‘I don’t want to hold you up.’
‘You know, with this news I have to deliver …’
He knew the Ile Saint-Louis from when they had lived on Place des Vosges, and at that time they had often walked arm in arm around the island in the evening.
He rang at a green door. Cars were lined up along the pavements, most of them luxury models. A narrow door opened up in the larger one.
‘Monsieur Batille, please?’ he asked, stopping by a kind of skylight.
A sleepy woman’s voice replied simply:
‘Second on the left.’
He took the lift, and some of the rain drenching his overcoat and trousers formed a puddle at his feet. The building, like most of the ones on the island, had been restored. The walls were white stone, the lighting came from torches in carved bronze. On the marble landing, the doormat bore a big red letter B.
He pressed the button and heard an electric bell ringing very far away, but a very long time passed before the door opened silently.
A young parlour-maid in a fashionable uniform looked at him curiously.
‘I’d like to talk to Monsieur Batille.’
‘The father or the son?’
‘The father.’
‘Monsieur and madame haven’t come home, and I don’t know when they’ll be back.’
He showed her his badge. She asked him:
‘What is it?’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, of the Police Judiciaire.’
‘And you’ve come to see monsieur at this time of night? Does he know what it’s about?’
‘No.’
‘Is it that urgent?’
‘It’s important.’
‘It’s almost midnight. Monsieur and madame have gone to the theatre.’
‘In that case, it’s possible that they’ll be back soon.’
‘Unless, as they often do, they go for supper with friends afterwards.’
‘Didn’t the younger Monsieur Batille go with them?’
‘He never goes with them.’
She sounded embarrassed. She didn’t know what to do with him, and he must have looked pitiful, dripping with water. He saw a vast hall, its parquet floor covered with a rug, light blue tending slightly towards green.
‘If it’s really urgent.’
She resigned herself to letting him in.
‘Give me your hat and your overcoat.’
She glanced anxiously at his shoes. She still couldn’t ask him to take them off.
‘This way.’
She hung the coat up in a cupboard, and hesitated to bring Maigret into the big drawing room that opened up on the left.
‘Would you mind waiting here?’
He understood very clearly. The apartment was luxurious in a way that was almost excessively refined, and rather feminine. The armchairs in the drawing room were white, and the paintings on the wall were from Picasso’s blue period, and by Renoir and Marie Laurencin.
The maid, young and pretty, was clearly wondering whether she was supposed to leave him on his own or keep an eye on him, as if she didn’t place very much trust in the badge that he had shown her.
‘Is Monsieur Batille a businessman?’
‘Don’t you know him?’
‘No.’
‘So you don’t know that he’s the owner of Mylène Perfumes and Beauty Products?’
He knew so little about beauty products! And Madame Maigret, who only used a small amount of powder, couldn’t have kept him up to date.
‘How old is he?’
‘Forty-four. Forty-five. He looks very young and …’
She blushed. She must have been more or less in love with her boss.
‘What about his wife?’
‘That’s her portrait that you’ll see if you bend down a little, above the mantelpiece.’
In a blue evening gown. Blue and pale pink seemed to be the colours of the house, as in the paintings of Marie Laurencin.
‘I think I hear the lift.’
And in spite of herself she gave a faint sigh of relief.
She talked to them in an undertone, near the door that she had rushed to open. They were a young couple, elegant, apparently carefree, coming home after an evening at the theatre. They each looked in turn, from a distance, at this intruder with the wet shoes and trousers, who had risen clumsily from his chair and was trying to keep his composure.
The man removed his grey coat, beneath which he wore a dinner-jacket, and his wife, beneath her leopard-skin coat, was wearing a cocktail dress of a fine silver mesh. They had about ten metres to walk, maybe less. Batille came over first, taking quick and nervous steps. His wife followed him.
‘I’m told you are Detective Chief Inspector Maigret?’ he murmured with a frown.
‘That’s correct.’
‘If I am not mistaken, you are the head of the Crime Squad?’
There was a brief and quite unpleasant silence during which Madame Batille tried to guess what was happening; already she had shed the relaxed mood with which she had passed through the door a few moments before.
‘Strange time of night to … Might this have anything to do with my son?’
‘Were you expecting bad news?’
‘Not at all. Let’s not stay here. Let’s go into my office.’
It was the last room, which opened up on to the drawing room. Batille’s real office must have been elsewhere, in the Mylène building, which Maigret had often noticed in Avenue Matignon.
The wood of the bookshelves was very light, lemon or sycamore, and the walls were covered with books. The leather armchairs were a very light beige, like the desk accessories. On the desk stood a photograph in a silver frame, showing Madame Batille, with the faces of two children, a boy and girl.
‘Have a seat. Have you been waiting for me for a long time?’
‘Only ten minutes or so.’
‘Can I offer you a drink?’
‘No thank you.’
It seemed as if now the man was putting off the moment of hearing what Maigret had to say to him.
‘You aren’t worried about your son?’
He seemed to think about it for a second.
‘No … He’s a calm and reserved boy, perhaps too calm and reserved.’
‘What do you think about the company he keeps?’
‘He hardly sees anybody. He’s quite the opposite of his sister, who is only eighteen and makes friends easily. He has no friends, no colleagues … Has something happened to him?’
‘Yes.’
‘An accident?’
‘If you could put it that way. He was attacked this evening, on the dark pavement of Rue Popincourt.’
‘Is he injured?’
‘Yes.’
‘Seriously?’
‘He’s dead.’
He would have preferred not to see them, not to witness their abrupt collapse. The chic couple, full of ease and confidence, disappeared. Their clothes no longer came from the grand stylist, the smart tailor. The apartment itself lost its elegance and charm.
Now there was only a man and a woman still struggling to believe in the reality that they were being told about.
‘Are you sure that it’s my—’
‘Antoine Batille, isn’t that right?’
Maigret held out the wallet, still drenched with water.
‘That’s his, yes.’
He automatically lit a cigarette. His hands were trembling. His lips too.
‘How did it happen?’
‘He came out of a little local bar. He walked about fifty metres through the squalling rain and someone stabbed him several times from behind.’
The woman grimaced as if she was the one who had been stabbed, and her husband put his arm around her shoulders. He tried to speak but wasn’t immediately able to do so. And to say what, in any case? What was running through his head, even if it wasn’t his current concern:
‘Have they arrested the …’
‘No.’
‘Did he die straight away?’
‘Upon arrival at the Saint-Antoine Hospital.’
‘Can we go and see him?’
‘I would advise you not to go there tonight, but tomorrow morning.’
‘Did he suffer?’
‘The doctor says not.’
‘You should go to bed, Martine. At least lie down in your bedroom.’
He led her away gently but firmly.
‘I’ll be with you in a moment, inspector.’
Batille was away for almost a quarter of an hour, and when he came back he was very pale, his features drawn, his face expressionless.
‘Please, have a seat.’
He was small, thin and nervous. It was as if Maigret’s big, heavy bulk made him uneasy.
‘You still don’t want anything to drink?’
He opened a small bar and took out a bottle and two glasses.
‘I won’t pretend I don’t need it.’
He served himself a whisky and poured some into the second glass.
‘A lot of soda?’
And, straight away:
‘I don’t understand. I can’t understand. Antoine was a boy who hid nothing from me, and besides, there was nothing to hide in his life. He was … I find it hard to talk about him in the past tense, and yet I’ll have to get used to it … He was a student. He was studying literature at the Sorbonne. He wasn’t part of any group. He didn’t have the slightest interest in politics.’
He stared at the tan carpet, arms dangling, and said to himself:
‘They’ve killed my boy. Why? But why?’
‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’
He looked at Maigret as if for the first time.
‘Why did you take the trouble to come here in person? For the police, it’s just a run-of-the-mill event, isn’t it?’
‘Just by chance I was almost at the scene.’
‘Did you see anything?’
‘No.’
‘Did anyone see anything?’
‘An Italian grocer, who was going home with his wife. I have brought you the objects I found in your son’s pockets, but I forgot his tape recorder.’
The boy’s father didn’t seem to understand straight away, then he murmured:
‘Ah! Yes.’
He nearly smiled.
‘That was his passion. You will probably laugh. His sister and I joked with him about it. Other people are wild about photography and go hunting for photogenic faces even under bridges.
‘Antoine collected human voices. Often he spent whole evenings doing it. He went into cafés, stations, all kinds of public places and switched on his tape recorder.
‘He wore it around his neck, and lots of people thought it was a camera. He had a miniature microphone hidden in his hand.’
At last Maigret had something to cling to.
‘Did he ever have any trouble?’
‘Only once. He was in a bar near the Quartier des Ternes. Two men were leaning on the counter. Antoine, leaning on his elbows beside them, was discreetly recording.
‘“Come on, kid,” one of the two men said suddenly.
‘He took his tape recorder off him and removed the cassette.
‘“I don’t know what you’re playing at, but if I ever see you round here again, try not to have that thing with you.”’
Gérard Batille took a sip and went on:
‘Do you think that …’
‘Anything is possible. We can’t rule anything out. Did he often go out voice-hunting?’
‘Two or three evenings a week.’
‘Always alone?’
‘I told you, he had no friends. He called those recordings “human documents”.’
‘Are there many of them?’
‘Maybe a hundred, maybe more. From time to time he would listen to them and erase the ones that didn’t work. At what time do you think, tomorrow …?’
‘I’ll let the hospital know. After eight, at any rate.’
‘Could I have the body brought back here?’
‘Not straight away.’
The boy’s father understood, and his face turned even paler, as if he was imagining the post-mortem.
‘Excuse me, inspector, but I …’
He couldn’t keep going. He needed to be alone, or perhaps go and join his wife, perhaps weep or shout meaningless words into the silence.
He said, as if to himself:
‘I don’t know what time Minou will be coming back.’
‘Who’s—?’
‘His sister. She’s only eighteen but she lives as she pleases. I imagine you have a coat.’
The maid appeared just as they reached the cupboard and helped Maigret to put on his wet overcoat and held out his hat.
He found himself on the stairs, then passed through the little door and stayed there for a while, watching the rain come down. The wind seemed to have subsided a little, the torrents of rain were less furious. He hadn’t dared to ask permission to ring for a taxi.
Shoulders hunched, he crossed Pont Marie, took narrow Rue Saint-Paul and eventually found a taxi parked outside Saint-Paul Métro station.
‘Boulevard Richard-Lenoir.’
‘Got it, chief.’
Someone who knew him and didn’t protest that it was too short a journey. Raising his head, once he had got out of the car, he noticed light in the windows of his apartment. As he was climbing the last flight of stairs, the door opened.
‘I hope you haven’t caught a cold.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I’ve got some boiling water to make you a hot rum. Sit down. Let me take your shoes off.’
His socks needed wringing out. She went and fetched him a pair of slippers.
‘Pardon told his wife and me. How did the parents react? Why did you have to …?’
‘I don’t know.’
He had attended to the matter automatically, because it had happened almost right in front of him, because it reminded him of so many years that he had spent in the streets of Paris at night.
‘They didn’t grasp it straight away. They’ll both be going to pieces now.’
‘Are they young?’
‘The man must be a bit over forty-five, but I would say less than fifty. His wife looks barely forty and she’s very pretty. You know Mylène perfumes?’
‘Of course. Everyone—’
‘Well, it’s them.’
‘They’re very rich. They have a chateau in the Sologne, a yacht in Cannes and they give glittering parties.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You forget that I sometimes spend hours waiting for you, and I sometimes read the newspaper gossip columns.’
She poured some rum into a glass, added some sugar, left in the spoon so that the glass didn’t shatter and added boiling water.
‘A slice of lemon?’
‘No.’
The room felt small and cramped. He looked around at the decor like someone coming back from a long journey.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘As you said, they’re very rich. They live in one of the most sumptuous apartments I’ve ever seen. They were coming back from the theatre, still in high spirits. They saw me sitting at the end of the hall. The maid told them in a low voice who I was.’
‘Take your clothes off.’
In the end, weren’t he and his wife better off here? He put on his pyjamas and went to brush his teeth, and a quarter of an hour later, a little light-headed because of the rum, he was in bed next to Madame Maigret.
‘Goodnight,’ she said, bringing her face close to his.
He kissed her, as he had done for so many years, and murmured:
‘Goodnight.’
‘As usual?’
That meant:
‘Shall I wake you up at seven thirty as usual, with your coffee?’
He muttered an already vague ‘yes’, because sleep had suddenly hit him. He didn’t dream. At any rate, if he did, he didn’t remembe
r it. And all of a sudden it was morning.
As he drank his coffee, sitting up in bed, and his wife opened the curtains, he tried to see through the tulle covering the lower parts of the windows.
‘Is it still raining?’
‘No. But judging by the way the men are walking with their hands deep in their pockets, it isn’t spring yet, whatever the calendar says.’
It was 19 March. A Wednesday. His first task was to telephone the Saint-Antoine Hospital, and he had a great deal of trouble getting through to a member of the administrative staff.
‘Yes. I would like him to be put in a special room … I know he’s dead. That’s no reason for his parents to go and see him in the basement. They’ll be there in an hour or two. After their visit, the body will be transferred to the Forensic Institute … Yes. Don’t worry. The family will pay … Yes. They will fill in as many forms as you like.’
He sat down opposite his wife and ate two croissants while drinking a fresh cup of coffee and looking mechanically into the street. There were still clouds moving very low in the sky, but they weren’t the same unhealthy colour as the previous day. The wind, which was still strong, shook the branches of the trees.
‘Do you have any idea …?’
‘You know I never have ideas.’
‘And if you do you never say so. Didn’t you think Pardon looked terrible?’
‘Did you notice that too? He isn’t just tired, he’s getting pessimistic. Yesterday he talked to me about his profession as he has never done before.’
At nine o’clock he was in his office, and called the eleventh arrondissement station.
‘Maigret here. Is that you, Louvelle?’
He had recognized his voice.
‘I expect you’re calling about the tape recorder?’
‘Yes. Have you got it?’
‘Demarie collected it and brought it here. I was worried that the rain might have ruined it, but I got it working. I wonder why the boy recorded these conversations.’
‘Can you send me the recorder this morning?’
‘At the same time as the report, which will be typed up in a few minutes.’
Some mail. Some filing. The previous evening, he hadn’t told Pardon that he too was weighed down under administrative paperwork.
Then he went to the morning briefing in the commissioner’s office. In a few words he gave an account of what had happened the previous day; because of Gérard Batille’s celebrity the case risked causing a stir.
Maigret and the Killer Page 2
