The Misty Harbour

by Georges Simenon

  ‘It must have come loose,’ observed Delcourt dismissively. ‘That happens!’

  ‘It did not come loose, for the very good reason that in this weather, the dinghy would not have been in tow, but on deck!’

  And the lock workers, still at their posts, were trying to hear every word.

  ‘We’ll see about it in the morning. Leave the dinghy here.’

  Turning to Maigret, Delcourt gave him a crooked smile.

  ‘You can see what an odd sort of job I have,’ he murmured. ‘There’s always something …’

  Maigret did not smile back, however. In fact, he replied with the utmost gravity.

  ‘Listen: if you don’t see me anywhere tomorrow morning at seven, or perhaps eight, then telephone the public prosecutor at Caen.’

  ‘But what …’

  ‘Goodnight! And make sure that the dinghy does stay here.’

  To lay a false trail, he walked off along the jetty, hands in his pockets, his overcoat collar turned up. The sea rumbled and sighed beneath his feet, ahead of him, on his right, on his left. The air he breathed into his lungs smelled strongly of iodine.

  When almost at the end of the jetty, he bent down to pick something up.

  5. Notre-Dame-des-Dunes

  At dawn Maigret plodded back to the Hôtel de l’Univers in his sodden overcoat with a parched throat, having smoked pipe after pipe. The hotel seemed deserted but he found the hotel-owner in the kitchen, lighting the fire.

  ‘You were out all night?’

  ‘Yes. Would you bring some coffee up to my room as soon as possible? Oh, and is there any way I can have a bath?’

  ‘I’ll have to fire up the boiler.’

  ‘Then don’t bother.’

  A grey morning with the inevitable fog, but it was a light, luminous one. Maigret’s eyelids were stinging, and his head felt empty as he stood at the open window in his room, waiting for the coffee.

  A strange night. He had done nothing sensational. Made no great discoveries. Yet he had made progress in his understanding of the crime. Many nuggets of information had been added to his growing store.

  The arrival of the Saint-Michel. Lannec’s behaviour. Was the skipper’s attitude ambiguous? Dubious? Not even that! Yet he was a slippery fellow. But Delcourt as well was sometimes less than forthcoming. They all were, if they had anything to do with this harbour! Big Louis, for example, was definitely acting suspiciously. He hadn’t gone on to Caen with the schooner. He was holed up on an empty dredger. And Maigret was sure that he wasn’t there alone.

  Then he had learned that the Saint-Michel had lost its dinghy shortly before entering the harbour. And at the end of a jetty, he had made a most unusual find: a gold fountain-pen.

  It was a wooden jetty supported by pilings. At its far end, near the green light, an iron ladder went down to the water. The dinghy had been found in that area. In other words, the Saint-Michel had been carrying someone who did not want to be seen in Ouistreham. After landing in the dinghy, this passenger had let it drift away, and, as he had leaned over at the top of the ladder to hoist himself on to the jetty, the gold fountain-pen had slipped from his pocket.

  The man had taken refuge in the dredger, where Louis was to join him.

  This scenario was just about airtight. There could be no other interpretation of the facts.

  Conclusion: an unknown man was hiding in Ouistreham. He had not come here without a reason: he had a job to do. And he belonged to a milieu in which men used gold fountain-pens!

  So: not a sailor. Not a tramp … The expensive pen suggested clothing of equally good quality. The man must be a gentleman – a ‘gent’ as they say in the countryside … And off-season, in Ouistreham, a ‘gent’ would not pass unnoticed. He would have to lie low all day in the dredger. But wouldn’t he come out at night to accomplish whatever he had come here for?

  Maigret had therefore resigned himself, grumpily, to mounting guard. A job for a junior inspector! Spending hours in the drizzle peering at the inordinately complicated shadows of the dredger.

  Nothing had happened. No one had come ashore. Day had dawned, and now the inspector was furious at not being able to enjoy a hot bath. Contemplating his bed, he considered snatching a few hours’ rest.

  The hotel-owner came in with his coffee.

  ‘You’re not going to sleep?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet. Would you take a telegram to the post office for me?’

  He was summoning Lucas, a trusted colleague, for Maigret had no desire to keep an eye on the dredger again that night.

  The window looked out on the harbour, Joris’ cottage and the sandbanks now emerging as the ebb tide left the bay.

  While the inspector wrote his telegram, the hotel-owner looked outside, remarking off-handedly, ‘Well! Captain Joris’ maid is going for a walk …’

  Looking up, Maigret saw Julie, who closed the front gate and set out briskly for the beach.

  ‘What’s over there?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Where can one go? Are there any houses?’

  ‘Nothing at all! Only the beach, but no one goes there because it’s interrupted by breakwaters and mud sinkholes.’

  ‘No path or road?’

  ‘No. You reach the mouth of the Orne, and the banks are marshy all along the river. Wait, now … There are some duck blinds there for hunting.’

  Maigret was already heading out of the door with a determined frown. He strode across the lock bridge, and by the time he reached the beach Julie was just a few hundred metres ahead of him.

  The place was deserted. The only living creatures in the morning mist were the gulls, shrieking as they flew. To avoid being seen, the inspector went up into the dunes on his right.

  The air was cool and the sea, calm. The white hem of the surf subsided with a rhythm like breathing and the crunching of broken shells.

  Julie was not out for a walk. She advanced quickly, holding her little black coat tightly closed. She hadn’t had time, since Joris’ death, to order mourning clothes, so she was wearing all her black or dark things: an old-fashioned coat, woollen stockings, a hat with a downturned brim.

  She staggered along, her feet sinking into the soft sand. Twice she turned around but did not see Maigret, hidden by the rolling dunes.

  About a kilometre from Ouistreham, however, she almost spotted him when she went abruptly off to the right.

  Maigret had thought she was making for a duck blind, but there was nothing like that out in the landscape of sand and coarse beach grass.

  Nothing but a tumbledown structure missing one entire wall. Facing the ocean, five metres in from the high-tide line, there was a small chapel, probably constructed a few centuries earlier.

  It had a semicircular vault, and the missing wall allowed Maigret to judge the thickness of the others: almost one metre of solid stone.

  Julie went inside to the back of the chapel, and the inspector could now hear small objects being moved, almost certainly shells, from the sound of them.

  He moved forwards cautiously and could see a small recess in the far wall, closed with a metal grille. Beneath was a kind of tiny altar, over which hovered Julie, looking for something.

  She whipped around and recognized Maigret, who had had no time to hide.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I … I’ve come to pray to Notre-Dame-des-Dunes …’

  She was nervous, and everything about her showed that she was hiding something. Her red eyes betrayed an almost sleepless night, and two locks of untidy hair stuck out from beneath her hat.

  ‘Ah! This place is a Lady chapel?’

  And indeed, in the niche behind the grille was a statue of the Virgin, so old and eaten away by time that it was almost unrecognizable.

  The stone all around the niche was covered with a tangle of supplications written in pencil or incised with a sharp rock or pocket-knife.

  Help Denise pass her
exam … Notre-Dame-des-Dunes, make Jojo quickly learn to read … Grant good health to the whole family and especially Grandmother and Grandfather …

  There were more earthly inscriptions, too, with hearts pierced by arrows.

  Robert & Jeanne for ever …

  Dried stalks that had once been flowers still hung from the grille, but what made this chapel different from so many others were the shells piled high on the ruins of the altar. Shells of every shape and kind, and there were words written on all of them, mostly in pencil, in the clumsy handwriting of children and simple souls, or sometimes the firmer script of more literate supplicants.

  May the fishing be good in Newfoundland and Papa need never sign up again …

  The floor was of beaten earth. Where the wall had fallen, the view was of sandy beach and silvery sea in the white haze. And in spite of herself, having no idea how to handle the situation, Julie kept glancing anxiously at the shells.

  ‘Did you bring one here?’ asked Maigret.

  Julie shook her head.

  ‘When I arrived, though, you were going through them. What were you looking for?’

  ‘Nothing, I …’

  ‘You …?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  And she glared stubbornly, clutching her coat more tightly around her.

  Now it was the inspector’s turn to pick up the shells one by one to read what was written on them. Suddenly, he smiled. On an enormous clam shell he read, ‘Notre-Dame-des-Dunes, help my brother Louis succeed so we will all be happy.’

  The date on it was 13 September. So this primitive ex-voto had been brought here three days before Captain Joris vanished!

  And hadn’t Julie come here to remove it?

  ‘Is this what you were hunting for?’

  ‘What business is it of yours?’

  Her eyes never left the shell. She seemed ready to jump at Maigret to tear it from his hands.

  ‘Give it to me! Put it back where it belongs!’

  ‘All right, I’ll leave it here, but you must, too. Come on, we’ll talk about it on the walk back.’

  ‘I’ve nothing to say to you.’

  They set out, leaning forwards because their feet sank into the soft sand. The wind was so sharp that their noses were red and their cheeks gleamed.

  ‘Everything your brother has done has gone wrong, hasn’t it?’

  She stared straight ahead at the beach.

  ‘Some things are impossible to hide,’ he continued. ‘I’m not talking only about … about what landed him in prison.’

  ‘Of course! It’s always that! After twenty years they’ll still be saying—’

  ‘No, no, Julie! Louis is a good sailor. Even an excellent one, I hear, able to serve as a first mate. Except that one fine day he gets drunk with some fellows he’s just met and does some stupid things, doesn’t return to his boat, drags around for weeks without a job. Am I right? At times like that, he asks you for help. You – and just a few weeks ago, Joris. Then he becomes responsible and hardworking again for a while.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What was the plan that you wanted, on the 13th of September, to make turn out well?’

  Julie stopped and looked into his face. She was much calmer now. She had had time to reflect. And there was an appealing gravity in her eyes.

  ‘I knew it would bring us trouble. And yet, my brother did nothing! I swear to you that if he had killed the captain, I would have been the first to pay him back in kind.’

  Her voice was low and heavy with emotion.

  ‘It’s just that, there are some coincidences, and then that time in prison always hanging around his neck. Whenever anyone does something wrong, Louis gets blamed for everything that happens afterwards.’

  ‘What was the plan Louis had?’

  ‘It wasn’t a plan. It was quite simple. He’d met a really rich man, I don’t remember any more if it was in England or at Le Havre. He didn’t tell me his name. A gentleman who’d had enough of life ashore and wanted to buy a yacht and travel. He asked Louis to find him a boat.’

  They were still standing on the beach, where all they could see of Ouistreham was the lighthouse, a raw white tower set off by the paler sky.

  ‘Louis talked to his skipper about it. Because for some time, on account of the slump, Lannec had been wanting to sell the Saint-Michel. And that’s the whole of it! The Saint-Michel is the best coaster anyone could find for turning into a yacht. In the beginning my brother was supposed to get ten thousand francs if the deal was made. Next the buyer talked about keeping him aboard as captain, someone he could trust.’

  Immediately regretting those last words, she glanced at Maigret and seemed grateful to him for not smiling ironically at the idea of someone trusting an ex-con.

  Instead, Maigret was thinking things over. Even he was startled by the frank simplicity of her story, which had the troubling ring of truth.

  ‘But you haven’t any idea who this buyer is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or where your brother was going to meet him again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or when?’

  ‘Very soon. The refitting was supposed to be done in Norway, he said, and the yacht would leave within a month for the Mediterranean, bound for Egypt.’

  ‘A Frenchman?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And you were at Notre-Dame-des-Dunes just now to retrieve your shell?’

  ‘Because I thought that, if it were found, everyone would think something completely different from the truth. Admit it: you don’t believe me …’

  Instead of an answer, another question.

  ‘Did you see your brother?’

  She shuddered in surprise.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last night … or this morning.’

  ‘Louis is here?’

  She seemed frightened, disoriented.

  ‘The Saint-Michel has arrived.’

  His words appeared to reassure her, as if she had been afraid that her brother had shown up without the schooner.

  ‘So he’s on his way to Caen?’

  ‘No, he spent the night aboard one of the dredgers.’

  ‘Let’s go – I’m cold …’

  The wind from the ocean was freshening as the overcast deepened.

  ‘Does he often sleep on an empty old boat?’

  When she didn’t reply, the conversation died on its own. They walked on, hearing only the sand crunching softly underfoot and the snapping leaps of tiny crustaceans, disturbed at their feast of seaweed swept in by the tide.

  Maigret was seeing two images come together in his mind’s eye: a yacht … and a gold fountain-pen.

  Then his thoughts came like clockwork. Earlier that morning, the pen had been difficult to explain because it didn’t fit in with the Saint-Michel or its rough-and-ready crew.

  A yacht … and a fountain-pen. That made more sense! A wealthy, middle-aged man is looking for a pleasure yacht and loses a gold pen.

  But how to explain why this man, instead of going ashore at the quay, took the schooner’s dinghy, hauled himself up the jetty ladder and hid in a waterlogged dredger?

  ‘The night Joris vanished, when your brother came to see you, did he talk about this buyer? He didn’t mention, for example, that the man was aboard the Saint-Michel?’

  ‘No. He simply said that the deal was almost settled.’

  They were approaching the foot of the lighthouse. Joris’ cottage was just to the left, and flowers planted by the captain were still blooming in the garden.

  Julie’s face fell. She seemed sad and looked around vacantly like someone who no longer knew what to do with her life.

  ‘You’ll probably be going to see Joris’ lawyer soon, for the reading of the will. You’re a wealthy woman, now.’

  ‘Fat chance!’ she said curtly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know perfectly well. All this nonsense about a fortune, huh … The captain wasn’t rich.’

>   ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘He didn’t keep secrets from me. If he’d had hundreds of thousands of francs, he would have told me. And he wouldn’t have hesitated, last winter, to buy himself a two-thousand-franc shotgun! He really wanted that gun … He’d had a look at the mayor’s and found out how much it cost.’

  They had reached the front gate.

  ‘Are you coming in?’

  ‘No. Perhaps I’ll see you later.’

  She hesitated before going inside the cottage, where she would be all alone.

  Nothing much happened over the next few hours. Maigret hung around the dredger like someone with time on his hands and a deep fondness for strange sights. There were chains, capstans, dredging buckets, huge pipes …

  Towards eleven, he had an aperitif with the bar regulars.

  ‘Has anyone seen Big Louis?’

  They had seen him, rather early that morning. He had downed two glasses of rum there and taken off along the main road.

  Maigret was drowsy. Perhaps he had caught a chill the night before. In any case, he felt as if he were coming down with the flu and looked it, too. He seemed lethargic.

  But it didn’t appear to bother him – and that bothered everyone else! His companions stole worried glances at him; the general mood was subdued.

  ‘What should I do with the dinghy?’ asked Delcourt.

  ‘Tie it up somewhere.’

  Maigret tossed out another disquieting question.

  ‘Has a stranger been seen around here, this morning? Or anything unusual, over by the dredgers?’

  No, nothing! But now that he had asked, they all felt something was in the offing.

  It was funny: they all expected high drama! A presentiment? The feeling that this chain of events still had one more link to go?

  A boat sounded its horn at the lock. The men stood up. Maigret trudged to the post office to see if there were any messages for him. A telegram from Lucas announced his arrival at 2.10.

  And when that time came, so did the little train that runs along the canal from Caen to Ouistreham. With its 1850-model carriages, it looked like a child’s toy when it appeared in the distance, but it pulled into the station with squealing brakes and a cloud of hissing steam.