. Because I’d lost my mother, I just couldn’t bear the
thought of ever losing the children. So I was a very protective—
an overprotective—mother.”

Lucie won a scholarship to Walthamstow Hall, a stalwart

redbrick nineteenth-century institution founded for the daugh-
ters of Christian missionaries. She was a hard worker and
might have been expected to flourish at “Wally Hall,” which
took pride in the number of girls it sent to university. And yet
Lucie never quite fitted in there. “Walthamstow Hall was
quite a posh school,” said Jane. “A lot of girls on their birthday
were given car keys. That was their birthday present, and that
wasn’t the league we were in at all.” However, the darkest
shadow over Lucie’s teenage years was not money but illness.
At the age of twelve, she contracted mycoplasma pneumo-
nia, a rare form of the illness, which laid her low for weeks.
“She was very, very ill and no one knew what was the matter
with her,” said Jane. “She’d be propped up in bed on so many
pillows, and I had to give her this treatment to get rid of
the mucus, to pummel her back. There was a rattle when she
breathed, you could hear it in her lungs.” Afterwards Lucie was
affl icted with a malaise that caused her legs to ache so much
that she could barely walk, and put paid to two years of school-
work. For weeks at a time she had no energy at all; the effort
of descending a fl ight of stairs left her spent with exhaustion,
and a series of doctors could give no assurances about when, or
even if, her good health would return.
Jane Blackman had a strong belief in the hidden powers of
the mind, and in her own gifts of prediction and intuition.
She worked as a reflexologist—a masseuse and a therapist of
the feet—and frequently, she said, she had found herself accu-
rately foreseeing imminent events—the death of an elderly
relative, the pregnancy of a patient before the woman was
aware of it herself. “I just have feelings about things when I’m
32 PEOPLE WHO EAT DARKNESS
working,” she said. “A voice will come into my head to tell me
something and afterwards I’m right. It goes back to my sense
of justice: I feel people’s pain. People say I’m very empathetic,
but I think if you’ve been through a lot yourself it gives you
that ability.”
It was during Lucie’s long illness, her mother believed, that
her daughter’s own gift for supernatural perception first dis-
played itself.
Separately, both her parents began to notice a faint but
distinctive smell in the master bedroom where Lucie was being
nursed—the smell of cigars. No one in the family smoked them;
Tim even called on the neighbors to confirm that the smoke
was not coming through their shared wall. A few days later,
Jane mentioned the strange smell to Lucie. It was a time when
she was extremely weak, drifting between sleep and wakeful-
ness, but it was still a surprise when she replied, “It’s the man
who sits on the end of my bed.”
“What man?” asked Jane.
“In the night, there’s this old man who comes and sits on
the end of my bed sometimes, and he smokes cigars.”
“Poof!” said Tim, telling the story later. “We all thought,
‘Lucie’s gone completely off her rocker.’ ”
Much later, after her strength had returned, Lucie visited
the home of Jane’s father and stepmother. She came across a
photograph on a sideboard of an old man and asked who it
was. Jane’s own grandmother, Lucie’s great-grandmother, was
there that day, and the man was her husband, Hollis Ether-
idge, who had died years before.
“That’s the man,” said Lucie, “the one who came and sat at
the end of my bed.”
Throughout his life, he had been a smoker of cigars.