In his statement, Pavel Fabianski, the school caretaker, insisted that on Sunday, December 20, at about eight in the morning, he had raised the gate to allow an Alpine A310 driven by Alexis Clément to leave the grounds. Fabianski was positive that Vinca Rockwell was in the passenger seat and had rolled down her window and waved to thank him. Some minutes later, at the Haut Sartoux traffic circle, two council workers clearing snow saw Clément’s car; it skidded slightly as it approached the intersection, then took the road toward Antibes, and it was on the avenue de la Libération that the car was found, parked outside a launderette near Antibes train station. A number of passengers on the Paris TGV remembered seeing a red-haired girl with an older man wearing a soccer cap emblazoned with the name of Clément’s favorite team, Mönchengladbach. On Sunday evening, the night porter at the Hôtel Sainte-Clotilde on the rue de Saint-Simon in Paris stated that a Mademoiselle Vinca Rockwell and a Monsieur Alexis Clément took a room for the night. The reservation had been made by telephone the previous day, and they paid in cash. They consumed a bottle of beer, two cans of Pringles, and a bottle of pineapple juice from the minibar. The porter went on to say that the girl had called down to the front desk to ask whether they had any Cherry Coke, and he had told her that they didn’t.

Up to this point, the story of lovers running away together made sense. But after that, investigators could find no trace of them. Vinca and Alexis had not had breakfast in their room or in the hotel restaurant. A chambermaid had seen them in the corridor early in the morning, but no one could say for sure when they left. A toiletry bag containing makeup, a toothbrush, a Mason Pearson hairbrush, and a bottle of perfume was found in the en suite bathroom and put in a storeroom where the hotel kept lost property.

And that’s where the investigation ended. No credible witness ever came forward to say he or she saw Vinca and Alexis after that. At the time, most people expected them to reappear as soon as the fires of passion guttered out. But Alastair Rockwell’s attorneys persisted. In 1994, they obtained a court order to have the toothbrush and the hairbrush left in the hotel tested for DNA. The results confirmed that they belonged to Vinca, though this did not move the investigation forward. It’s possible that some single-minded cop later made a token attempt to reopen the case so that it would not be closed under the statute of limitations, but as far as I know, that was the final act of the investigation.