They had seen each other like that, in the distance, on quite a large number of occasions. They even arranged meetings of a kind.
Tomorrow, at about three o’clock, I will be walking in the Tuileries with my son …
Saint-Hilaire, for his part, passed below her windows at times of day that were agreed in advance.
On the subject of her son, while he was about ten years old, there was a characteristic phrase that Maigret read out loud.
‘ “Philippe, finding me writing once again, asked me candidly: ‘Are you writing to your lover again?’ ” ’
Maigret sighed and mopped his brow, then tied up the bundles again, one after the other.
‘Try to get Dr Tudelle on the phone for me.’
He needed to find himself back on solid ground. The letters were returned to their place in the bookcase, and he promised himself that he wouldn’t touch them again.
‘He’s on the line, chief …’
‘Hello, doctor … Maigret, yes … You finished ten minutes ago …? No, of course, I won’t ask you for all the details …’
While listening, he scribbled down some words, meaningless marks, on Saint-Hilaire’s pad.
‘Are you sure? You have already sent the bullets to Gastinne-Renette? I’ll call him a little later … Thank you … It would be better if you sent the report to the examining magistrate … He’ll be glad of that … Thanks again.’
He started pacing around the room, his hands behind his back, stopping from time to time to look at the garden, where an unconcerned blackbird was hopping in the grass a few feet away from him.
‘The first bullet,’ he explained to Janvier, ‘was fired head on, almost point-blank … It’s a 7.65 bullet with a nickel-plated jacket … Tudelle isn’t yet as experienced as Dr Paul, but he is more or less sure that it was fired from a Browning automatic … He is categorical on one point: that first bullet was the almost instantaneous cause of death. The body leaned forward and slipped from the armchair to the rug …’
‘How does he know?’
‘Because the other shots were fired downwards.’
‘How many others?’
‘Three. Two to the belly and one to the shoulder. Automatic pistols contain six cartridges, or seven if one had slipped into the barrel, so I wonder why the murderer stopped suddenly after the fourth bullet. Unless the pistol jammed …’
He looked at the rug, which had been given a bit of a clean, but on which one could still make out the outline of bloodstains.
‘Either the perpetrator wanted to be sure that his victim was dead or he was in such a state of excitement that he went on mechanically firing. Call Moers for me, will you?’
That morning he had been too gripped by the strange aspect of the case to pay attention to physical clues and had left that task to the specialists from Criminal Records.
‘Moers? Yes … How far have you got? Of course … First of all, tell me if you found any cartridge cases in the office … No? … None?’
It was odd, and it seemed to indicate that the murderer knew he wouldn’t be disturbed. After four noisy explosions, very noisy if the gun was a Browning 7.65, he had taken the time to look around the room for cartridge cases that had been ejected quite some distance.
‘The door handle?’
‘The only more or less clean prints belonged to the housekeeper.’
‘The glass?’
‘The dead man’s prints.’
‘The desk, the furniture?’
‘Nothing, chief. I mean no unfamiliar prints apart from yours.’
‘The lock, the windows?’
‘Photographic enlargements show no sign of a break-in.’
Perhaps Isabelle’s letters weren’t like the love letters that Maigret normally dealt with, but the crime was real enough.
Yet two details appeared at first sight to contradict one another. The murderer had gone on firing at a corpse, a man who had stopped moving and who, with his shattered skull, presented quite a horrid spectacle. Maigret remembered the still abundant white hair sticking to the gaping cranium, one eye still open, a bone protruding from the torn cheek.
The pathologist affirmed that after the first shot the corpse was on the ground, at the foot of the armchair, in the spot where it had been found.
So the murderer, who was probably on the other side of the desk, had come around it to shoot again, once, twice, three times, downwards, at close range, less than fifty centimetres, according to Tudelle.
At that distance there was no need to aim to hit a precise point. In other words, the chest and the belly had been shot deliberately.
Did that not suggest revenge or an unusual level of hatred?
‘Are you sure there’s no gun in the apartment? Have you searched everywhere?’
‘Not even in the chimney,’ Janvier replied.
Maigret too had looked for the automatic that the housekeeper had talked about, albeit in quite vague terms.
‘Go and ask the officer stationed outside the door if he happens to have a 7.65 in his belt.’
Many uniformed officers were equipped with a weapon of that calibre.
‘Ask him to lend it to you for a moment.’
He left the office too, walked across the corridor and pushed open the door of the kitchen, where Jaquette Larrieu was sitting straight-backed on a chair. Her eyes closed, she looked as if she was sleeping. She gave a start at the sound.
‘Will you follow me …’
‘Where to?’
‘The office. I have a few questions I would like to ask you.’
‘I’ve already told you that I don’t know anything.’
Once she was in the room, she looked around as if to check that nothing had been disturbed.
‘Take a seat.’
She hesitated, probably unused to sitting down in this room in the presence of her employer.
‘On this chair … There you are.’
She reluctantly obeyed and gave the inspector a more suspicious look than ever.
Janvier came back, holding an automatic.
‘Give it to her.’
She couldn’t bear to take it, opened her mouth to speak, closed it again, and Maigret could have sworn that she nearly said:
‘Where did you find it?’
She was fascinated by the gun. She had difficulty taking her eyes off it.
‘Do you recognize this pistol?’
‘How could I recognize it? I’ve never examined it from close to, and I can’t imagine they only made one like it.’
‘Is this the kind of gun that the count owned?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘The same size?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Take it in your hand. Is it about the same weight?’
She refused outright to do what was asked of her.
‘There would be no point, because I’ve never touched the one that was in the drawer.’
‘You can take it back to the officer, Janvier.’
‘You don’t need me any more?’
‘Please stay. I assume you don’t know if your employer gave or lent his pistol to anyone, his nephew, for example, or anyone else?’
‘How would I know? All I know is that I haven’t seen it for a long time.’
‘Was the Count of Saint-Hilaire afraid of robbers?’
‘Certainly not. Not robbers, not murderers. The proof is that in the summer he slept with the window open, even though we are on the ground floor and anybody could have got into the bedroom.’
‘And he didn’t keep any valuable objects in the apartment?’
‘You and your men know better than I do what there is here.’
‘When did you go into service with him?’
‘Immediately after the First War. He was coming back from abroad. His manservant had died.’
‘So you were in your twenties?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘How long had you been in Paris?’
‘A few
months. Before that I lived with my father in Normandy. When my father died, I was obliged to work.’
‘Did you have love affairs?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’m asking if you had lovers or a fiancé.’
She looked at him resentfully.
‘You’re barking up the wrong tree.’
‘So you lived alone with the Count of Saint-Hilaire in his apartment?’
‘Is there anything wrong with that?’
Maigret wasn’t necessarily following a logical order, because nothing struck him as logical in this case, and he moved from one subject to another as if looking for the sore spot. Janvier, having come back into the room, had sat down near the door. As he lit a cigarette and dropped the match on the floor, the old woman, who didn’t miss a thing, told him off.
‘You could use an ashtray.’
‘By the way, did your employer smoke?’
‘He smoked for a long time.’
‘Cigarettes?’
‘Cigars.’
‘And recently, had he stopped smoking?’
‘Yes. Because of his chronic bronchitis.’
‘But he seemed to be in excellent health.’
Dr Tudelle had told Maigret on the telephone that Saint-Hilaire must have enjoyed exceptionally good health.
‘A solid frame, a heart in perfect condition, no sclerosis.’
But some of his organs were too severely damaged by bullets to allow a complete diagnosis.
‘When you went into his service, he was almost a young man.’
‘He was three years older than me.’
‘Did you know that he was in love?’
‘I took his letters to the post office.’
‘You weren’t jealous?’
‘Why would I have been jealous?’
‘Didn’t you ever see the person he wrote to every day?’
‘She never set foot in the flat.’
‘But you saw her?’
She fell silent.
‘Tell me. When the case goes to the Court of Assizes, you will be asked more embarrassing questions than that, and you won’t be allowed to say nothing.’
‘I don’t know anything.’
‘I asked you if you had seen this person.’
‘Yes. She passed along the street. I sometimes delivered letters that he sent to her in person.’
‘Secretly?’
‘No. I asked to see her and I was shown into her apartment.’
‘Did she speak to you?’
‘Sometimes she asked me questions.’
‘You’re talking about forty years ago?’
‘Then and more recently.’
‘What kind of questions?’
‘Mostly about the count’s health.’
‘Not about the people he had over for dinner?’
‘No.’
‘Did you follow your employer abroad?’
‘Everywhere!’
‘As a minister, then as an ambassador, he was obliged to keep a large household. What was your precise role?’
‘I looked after him.’
‘You mean that you weren’t on the same footing as the other servants, that you didn’t have to deal with cooking, cleaning, receptions?’
‘I kept an eye.’
‘What was your title? Housekeeper?’
‘I had no title.’
‘Did you have lovers?’
She stiffened, her face more contemptuous than ever.
‘Were you his mistress?’
Maigret worried that she was about to pounce on him with all her claws out.
‘I know from his correspondence,’ he went on, ‘that he had love affairs.’
‘He had every right, didn’t he?’
‘Were you jealous?’
‘Sometimes I threw certain people out of the door, because they weren’t right for him and would have caused him problems.’
‘In other words, you took care of his private life.’
‘He was too good, too naive.’
‘But he carried out the delicate role of ambassador with great distinction.’
‘It’s not the same thing.’
‘Did you ever leave him?’
‘Is that mentioned in the letters?’
It was Maigret’s turn not to reply, but to continue:
‘For how long were you parted from him?’
‘Five months.’
‘When was that?’
‘When he was an envoy in Cuba.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of a woman who demanded that he put me out of the house.’
‘What kind of woman?’
Silence.
‘Why couldn’t she bear you? Did she live with him?’
‘She came to see him every day and often spent the night at the residence.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘I rented a little lodging near the Paseo del Prado.’
‘Did your employer visit you there?’
‘He didn’t dare to, he merely phoned me to mollify me. He knew it wouldn’t last. I still bought my ticket back to Europe.’
‘But you didn’t leave?’
‘He came to see me the day before I was due to leave.’
‘Did you know Prince Philippe?’
‘If you have really read the letters, you don’t need to ask me. It shouldn’t be allowed, looking through people’s correspondence after they die.’
‘You didn’t answer the question.’
‘I saw him when he was young.’
‘Where?’
‘Rue de Varenne. He often went to see his mother.’
‘It didn’t occur to you to phone the princess this morning, before going to Quai d’Orsay?’
She looked at him without batting an eyelid.
‘Why didn’t you do that when, by your own account, you acted for a long time as an intermediary between the two?’
‘Because it’s the day of the funeral.’
‘And afterwards, this morning, while we were out, you weren’t tempted to inform her?’
She stared at the telephone.
‘There was always someone in the office.’
There was a knock at the door. It was the policeman on duty on the pavement.
‘I don’t know if this is of interest. I thought I should bring you the paper.’
It was an afternoon daily, which must have come out an hour before. A headline in quite big letters, at the bottom of the front page, announced:
MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF AN AMBASSADOR
It was a short article.
This morning the body of Count Armand de Saint-Hilaire, for a long time the French ambassador in various capital cities, including Rome, London and Washington, was found at his home in Rue Saint-Dominique.
Having retired several years ago, Armand de Saint-Hilaire has published two volumes of memoirs and was correcting the proofs of a third volume when he appears to have been murdered.
The crime was discovered early this morning by an elderly housekeeper.
It is not yet known whether the motive was robbery, or whether more mysterious reasons are yet to be found.
He held out the newspaper to Jaquette and looked hesitantly at the telephone. He was wondering whether they had read the newspaper at Rue de Varenne, or whether anyone had told Isabelle the news.
In that case, how would she react? Would she dare come in person? Would she send her son for information? Would she merely wait, in the silence of her townhouse, where they had probably closed the shutters as a sign of mourning?
Shouldn’t Maigret …
He got to his feet, annoyed with everything, and went and stood looking at the garden, tapping his pipe against his heel to empty it, much to Jaquette’s indignation.
4.
The old maid, tiny and stiff on her chair, listened with horror to the inspector’s voice, which was filled with inflections that she had not heard before. However, Maigret was addressing not her but an unseen person
at the other end of the line.
‘No, Monsieur Cromières, I haven’t sent out a press release, and I haven’t invited either journalists or photographers, as gentlemen from the ministries do at the drop of a hat. As to your second question, I have nothing else to tell you, nor any idea, as you say, but if I discover something I will immediately give a report to the examining magistrate …’
He caught Jaquette glancing covertly at Janvier. She seemed to be taking him as witness to Maigret’s ill-contained rage, and there was a faint smile on her lips, a little as if she had said to the inspector:
‘Well, your boss …’
Maigret dragged his companion into the corridor.
‘I’m going to call in on the notary. Keep asking her questions, without pressing her too much, nicely, you know what I mean. Perhaps you’ll have more luck charming her than I have had.’
It was true. If he had predicted that morning that he would be dealing with a stubborn old maid, he would have brought along young Lapointe rather than Janvier, because out of everyone in the Police Judiciaire it was Lapointe who enjoyed the greatest success with women of a certain age. Hadn’t one of them said, shaking her head: ‘I wonder how such a well-brought-up young man can do this job …’
She had added:
‘I’m sure it causes you pain.’
Maigret found himself back in the street, where the journalists had only left one of their own on sentry duty while they went to refresh themselves in a local bistro.
‘No news, my friend. No point in following me.’
He didn’t go far. You never had to go far in this case. It seemed as if, for everyone involved, closely or otherwise, Paris was no more than a small number of aristocratic streets.
The notary’s house in Rue de Villersexel was of the same period and style as the one in Rue Saint-Dominique; it too had a coach-gate, a huge red-carpeted staircase and a lift that probably rose smoothly and silently. He didn’t need to take it, because the practice was on the first floor. The brass buttons on the double door were well polished, as was the plaque inviting visitors to come in without ringing.
‘If I find myself face to face with another old man …’
He was pleasantly surprised to see, among the clerks, a pretty woman in her thirties.
‘Maître Aubonnet, please.’
Maigret and the Old People Page 5
