‘Neither do I. Except if I went too quickly, he probably wouldn’t allow himself to be arrested, and would prefer to end it all.’
‘Are you afraid that he’ll kill himself?’
‘He hasn’t much to lose, don’t you think?’
‘Hundreds of criminals have been apprehended, and very few have taken their own lives.’
‘What if he was of that type?’
‘Has he written to the papers yet?’
‘A letter was deposited in a newspaper’s letterbox, yesterday evening or last night.’
‘I think that mania is well known. If I remember my criminology courses correctly, it’s usually the preserve of the paranoid.’
‘According to psychiatrists, yes.’
‘You don’t agree with them?’
‘I don’t know enough to contradict them. The only difference between them and me is that I don’t divide people into categories.’
‘But it’s necessary.’
‘Necessary why?’
‘To judge them, for example.’
‘It’s not my role to judge.’
‘I was told that you’d be hard to handle.’
The magistrate said that with a faint smile, but he still meant it.
‘Shall we do a deal? It’s Monday. Let’s say Wednesday at the same time …’
‘I’m listening.’
‘If your man isn’t behind bars, you’ll send his photograph to the papers.’
‘You really want me to do that?’
‘I’m giving you as much time as I think is necessary.’
‘Thank you.’
Maigret went back down to his floor and opened the door to the inspectors’ office. He didn’t need them especially.
‘Are you coming, Janvier?’
In his office he went over to the window and opened it, because he was hot, and the noise from outside suddenly filled the room. He sat down at his desk and chose a pipe with a curved stem that he smoked less often than the others.
‘No news?’
‘No news, chief.’
‘Sit down.’
The magistrate hadn’t understood. For him, criminals were defined by one article or another of the Penal Code.
Maigret also sometimes needed to think out loud.
‘He called me again.’
‘Has he decided to hand himself in?’
‘He wants to. He’s still hesitating, the way one hesitates to jump into icy water.’
‘I suppose he trusts you?’
‘I think so. But he knows it’s not down to me. I’m just back from upstairs. When the examining magistrate starts questioning him, unfortunately he’ll grasp certain realities.
‘I know a bit more about him. He comes from a small provincial town, and preferred not to tell me which one. That means it’s a very small town, where we would easily have been able to pick up his trail. His father is a head accountant, a right-hand man, as he says, not without bitterness.’
‘I know the type.’
‘They wanted him to be a lawyer or a doctor. He couldn’t complete his studies. And he didn’t want to go into the same company as his father either. That’s not uncommon, as I told him.
‘He’s an office clerk. He lives alone. He has a reason for not getting married.’
‘Did he tell you what?’
‘No, but I think I understand.’
But Maigret avoided saying anything more on the subject.
‘There’s nothing I can do but wait. He will probably remind me tomorrow. On Wednesday afternoon, I will have to send his photograph to the newspapers.’
‘Why?’
‘An ultimatum from the examining magistrate. He doesn’t want to assume the responsibility of waiting for longer than that.’
‘Do you hope that—?’
The phone rang.
‘It’s your anonymous caller, inspector.’
‘Hello … Monsieur Maigret? … Forgive me for hanging up on you this morning. There are moments when I say to myself that nothing makes any sense. I’m like a fly bumping into a window as it tries to escape the four walls of the room …’
‘You’re not in the office?’
‘I went in. I did so in good faith. They gave me an urgent file. When I opened it and read the first few lines, I asked myself what I was doing there …
‘I was seized by a sort of panic, and on the pretext of going to the toilet I went out into the corridor … I paused just long enough to grab my raincoat and hat in passing … I was worried that I was going to be caught, as if I felt I was being hunted down.’
At the start of the call, Maigret had gestured to Janvier to pick up the second receiver.
‘What part of town are you in?’
‘On the Grands Boulevards … I’ve been walking in the crowd for over an hour … There are times when I’m angry with you, when I suspect you of doing it on purpose to drive me mad, to put me gradually in such a state of mind that I will have no option left but to hand myself in …’
‘Have you been drinking?’
‘How can you tell?’
His voice grew more vehement.
‘I’ve had two or three brandies.’
‘Are you not in the habit of drinking?’
‘Just a glass of wine with meals, the occasional aperitif.’
‘Do you smoke?’
‘No.’
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I don’t know … Nothing … Walk … Perhaps go and sit in a café to read the afternoon papers …’
‘Have you sent any other messages?’
‘No. I might write one, but I haven’t got much left to say.’
‘Do you live in a furnished apartment?’
‘I own my own furniture and have access to a kitchenette and a bathroom.’
‘Do you prepare your own meals?’
‘I used to prepare my evening meal.’
‘And you haven’t done that for a few days?’
‘That’s right. I go home as late as possible … Why are you asking me such banal questions?’
‘Because they help me to understand you.’
‘Do you do the same thing with all your clients?’
‘It varies from case to case.’
‘Are they so different from each other?’
‘All men are different … Why don’t you come and see me?’
He giggled nervously.
‘Would you let me go again?’
‘I can’t promise to do that.’
‘You see? When I go and see you, as you say, that’s when I will have made a definite decision.’
Maigret nearly talked to him about the examining magistrate’s ultimatum, then he weighed the pros and cons and decided to keep quiet.
‘Goodbye, inspector.’
‘Goodbye. Good luck.’
Maigret and Janvier looked at one another.
‘Poor guy!’ Janvier murmured.
‘He’s still struggling with himself. He’s lucid. He’s not deluding himself. I wonder if he’ll come before Wednesday.’
‘Don’t you have a sense that he’s already hesitating?’
‘He’s been hesitating since Saturday. For now he’s outside, in the sunlight, in the crowd where no one is pointing at him. He can go into a café and order a brandy and they’ll serve him without paying him any attention. He can go for dinner in a restaurant or sit in the darkness of a cinema.’
‘I understand.’
‘I’m putting myself in his place. At any moment …’
‘If he committed suicide, as you fear, it would be even more final.’
‘I know. But he’s the one who should know that. I only hope he won’t go on drinking …’
A draught of fresh air passed through the room, and Maigret looked at the open window.
‘In fact, why don’t we go for a drink?’
And, a few minutes later, they were both standing at the bar of the Brasserie Dauphine.
‘A cog
nac,’ Maigret ordered, while Janvier smiled.
7.
Tuesday was difficult. But Maigret was in very good spirits when he reached his office. It was such a fine spring day that he had walked the whole way from Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, sniffing the air, the smell of the shops, sometimes turning to look at the bright, cheerful dresses of the women.
‘Nothing for me?’
It was nine o’clock.
‘Nothing, chief.’
In a few minutes, in half an hour, one of the editors or editors-in-chief would call him to announce a new letter written in block letters.
He was counting on a decisive day. He had prepared for it and arranged his pipes on his desk, carefully chose one and went and lit it by the window while looking at the Seine sparkling in the morning sun.
When he had to attend the morning briefing, he had Janvier go and sit in his office.
‘If he phones, make him wait and come and get me straight away.’
‘Yes, chief.’
There was no phone call while he was in the commissioner’s office. There wasn’t one at ten o’clock. There still hadn’t been one by eleven.
Maigret went through some mail, absent-mindedly filled in forms and, sometimes, as if to cheat time, went and spent a few minutes in the inspectors’ office, taking care to leave his door open. Everyone felt worried, nervous.
This telephone that wasn’t ringing created a sort of void that made him uneasy. Something was missing.
‘Are you sure that there wasn’t a call for me?’
He was the one who ended up phoning the papers.
‘Have you had anything this morning?’
‘Not this morning, no.’
The previous day, the first phone call from the man from Rue Popincourt had come in at 12.10. At midday, Maigret didn’t go out with the others. He waited until half-past and, once again, asked Janvier, who knew most about the case, to take his place.
His wife didn’t ask any questions; the answer was all too obvious.
Had he lost the game? Had he been wrong to trust his instinct? Tomorrow, at the same time, he would be obliged to go and see the examining magistrate and admit defeat. The photograph would be published in the papers.
What the hell could that idiot be doing? Rage surged through him in waves.
‘He was only trying to make himself interesting, and now he’s dropping me. Maybe he was making fun of how trusting I am.’
He went back to the office sooner than usual.
‘Nothing?’ he asked Janvier automatically.
Janvier would have given a lot to have good news to give him, because it was difficult to see his boss in this state.
‘Not yet.’
The afternoon was even longer than the morning. Maigret tried in vain to take an interest in routine work, making the most of the opportunity to get through overdue paperwork. But his mind was elsewhere.
He imagined all the possible hypotheses and rejected them one by one. He even telephoned the police emergency number.
‘Has anyone called you about suicides?’
‘Just one moment … There was one during the night, an old woman who gassed herself, at Porte d’Orléans … A man threw himself into the Seine at eight o’clock this morning. We were able to save him.’
‘What age?’
‘Forty-two. Neurasthenic.’
Why was he so bothered? He had done what he could. It was time to face up to reality. He wasn’t unhappy because he had been deceived, but because his intuition had failed him. Because then it was serious. It meant that he had lost touch and, in that case …
‘Damn, damn and damn!’
He had said that at the top of his voice, in the solitude of his office, and he picked up his hat and went, without an overcoat, all alone, towards the Brasserie Dauphine, where he drank two large beers at the bar, one after the other.
‘No phone call?’ he asked as he came back.
By seven o’clock there had been no call, and he resigned himself to going home. He felt cumbersome, and not at peace with himself. He took a taxi. He didn’t enjoy the sun, or the colourful bustle of the streets. He didn’t even know what the weather was like.
He began heavily climbing the stairs and stopped twice because he was slightly out of breath. A few steps away from his landing he saw his wife, who was watching him come up.
She was waiting for him the way one waits for a child coming home from school, and he was about to get cross with her. When he was level with her, she merely said to him in an undertone:
‘He’s here.’
‘Are you sure it’s him?’
‘He told me so himself.’
‘Has he been here for a long time?’
‘Nearly an hour.’
‘Aren’t you frightened?’
Maigret suddenly felt retrospectively afraid for his wife.
‘I knew I wasn’t in any danger.’
They whispered outside the door, which was ajar.
‘We’ve been chatting.’
‘About what?’
‘About everything … spring … Paris … The little restaurants popular with taxi-drivers that are disappearing …’
Maigret came in at last and, in the living room which served as both a dining room and a drawing room, he saw a man, still young, rising to his feet. Madame Maigret had invited him to take off his raincoat, and he had set his hat down on a chair. He was wearing a navy-blue suit and looked younger than he was.
He forced a smile.
‘Forgive me for coming here,’ he said. ‘Up at your office I was afraid that they wouldn’t let me see you straight away. People tell so many stories.’
He must have been afraid of being beaten up. He was embarrassed and tried to find words to break the silence. He didn’t realize that the inspector was as embarrassed as he was. Meanwhile, Madame Maigret had gone back into the kitchen.
‘You’re just as I imagined you would be.’
‘Take a seat.’
‘Your wife has been very patient with me.’
And, as if he had forgotten to do it until then, he took a Swedish knife from his pocket and held it out to Maigret.
‘You’ll be able to have the blood analysed. I haven’t cleaned it.’
Maigret set it down casually on a pedestal table and sat down in an armchair facing his visitor.
‘I don’t know where to start … It’s very difficult …’
‘First of all I’m going to ask you some questions … What’s your name?’
‘Robert Bureau … Bureau like an office … You could say it’s symbolic, because my father and I …’
‘Where do you live?’
‘I have a small lodging in Rue de l’École-de-Médecine, in a very old building at the end of the courtyard. I work in Rue Laffitte, for an insurance company. Or rather I did work. It’s all over, isn’t it?’
He uttered the phrase with melancholy resignation. He was serene and looked at his calm surroundings as if trying to become a part of them.
‘What town do you come from originally?’
‘Saint-Amand-Montrond, on the banks of the Cher. There’s a big printworks there, the Mamin and Delvoye printworks, which does work for several Paris publishers. My father is a clerk there, and on his lips the names of Mamin and Delvoye are nearly sacred. We lived – my parents still do – in a small house near Canal de Berry …’
Maigret didn’t want to rush him and get to the essential questions too quickly.
‘You didn’t like your town?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I felt as if I was suffocating there. Everyone knows everybody. When you walk down the street you see curtains twitching in the windows. I’ve always heard my parents murmuring:
‘“What would people say?”’
‘Were you a good student?’
‘Until the age of fourteen and a half I was top of the class. My parents got so used to it that they told me off if I came down a ma
rk in my report.’
‘When did you begin to get frightened?’
Maigret had the impression that his interlocutor was becoming paler, that two little hollows formed near his nostrils, and that his lips were growing dry.
‘I don’t know how I’ve been able to keep the secret until now.’
‘What happened when you were fourteen and a half?’
‘Do you know the area?’
‘I’ve passed through it.’
‘The Cher runs parallel to the canal. In places it’s only about ten metres away. It’s broad and shallow, with stones and rocks that mean it can be forded.
‘The banks are covered with reeds, willows and all kinds of shrubs. Especially towards Drevant, a village about three kilometres from Saint-Amand.
‘That’s where the local children go and play. I didn’t play with them.’
‘Why not?’
‘My mother called them little hooligans. Some of them swam stark naked in the river. Almost all of them were the sons of print-workers, and my parents made a big distinction between the workers and the office clerks.
‘There were about fifteen, maybe twenty of them playing. There were two girls with them. One of them, Renée, who must have been thirteen, was very shapely for her age and I was in love with her.
‘I’ve thought of all that a lot, inspector, and I wonder if things might have happened differently. I suppose they might. I’m not trying to make excuses for myself.
‘One boy, the butcher’s son, kissed her in the bushes … I caught them … They went and swam with the others … The boy was called Raymond Pomel and he had red hair, like his father, from whom we bought our sausages …
‘At one point he had gone off to relieve himself … He had come close to me without knowing and I took my knife out of my pocket and flicked out the blade …
‘I swear I didn’t know what I was doing … I stabbed him several times, with a sensation of freeing myself of something … For me at that moment it was indispensable … I wasn’t committing a crime, killing a boy … I stabbed … I went on stabbing when he was on the ground, then I walked calmly away …’
He had grown animated and his eyes were gleaming.
‘They only discovered him two hours later … They hadn’t noticed that he was no longer with the gang of twenty or so kids … I went home after washing the knife in the canal …’
Maigret and the Killer Page 13
