Expat pair reunited with stolen bag

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Scottish couple reunited with stolen bag

Atartan face mask turned out to be a key piece of evidence that allowed a pair of amateur French sleuths to reunite a stolen backpack with its rightful expat owners. The story began when retired couple Colin and Anne Macaulay were on a train from Toulouse heading towards their holiday home in Béziers, near Montpellier on the Mediterranean coast. With reduced mobility and needing sticks to walk, Mr Macaulay accepted help from a stranger who offered to take his bag and place it in the luggage rack at the end of the carriage.

It was not until several minutes later that he realised that their bag was nowhere to be seen. “Anne got off the train and we tried to look for it, but it was gone,” Mr Macaulay explained. “The staff could not have been kinder or more helpful, but they had to keep to the timetable, so we departed without it.”

That is where the story could so easily have ended, with a sadly routine example of bag snatching. The couple began the process of contacting their insurance company, but were also faced with the problem that the bag contained important medication and a vital sleep apnea mask. Just two days later, however, the couple had their bag back, including the Valentine's Day card that Colin had packed for his wife.

Their luck was down to a local Toulouse couple, Delphine Prévost and Nicolas Bouisset, who had noticed the bright blue bag outside the Airbus building where they both worked in Toulouse city centre. “We thought it had been forgotten, but the next day it was still there, it had just been moved towards the bins,” Delphine later explained.

Closer inspection quickly revealed that it was a stolen bag that had been dumped, but the couple became concerned when they realised that it contained medicines and breathing apparatus. On finding a Tesco Club Card, the fledgling detectives called the British supermarket, hoping they would let their customers know the bag had been found. They were informed this was not possible for “confidentiality reasons”.

The bag also contained a box of Scottish tablet - a common fudge-like treat – as well as the tartan face mask, which led the couple to conclude the bag's owners were Scottish. They then took to a British lost and found page on Facebook, detailing the contents of the bag along with the names Anne and Colin that they found in the Valentines card.

Miraculously, and in less than 30 minutes, someone who knew the couple had seen the post and put them in touch with the Macaulays. The Scottish couple returned to Toulouse the next day and were reunited with their bag over lunch with their new French friends. A bottle of whisky - a gift for friends in Béziers - had been stolen, along with some Christmas jumpers, but “nothing major” was missing. “The kindness, the serendipity of it. If it hadn’t happened to me and I had read it, I would have thought: what a lovely story,” Colin said. “And it is.”

“Delphine and her partner have insisted that we go for dinner at their place when we are back in Toulouse at the end of the month, before we fly back to Scotland,” Mr Macaulay said. “I hope that they can come to visit us in Nairn one day. They are really nice kids - they are the same age as our children.

“The reality is that although there are bad people in the world, there are also just really lovely people everywhere. We have certainly found that to be true on our travels.” ■

credit: Colin & Anne Macaulay