‘“To talk to you,” I answered.
‘I’m convinced he was frightened. He asked me to come back the next day, claiming that he wasn’t feeling well, that he was suffering from neuralgia.
‘“If you don’t come down right away,” I shouted, “I’ll have you arrested.”
‘In the end he came down, in his pyjamas and dressing gown. Have you seen him?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I insisted: “Let’s go into your study. Where is your wife?”
‘“She’s in bed. I think she’s asleep.”
‘“Good.”
‘“Mother, are you sure this can’t wait until tomorrow?”
‘And do you know what I replied?
‘“That won’t do you any good. A few hours more, or less …”
‘He tried to follow. He was as cold as a pike. I’ve always said he was like a pike, but people laughed at me.
‘He opened the door to his study.
‘“Sit down,” he said to me.
‘“There’s no need.”
‘Had he guessed what I was about to do? I’m convinced he had, because he automatically glanced at the desk drawer where he usually keeps his gun. If I’d given him the time, I’ll wager that he would have defended himself and he would probably have shot first.
‘“Listen, Malik,” I went on. “I know about all your vile deeds. Roger is dead (Roger was Campois’ son), your daughter is dead, your son …”’
Maigret had opened his eyes wide at the words your daughter. He had finally understood and he looked at the old woman with a stupefaction that he no longer sought to hide.
‘“Since there’s no other way out and no one had the guts to do it, it may as well be an elderly grandmother who takes care of it. Goodbye, Malik.”
‘And as I said the last word, I fired. He was three paces away from me. He clutched his stomach, because I shot too low. I squeezed the trigger two more times.
‘He fell, and Laurence came rushing in, half-crazy.
‘“There,” I said to her. “Now we can live in peace and we can all breathe at last.”
‘Poor Laurence. I think it was a relief for her too. Aimée’s the only one to shed any tears for him.
‘“Call a doctor if you like, but I don’t think there’s any point,” I continued. “He’s well and truly dead! And if he weren’t, I’d finish him off with a bullet through the brain. Now, I suggest you come and spend the rest of the night at our house. There’s no need to call the servants.”
‘We both left. Aimée came running to meet us, while Charles stood in the doorway looking shifty.
‘“What have you done, Mother? Why is Laurence …?”
‘I told Aimée. She suspected as much, after the conversation we had just had in my room. Charles didn’t dare open his mouth. He followed us like a big dog.
‘I came back here and telephoned the gendarmerie. They were very courteous.’
‘So,’ murmured Maigret after a silence, ‘it’s Aimée.’
‘I’m just an old fool, I should have guessed. I’d always had my suspicions about Roger Campois, for example. At least that it was Malik who had got him into the habit of gambling.
‘I was so thrilled, at the time, that he would be our son-in-law! He was more brilliant than the others. He was able to entertain me. My husband had the tastes of a petty bourgeois, a country bumpkin even, it was Malik who taught us how to live in style, who took us to Deauville. Before that, I had never set foot in a casino and I remember he gave me the first chips to play roulette.’
‘He married Laurence—’
‘Because Aimée was too young, wasn’t she? Because she was only fifteen at the time? If Aimée had been two years older, Roger Campois might perhaps have lived. He would have married the older daughter and Malik the younger.’
They could hear people coming and going down below. Through the windows they saw a group heading for the Maliks’ house, where the body still lay.
‘Aimée truly loved him,’ sighed Madame Amorelle. ‘She still loves him, in spite of everything. She hates me now, for what I did last night.’
The skeleton in the cupboard! If there had only been, in that metaphorical cupboard, just the skeleton of the shy Roger Campois!
‘When did he think of bringing his brother from Lyon to marry your youngest daughter?’
‘Perhaps two years after his own marriage. And I was naive! I could see that Aimée was only interested in her brother-in-law, that she was much more in love with him than her sister was. Strangers mistook her for his wife, and when we travelled together, she was the one, despite her young age, that they called madame.
‘Laurence wasn’t jealous. She was blind to it, was happy to live in the shadow of her husband, whose personality crushed her.’
‘So Monita was the daughter of Ernest Malik?’
‘I found out yesterday. But there are other things that, at my age, I’d rather not know.’
This brother who was brought from Lyon, where he was just a low-wage earner and then married off to a rich heiress.
Did he know, at the time?
Probably! He’s spineless, meek! He got married because he was told to get married. He acted as a screen! In exchange for playing the part of husband, he shared the Maliks’ fortune with his brother.
So Ernest had two wives, and children in both homes.
And that was what Monita had found out. That was what had overwhelmed her with disgust and driven her to drown herself.
‘I don’t know exactly how she discovered the truth, but, since last night, I have an idea. Last week, I had the lawyer come to change my will.’
‘Maître Ballu, I know—’
‘I had not been getting along with the Maliks for a long time, and funnily enough it was Charles I hated the most. Why, I don’t know … I’d always found him underhand. I was close to thinking that he was worse than his brother.
‘I wanted to disinherit the pair of them, and leave my entire fortune to Monita.
‘That same evening, Aimée admitted yesterday during the scene we had, Ernest came to see Charles to discuss the matter.
‘They were very worried about this new will, whose contents they didn’t know. They spent a long time talking in Charles’ study on the ground floor. Aimée went up to bed. It was only much later, when her husband came up to bed that she said:
‘“Hasn’t Monita come back?”
‘“Why do you say that?”
‘“She didn’t come up and say good night to me as usual.”
‘Charles went into the girl’s room. She wasn’t there and the bed hadn’t been slept in. He went downstairs and found her in the lounge, ashen-faced, sitting in the dark as if frozen.
‘“What are you doing here?”
‘She appeared not to hear. She consented to go upstairs.
‘I am convinced, now, that she had overheard everything. She knew. And the next morning, before anyone was up, she went out as if going for her swim, which she often did.
‘Except that she didn’t intend to swim.’
‘And she’d had the opportunity to speak to her cousin … her cousin whom she loved and who is, in fact, her brother.’
There was a timid knock at the door. Bernadette Amorelle opened it and found herself facing the chief inspector from Melun.
‘The car is downstairs,’ he announced, not without some embarrassment, for it was the first time in his career that he had had to arrest an eighty-two-year-old woman.
‘In five minutes,’ she answered,
as if she were speaking to her butler. ‘We still have a few things to say to each other, my friend Maigret and I.’
When she went back to Maigret, she commented, demonstrating her astonishing alertness:
‘Why haven’t you smoked your pipe? You know very well that you can. I came to fetch you. I didn’t know what was afoot. At first I wondered whether Monita had been killed because I had just made her my heiress. I confess to you – but this is none of their business, there are things that are none of their business – that I thought that they might want to poison me. There, inspector. There’s still the boy. I’m pleased that you took care of him, for I can’t get the idea out of my head that he would have ended up like Monita.
‘Put yourself in their shoes … At their age, suddenly finding out …
‘In the boy’s case, it was even more serious. He wanted to know. Boys are more enterprising than girls. He knew that his father kept his private papers in a little cupboard in his bedroom and that he always kept the key on him.
‘He forced the cupboard open, the day after Monita’s death. It was Aimée who told me. Ernest Malik told her everything, he knew he could trust her, that she was worse than a slave.
‘Malik realized the cupboard had been broken into and he immediately suspected his son.’
‘What documents could he have found?’ sighed Maigret.
‘I burned them last night. I asked Laurence to go and fetch them, but Laurence didn’t dare go back into the house where her husband’s body lay.
‘Aimée went.
‘There were letters from her, little notes they passed to each other, arranging to meet.
‘There were receipts signed by Roger Campois. Not only did Malik lend him money to sink him further, but he got him loans from money-lenders, which he then redeemed.
‘He kept all that.’
And, with contempt:
‘Despite everything, he had the soul of a book-keeper!’
She did not understand why Maigret corrected her as he heaved himself to his feet:
‘Of a tax collector!’
It was he who saw her into the car, and she extended her arm through the window to shake his hand.
‘You’re not too annoyed with me?’ she asked as the police car pulled away, taking her to her prison.
And he never knew if she meant for having dragged him away from the peace and quiet of his garden in Meung-sur-Loire for a few days or for firing the gun.
There had been a skeleton in the cupboard for many years, and it was the old lady who had taken it upon herself to clean things up, like those grandmothers who can’t bear the house to be dirty.
1.
The ship must have reached the Quarantine Landing at about four in the morning, and most of the passengers were asleep. Some had half-awakened at the loud rattling of the anchor, but in spite of their earlier intentions, very few of them had ventured up on deck to gaze at the lights of New York.
The final hours of the crossing had been the hardest. Even now, in the estuary, a few cable lengths from the Statue of Liberty, a strong swell heaved under the ship … It was raining. Or rather, drizzling: a cold dampness that fell all around, soaking everything, making the decks dark and slippery, glistening on the guard rails and metal bulkheads.
As for Maigret, just as the engines fell silent he had put his heavy overcoat on over his pyjamas and gone up on deck, where a few shadows strode this way and that, zigzagging – now high overhead, now way lower down – as the ship pitched at anchor.
Smoking his pipe, he had looked at the lights and the other vessels awaiting the health and customs officials.
He had not seen Jean Maura. Passing his cabin and noticing light under the door, he had almost knocked, but why bother? He had returned to his own cabin to shave. He had swallowed – he would remember this, the way one remembers unimportant details – a mouthful of brandy straight from the bottle Madame Maigret had slipped into his suitcase.
What had happened next? He was fifty-six; this was his first crossing and he was amazed to find himself so lacking in curiosity, so unimpressed by the magnificent view.
The ship was coming to life. Stewards noisily dragged luggage along the corridors as one passenger after another rang for assistance.
When he was ready Maigret went back up on deck. The misty drizzle was turning milky, and the lights were growing dim in that pyramid of concrete Manhattan had set before him.
‘You’re not angry with me, are you, inspector?’
Maigret had not heard Maura come up to him. The young man was pale, but everyone out on deck that morning looked bleary-eyed and a little ashen.
‘Angry with you for what?’
‘You know … I was too nervous, on edge … So when those people asked me to have a drink with them …’
All the passengers had drunk too much. It was the final evening; the bar was about to close. The Americans in particular had wanted to enjoy their last chance at the French liqueurs.
Jean Maura, however, was barely nineteen. He had just been through a long period of intense emotional strain and had rapidly become intoxicated, unpleasantly so, growing maudlin and threatening by turns.
Maigret had finally put him to bed towards two in the morning. He’d had to drag him off by force to his cabin, where the boy rounded on him in protest.
‘Just because you’re the famous Detective Chief Inspector Maigret doesn’t mean you can treat me like a child!’ he shouted furiously. ‘Only one man – you hear me? – only one man on earth has the right to order me around, and that’s my father …’
Now he was ashamed, feeling upset and queasy, and it fell to Maigret to buck him up, to clap a hearty hand on his shoulder.
‘I went through the same thing well before you did, young man.’
‘I behaved badly, I was unfair. You understand, I kept thinking about my father …’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m so glad to be seeing him again and to make sure that nothing has happened to him …’
Smoking his pipe in the fine drizzle, Maigret watched a grey boat heaving up and down on the swell draw skilfully alongside the gangway ladder. Officials seemed practically to leap aboard, then vanished into the captain’s quarters.
Men were opening the holds. The capstans were already revolving. More and more passengers were appearing on deck, and in spite of the poor light, a few of them insisted on taking photographs. Others were exchanging addresses, promising to write, to see one another again. Still others were in the ship’s lounges, filling out their customs declarations.
The customs men left, the grey boat pulled away, and two motor-boats arrived alongside with officials from the immigration, police and health departments. Meanwhile, breakfast was served in the dining room.
At what point did Maigret lose track of Jean Maura? That is what he had the most trouble determining later on. He had gone to have a cup of coffee, had then handed out his tips. People he barely knew had shaken his hand. Next he had queued up in the first-class lounge, where a doctor had taken his pulse and checked his tongue while other officials examined his papers.
At one point, out on deck, there was a commotion. Maigret was told that journalists had just come aboard and were taking pictures of a European minister and a film star.
One little thing amused him. He heard a journalist who was going over the passenger list with the purser exclaim (or so he thought, for Maigret’s knowledge of English dated back to his schoolboy days): ‘Huh! That’s the same name as the famous chief inspector of the Police Judiciaire.’
/> Where was Maura at that moment? Passengers leaning on their elbows at the rail contemplated the Statue of Liberty as the ship moved on, pulled by two tugs.
Small brown boats as crammed with people as subway cars kept passing close to the ship: commuters from Jersey City or Hoboken on their way to work.
‘Would you come this way please, Monsieur Maigret?’
The steamer had tied up at the French Line pier, and the passengers were disembarking in single file, anxious to reclaim their luggage in the customs hall.
Where was Jean Maura? Maigret looked for him. Then his name was called again, and he had to disembark. He told himself that he would find the young man down on the pier with all their luggage, since they had the same initials.
There was no feeling of uneasiness in the air, no tension. Maigret felt leaden, tired out by a difficult crossing and by the impression that he had made a mistake in leaving his house in Meung-sur-Loire.
He felt so out of his element! In such moments, he easily turned peevish, and, as he hated crowds and formalities and had a hard time understanding English, his mood was souring rapidly.
Where was Maura? Now he had to search for his keys, for which he inevitably fumbled endlessly through all his pockets until they turned up in the place where they naturally had to be. Even with nothing to declare, he still had to unwrap all the little packages carefully tied up by Madame Maigret, who had never personally had to go through customs.
When it was all over, he caught sight of the purser.
‘You haven’t see young Maura, have you?’
‘He’s no longer on board, in any case … He isn’t here, either. You want me to find out?’
The place was like a train station, but more hectic, with porters banging suitcases into people’s legs. The two men looked everywhere for Maura.
‘He must have left, Monsieur Maigret. Someone probably came to get him, don’t you think?’
Whoever would have come to get him, since no one had been informed of his arrival?
Maigret was obliged to follow the porter who had carried off his luggage. He had no idea what the barman had handed him in the way of small change or what he should give as a tip. He was literally pushed into a yellow cab.
Maigret Gets Angry Page 13
