As an adult, when Elvira decided to look for her parents, she discovered a family history wilder than anything she had imagined. Once there, he told the children to wait while he bought sweets. The three siblings waited, but Denis did not return.
Eventually, Elvira started crying. Nor could the children give their own surnames, or say where they lived — except that, until recently, it had been Paris. Five-year-olds usually know such basic things, but the police were not overly concerned.
Children are not generally abandoned without explanation, especially in groups of three. Authorities expected that very soon, someone — a relative, friend or schoolteacher — would report them missing and the mystery would be solved. They made no attempt to alert the press or appeal to the public for help.
That evening, police took them to an orphanage in Barcelona. Three days later, they were moved to a care home for vulnerable children in the centre of the city. The mids was an age of faxes, telegrams and hand-delivered mail, so international communication was slow, but police in France and across Europe were now informed of the three missing children in Barcelona.
Days turned into weeks, but no one came looking. Care home staff noticed that when the conversation turned to their parents or the past, the well-behaved children either had nothing to say or walked away.
