Read Chapter 27: The Search

Dawn came through the slats of Julien’s shutters like a blade. Camille hadn’t slept, and by the set of his jaw as he pulled a T-shirt over his head, neither had he.

“Two hours,” he said. “The board meets in two hours.”

She stood from the edge of his bed, the sheet still tangled around her legs from the night before—a night of confession, not passion. She’d told him everything. The fake degree. Moreau’s debts. Vincent’s letter. And he’d chosen her. Now they had to make that choice mean something.

“We can’t walk into that room blind,” she said. “You know what Moreau will say. He’ll frame the surgery as non-negotiable, the notes as my fault, and the board will vote whatever way he tells them.”

Julien grabbed his phone from the nightstand. “Then we don’t walk in blind. We find the money.”

---

Moreau’s office was on the second floor of the clubhouse, a glass-walled fishbowl overlooking the training pitches. At six in the morning it was dark, the pitch lights off, the Mediterranean a gray smear beyond the coastal road.

Julien jiggled the handle. Locked.

“You know breaking and entering isn’t going to help my case,” Camille said.

“It’s not breaking.” He pulled a keycard from his wallet. “Stéphane gave me this last year. Emergency access for when I forgot my kit before away matches.”

“Stéphane is a grounds keeper who thinks you walk on water.”

“Exactly. He never asked for it back.”

The lock clicked. They slipped inside. Moreau’s desk was a monument to an ego outgrowing its salary—a mahogany slab, framed photos of himself with regional politicians, a rugby ball signed by the ’07 squad. Camille went straight for the computer, but it was password-locked.

“He’s not stupid enough to leave that lying around,” she muttered.

“No.” Julien was already pulling at a filing cabinet. “But he’s arrogant enough to keep paper records. Old men always do.”

They worked in silence for ten minutes. Bank statements, sponsorship contracts, a folder thick with injury reports—she recognized some of the markups in Dr. Faure’s handwriting. But nothing about debts.

“This is useless,” Julien said, slamming a drawer. “The man doesn’t keep receipts for his vices. He’d have them hidden somewhere his wife can’t find them.”

Camille froze. “His wife.”

“What about her?”

“Moreau’s a creature of habit. Marriages make him complacent. He thinks she never looks at anything.”

She moved to a bookshelf, ran her fingers along the spines. Law books, business biographies, a worn copy of a French rugby history. She pulled it out. A envelope fell from between the pages, unsealed.

“Julien.”

He came over. The envelope was marked *MARSEILLE* in a neat, unfamiliar hand. Inside were wire transfer records from a bank Camille didn’t recognize, routing through a shell company called *Côte Bleue Développement*.

“Property development,” she read aloud. “That’s what Marcel Aubert told the club when he invested.”

“Aubert is the landowner who bought the stadium sponsorship rights.”

“He’s not a landowner.” Camille scanned further down the page. Three separate transfers, each for two hundred thousand euros, paid out over the last nine months. The sender wasn’t Aubert’s shell company. It was his name attached to a letterhead she’d never seen. *Domaine Agro-Méditerranée*.

“That’s not real estate,” she said. “Domaine Agro-Méditerranée is a front. I’ve seen that name before.”

Julien’s eyes narrowed. “Where?”

“Paris. A police blotter a journalist friend showed me. They busted a cocaine ring running through Marseille that used agricultural fronts to launder cash. Same shell company. Same structure.”

Julien took the paper, held it up to the gray light coming through the window. “Marcel Aubert is a syndicate man.”

“He’s not just a syndicate man. He’s their money. He funnels the cash into legitimate businesses—rugby clubs included.”

They stood there, the truth settling over them like a cold front. Camille’s hands were shaking. She put the paper down carefully, as if it might burn her.

“Moreau isn’t just in debt to bookies,” she said. “He’s embedded in their operation. He’s been laundering for them through the club’s sponsorship deals. That’s why he can’t say no. That’s why they have leverage.”

“And the board doesn’t know,” Julien said.

“The board thinks Aubert is a patron. They think he bought the stadium naming rights because he loves rugby.”

Julien’s jaw worked. “Can we use it?”

“Against Moreau? He’d see it as a threat. He’d bury it before we could say it out loud. But if the board knew their president is running a money-laundering scheme through club accounts…” She tilted her head, thinking.

“Then they’d have every reason to vote him out. Not just on the injury question. On everything.”

---

They found the second thing in a locked drawer behind Moreau’s chair. Julien broke it with a letter opener he didn’t ask permission to use. Inside was a handwritten ledger, the kind a man keeps when he doesn’t trust anyone, not even the computers.

The entries were in Moreau’s cramped script. *Avance club—€50,000. Remboursé Marseille—€62,000.* Every line was a transfer from the club’s youth development fund.

“He’s been stealing from the academy,” Camille whispered.

“Thèo’s lads. The kids he paraded around at the season launch. The ones he said were the future of this club.”

Julien’s knuckles were white around the ledger. “How much?”

Camille did the math quickly, running through the entries. “Over the last season and a half? Just shy of a quarter million.”

“For the gambling.”

“For the gambling, and to keep Aubert’s payments quiet. He’s not just in debt. He’s embezzling to pay off the debt, and the syndicate is skimming off the top.”

Julien stared at the ledger, then at the transfer records, then at Camille. His face had that dangerous stillness she’d seen on the pitch—the calm before a player launched himself into a tackle.

“We bring both to the board,” he said. “Now. Not at the meeting. We find Moreau in the corridor and we tell him we’ll burn it all unless he calls off the surgery demand and stops threatening you.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“Because Aubert isn’t just Moreau’s creditor. He’s the syndicate’s representative. If we expose the laundering, we expose their operation. They won’t come after Moreau. They’ll come after us.” She met his eyes. “And they’ve already made it clear they know where I live.”

Julien’s anger didn’t fade, but it sharpened into something else—focus. He pocketed the ledger and the wire transfer records.

“Then we don’t take this to the board. We take it somewhere else. The one place they can’t protect themselves from.”

“The police?”

“The press.” He pulled out his phone, already scrolling. “The same journalist who wrote your bit about my crumbling body. She got the notes leaked anonymously. That means she has sources inside the club. She’ll love a story about a president laundering drug money through a youth fund.”

Camille caught his wrist. “Julien. If we go to the press before the board meeting, we lose every card we have. They’ll close ranks. Moreau will say you’re a desperate cripple making accusations. Aubert will burn his records. And we’ll be left with nothing.”

He held her gaze for a long moment. Then he looked at the window, at the first ferrous light of the sun breaking over the Mediterranean.

“We need more,” he said. “We need proof that can’t be dismissed. The ledger is Moreau’s hand. The transfers are Aubert’s front. But we need a connection between them that a journalist will print.”

“Vincent’s letter,” Camille said.

“What about it?”

“The letter didn’t just mention me. It said something else. ‘The club is not theirs to make dirty. They will answer for what they have taken.’ I assumed he meant the syndicate. But Vincent worked as Moreau’s assistant before he died. He saw the ledgers. He saw the handoffs.”

Julien’s nostrils flared. “Vincent tried to whistleblow.”

“And he died in the crash on the A8. The one that the police ruled a brake failure.”

The implication hung in the air like exhaust. Neither of them said it out loud.

“Vincent had a scrum cap,” Camille said slowly. “He kept documents in it sometimes. I saw it once in his locker—he said it was his grandfather’s, lucky old thing from the 60s. We used it for his funeral display.”

“You think there was evidence hidden in the cap?”

“I think Vincent was careful. And the cap is gone. It was in my office, in a storage box with the other memorial items, when I came back from shore leave. I checked the day the notes went viral. The box was there. The cap wasn’t.”

Julien was already moving toward the door. “Then we go get it before someone else does.”