Read Chapter 27: On the Run

The cottage smelled of damp wool and last season’s copper spray. A rusted bed frame sagged against one wall, its mattress rolled up and bound with twine. Julien locked the door behind him, slid the bolt, and let his back meet the splintered wood. His hands were steady. That worried him more than trembling would have.

Through the single dirt-filmed window, the vineyard rolled down toward the Dordogne in even rows, their leaves gone amber and bronze. Forty-eight hours ago he’d been a private investigator chasing a missing heir. Now he was a fugitive with a recording that could take down a police captain and a financier, hiding in a shack his grandfather had used during the 1945 harvest.

He pulled his phone from his jacket. One bar. Enough.

The journalist’s name was Claire Fontaine. She’d been chasing the Belliveau story for months before Julien had even been hired, and she’d been the first to call when Étienne Belliveau’s remains surfaced at the bottom of the estate’s old well. She believed in the story. More importantly, she had reach—a column in *Sud-Ouest* and a podcast with forty thousand listeners.

Julien dialed. It rang four times. Five. On the sixth, a recorded voice told him the subscriber was unavailable.

He tried her office line. Same result.

He texted: *I have something. Delacroix. On tape. Can you meet?*

The reply came sixteen minutes later, in the form of a forwarded press release from the *Sud-Ouest* newsroom. Julien read it twice before the words settled.

> **Fontaine departs for sabbatical; new investigative lead announced** > > Bordeaux– Claire Fontaine, senior crime correspondent, will step away from full-time reporting for a personal project, effective immediately. The paper's managing editor, Gérard Loubet, confirmed the move is unrelated to the ongoing Belliveau estate investigation. "Claire has earned the right to recharge," Loubet said. "We're proud of her work and look forward to her return."

Julien swore softly. He sat on the edge of the bed frame, the springs groaning beneath him. Fontaine had been chasing this story harder than anyone. She’d called him twice a week since the beginning. She wouldn’t walk away for a sabbatical.

Someone had gotten to her.

He checked Fontaine’s social feed. Her last post was a photograph of the Gironde estuary at sunset, captioned *"Gratitude for old friends and new beginnings."* Posted five hours ago. The account had liked, retweeted, and otherwise engaged with nothing since. Dead air. Managed by a handler, or cut off completely.

His phone buzzed. A number he didn’t recognize.

He let it ring. When the voicemail notification arrived, he pressed it to his ear.

*“Monsieur Moreau. This is Henri Vasseur of Vasseur & Fils, solicitors. I represent an interested party who wishes to discuss your current predicament. Please call me back at your earliest convenience. I assure you, discretion will be mutual.”*

Julien deleted the message. Delage’s eyes were everywhere. But the fact they were reaching out through a lawyer meant they didn’t know where he was. That gave him time. Not much.

He called Bréard next. The commissioner answered on the second ring.

“Moreau. You shouldn’t be calling this line.”

“The journalist. Fontaine. They bought her.”

Bréard’s silence was confirmation enough. When he spoke, his voice was low, careful. “You need to understand something. Delage has reach. He has money. The construction of your narrative is already underway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Captain Delacroix’s arrest was handled quietly, but someone in the building has started a counter-narrative suggesting you manipulated the recording. That you coerced him. That this is the frame-up of a man who was trying to hold you accountable for your own missteps.”

“My missteps? I was set up.”

“I believe you,” Bréard said. “But belief doesn’t hold up in a court of law, and it doesn’t stop sixty seconds of footage from being edited into something else. Delage has already leaked a partial recording that makes you sound like you were orchestrating the suppression of the evidence yourself.”

Julien stood. His chest felt tight. “You have the full recording. You have his confession.”

“I have it. But the media narrative is shifting. Unless we can get this in front of a judge—or the public—in the next twenty-four hours, you’re going to be the story. And no one will listen to a fugitive.”

“Twenty-four hours before what?”

Bréard paused. “There’s a motion to vacate the estate pending before the tribunal. An emergency hearing. Delage’s counsel filed it this morning, citing your criminal status as grounds to stop the forensic recovery. If they succeed in blocking the excavation, the well evidence becomes inadmissible. And the debt deadline—I assume you remember that.”

The Swiss bank. Thirty-six hours had become twelve. If the debt was declared invalid, the estate had a fighting chance. If it wasn’t—the Belliveau heirs would lose everything, including access to the well that proved a century of murder and fraud.

“I need to see the original promissory notes,” Julien said. “The ones the family signed. If Parmentier never existed, the signature is forged. But I can’t examine them from a wine worker’s cottage.”

“Where are you?”

Julien looked around the shack. Rodent droppings along the baseboards. An old pruning knife hanging from a nail. A photograph of a harvest crew from 1958, twenty men with weathered faces, one of them wearing his grandfather’s smile.

“Somewhere safe,” he said. “For now.”

“Get somewhere safer,” Bréard said. “Delage knows you’re in the region. He’s already placed a private security team on the estate perimeter. They’re watching for you. If you get caught before you can prove fraud, this is over.”

The line went dead.

Julien pocketed the phone. Fontaine had been bought. The police commissioner was compromised enough that he had to speak in code. The forensic team at the well was one court motion away from being pulled. And the only person who could still unravel the entire scheme was sitting in a shed with a dead battery in his car and a single bar of signal.

He pulled the pruning knife from the nail. Its blade was honed to a fine edge, oiled and cared for by hands that had been gone for decades. He turned it over. On the wooden handle, burned into the grain, was a small brand: the letter *B*, surrounded by a circle.

The Belliveau stamp.

Julien went still. He ran his thumb over the mark. His grandfather had worked the Belliveau vineyards for thirty years. He’d been given a cottage at the edge of the estate. The tools were his own.

But this one wasn’t a pruning knife. Not for vines. The blade was curved like a scythe, too heavy for grape work.

He turned it into the light. Near the guard, barely visible, was an engraving. Three digits followed by a year.

*1903.*

The year of the murders. The year Étienne Belliveau had supposedly disappeared into the well.

Julien’s grandfather had never spoken of 1903. But he’d kept this knife, hidden in a wall cavity, labeled with the vintage that marked the beginning of the Belliveau deceptions.

The family wasn’t just protecting a secret. They’d been armed against it.

Julien pocketed the knife. Whatever his grandfather had known, the answer wasn’t in this shack. But the estate’s records were. The Château had a private library, untouched by the forensic teams, where the family had kept every document they’d ever wanted to forget.

If the promissory notes were there. If the true history of the vintages was written down. He could prove everything.

He looked out the window. The estate lay two kilometers through the vines, its towers faint against the dusk sky.

The security team would be watching the doors. They wouldn’t be watching the library.

He tucked the knife into his belt, pulled his jacket tight, and slipped out the back door after the sun went down.