Sitting in his garden facing the bare rocks of the Trois-Evêchés massif, François Balique meditates. ” It’s a mystery. A mystery that we turn in every direction…” The mayor of Vernet, his cheeks hollow with weariness, continues without paying attention to the ringing of the bells of the neighboring church. “Why are people so interested in it? Because it’s as mysterious as a miracle. But a tragic miracle…”
Two months since Emile S., a little boy aged 2 and a half, disappeared on July 8, on the heights of this town of one hundred and thirty inhabitants in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. The child was near his grandparents’ house, in Haut-Vernet, a hamlet nestled in a cul-de-sac, 2 kilometers from the main village. The vacation had just started.
The searches, carried out for two days by nearly eight hundred people – gendarmes, volunteer firefighters, family members, tourists, etc. – produced nothing. A 5 kilometer perimeter was searched. In vain. No trace. The judicial investigation is slipping. A national cell of twenty-three gendarmes, coordinated by the Marseille research section, is dedicated to it day and night. It is impossible to know if Emile is still alive. The case is nothing more than a litany of unanswered questions: was the child the victim of a road accident? From a kidnapping? A family conflict? From the attack of a wolf? In this type of case, time is often the enemy of truth and the accomplice of all fantasies.
Investigate instead of the police
At the beginning of September, François Balique saw the reappearance of journalists wandering in search of a resident who had not already revealed his feelings about this disappearance, saying that he knew nothing, that he shared the sadness of the family, of course, and hope for a happy outcome.
A foreign silhouette is easily spotted, between the fountains, the chalets and the imperturbable grazing donkeys. Especially since the streets of Vernet have seen the last vacationers leave: the village has only fifty main homes, for three hundred secondary residences. Only a few hikers still walk the GR 69, which joins Piedmont, in Italy, on paths formerly taken by shepherds and their flocks on transhumance, fleeing the summer heat of “this very old region of the Alps which penetrates into Provence”, in the words of Jean Giono.
The mystery fuels passions around this news item. The website of BFM DICI, the local version of the BFM-TV news channel, recorded record audiences in July, with more than twenty million visits, compared to eight hundred thousand in normal times. “Touche pas à mon poste”, Cyril Hanouna’s trashy show on C8, combs the Vernet in search of witnesses for its set.
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