The place where Alex Batty’s life changed glistens as rain tumbles down.
A stretch of road where traffic comes only occasionally during the day, and hardly at all in the middle of the night. Unless fate intervenes.
Alex was standing here a couple of nights ago, at 3am, braving the rain and clutching his skateboard, when a van came by, passed him, and then returned.
This time, the driver, an amiable chiropractor named Fabien Accidini, offered shelter.
And that was the moment when Alex, apparently lost to the world for six years, was suddenly found again.
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Standing here now, you get an idea of how remote it must have felt.
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During the day, you can make out the village of Lagarde in the distance, but look in most directions and all you see are fields and trees. The forests around here are thick and imposing.
Alex was standing at a point where the road narrows slightly, with metal barriers on either side. There is some brickwork here; a place to sit down. You would barely know it as a driver, but this is actually a bridge over a small river.
And this is where Alex Batty had come to a halt on the night he was found; where his four-day trek towards safety came to an end.
In the daylight, a bird circles over the field opposite us, peering for a catch. There is a sign for a campsite and, in the woodland by the side of the road, some twisted metal bars.
A large 4×4 car comes past us hauling a trailer full of wood. An old Renault 5 drives by with a couple in the front and a huge dog in the back.
They look at our camera, frown and drive on. It’s not the sort of place I would choose to walk, alone, at night.
But the truth is this is an unexceptional place that witnessed an exceptional occurrence.
It’s not just that Alex was found, but that he was helped by someone as warm as Fabien, a 26-year-old who delivers medicine overnight to supplement his income.
Originally from Marseille, he came to Toulouse simply because it was, he thought, the best place to train as a chiropractor.
When we met, he was still in shock at what he’d achieved. At first, Alex, perhaps wary of being pursued by the group he had left behind, had said his name was Zach.
Only after ten minutes of driving, when Fabien had shown him the cargo of medicines and asked him to help with the deliveries, did Alex tell the truth.
“He said to me that he had been kidnapped by his mother, that he had been in Morocco, then Spain, then here in France, and that he had decided to leave…I was,” he pauses, searching for the right word. “Shocked.”
An understatement, you suspect.
The unlikely pair drove around for two hours, completing Fabien’s delivery round, before calling the police and then ending up at the police station in Revel, a bustling market town.
There, the police tried to call the British Embassy, but got no reply.
Fabien, who speaks English, translated on behalf of Alex, whose French is rudimentary.
And then Alex fell asleep on the floor of the police station.
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Fabien tells me that Alex’s ambition was to get home to see his grandmother.
Then a thought comes into his head. “Is she alive?” he asks and is delighted when I tell him that, yes, Alex’s grandmother is still waiting for him.
I ask Fabien about the location where he found Alex (“the middle of nowhere” he says) and then, when I wake up this morning, there is a message from him – a photo of the road, taken by him as he went on another, and less eventful, round of night-time deliveries, and a map reference.
And so it is that we stand here now, in the very place where Alex Batty’s young life took such an abrupt change.
The rain is starting to lighten. Ordinary place. Extraordinary story.
