The first person other than me to worry about Vinca’s disappearance was Alastair Rockwell, her grandfather and legal guardian. Vinca had often described him as a tight-lipped, authoritarian patriarch. The epitome of an industrialist, he was a self-made man who saw his granddaughter’s disappearance as a kidnapping and therefore an attack on his whole family. The parents of Alexis Clément also began to ask questions. Their son was supposed to join some friends for a week of skiing in Berchtesgaden but had not shown up, nor had he visited them, as he usually did, to celebrate the new year.

Although the families worried about these disappearances, it took some time before the police launched a serious investigation. That was partly because Vinca was over eighteen and partly because the prosecutor was reluctant to initiate proceedings, since it was a legal nightmare as to who had jurisdiction. Vinca held both French and American citizenship. Alexis Clément was German. It was not known where or when they had disappeared. Was one of them the aggressor, or were they both victims?

It was at least a week after the start of the school term before the police showed up at Saint-Ex, and even then, their investigation was limited to brief interviews of Vinca’s and Alexis’s close friends. They conducted fairly minimal searches of their rooms and then had them sealed, though they did not call in a forensics team.

It was only much later, when Alastair Rockwell flew to France toward the end of February, that the pace of the investigation picked up. The industrialist made the most of his contacts and told the media that he had hired a private detective to find his granddaughter. There was another visit by the cops, this time the Nice Serious Crimes Unit. They questioned a number of people—including me, Maxime, and Fanny—and collected DNA evidence from Vinca’s room.

Gradually, from witness statements and from documents they seized, they were able to get a clearer sense of what had happened on Sunday and Monday, December 20 and 21, the days when Vinca and Alexis had vanished into thin air.