‘I suppose he started by writing to her?’
‘Yes. She didn’t reply for over two months. When she did, it was to tell him to leave her alone.’
‘I have experienced that.’
‘It sounds ridiculous, when it happens to other people.’
But it hadn’t seemed ridiculous to her. On the contrary, she seemed to have been passionately involved in her friend’s affair.
‘It was after that letter that he had the audacity, one morning, to come up here … “I absolutely have to speak with you,” he said.
‘Odette didn’t know what to do … I couldn’t leave them in the fitting room … I pushed them into my office …
‘After that, they carried on writing to each other …’
‘You acted as go-between, I presume?’
‘Yes. Then …’
‘I understand.’
‘It was very sincere, I promise you.’
‘Of course!’
‘The proof is that Odette had no qualms in giving up everything. In Paris, she would have had to work, for he had only found a modest position. When I asked her whether she’d be taking her dresses and jewellery, she replied, “No, nothing, I want to start my life all over again.”’
‘What about Bellamy?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did he not suspect anything? Did you ever see him hanging around your place? One important question: did your friend keep her lover’s letters?’
‘I’m sure she did.’
She realized what he meant.
‘Another thing: are you absolutely certain that no one, other than yourself, knows?’
He understood from her discomfort, that something wasn’t right.
‘I wonder how it didn’t occur to me yesterday,’ she said almost to herself, pensive. ‘In the early spring, Émile was in bed for a week with tonsillitis. The letters continued arriving in my letterbox. I should add that, as a precaution, he never sent them by post. Once I opened the door early in the morning and saw a girl running away …’
‘Lucile?’
‘His sister, yes.’
‘Do you think he told her he was leaving?’
‘It’s possible. I don’t know. I don’t know any more. It all seemed so straightforward, so easy, so innocent …’
‘You see, mademoiselle, there is a man who, for the past few days, has been following the same trail as me, with the advantage that he knows a lot more than I do. But this morning, I ended up here …’
‘How?’
‘By going from door to door. Because I took Odette and Émile as my starting point. Because they had to meet somewhere. And I didn’t think, as any woman in my place would have done, of the dressmaker. Who paid Madame Bellamy’s bills?’
‘Her husband sent me a cheque at the end of the year.’
‘Does he know that you were childhood friends?’
‘I’m sure he does, for Odette and I were constantly together when he fell in love with her.’
‘Did she love him?’
‘I think so.’
‘It was a lukewarm love, wasn’t it, in which the big house, the jewellery, the dresses and the car played a large part?’
‘It’s likely. Odette was always afraid of ending up like her mother. What am I to do now? What are you going to do?’
The telephone rang.
‘May I?’
As soon as she picked up the receiver, she turned pale, and gestured to Maigret.
‘Yes, doctor … Hello, doctor, I can’t hear you very well … This is Olga, yes … Pardon? … Could you repeat the name? … Maigret? …’
She shot Maigret a questioning look and he nodded his head vehemently.
‘You want to know if he has been to see me?’
Maigret pointed to the room, and she wasn’t sure she understood. She replied on the off chance:
‘He is here at the moment … No … Not long ago … Hold on, I think he wants to talk to you.’
Maigret snatched the receiver.
‘Hello! … Is that you, doctor?’
Silence on the other end of the line.
‘I was just about to phone you to request an interview … Don’t forget that you told me that you would remain at my disposal … Hello …’
‘I’m here, yes.’
‘Are you at home at the moment?’
‘Yes.’
‘With your permission, I’ll be there in a few minutes … The time it takes to walk half the length of Le Remblai … Hello! …’
Silence again.
‘Can you hear me, doctor?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am speaking to you as a fellow human being. Hello! … I’m pleading with you, I beg you, I command you not to do anything before I get there … Hello! …’
‘Yes …’
‘You promise?’
Silence.
‘Hello! … Hello! Mademoiselle … Don’t cut us off … What? … He has hung up? …’
He hurriedly put on his hat, dashed out of the door and hurtled down the stairs. Almost outside the door, he saw the convertible car belonging to the leather goods shop owner next door and the latter, his hat on his head, came out of his shop and said a few words to his wife.
‘Would you drive me to Doctor Bellamy’s, please?’
‘With pleasure.’
It was only three hundred metres away, but it seemed to Maigret that during the short time it took to get there, he was no longer breathing. His companion looked at him in surprise, so overawed that he didn’t dare ask any questions.
He braked hard.
‘Shall I wait for you?’
‘No thank you …’
He rang the electric bell. He pressed the button for a long time. Through the door he heard a woman’s voice, that of Doctor Bellamy’s mother, saying:
‘Francis, go and see who that lout is …’
Francis opened the door, stunned to find himself face to face with Maigret in such a state of agitation.
‘Is he upstairs?’
‘In the library, yes … In any case, he was fifteen minutes ago …’
Madame Bellamy senior, her walking stick in her hand, appeared in the doorway to one of the drawing rooms, but he didn’t bother to greet her. He raced up the stairs. He paused outside Odette’s room for a moment. He heard a noise in the corridor. Perhaps otherwise he might have tried to open the door.
Philippe Bellamy was waiting for him, standing stiffly, as in a portrait, with the library’s lavishly bound books behind him.
‘What are you afraid of?’ he asked, as Maigret got his breath back.
A cold irony made his lip curl.
He stepped aside and indicated the room where, the previous evening, the three of them had sat talking, and motioned to his visitor to sit in one of the armchairs.
‘You see that I waited for you.’
Why could Maigret not take his eyes off his white hands, as if he were looking for bloodstains?
That gaze too, the doctor understood.
‘You do not believe me?’
A hesitation. A moment’s thought. Bellamy must be horrendously tense. He wiped his hand across his forehead.
‘Come.’
He preceded him in the corridor, taking a small key out of his pocket as he walked. Then he stopped outside his wife’s door. He turned round and looked at Maigret. Perhaps he was still uncertain?
At last he opened it, slowly, and Maigret saw the gilded atmosphere of the room, whose curtains were drawn.
In a vast silk-padded bed, light-coloured hair was spread over the pillow. A face was
visible in half profile, long eyelashes, the curve of a nose with quivering nostrils, the pout of a protruding lip and, on the golden eiderdown, a bare arm lay limply.
Philippe Bellamy stood stock still against the doorpost. And, when Maigret turned towards him, he saw that the doctor’s eyes were closed.
‘Is she alive?’ asked Maigret in a whisper.
‘She’s alive.’
‘Is she asleep?’
‘She’s asleep.’
Bellamy spoke like a sleepwalker, his eyes still closed, his hands clenched.
‘Bourgeois came to see her this morning and gave her a sedative. She must sleep.’
When they were quiet, the young woman’s regular breathing could just be heard, as light as the beating of a moth’s wings.
Maigret took a step towards the door, then turned round one more time towards the sleeping woman.
The doctor said impatiently:
‘Come.’
He carefully locked the door, slipped the key into his pocket and made his way towards the library.
9.
They were ensconced in the library again, Bellamy in his usual chair, at the desk, Maigret in one of the leather armchairs, and they both remained silent. It was not an awkward or hostile silence, but one that afforded a kind of respite.
It was then, after lighting his pipe, that Maigret noticed that a change had come over Bellamy − since the previous day or in the past few minutes? He now looked like a man suffering from a great weariness but who was controlling himself, determined to hold out until the end. There was a thin, deep shadow under his eyes, and his skin was so ashen, so dull, that his mouth seemed red in contrast, as if he were wearing lipstick.
He was conscious of Maigret’s unintentional scrutiny, but he did not allow it to trouble him and, when he finally came out of himself, it was to reach for the bell. His gaze, for the first time, seemed to be asking for permission. It cannot be said that he was smiling, and yet his face somehow lit up with something very vague, bitter, a sort of irony towards Maigret, with a hint of self-pity.
Was he thinking, as he pressed the button, that this was perhaps the last time he was acting as a free, wealthy man, in these surroundings that he had so lovingly created?
The way he wiped his hand across his forehead that day was like a nervous twitch; he did it twice just waiting for Francis to appear.
‘Whisky for me,’ he said, ‘and for you, Monsieur Maigret?’
‘Even though it’s still early, I’ll have something dry, brandy or Armagnac.’
Once the tray was on the table and the drinks poured, the doctor, lit cigarette in hand, said dreamily:
‘There are several solutions …’
As if it were merely a matter of a problem that they needed to resolve together.
‘There is never only one solution,’ sighed Maigret, echoing him.
And Maigret rose heavily, and went over to the telephone sitting on the desk.
‘May I? … Hello! Mademoiselle, put me through to 118 at La Roche-sur-Yon, please … Pardon? … There’s no wait? Hello! … I’d like to speak to the examining magistrate Alain de Folletier … This is Doctor Bellamy … Bellamy, yes …
‘Hello! … Is that you, Judge Folletier? … Maigret here… Sorry? … No, no … I am in his office and I’ll pass him to you right away … I think he wants to ask you to join us without delay …’
As if it had been arranged beforehand, he passed the receiver to the doctor, who took it with an air of resignation. Their eyes met for a second. They had understood one another.
‘It’s me, Alain … Yes, I would like you to come and see me as soon as you can get here … Pardon? Knowing you, if you start having lunch, you’ll be at it for half the afternoon … Could you not, just this once, make do with a sandwich and jump into your car? … Your wife has taken it to go to Fontenay? … In that case, take a taxi … Yes … we’ll wait for you … It is quite important …’
He hung up and silence reigned again, broken a little later by the ringing of the intercom. Bellamy seemed to be asking for permission to reply, Maigret batted his eyelids.
‘Hello! … Yes, Mother … No … I’m going to be busy for quite a while … No, no … Please have lunch on your own … I shan’t be coming downstairs …’
When he had hung up, he said:
‘Admit that you have no proof.’
‘That is true.’
There was nothing arrogant about Philippe Bellamy. He was not challenging Maigret. He was simply making a statement, without crowing. They were two men calmly examining the facts.
‘I don’t know how you intend to proceed with Alain, but given the current state of the investigation, I doubt that you will obtain an arrest warrant. Not only because he is my friend. Any examining magistrate would be reluctant to take on such a responsibility.’
‘But,’ said Maigret, ‘I have to take that responsibility. Do you not think, doctor, that there have been enough victims already?’
Bellamy bowed his head, and it was perhaps to look at his hands.
‘Yes,’ he finally conceded. ‘I thought so before your arrival. For two days, I have been following your reasoning, hour by hour, by watching your actions. This morning, I understood Olga’s role before you did, then I saw you going from door to door on Le Remblai and I knew that you’d eventually end up at her place. I was one step ahead of you. While you were going around questioning people, I could have rung the back-door bell—’
‘Do you think that would have been sufficient?’
‘Mind you, even with Olga’s testimony, you have no charge against me. Assumptions perhaps, on which no jury would find a man in my position guilty. What I would like you to understand is that I can still hold my own, play the game, and that I would probably come out of it if not with glory, at least as a free man.’
He gaze seemed to caress his surroundings and once again there was a glimmer of the same irony.
‘Only—’ he began.
‘Only,’ Maigret interrupted him, ‘you would have to add to the list. And you are beginning to tire of it, aren’t you? Even if you hurried, you wouldn’t arrive in time. There is something you have forgotten, a person. For the rest you acted alone. But you had to ask for someone’s help over one tiny detail.’
Frowning, the doctor racked his brains, as if trying to resolve an equation.
‘The picture postcard,’ Maigret prompted him. ‘The card that had to be posted from Paris without going there. Let me go to Paris tomorrow and summon your mother-in-law to my office at Quai des Orfèvres, let me question her for several hours if necessary … Are you with me? She’ll talk eventually …’
‘Maybe.’
‘And I must say, it is one of the factors that most surprised me. How did you happen to have a picture postcard of Paris to hand? I went into the bookshop but they didn’t have any.’
The doctor shrugged, rose and went over to take something out of a drawer.
‘As you can see, I didn’t go to the trouble of destroying the others. I must have bought it one day from a beggar or a pedlar. It has been in this drawer for years.’
He held out an envelope that contained around twenty very crude postcards on which was written: ‘France’s major cities’.
‘I wouldn’t have thought you capable of imitating a person’s handwriting so perfectly.’
‘I didn’t imitate it.’
Maigret looked up sharply, amazed, admiring.
‘You mean …?’
‘That he wrote it himself.’
‘Dictated by you?’
The doctor shrugged, as if to say that it was too easy. Almo
st at the same time signalling to Maigret not to move. Then he tiptoed over to the communicating door and flung it open.
The maid was there, all flustered. Bellamy pretended to believe that she had just arrived.
‘Did you want to speak to me, Jeanne?’
At last, Maigret caught sight of her. She was a skinny girl, flat-chested and with no hips, and had an unattractive face with irregular features and bad teeth.
‘I thought you were having lunch and I came to clean the room.’
‘I would rather, Jeanne, that you went to clean my consulting room. Here is the key.’
Once the door had closed, he sighed:
‘Now I wouldn’t have needed to kill that girl there. Do you understand? I have no idea what she thinks. I don’t know how much she has guessed.
‘But even if I had killed half the town, even if I were the most heinous monster, you wouldn’t get a word out of her.’
A moment ticked by, then the doctor sighed:
‘That girl loves me …’
Humbly, but passionately, without hope, despite the other love that fired hers.
Jeanne loved him, and the way she jealously surrounded Odette Bellamy with her protective care was another manifestation of that love.
Was the doctor still following Maigret’s thinking step by step? In any case, having lit another cigarette and taken a sip of whisky he shook his head.
‘You are mistaken. She’s not the one …’
He took his time before adding, with a quiet melancholy:
‘It’s my mother! And she loves me too, at least I presume so, since she is as jealous of me as I have ever been of my wife. Doubtless you are wondering how I found out about everything?
‘It’s both straightforward and silly. In my wife’s boudoir, there is a little rosewood Louis XV desk. On it there is a writing case and a blotter. Now no one hates writing more than Odette. I often used to tease her about it and it was I who had to write to our few friends to accept or refuse an invitation.
‘But one morning when my wife was in the garden, Mother showed me the blotter. “It looks as if Odette has changed her habits,” she simply said.
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