Steve Braunias investigates the disappearance of a French teenager.
Eloi Rolland is up and about on his feet in the darkness before dawn, a solitary figure waiting at the bus stop at 87 Mokoia Rd in Birkenhead on Auckland's North Shore. His movements will be tracked later in the police investigation Operation Cookeville – "French national, 18 years old" - but right now, on a Saturday morning in late summer, no one is watching, no one else is around. He's walked five minutes around the corner from the house where he's been staying with a host family since he arrived in New Zealand as an English language student from Montpellier. Things didn't work out at that house. Things haven't worked out anywhere in New Zealand - but that's okay. He's got his plane ticket booked for March 20. Time to go home. Enough time, today, to do something right, to fulfil a promise.
He's all set. He's on his phone at 5.02am searching Google Maps for directions to Piha. It tells him to cross the harbour bridge and head west, beyond the mountain range, to the black sand beaches. He had gone there not long after he arrived in New Zealand. That was in spring. Things were simpler then. He had come to an island nation where they spoke two languages that he only heard as sounds, as a kind of music. Better to listen to the noise of the surf, smashing on the beach, sea spray hanging in curtains of mist that were always out of reach.
The bus approaches the shops at Birkenhead. It's 5.46am. Three days ago, he spoke with his parents in France. He asked his mother Christine, "What would you like as a souvenir from New Zealand?"
She said, "Sand from a beach."
He said, "Yes! I went to a beautiful beach with black sand."
She said, "How long would it take you to walk there?"
He gets on the bus and it heads over the black water of the harbour towards the shining city, lit brightest by the glowing red stalk of the Sky Tower and the container ship moored at the wharf, blazing like a Christmas tree.
Eloi Rolland went missing on Saturday, March 7, 2020. Two years of a massive police search, as well as a private search created by people who were moved by his disappearance; two years of a grief beyond measure for his family, stranded by Covid back in France; two years of a mystery so complete that no one has any firm idea of what happened.
Police gave the Herald full access to Operation Cookeville. The officer in charge, Detective Senior Sergeant Callum McNeill, presented the investigation on Thursday afternoon last week at the North Shore Police Station. Maps, video footage, timelines, electronic surveillance, interviews with hundreds of people – he gave a running commentary while the files were shown as a PowerPoint display above a little stage, and at the end of the 70-minute presentation, he sighed out loud, and said, "So this is where we are at the moment." He had gone through all the known facts to arrive at a point of unknowing.
And then McNeill said, "There's not a day goes by that I don't think about him or his poor family and wanting to resolve it. I've been in the police for 29 years and worked on a hell of a lot of homicides and this is one of the very few cases that hasn't been resolved. All investigations involving potentially someone dying are sad. They all take a little piece out of you I guess. But this one - I don't like not knowing.
"Generally you can put all of the pieces together but this one is a puzzle. So yeah. Not a day goes by that I'm not thinking about where he is. I'm hopeful that one day someone will stumble upon him or provide information where he might be. Because we're still getting calls. If people have not spoken to police about it, and have something to say, they should call. We are desperate to resolve this and find him and get him home."
All mysteries are an accumulation of possibilities and one possibility is that someone knows something and has "something to say". It will be two years next week since that thin and unhappy boy from France went missing and not a single trace has been found. False leads that were a waste of time: check. Lurid theories not backed by a shred of evidence: check. But not any item of clothing, not his backpack, not one forensic sign. His case will be referred to the coroner.
The sea, the cliffs, the bush – Piha is a beautiful end of the line, a population of 900 clinging to a wild shore. Easy to go missing. But to go missing that completely, that utterly, is almost like an achievement. He created a lacuna, that soft Latin word meaning ditch, pit, gap, deficiency. Boy heads west. Boy covers a lot of ground. Boy is seen, and then the ultimate lacuna: boy vanishes.
A national state of emergency was set a fortnight later as New Zealand entered into its first Covid lockdown, the intensity of the shock and the scale of the drama obscuring the search for a missing boy, complicating it. He was considered surplus to news requirements. He disappeared; the country was too busy – too locked down, too afraid – to notice. On the other side of the world, his family continue to endure an agony of grief, not knowing what happened, not being able to do anything. His sister Aurore gave a long, anguished, sometimes furious interview. Asked whether she would like one day to come to New Zealand and see where her brother was last seen, she said, "To do what? I don't see how my coming could resurrect him from the limbo of the missing."
Eloi Rolland approaches the train station at Britomart. To the east, the sky has cracked open a little, and the dawn light allows a glimpse of delicate pink and blue hues. He takes the escalator, and heads underground to platform 5 to catch the 6.36am train on the Western Line. He takes long strides; there is an air of purpose about him, a narrow-hipped, small boy, 170cm (5'6") in sneakers, blue jeans, a blue jacket, and a small backpack. He has black hair and a long, pale face. He's not so much merely handsome as downright gorgeous. He'd posed for fashion photographer David Shields in Auckland and even though he was made to wear awful clothes, the eye immediately takes in his pout, his deep-set eyes, his cheekbones as sharp as blades. A beautiful boy, cursed by the protests raging inside his head: he has fantastic ideas, revolutionary concepts, too grand to merely describe as thoughts, because they are nothing less than solutions. He can solve issues that affect all of mankind.
His six months in Auckland were eventful, restless, bizarre, unstable. When he arrived, nothing was amiss. He had no mental health history; his sister Aurore, 12 years older than Eloi, described him as a "jovial child". He grew up in Saint Drezery, a small (population 2000), romantic village near Montpellier on the Mediterranean coast. He had a lot of friends. He was a sailing instructor. He first heard of New Zealand at a student fair and set his heart on travelling here. His parents supported his dreams, and he enrolled at Education First, an English language school with offices in downtown Auckland, on Fort St. He arrived on September 15, 2019. The school billeted him with a host family in Birkenhead. He was popular, happy, outgoing. There was a trip to a waterfall at Karekare, and then a walk on the black sands of Piha – he raved about the beauty of it to his parents. And then he fell in love.
His teacher at the language school, Cristina da Silva, spoke of him with fondness and despair. "At first he was a regular boy, friendly, fun, positive. He was fine," she said. "But then after December, he changed and his behaviour became a little bit off. He became strange. It all started because he fell in love with one of the students, a French girl, and she was not in love with him. She had a boyfriend. And when that boy came to New Zealand in December, it aggravated the situation."
He takes out his phone on the train. There is no one else in his carriage and there are few commuters coming into the city that early on a Saturday morning. He checks Google Maps again for Piha.
Detective McNeill confirmed there was an unrequited love affair and that things started to fall apart at the end of 2019. "At the family's request he was temporarily placed with another homestay. From interviews we were told they found him obnoxious, arrogant, rude, and shifted him to another place, but he made the residents there uncomfortable. He was withdrawn and angry … One night they found him lying in the grass outside. They thought he was either on drugs or having a mental health episode and was placed back with his original home family."
There was no evidence of either drug use or problems with alcohol, and the early signs of any unhappiness seem petty, kind of standard. In December, he went to the girl's house at 2am, and demanded she come outside. She refused. When her boyfriend arrived in New Zealand, he messaged her saying he wanted to fight him. He begins to contact his parents more frequently. He began to talk about social problems in the world, as well as global warming, and a subject that people are starting to notice – the coronavirus.
"After the holiday period," said Cristina Da Silva, meaning Christmas 2019, "he was getting really weird, saying lots of weird things. That he could save all the problems of the world. I said, 'Come on, mate, what's going on? Stop being weird.' I told the school, 'This boy needs to go home. He's not well.'"
He found restaurant work at Headquarters in Westhaven Marina, and the Cordis hotel. Both gave him the sack. At the former, he was described as unfocused and distracted; his behaviour at the latter was much worse, culminating in a spectacular freak-out on February 14, when he ran around the dining tables saying he had coronavirus. Security were called, and threw him out of the back entrance, on Liverpool St. Police were given the film that security took of him, standing in the middle of the street and raving sometimes in English, sometimes in French, and it's almost like he's dancing, almost like he's rapping, it's a performance of weird and terrible power, a deranged boy moving to a rhythm only he can hear, and chanting, "Kill me! Kill me! Kill me! Woo! Woo! Woo! Coronavirus! Coronavirus! Coronavirus!"
Later that same evening, he sent a video home to his parents; this time he presents as completely calm, but there's a profound disconnect between his appearance and the things he's saying: "The owner [of the Cordis Hotel] created the coronavirus. He's the most horrible man in the planet. He wanted to kill me. I managed to run away by luck…"
They are terrifying films to watch. They show someone experiencing a mental collapse, a fever dream. The previous week, on February 7, he made an appointment with an immigration specialist to discuss his visa. Detective McNeill: "We took a statement from that person. They said Eloi was talking about atomic bombs saving the planet, and a project that provides a solution to the virus .. He believed he [Eloi] had some mental health issues."
He was running out of track. No one wanted to have anything more to do with him; he was always alone; he told his host family he was having problems with depression and they would sometimes find him crying to himself. He told his sister that he was afraid he was schizophrenic. One night at Countdown supermarket in downtown Auckland, he ran into the girl he'd fallen in love with and followed her and her boyfriend around the aisles. When they stopped to talk with him, he made a speech they found entirely incoherent. It was the last time she saw him: March 1, six days before his disappearance.
The doors of the carriage close with a whisper. The train heads west, last stop Swanson.
Eloi Rolland was so busy going crazy that he managed to find time to stage a crazed encounter with Leo Molloy. The mayoral candidate, restauranteur, and provocateur owns Headquarters, where the French boy worked from December 27 until January 19. At close to 3am on the night of January 17, an alarm was activated at the restaurant, and it went through to Molloy, who lives close by.
Molloy said, "Rather than call in security, because in my experience they're f***in' useless, I invariably sneak in if the alarm goes off and listen carefully, because it's a big building – have you ever been to HQ? Okay, well, you've to work your way around the front, and check the toilets - every cubicle has got to be opened one at a time, you can hear the sound of your own heartbeat if you're a nervous type, and I'm always aware, if there is a person in there, that we have a kitchen full of very sharp knives.
"On that particular night, I worked my way around, I'd done the toilets, done the kitchen, and went to step into the office and I could see someone lying across four barstools where the staff have an after-work drink. So I went in to gently wake him and he jumped up and it was this guy, Eloi.
"I said to him quite generously, 'Look I'll get you an Uber home if you've got no money,' and he went into a rabid, demented rant at me for about 15 minutes in broken English about capitalism and socialism and who's got money and who hasn't, and he made bizarre assertions that I was wealthy and rich, which I'm neither, I'm modestly well-off but I work hard, anyway he was of a view that all money should be shared and followed me around the room foaming at the mouth.
"He had a yellow top on. I love yellow as a colour, so I remember it well. And I said, 'Would you mind if I take your photo?' I was actually very nervous about his mental state. I mean I'm frightened of no one, let me make that absolutely clear, but it was a three in the morning rendezvous and I was sufficiently nervous about his salivating, rabid behaviour that I took a picture of him on the basis that I wanted it on the record if anything happened to me.
"He refused an Uber, walked off, and later on I put the picture up on our senior management message chat and said, 'Help me understand what's going on with this dude,' and they were all of the view that this was typical of his behaviour, that he was very unbalanced and delusional, and paranoid. All of those sort of things, and I never saw him again."
Eloi Rolland travels on the Western Line, the train heading east at first, to Newmarket, then branching west, the dawn light like a grey smoke over Mt Hobson. The barbed wire and brick walls of Mt Eden prison appear out of the gloom like a threat. Apartments line the banks of the train tracks. There are plants and barbecues on the balconies, then paddling pools and taro plants in the back yards of homes lining the banks of the train tracks as the Western Line slides through Kingsland and Mt Albert. His English has improved but nowhere to the point where he can make sense of signs at the Colon Care Centre, which advertise bowel cleaning. But he recognises the office sign for Greenpeace. He should talk to them. They need his help, his ideas, his solutions.
"Eloi suddenly took a passion for ecology and the environment," said Aurore. "He evoked a seventh continent where all the plastic waste would have to be collected and an atomic bomb dropped there to save the planet. He spoke of this to everyone around him like a fanatic enrolled in a sect. He had never been so sure in his convictions, and it was almost terrifying."
The train stops at Avondale, high above the town. Below the platform at Avondale is the green oval of the racecourse and it's from here that he first sees the line of the Waitakere Ranges. "Like the rim of a blue painted bowl," wrote novelist Maurice Shadbolt; on the other side are the black beaches, baked hot as glass by the sun. The train lurches forward. Next stop, New Lynn, and the tracks swing right, the train arching straight towards the west coast. He sits alone in a deserted carriage. The loneliness of a traveller a long way from home can be intense, enveloping. He was keen on another girl in the language school but she, too, rejected his advances.
His flight home was abruptly brought forward, from May to March 20. He last talked with Aurore four days before he went missing, on March 3. "We spoke at length. He was cheerful, nothing seemed unusual to me. I was trying to find out more about the decision of his hasty return, I pushed him to his limits but he maintained his homesickness argument, which I had a lot of trouble believing because it was brutal, he didn't never hinted at any early return. I didn't really believe his explanation and yet I don't know more, he refused to speak. During our discussion, he did not seem depressed, he said he was taking his life in hand, clearly stated that he was moving forward and taking things as they came. He was very sad after several failed love stories. These heartaches had affected him a lot during his entire stay, but he said he was staying the course, taking charge of his life and continuing to move forward."
The train goes underground at New Lynn, then rises into the open again, passing creeks and scrub, and dense housing, into classic Auckland suburban territory where it becomes difficult to know where one suburb ends and another begins.
His teacher Cristina Da Silva said, "The last time I heard from him was on the Friday night before he went missing the next day. He sent a very strange email to everybody in the class. He said he was going to write a book and that he was going to Piha the next day."
The group email was sent at 7.15pm. The subject line was Forrest Gump. Callum McNeill said, "It might be a reference to Forrest Gump who went on a big walk. He knows he's going on a big walk the next day."
The train pulls into the Fruitvale Rd station. It's in the middle of a West Auckland nowhere, a bare little platform with CCTV cameras on loudspeaker poles. Cristina Da Silva mentioned the class Christmas party when he and another student angered her by drinking beer that didn't belong to them. "He brought in some chocolates for me the next day and said he was sorry." And then she said a sweet thing: "You couldn't not like him."
He gets off the train at Fruitvale.
Eloi Rolland looks very soulful in the framed portrait placed next to a lit candle at the Auckland house of 36-year-old Cilla Isara. Sometimes she moves his picture to a windowsill. "I know it may sound crazy," she said, "but for me, it's like I face him out so he can have a different view."
To visit her very tidy home is to visit a sort of shrine. She attends Life Church and grew up attending the Samoan Congregational Church. "So our faith is pretty strong in our family. Faith, to me, is quite important." Had the boy's disappearance tested that faith? "Big time. A lot. I sometimes ask God, 'Why do you take good people?' It's pushed me to … Sometimes I ask myself, 'Are you still a Christian?'" She cried, not the first or last time in our interview; her living room was a zone of worship and sadness.
His disappearance – and the lack of news coverage, dominated then by the shock of Covid and the first lockdowns – moved her so deeply that she created a Facebook page to remind people ("Just getting the word out there") and then to stage a search, attracting over 100 people who combed the Waitākere Ranges. "It was the love of the community that came out to look for him … He's just one kid who literally pulled a lot of heart strings," she said, and wept again.
She has made other searches, messaged the family back in France, taken his photo into the ranges on the first anniversary of his disappearance: "We felt this big aura around us. It was almost like a glow. It didn't freak me out but I just felt like he was there with us."
Not one forensic sign of him has emerged from her searches but it's as though a part of him lives on in a house in Wesley, near Mt Roskill, on a street where cars are routinely parked on front lawns and overgrown berms. She wept, and said, "This was a kid I didn't even know, but for some reason, he just really attached himself to me. It was almost like I felt it was like a family member. He literally came part of me and part of my family … I feel like I connect with him sometimes. I feel like I understand him. I feel like he is one of those kids that just – they couldn't understand or adapt to all the things going on in the world, like I was when I was his age. I feel like I've known him in the past."
She had feelings, too, about what happened. Instincts that were more deeply felt than just guesses but were exactly that, just guesses. "I just – I know deep down he was with someone else. It just feels like he may have been with someone else. Could have met someone. That's what I believe, that he's met up with someone and something has happened between them, I'm not quite sure how. But deep down I feel like someone knows something and hasn't come forward. I believe that person knows where he may be."
She stood up, and moved to the photo and the flickering candle. "I'm never going to forget. This is something I will take with me and remember for life," she said, and wept.
Eloi Rolland is the only passenger who gets off at the Fruitvale Rd station. He heads west, past a house where a cat shares the front lawn with a family of ducks, past grass growing in the gutters, past a bathtub on another front lawn, past a house with boarded windows, then on to West Coast Rd. These are his last known hours. He's got his phone open to Google Maps showing the way to Piha on foot. It's a long walk, but he moves fast, and covers 11km in one hour and 46 minutes. CCTV films him at a Mobil petrol station in Oratia at 8.24am. GPS on Google Maps shows him turning on to Piha Rd at 9.16am. These are his last known minutes.
Ted Scott saw him. He was driving up towards Piha Rd to play Saturday morning bowls in Glen Eden. Piha Rd is narrow, winding, and dangerous – traffic moves fast, especially towards Piha – and there's no pavement, just ditches and gravel up against clay banks and steep bush. The sighting was just past the Elevation Cafe, which is at the highest point of the ranges. The suburbs have receded. It's just wilderness.
Ted said, "He was three-quarters of the way down there before you get to a carpark on the other side of the road that goes to the dams. He was on the straight going down." He meant the boy was facing the traffic.
"I saw him walking on the edge of the road and I was doing about 100. I know what it's like when cars go by at speed, it's not very pleasant, so I pulled over to the other side because there was no other traffic. I made a big detour around him and as I looked at him I thought there was something about him that was sad, that he wasn't a happy person, and it stuck in my mind. There was an air of gloom about him."
He turned up for his game of bowls, but another player had cancelled, so he turned around and the 80-year-old photographer ("The police showed me the picture and it was exactly as I described him. I know images") drove back to Karekare. "And I looked all the way along it just in case he was still walking. But I didn't see any sign of him."
Louise Rainger saw him. She was driving with her husband Brian ("He's 91 this year. 91!") from their home in Ōrākei to their holiday home in Piha for the weekend. They saw someone walking only a few metres from Ted's sighting, but this time on the other side of the road, and very close to the carpark of the track leading to the Upper Nihoputu Dam.
She said, "Everybody drives very fast down Piha Rd. I was doing probably about 70, and I'm considered a slow driver on that road, I always get people blinking their lights at me to move over if I can. Oh dear! Anyway we saw him walking along and I said to Brian, 'Look at this foolish guy. He's going to get killed where he is. What a ridiculous place to be.' Because it's just a ditch. I slowed down, I can't remember if I tooted, but Brian put his window down and waved at him, like 'Get off the road!'
"We just assumed he was walking to the carpark. And that was it, really."
He looks at his phone, again, to consult Google Maps on walking to Piha, at 9.43am. He's walked past the carpark to the dam, and he's on the side of the road just after Ted Scott and Laura Rainger saw him. He's been awake and up and about since at least 5am. It's a warm, lovely day in late summer, and traffic is beginning to build up towards Piha – there's a national surfing contest the next weekend and surfers are keen to practise while they can, before the dread of lockdown. He's not stopped to buy anything to eat. He's messaged the friend who he went with to Piha in spring, but gets no reply. He's alone, he's been rejected by two girls in six months, he's got ideas about how to solve the problems of the world, he's got ideas about who caused the coronavirus, he's not really welcome at his homestay, but he's getting better, he's booked a ticket to fly home, he's secured a place at the Universite de Toulouse III to study engineering, he's making good his promise to bring back a souvenir of black sand for his mum, he's determined to do it, he's been on his feet and walking fast for more than two hours, he's doing his level best to bear the intolerable pressures of the world and his hectic mind. "And then it happens," Zendaya narrates on Euphoria, "that moment when your breath starts to slow, and every time you breathe, you breathe out all the oxygen you have. And everything you feel, and wish, and want to forget, finally it all just stops."
At 9.48am, the battery on his phone goes dead, and separates his last link with the world.
"That's the last we hear from him," said Detective Senior Sergeant Callum McNeill. "So we are left with … We really don't know after that where he might have ended up."
Eloi Rolland's sister Aurore is asked the worst, most intrusive and insensitive question in the world: "How are your parents feeling?"
She replied, by email, "I return the question to you.
"Imagine that it's your 18-year-old son whom you accompanied with your own car, on your own initiative, to the plane that will take him to his death at the end of the world a few months later, with all the anguish that that entails.
"Imagine a global pandemic, which immediately leads to the closing of borders, and any possibility of going to the scene of the tragedy reduced to nothing.
"Imagine people, strangers, looking for your children in the forest when you should be there.
"Imagine the anguish, the guilt, the nights of insomnia, the film of the events that you rewind constantly to find out what you missed to get there.
"Imagine discovering your son under another face, a face that you don't know, that of a potentially crazy young man.
"Imagine the horror you would inflict on yourself looking at yourself in the mirror knowing that for those six months you had been the distant spectator of it all, and that you had seen nothing, that you didn't react, that you let it happen, until your child, whom you accompanied until the dawn of adulthood, vanishes in a flash without any explanation.
"Imagine living with this absence that never ends, and that has no answer.
"Imagine the empty room, the cold bed, the snippets of memories from here and there fading away more each day.
"Imagine the immensity of the absence.
"Imagine all the little details in life that remind you of him, a music, a song, a plate of spaghetti, an icecream, a catamaran or a surf kit, a beach, a photo; and all this constantly, every day that passes, at every moment, with a void in return, a nothingness.
"Imagine the guilt, the remorse, the reproaches, the relationships that wither when it comes to Eloi.
"Imagine a journalist who asks you questions without providing an answer whether Eloi is dead or alive.
"Imagine what it's like to feel the knife turning in the wound with these questions that keep you bound hand and foot to March 7, 2020, without it leading to anything.
"Imagine the pain of constantly remembering the unimaginable.
"So maybe you can imagine a glimpse of how my parents feel."
Eloi Rolland is alive at 9.48am on a Saturday morning two years ago and beyond that nothing is certain.
"From that point his phone goes dead," said officer-in-charge Callum McNeill. "He's either gone into the bush or he's continued walking down Piha Rd. But we actually don't have any sightings past that time, although you mentioned one at Black Sands?"
Yes: Cilla Isara said in her interview that during the search party she instigated, a woman approached to ask what they were doing, and then promptly claimed she had seen someone matching Eloi's description at about 11am on March 7 near the Black Sands cabins in Piha town.
"She believed she may have been the last person to see him," Cilla said. "She was coming out to take out the recycling bin that morning when he walked past. She said hello to him, but he didn't answer or say anything, and she said he looked so down. She goes, 'There are people that you remember and people you don't, and there was something really odd about that boy. For whatever reason, he looked really unhappy, really sad.' He had on the blue jeans and the backpack and was by himself."
This is the only sighting that puts Eloi actually in Piha, his destination that day. It's crucial information. But the woman didn't come forward to police and didn't give her name to the search party. Did he really get that far? If so, how is that no one else saw him, on the road, or in the town, or at the beach? Searchers advised the woman to go to the police. She hasn't taken that advice.
If she had seen him, it raises the possibility of drowning. But someone would have found his shoes and backpack on the beach.
"It looks unlikely he's gone into the sea," said McNeill. "My thoughts are still the bush. He's potentially tried to take a shortcut to the beach and didn't realise how far that would be, and over-estimated his abilities. It's pretty gnarly in there. Is it possible he's just thought, 'Well, I think it's a straight line down here, shouldn't be a problem,' and maybe he's come to grief in the bush somewhere."
Police looked at the possibility he was hit and killed by a speeding car – the exact same thought Louise Rainger had when she saw him – and searched a few metres either side of the length of Piha Rd in case he'd been flung into the bush, but found no indications it happened.
For all that he was clearly in some state of prolonged madness – the crying, the freak-out at Cordis, the only person in the world able to out-talk Leo Molloy – suicide or self-harm seems unlikely. He had no mental health concerns before coming to New Zealand, and the police behavioural unit found few features consistent with suicide. There was nothing relating to suicide or depression in his Google searches. "His search history is largely unremarkable," as McNeill said. But if he'd got lost, or in some difficulty in the bush, his mental health might have compromised his chances of safety.
His sister Aurore said, "When I learned of his disappearance, my first reaction was to affirm that he had been killed. I was firmly convinced of it - until I learned more about his psychological profile. I came to tell myself that I knew almost nothing about my brother, that I had no concrete and real idea of what he was going through on the other side of the world, neither in his head nor in his heart, nor in his life, and that all things considered, we do not fully know those whom we think we know. Everyone has their dark side, and unfortunately, I only caught a glimpse of my brother's, and far too late to react in time."
Asked, again, if she would entertain the thought of coming to New Zealand to retrace his last day, she said, "If my parents go there, I would really like to accompany them to support them. But I also have a life here, in France, a family and children who I want to see grow up rather than going to Piha for lost causes."
There are 40,000 acres and 160sq km of walking tracks in the Waitākere Ranges. Even to step inside for a few moments is to be immersed in sunshine and shadow on moss, on fern, on mānuka; there are sparkling clear streams, tomtits hopping their way up trees, the rising warmth of the earth. It's beautiful, it's dense. "He would often go for walks in the bush to clear his head," Callum McNeill said of Eloi when he lived at the address in Birkenhead. "It wasn't unusual for him to walk there after dark." The beautiful boy acting out an idea of himself as a Forrest Gump, walking, walking, walking, alone and unhappy, his heart broken and his ideas a mess of juvenile rubbish, and yet on a mission and quite determined, moving forward, mapping out his direction, a sweet boy ("you couldn't not like him") wandering along a pretty road towards a shore of black, shining sand. Imagine the immensity of absence: at dawn that day, he Google-searched the words "spirited away".