Read Chapter 3: The Collector's Tale

The morning fog was burning off the gravel drive when Julien parked his battered Peugeot beneath a row of skeletal plane trees. The address the collector had given him over the phone was less an address than a set of coordinates—a stone farmhouse at the end of a track so narrow his wing mirrors brushed nettles on both sides.

He killed the engine and sat for a moment, letting the silence settle. Somewhere behind the house, a dog barked once and then stopped, as if corrected.

The man who opened the door was smaller than Julien had expected. Sixty, maybe sixty-five, with thin grey hair combed flat and the stooped posture of someone who’d spent decades stooping over tables and shelves. He wore a cardigan with leather buttons and held a magnifying loupe in one hand like a rosary.

“Moreau,” he said. Not a question.

“You’re Monsieur Vasseur?”

The old man turned and walked back inside without answering. Julien followed him through a dark hallway that smelled of old wood and cork, into a room that must have once been a parlor. Now it was a library of wine—not bottles displayed in racks, but shelves upon shelves of them lying on their sides, each one tagged with a small handwritten label. Dust motes floated in the single shaft of light from a high window.

Vasseur sat down at a desk cluttered with auction catalogues and photographs of labels. He didn’t offer Julien a seat.

“You said you had a ’75,” Julien said.

“I said I had *one* ’75. One bottle. Out of an entire lot I purchased twenty years ago.”

Julien waited. Vasseur’s hands moved over the desk, straightening an already neat stack of papers. There was a tremor in them that wasn’t age.

“The lot came from a broker in Belgium who was liquidating a deceased collector’s estate,” Vasseur said. “Forty-two bottles from Château Montrose-Belliveau, covering vintages from ’61 to ’89. Or so the paperwork claimed.”

“But they weren’t from the château.”

Vasseur finally looked at him. His eyes were pale, the colour of washed-out china. “That’s the thing, Inspector. They were. And they weren’t.”

Julien felt the familiar itch at the base of his skull, the one that meant a case had claws in him. “What do you mean?”

The old man pushed aside a catalogue and pulled out a flat box from beneath the desk. He opened it carefully, like a jeweller showing a precious stone. Inside, padded with tissue, lay a single wine label, removed from its bottle and preserved in a clear plastic sleeve.

“This one came off the ’75,” Vasseur said. “Look at it.”

Julien took the sleeve and held it to the light. The label was classic—cream paper, black serif lettering, the château’s silhouette embossed in the centre. A green border ran along the edges, thin and elegant. Below the vintage it read *Château Montrose-Belliveau, Appellation Saint-Estèphe Contrôlée*.

Everything looked right. Almost.

“The border,” Julien said slowly. He’d spent enough years in the wine region to know what he was looking at before he fully understood what he was seeing. “The green line—it breaks here.” He traced the spot with his fingernail, just above the final *e* in the château’s name. A gap no wider than a hair, where the green stopped and never resumed.

Vasseur nodded, his thin lips pressing together. “Now look at the corner.” He produced a second sleeve from the box, a photograph this time, or what looked like a photograph—a digital copy of another label. Same year. Same wine. Same distinctive fault.

“That’s the same bottle?”

“No,” Vasseur said. “That’s a ’78. From a different lot, purchased from a different broker, in a different country. I came across it at an auction in London eleven years ago. I kept the image because I thought the fault was interesting.”

Julien looked between the two labels. The break in the border was identical. Not similar—identical. The same irregular hairline gap in the same position, as if the printing plate had been nicked once and never repaired.

“You buy a lot of vintage Bordeaux,” Julien said. “You know this is unusual?”

“I know that printing plates get damaged. I know that labels get reprinted. But I also know that when a wine is relabelled—when someone replaces the original label with a reproduction to hide the fact that the bottle has been opened and refilled, or to pass off a cheaper vintage as something worth ten times the price—the reproduction never matches perfectly.”

He tapped the sleeve with the ’75 label.

“This is a forgery. And whoever printed it used the same flawed plate for at least four years, which means they weren’t relabelling single bottles. They were producing thousands of labels, for vintages they were selling as genuine.”

Julien set the sleeve down carefully on the desk. The air in the room felt heavier.

“Alexander Belliveau contacted you,” he said. Not a guess. It was why Vasseur had agreed to see him at all; Julien had mentioned Alexandre’s name only in passing on the phone, and the old man’s silence had shifted at it like a needle finding north.

Vasseur’s eyes flickered to a framed photograph on the wall—a younger version of himself standing beside a woman, both of them holding glasses at what looked like a vineyard dinner.

“He found me,” Vasseur said. “Three weeks before he disappeared. He’d traced the bottle—my bottle, the ’75—through the auction records back to the lot I’d purchased. He asked me about the label. I told him what I saw.”

“What else did you tell him?”

“I told him the whole lot was like that. All forty-two. You remove the labels and you find clean bottles underneath—original labels, still intact, beneath the forgeries.” He shook his head slowly. “Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make those bottles look like something they weren’t. Not to make them *less* valuable—to make them *more*.”

“The ’75,” Julien said, thinking of the ledger in the cellar. “The year that shows up everywhere.”

Vasseur’s face tightened. “You know about the murders.”

“I know there were cases. I don’t know the connection.”

The old man stood abruptly and walked to a cabinet against the far wall. He unlocked it with a small brass key from his pocket and removed a single folder, thin and worn. When he returned, he didn’t sit. He held the folder against his chest like a shield.

“There were four bottles in that lot marked with a peculiar stamp on the underside of the cork—a tiny ink mark, like a cross with a slanted bar. I’ve only ever seen it once before, and that was in a book on wine fraud published in the ’80s. The author was a man named Armand Valmont.”

Julien felt the name land like a punch to the sternum. Valmont. The dead inspector.

“Valmont wrote about a ring of counterfeiters operating in the region in the ’60s and ’70s,” Vasseur continued. “He believed they had inside access to a major château—someone who could provide them with genuine wine but false labels, blurring the boundary between real and fake until even experts struggled to distinguish them. He traced the operation to a single period: between 1961 and 1975.”

“The years in the ledger,” Julien murmured.

Vasseur’s eyes met his, and for a moment the tremor in his hands stopped.

“Valmont was killed in 1985,” Vasseur said. “Hit by a car in a hit-and-run in the middle of Bordeaux. In the middle of the day. Witnesses described the car as black, with no plates. The case was closed within a week. Cause of death: accidental.”

“But you don’t think it was.”

“Valmont had just published an article about the Belliveau wines,” Vasseur said. “He was asking questions about their export records. He’d found an inconsistency between what the château declared to customs and what it actually shipped. He was scheduled to present his findings to the regional prosecutor two days later.”

Julien took a slow breath. The room was cold despite the morning sun beginning to press through the high window. He could see it now—not the full shape of things, not yet, but a structure emerging from the fog.

“The ’75 case,” he said. “The one Alexandre linked to the ’61 vintage. Do you know what that case was?”

Vasseur’s mouth opened, then closed. He looked at the folder in his hands, then at Julien, then at the folder again.

“I was the one who found the bottle,” he said finally. “In 1975. I was a young sommelier at a restaurant in Paris. A customer brought in a bottle of Montrose-Belliveau ’61—a magnum, presented with great ceremony. It was meant to be a celebration. He was coming into an inheritance.”

He paused. The silence stretched.

“The customer never made it to the restaurant. He was found in his apartment that afternoon, poisoned. The magnum was still in the crate, unopened. The police took it as evidence, but the case went cold when they couldn’t trace the poison to anything in the bottle. The bottle was still sealed.”

“A decade later,” Julien said slowly, “you found another bottle. From the same lot.” It wasn’t a guess. He watched Vasseur’s face and knew he was right.

“The same lot,” Vasseur confirmed. “The brother inherited instead. He kept the collection. When he died, his executor sold it, and the bottle—the one that had been in the apartment—came back into circulation. I bought it without knowing what it was. It wasn’t until years later that I made the connection.”

“Two bottles. Two deaths.” Julien whispered it, feeling the weight of it. “One vintage. One case number.”

Vasseur didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Julien reached for the folder, and after a long moment, Vasseur handed it over. Inside were photocopied pages—a police report, faded and yellowed, bearing a case number that made Julien stop breathing.

*78-114*.

The same number Alexandre had carved into the cellar wall before he disappeared.