Read Chapter 20: The Phone Call

The call came at seven in the morning, the landline in the kitchen jangling through the quiet house. I’d been awake since five, staring at the ceiling, running the same loops through my head—the stolen magnum, the red envelope, the list of names in that ledger. Sleep had become a stranger.

I picked up on the second ring. “Moreau.”

“Alex. It’s Marcus.” His voice was tight, the way it got when he was onto something. “I need you to sit down.”

“I’m already sitting.”

“Good. Because this one’s a doozy.” A pause, the rustle of papers. “That shell company—the one in the ledger with the Beaune address, the one connected to Roussel’s deposits. I traced it. It’s registered to a physical property. A residential apartment in the old quarter, Rue des Tonneliers.”

I grabbed a pen from the counter, but I didn’t need to write it down. I already knew the street. Everyone in Burgundy knew the street. Tonneliers, cooper’s row, where the men who built the barrels had worked for three centuries.

“Who owns it?”

“A man named Georges Aubert. Retired. Formerly in the cooperage trade—he supplied staves to the estate for over thirty years. Worked with your father, Alex. Directly.”

My grip tightened on the phone. Georges Aubert. The name surfaced from deep water—a heavyset man with a thick grey mustache and hands like slabs of oak, coming up the drive for Sunday lunch when I was a boy. He and Vincent would disappear into the study for hours, emerging with flushed faces and the unmistakable smell of brandy on their breath. I’d never thought twice about it. They were partners, or so I’d assumed. Business partners, old friends.

“Are you sure it’s the same company?” I asked. “Because the entries in that ledger—those were new. Recent. My father’s been dead for over a year.”

“I’m sure. The registration is current. The company was set up in 2019, and the registered office has never changed. It’s all there, Alex. Same name, same address. And here’s the kicker—Georges Aubert is the sole director. He’s the one who signed the financial filings. If those deposits flow through his account, he’s the middleman.”

Léa appeared in the doorway in yesterday’s clothes, dark hair mussed from sleep. She saw my face and stopped, arms crossed, watching.

“Marcus,” I said, “I need to go see this man.”

“I figured you’d say that. I pulled his file—he’s got no priors, no flags. Clean as a whistle on paper. But the timing, Alex—the deposits in that ledger started six months before your father died. If Aubert was the conduit, he was in it with them. And if he was in it with them, he’s got a choice to make right now. He can talk, or he can go down alone.”

I thanked him, ended the call, and met Léa’s eyes. The plan was already forming.

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The apartment on Rue des Tonneliers was a narrow second-floor walk-up above a shuttered cooperage, the wooden sign outside bleached from decades of sun. I’d driven myself, leaving Léa at the estate with strict instructions to stay inside, keep the doors locked, and keep the ledger and my copies of the photographs out of reach.

She hadn’t argued. That worried me more than if she had.

The front door was ajar. Not broken, not forced—just open a hand’s width, the way someone might leave it if they were expecting someone. Or if they’d just let themselves out.

I pushed it open with two fingers and stepped into a hallway that smelled of old wood and furniture polish. The stairs creaked beneath my boots. No lights on in the apartment above, no sound of movement. The silence had a weight to it—the weight of a place where something had already happened.

The door to the apartment at the top of the landing was also open.

Georges Aubert was sitting in a leather armchair by the window, a glass of wine still half full on the side table beside him. His head was tipped back, his eyes closed, his hands resting on the arms of the chair as if he’d simply settled in for an afternoon nap. A revolver lay on the floor beside his foot, still smelling of cordite.

The note was on his chest, weighted down by a fountain pen. Single sheet of cream paper, handwriting neat and controlled—the handwriting of a man who’d made lists his whole life.

*I couldn’t live with the guilt. I’ve done terrible things, and I can’t face what they’d do to me. It’s better this way. Forgive me.*

No name. No date. No details.

I stood in the doorway, breathing through my mouth, trying to process what I was seeing. Then I stepped closer, careful not to touch anything, and read the note again. The wine glass. The half-empty bottle of burgundy on the side table—a Volnay, I noted automatically, a good one. The revolver on the floor. The man in the chair, peaceful as a churchyard.

Something was wrong.

I crouched, peering at the glass. A man who’d written a suicide note, who’d decided to end his own life—would he pour himself a glass of wine first? Maybe. A last comfort. But he’d barely touched it, and there was no tremor in the note’s handwriting, no hesitation marks, no angled letters betraying a hand that knew what it was about to do.

And the glass itself—it wasn’t in the position you’d expect if he’d been holding it and dropped it in a final moment. It was centered on the coaster, almost deliberately placed.

Like a stage set.

I backed away from the chair, heart hammering. My eyes swept the room—the neat row of books, the photographs on the mantlepiece, the dead man’s small, tidy life rendered suddenly, horribly transparent. His family. His history. Thirty years of supplying staves to my father, and then—what? He’d become something else. A liability. A loose end.

And someone had tied it off.

I pulled out my phone, then stopped. Who did I call? Delacroix was the obvious answer—the inspector who claimed to believe my father was murdered, who warned me about the mole. But if there was a mole inside the gendarmerie, and if the Bouchards had gotten to Georges Aubert before I could, that meant they knew I was closing in.

They knew about the ledger.

They knew about Marcus’s call.

Or worse—they’d known Georges was the weak point all along, and they’d simply moved first.

The realization hit me like cold water. Philippe had been hired after my father’s death. Another man before him, briefly. But Georges Aubert—he’d worked with Vincent for decades, supplying the oak staves for the barrels that aged the wine in the cellar. He’d have had access to the estate. He’d have known the press house. He’d have known where the false magnum was kept.

But I shook my head. No. This wasn’t the work of an inside man. This was the work of someone who’d gotten here before me, who’d cleaned up a loose end before it could fray.

I took a photo of the note. Then another of the room. Then I walked out, pulling the door shut behind me, and descended the stairs with the precision of a man who knew he was being watched.

The street was empty. Shutters drawn. A cat slunk between garbage bins across the way.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Léa’s name on the screen.

“Alex.” Her voice was low, controlled. “He knows. The cellar master—he’s gone. I went down to check the northern racks and he’s not there. His tools are laid out, his jacket’s on the hook, but he’s gone. And the vault—Alex, the vault door is cracked. Not open, just cracked, like someone tried to force it and didn’t finish.”

I gripped the phone, blood roaring in my ears.

“Get out of the house,” I said. “Get the ledger. Take my car and drive to Dijon, now. Don’t call me until you’re there. Do not stop, do not tell anyone where you’re going. Just go.”

A beat of silence. Then, quiet but resolute: “What about the cellar master?”

“He’s gone, Léa. That means they already have him.” I started toward my car, steps quickening. “Or they’ve taken him somewhere we can’t reach. And if they’ve moved against the estate, they’re not waiting for Monday anymore.”

I ended the call and got in the driver’s seat, but I didn’t start the engine. I sat there, hands on the wheel, watching the empty street in the rearview mirror.

Georges Aubert, dead in his chair. The cellar master, gone. The ledger still in my possession, if Léa moved fast enough. The microfilm in Dijon, sitting in a darkroom, waiting to be developed.

I had one play left. One card I hadn’t shown anyone, not even Delacroix.

My father’s lawyer in Dijon—old Marcel Fournier, who’d handled the estate’s legal affairs for forty years. He knew things. He’d buried secrets deeper than any ledger. And he was the only man left in Burgundy I trusted with what I was about to do.

I started the engine and pulled away from the curb, leaving the dead man in his tidy apartment behind me, knowing that whoever had staged his suicide was already a step ahead. But they didn’t know about Fournier.

Not yet.