‘“Hello!” I said to myself. “Where’s she been, then?”
‘Then I forgot all about it until your inspector, who asked for the key to the musician’s room, came and started asking questions.’
‘You say you’d never seen her before?’
‘No, I can’t say that. She wasn’t a regular, that’s for sure. But I had a feeling I’d come across her somewhere. Her face wasn’t entirely new to me.’
‘How long have you worked at the Hôtel Beauséjour?’
‘Five years.’
‘So she could have been an old customer?’
‘It’s possible. There’ve been so many come through that door, you know! You see them for a fortnight or a month, then they move to another neighbourhood or out of town altogether unless your lot don’t cart them off first.’
A heavy-footed Maigret climbs the stairs with Inspector Dunan. Up on the fifth floor, where Pétillon lived, the lock in the door hasn’t been forced. It’s a basic lock and the simplest skeleton-key would make short work of it.
Looking around him, Maigret gives a whistle of surprise, for as thorough jobs go, this is a thorough job. There might not be much in the way of furniture, but it can safely be said that every inch of it has been painstakingly searched. Pétillon’s grey suit is on the bedside rug with the pockets turned inside out, every drawer gapes, underwear has been scattered everywhere and the visitor has taken a pair of scissors to the mattress, pillow and eiderdown, so that floccules of wool and feathers form a layer of what looks like snow on the carpet.
‘What do you reckon, sir?’
‘Any prints?’
‘The crew from Criminal Records has already been. I took the liberty of phoning them. They sent Moers, but he didn’t find anything. What were the people who turned the place over like this looking for?’
That is not what interests Maigret. What they were after, as Dunan using the plural, expressed it, is much less important than the frenzied way they went about looking for it. They also did it without putting a foot wrong!
The revolver which killed Jules Lapie is a Smith & Wesson, a gun to be found in the pocket of every seasoned tough guy.
What happened after the old man died? Pétillon panics. He tours the nightclubs and the more or less unsavoury bars in Montmartre, looking for someone he does not find. Though he has a feeling the police are on his trail, he goes ahead all the same, keeps on looking, goes as far as Rouen, where he asks about a girl named Adèle, who hadn’t worked in the Tivoli brasserie for several months.
This is when he loses heart. He is at the end of his tether. Maigret knows he is ripe for plucking: he’ll talk …
And at exactly that point, he is coolly mown down in the street, and whoever pulled the trigger is no choirboy.
He’s also probably the same man who, wasting no time, hurries off to Jeanneville.
In Place Pigalle, Pétillon was standing next to Maigret, but that did not stop his assailant.
Lapie’s house is being watched. The man must know, or at least suspect it, but that doesn’t stop him either. He gets into the bedroom, puts a chair in front of the wardrobe and prises one of its boards loose.
Did he find what he was looking for? Disturbed by Félicie, he knocks her over and vanishes, the only trace he leaves being the prints of a pair of new shoes.
It happened around three or four o’clock in the morning. And the very next afternoon Pétillon’s room was ransacked.
This time, it was a woman. A brunette and good-looking, like the Adèle who had worked in the brasserie. She does not make any mistakes. She might have got into the hotel, which was well used to the drop-in trade, to use the porter’s word, either with her lover or an accomplice. But how can anyone tell if the Hôtel Beauséjour is not also under surveillance? She plays it straight. It is with a man she has just picked up that she asks for a room. But when he has gone, she takes to the stairs, goes up to the fifth floor – there’s no one about on the upper floors at this time of day – and searches the room meticulously.
What emerges from these increasingly rushed comings and goings? That they’re in a hurry. That they need to find something as soon as they can. Ergo they haven’t found it yet.
Which is why Maigret also feels a feverish need for haste. True, he has the same feeling every time he puts any distance between himself and Cape Horn, as if he were expecting some catastrophe to happen in his absence.
He removes the rubber band around his notebook and tears out a sheet.
Big round-up tonight, ninth and eighteenth arrondissements
‘Give this to Inspector Piaulet. He’ll understand.’
Back out on the street, his eye again lingers over the terrace of the café, where all people have to do is enjoy life and breathe in the spring air. What the hell! Another quick beer. His close-cut moustache still flecked with froth, he sinks into the back seat of a taxi.
‘Poissy first … and I’ll tell you from there …’
He struggles to stay awake. With his eyes half-closed, he vows that when the case is solved, he will sleep for twenty-four hours. He pictures his room, window wide open, the play of sunshine on the counterpane, the familiar household noises, Madame Maigret moving about on tiptoe and saying sh! to noisy delivery men.
But that, as the song goes, is what never happens for you. You go on dreaming, you promise yourself you’ll live that dream, you swear it, and then, when the moment comes, the damned phone rings, even though Madame Maigret would like to strangle it, like some evil monster.
‘Hello? … Speaking …’
And Maigret is off again!
‘Where to now, sir?’
‘Go up the slope, on the left. I’ll tell you where to stop.’
His impatience returns despite his drowsiness. It’s all he has thought about since his visit to Gastinne-Renette. Why didn’t he think of it sooner? But he was getting very warm, as they say in children’s guessing games. At first, the business with the three bedrooms had struck him. Then he had been diverted. He had been deflected by his theory about jealousy.
‘On the right … Yes. The third house along … Listen, I’d like you to stay here all night. Have you eaten? … No? … Wait a minute … Lucas! Come here, would you? … Anything happened? Is Félicie there? … What was that? … She asked you in for a coffee and a glass of brandy? … Of course not! You’re wrong. It’s not because she’s afraid. It’s because this morning I told off a silly nurse who was sniggering at her. Her gratitude to me has rebounded on you, that’s all. Make the most of the car. Go to the Anneau d’Or. Have dinner. And see to it the driver gets his. Stay in contact with the woman in the post office. Say she can expect to be disturbed tonight by the phone … Is the bike here?’
‘I saw it in the garden leaning against the wall of the wine store.’
Félicie is watching from the doorway. When the taxi drives off and Maigret walks towards her, she asks, with her mistrust renewed:
‘So you went to Paris after all?’
He knows what she is thinking. She is wondering if he went back to the restaurant where they’d had lunch, if he succeeded in tracing the man with grey hair, the overcoat and the muffler, and if the man has talked despite her sorry little note.
‘Come with me, Félicie. This is not the time for playing games.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Upstairs. Come on.’
He opens the door to old Lapie’s bedroom.
‘Think before you answer … When Jacques had this room for several months, what items of furniture
, what things were in it?’
She wasn’t expecting this question and she has to think. She looks round the room.
‘First there was the brass bedstead which is now in the lumber room. What I mean when I say lumber room is the room next to mine, the one I was in for those few months. Since then we’ve used it as a dump for everything that’s cluttering up the house and in the autumn we even store apples there.’
‘The bed … And a … What else? … The washstand?’
‘No. It was the same one.’
‘The chairs?’
‘Wait. There were chairs with leather seats, which we took down to the dining room.’
‘The wardrobe?’
He has kept the wardrobe until last and he is so tense that his teeth bite hard the stem of his pipe, cracking the vulcanite stem.
‘It was the same one.’
He is suddenly deflated. He feels that since his visit to Gastinne-Renette he has been in a furious hurry only to be brought up short by a blank wall, or even worse, a vacuum.
‘When I say it was the same, it was the same, though not really. There are two identical wardrobes in the house. They were bought at an auction three, maybe four years ago, I can’t remember which. I wasn’t best pleased because I would rather have had wardrobes with mirrors. In the whole house there isn’t a mirror where you can get a full view of yourself.’
Phew! If only she knew what a load she has just taken off his mind! He loses interest in her. He rushes into her room, through which he passes like a whirlwind, enters the room beyond, the one turned into a lumber room, opens the window and savagely flings open the slatted shutters, which were fully closed.
Why hadn’t it occurred to him before? There is everything in this room: a roll of linoleum, old mats, chairs stacked on top of each other the way they are in a brasserie after hours. There are racks of deal shelves which are probably used for storing apples in winter, a chest containing an old Japy hand-pump, two tables and lastly, behind all this jumble of junk, a wardrobe like the one in the old man’s room. Maigret is in such a hurry that he knocks over the disassembled sections of the brass bed which lean against a wall. He moves one of the tables, clambers on to it and runs his hand through the thick layer of dust on the other side of the frieze running round the top of the wardrobe.
‘You don’t have some sort of tool I could use?’
‘What sort of tool?’
‘Screwdriver, chisel, pincers, anything …’
Dust settles on his hair. Félicie has gone downstairs. He hears her walk across the garden and go into the wine store. She finally reappears holding a cold chisel and a hammer.
‘What are you trying to do?’
Remove the slats from the back! Actually, it’s not too difficult. One of them is almost loose. Underneath, he feels paper. Maigret takes hold of it and soon works free a packet wrapped in an old newspaper.
He looks down at Félicie and sees that she has gone quite pale and stiff as she raises her eyes to him.
‘What’s in the packet?’
‘Not the faintest idea!’
She has rediscovered her sharp voice and that disdainful look.
He climbs down off the table.
‘We’ll soon find out, won’t we? You’re sure you don’t know?’
Does he believe her? Or doesn’t he? It is as if he’s playing a game of cat and mouse. He takes his time, examines the paper before unwrapping it
‘It’s a newspaper and it’s over a year old … Aha! … Did you know, Félicie, there were such riches in the house?’
Because what he is holding is a wad of one-thousand-franc notes.
‘Hands off! No touching!’
He climbs back on to the table, removes all the slats from the top of the wardrobe and makes sure that nothing else is hidden there.
‘We’ll be more comfortable downstairs. Come on.’
He is jubilant. He sits down at the kitchen table. Maigret has always had a weakness for kitchens which are always full of wholesome smells and the sight of appetizing eatables: fresh vegetables, fresh meat oozing blood, chickens being plucked. The decanter from which Félicie offered a glass to Lucas is still there, and he helps himself before he starts counting the notes like some conscientious cashier.
‘Two hundred and ten … eleven … twelve … ah, here are two stuck together … thirteen. … fourteen … Two hundred and twenty three, four … seven … eight …’
He looks at her. Her eyes are glued to the notes; all the colour has drained from her face, where the traces of where she was hit in the night now show up more clearly.
‘Two hundred and twenty-nine thousand francs, Félicie … Well, what do you make of that? Two hundred and twenty-nine thousand francs in notes hidden in the bedroom of your boyfriend, Pétillon …
‘Because you do realize that it was in his room that the money was hidden, don’t you? The man who now has such an urgent need of the money knew exactly where it was. There was just one thing he never suspected: that there were two wardrobes. How could he know that, when Lapie went back to occupying his room, he carried his obsessions to the point of taking his own wardrobe with him and consigning the other one to the lumber room?’
‘Does that leave you any further forwards?’ she asks archly.
‘At least it explains why you were hit so hard last night that you might have been knocked out and why, only a few hours later, your friend Jacques’ room in Rue Lepic was ransacked.’
He stands up. He needs to stretch his legs. His triumph is not complete. But one success leads to another. Now that he has found what he was looking for and that his theory has been borne out by the facts – he is mentally transported back to Gastinne-Renette’s shooting range where the notion had suddenly come to him! – now that he has moved forwards one square, other questions arise. He walks up and down in the garden, straightens the stem of a rose-bush, absently gathers up the dibble which Lapie, alias Pegleg, had put down shortly before going indoors to die so mindlessly in his bedroom.
Through the open kitchen window, he can see Félicie looking as if she has been turned to stone. A faint smile crosses the inspector’s lips. Why not? It is as if he is saying to himself, with a shrug of his shoulders:
‘Why not give it a try?’
Toying with the dibble, which still has soil clinging to it, he starts talking to her through the window.
‘You know, Félicie, I’m becoming more and more convinced, surprising as it might seem, that Jacques Pétillon did not kill his uncle and even that he had nothing whatsoever to do with this entire murderous business …’
She stares at him without reacting in any way. Her face, tired and drawn, registers no sign of relief.
‘Well, what do you say? You must be pleased.’
She does her best to oblige, but what flickers on her thin lips is a sorry, meagre smile.
‘Yes, pleased. I’m grateful …’
And he has to make an effort not to show how pleased he is too.
‘Yes, I can see that you’re happy, very happy … And I think that now you’re going to help me prove the innocence of the young man you love. Because you do love him, don’t you?’
She looks away, probably so that he won’t see her mouth, which betrays how close she is to tears.
‘Of course you love him. There’s no shame in that. I’m sure he’ll mend, that you’ll fall into each other’s arms and that, to thank you for everything you did for him …’
‘I’ve done nothing for him …’
‘Come now! … But no matt
er. I tell you I’m quite sure that you’ll marry him and raise a large family …’
She explodes, just as he was expecting. Isn’t this exactly what he was angling for?
‘You’re a brute! A brute! You are the cruellest, the most … the most …’
‘Because I tell you that Jacques is innocent?’
These simple words puncture her rage. She realizes she has made a mistake, but it’s too late now, and she is at a loss for what to say, she is miserable and floundering helplessly.
‘You know that it isn’t what you really think. You’re trying to make me talk. From the moment you first set foot in this house …’
‘When did you last see Pétillon?’
But she still has enough presence of mind to say:
‘This morning.’
‘Before that?’
She does not answer, and Maigret makes a great show of turning round to look at the garden and the arbour with the green-painted table on which, one fine morning, there was a decanter of brandy with two liqueur glasses. Her eyes follow the direction of his. She knows what he is thinking.
‘I won’t say anything.’
‘I know. You’ve told me that a dozen times at least. It’s starting to sound like some old refrain. Fortunately we’ve recovered the banknotes …’
‘Why fortunately?’
‘You see, you’re beginning to take an interest … When Pétillon left Cape Horn a year ago, he had fallen out with his uncle, correct?’
‘They didn’t get on, but …’
‘Which is why he hasn’t been back since …’
She tries to work out where he intends to lead her this time. Her mental effort is almost palpable.
‘And in all that time you never saw him once!’ Maigret muses casually. ‘Or more exactly, you didn’t speak to him. Otherwise you’d surely have told him that the furniture had been moved around.’
She senses danger: it is there, hidden beneath these insidious questions. God, how hard it is to defend yourself against this unflappable man who smokes his pipe and smothers you with that fatherly eye! She hates him! Yes, loathes him! No one has ever caused her as much pain as this inspector who will not let her alone for a moment and says the most unexpected things in that same, even voice while he pulls gently on his pipe.
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