‘And the night before last?’
‘Much later.’
‘After three?’
‘It’s possible. But as I’m sure you know, we’re not allowed to provide information on the comings and goings of our guests.’
‘Everyone’s obliged to bear witness in a criminal case.’
‘Then you must speak to the manager.’
‘Was the manager here the night before last?’
‘No, but I’ll only talk with his authorization.’
He was stubborn, narrow-minded, disagreeable.
‘Get me the manager on the phone.’
‘I can only disturb him for a serious reason.’
‘It’s serious enough for me to put you in a police cell if you don’t call him immediately.’
The man must finally have realized the gravity of the situation.
‘In that case, I’ll give you the information. It was after three, and even well after three thirty, because it was a little later that I had to go upstairs to stop the Italians making so much noise.’
Maigret gave him instructions, too, though he still had to speak to the manager of the hotel on the telephone.
‘Now will you be kind enough to put me through to John T. Arnold? Just ring his suite. I’ll talk to him.’
Holding the receiver, Maigret was quite nervous: this was a difficult, delicate game he was playing. He heard ringing in that suite he didn’t know. Then the telephone was picked up at the other end.
‘Monsieur Arnold?’ he asked in a muted voice.
‘Who is it?’
Half-asleep, Arnold had naturally spoken in his native language.
‘I’m sorry to bother you, Monsieur Arnold. This is Detective Chief Inspector Maigret. I’m about to lay my hands on the person who murdered your friend Ward and I need your help.’
‘Are you still in Lausanne?’
‘No, in Paris.’
‘When do you want to see me?’
‘Right now.’
There was a silence, a hesitation.
‘Where?’
‘I’m downstairs in your hotel. I’d like to come up for a moment and talk to you.’
Another silence. Arnold had a perfect right to refuse this interview. Would he do so?
‘Is it the countess you want to talk about?’
‘About her, too, yes.’
‘Did she come back with you? Is she with you now?’
‘No, I’m alone.’
‘All right. Come up.’
Maigret hung up, relieved.
‘Which suite?’ he asked the receptionist.
‘551. The bellboy will take you.’
Corridors, numbered doors. They encountered a single waiter, who knocked at the door of 551 for them.
John T. Arnold’s eyes were puffy, and he looked older than when Maigret had met him at the George-V. He was wearing a black dressing gown with a leaf pattern over silk pyjamas.
‘Come in. Excuse the mess … What did the countess tell you? She’s a hysteric, did you know that? And, when she’s been drinking …’
‘I know. I’m grateful to you for agreeing to see me. It’s in everyone’s interest – except for the murderer’s, of course – for the case to be brought swiftly to a close, isn’t it? I’ve heard that you and the English solicitor went to a great deal of trouble yesterday to sort out Ward’s estate.’
‘It’s very complicated,’ the pink little man sighed.
He had ordered tea from the waiter.
‘Would you like some, too?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Something else?’
‘No. To tell the truth, Monsieur Arnold, it isn’t here that I need you.’
Even though he pretended not to look at Arnold, he kept an eye on his reactions.
‘At Quai des Orfèvres, my men have made a number of discoveries that I’d like to put to you.’
‘What kind of discoveries?’
Maigret pretended not to have heard.
‘I could obviously have waited until tomorrow morning to summon you. But as you’re the person who was closest to the colonel, and the most devoted, I didn’t think you’d be too upset with me if I disturbed you in the middle of the night.’
He was as benign as he could possibly be, like a civil servant embarrassed at having to perform an unpleasant task.
‘In cases like this, time is of the essence. You’ve spoken more than once of the importance of Ward’s business affairs, the repercussions of his death in financial circles … If you don’t mind, I’d like you to get dressed and come with me.’
‘Where to?’
‘My office.’
‘Can’t we talk here?’
‘My office is the only place where I’ll be able to show you the evidence and ask your advice on a number of matters.’
It took a little more time, but in the end, Arnold made up his mind to get dressed, moving from the sitting room to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the bathroom.
Not once did Maigret utter the name Muriel Halligan, but he spoke a lot about the countess, in a half-serious, half-amused tone. Arnold drank his scorching-hot tea. In spite of the hour, and the place they were going, he made himself as immaculate as usual.
‘I don’t suppose this’ll take long, will it? I went to bed early because tomorrow I have an even busier day than today. You do know that Bobby, the colonel’s son, has arrived with someone from his school? They’re staying here.’
‘Not at the George-V?’
‘I thought it preferable, given what happened there.’
‘You did the right thing.’
Maigret made no attempt to hurry him. Quite the contrary: he had to give Lucas and the others time to do all they had to do, to get everything ready.
‘Your life is going to change a lot, isn’t it? How long, by the way, were you with your friend Ward?’
‘Nearly thirty years.’
‘Going everywhere with him?’
‘Everywhere.’
‘And overnight … I wonder if it’s because of him that you’ve never married.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If you were married, you wouldn’t have been as free to go with him. When it comes down to it, you sacrificed your personal life to him.’
Maigret would have preferred to go about it differently, to plant himself in front of this plump, well-groomed little man and say straight out:
‘Just between ourselves, you killed Ward because …’
The unfortunate thing was that he didn’t know why exactly, and Arnold would doubtless have shrugged off the accusation.
‘Countess Palmieri will get into Gare de Lyon at seven. She’s on the train right now.’
‘What did she tell you?’
‘That she went to the colonel’s suite and found him dead.’
‘Have you summoned her to Quai des Orfèvres?’ He frowned. ‘You’re not going to make me wait there until she arrives?’
‘I don’t think so.’
At last they both headed for the lift. Arnold automatically pressed the button.
‘I forgot to take a coat.’
‘I don’t have one either. It isn’t cold, and it’ll only take a few minutes by taxi.’
Maigret didn’t want to let him go back to his suite alone. As soon as they were in the cab, an inspector would conduct a thorough search of it.
They crossed the lobby quickly enough for Arnold not to notice that it wasn’t the same man in reception. A taxi was waiting.
‘Quai des Orfèvres!’
The boulevards were deserted. Couples here and there. A few taxis, mostly on their way to the railway stations. Maigret only had a few minutes left to play his disagreeable role and to wonder if he wasn’t barking up the wrong tree.
The taxi didn’t take them into the courtyard. The two men walked past the sentry and went in under the stone archway, where it was always colder than elsewhere.
‘I’ll show you the way.’
&n
bsp; Maigret walked in front up the dimly lit main staircase. He held the glass door open for his companion. The vast corridor, on to which the doors of the various departments gave, was empty, with only two of the lights on.
‘Just like a hotel at night!’ Maigret thought, remembering all the corridors he had wandered down that night.
Out loud, he said:
‘This way … Please come in.’
He didn’t take Arnold to his own office, but to the inspectors’ office. He himself stayed behind him, knowing the sight that awaited the Englishman on the other side of the door.
One step … Two steps … A pause … He was aware of a shiver running down Arnold’s back, a movement to turn back that he was tempted to make but controlled.
‘Go in.’
Closing the door behind them, he found that everything had been staged exactly as he had imagined. Lucas was sitting at his desk, apparently engrossed in writing a report. At the desk opposite, young Lapointe sat with a cigarette between his lips. Maigret noticed that of all of them he was the palest. Did he realize what a difficult, even dangerous, game Maigret was playing?
Along the walls, on chairs, bodies and faces as motionless as wax figures.
The extras hadn’t been placed any old how, but in a specific order. First, in an overcoat open over his black trousers and white jacket, the night waiter who worked on the third floor of the George-V. Then a uniformed bellboy. Next, a little old man with bilious eyes, the man who ought by rights to be in the glass cage near the service entrance in Rue Magellan right now.
These three were the most ill at ease, and they avoided looking at Arnold, who couldn’t have failed to recognize them, the first of them anyway, or the second because of his uniform.
The third could have been anybody. It didn’t matter. Next came Olga, the redhead with the luxuriant breasts, who was chewing gum to overcome her irritation, and the friend who had gone to wait for her outside the rooming house in Rue Washington.
And finally, the waiter from the bar, also in an overcoat, with a check cap in his hand, the old flower-seller and the receptionist from the Scribe.
‘I assume you know these people?’ Maigret said. ‘We’ll go to my office and talk to them one by one. Do you have the written statements, Lucas?’
‘Yes, chief.’
Maigret opened the communicating door.
‘Please come in, Monsieur Arnold …’
Arnold stood there for a moment, rooted to the spot, his eyes fixed intensely on Maigret.
It was essential for Maigret to sustain that gaze, to keep his air of self-confidence.
He repeated:
‘Please come in.’
He switched on the green-shaded lamp on his desk and pointed to an armchair facing his.
‘You can smoke if you like.’
When he looked again at Arnold, he realized that the Englishman was still staring at him in genuine terror.
As naturally as possible, Maigret filled a pipe and said:
‘And now, if you don’t mind, we’ll call in the witnesses one by one in order to establish your movements from the moment in Colonel Ward’s bathroom when …’
As his hand moved ostentatiously to press the button, he saw Arnold’s prominent eyes mist over and his lower lip rise as if in a sob. But he didn’t cry. Swallowing to relax the tension in his throat, he said in a voice that was painful to hear:
‘There’s no point.’
‘Do you confess?’
A silence. A flicker of the eyelids.
And then something happened that was almost unique in Maigret’s career. He had been so tense, so anxious, that there was a sudden collapse of his whole body, betraying the relief he felt.
Arnold, who hadn’t taken his eyes off him, was stunned at first, then frowned and grew pale.
‘You …’
The words emerged with difficulty.
‘You didn’t know, did you?’
At last, in a burst of realization:
‘They never saw me, did they?’
‘Not all of them,’ Maigret admitted. ‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Arnold, but it was best to have done with it, don’t you think? It was the only way.’
Hadn’t he saved him hours, perhaps whole days of interrogation?
‘I assure you it’s best for you, too.’
They were still waiting next door, all the witnesses, those who had really seen something and those who had seen nothing. By placing them in a row, in the order in which Arnold might have met them, Maigret had created the impression of a solid chain of testimonies.
In a way, the real ones made up for the fake ones.
‘I assume I can let them go?’
Arnold did try to struggle a little.
‘What is there to prove, right now, that—’
‘Listen to me, Monsieur Arnold. Right now, as you say, I know. You might be able to retract your confession, and even claim it was extracted from you by violence.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘But it’s too late to turn the clock back. So far, I haven’t seen fit to disturb a certain lady who’s staying at a hotel on Quai des Grands-Augustins and with whom you had lunch yesterday. I can do that. She’ll sit where you’re sitting, and I’ll ask her so many questions that she’ll have to answer in the end.’
There was a heavy silence.
‘You were planning to marry her, weren’t you?’
No reply.
‘How many days did you have before the divorce became final and she had to give up her claims to the estate?’
Without waiting, Maigret went and opened the window. The sky was starting to lighten, and tugboats could be heard calling to their barges upstream of the Ile Saint-Louis.
‘Three days.’
Had he heard? As if everything was normal, Maigret opened the communicating door.
‘You can go, everyone. I don’t need you any more … Lucas!’
He had hesitated between Lucas and Lapointe. Seeing how disappointed the young man was, he added:
‘You, too. Come in, both of you, and take his statement.’
He went back to the middle of his office, chose a fresh pipe, which he filled slowly, and looked around for his hat.
‘Do you mind if I leave you, Monsieur Arnold?’
Arnold was slumped on his chair, suddenly very old. With every passing minute he was losing that … That what? Maigret would have found it hard to express what he was thinking. That indefinable sense of ease and brilliance, that self-assurance that distinguished the people who were part of a certain world, the people encountered in luxury hotels …
It was almost gone now, and he was just a man, an unhappy, shattered man who had played the game and lost.
‘I’m going home to bed,’ Maigret told his colleagues. ‘If you need me …’
It was Lapointe who noticed that as Maigret passed John T. Arnold, he placed a hand on his shoulder for a moment, as if without thinking, and there was a troubled expression in the young inspector’s eyes as he watched his chief walk to the door.
1. The Tuesday Morning Visitor
It hardly happens more than once or twice a year at Quai des Orfèvres, and sometimes it is over so quickly that you haven’t time to notice it: all of a sudden, after a frantic period in which there is a rapid succession of cases, arriving three or four at a time, putting all the staff on edge, so much so that the inspectors, for want of sleep, end up gaunt and red-eyed, all of a sudden there is dead calm, a void, one might say, barely punctuated by some unimportant phone calls.
The same had been true the previous day. Admittedly that had been a Monday, a day that was usually less busy than the others anyway. The same atmosphere prevailed on Tuesday, at eleven o’clock in the morning. In the vast corridor, barely two or three small-time informers hung about uneasily, coming to pass on their information, and all the people in the inspectors’ office were at their desks except the ones who were off with flu.
Whereas in an emergency M
aigret usually didn’t have enough staff and had a huge amount of trouble finding enough men to put on a case, today he could have had access to almost his entire squad.
It is true that it was more or less the same in the rest of Paris. It was 10 January. After the holidays, people were living their lives in slow motion, with a vague hangover, and the prospect of rents and taxes to be paid.
The sky, in harmony with everyone’s minds and moods, was a neutral grey, the same grey, more or less, as the flagstones. It was cold, not cold enough to be picturesque or newsworthy, but an irritating cold, nothing more than that, the kind of cold you only noticed after walking in the streets for a certain amount of time.
The radiators in the offices were scorching, adding to the thickness of the atmosphere, with occasional gurgles in the pipes and strange noises issuing from the boiler.
Like schoolchildren once the exams are over, some addressed themselves to the small jobs that are normally put off until later, discovering in drawers forgotten reports, statistics to be established, dull administrative tasks.
Almost all the people who made the headlines were on the Côte d’Azur or on the ski slopes.
If Maigret had still had his coal-fired stove, which he had been allowed to keep for so long after the installation of central heating, but which had finally been taken away, he would have broken off from time to time to refill and poke it, bringing down a rain of red ash.
He wasn’t in a bad mood, but he wasn’t in very good form either, and in the bus that brought him from Boulevard Richard-Lenoir he had wondered for a moment if he wasn’t coming down with flu.
Perhaps it was his wife he was worried about? The previous day his friend Pardon, the doctor on Rue Picpus, had phoned him out of the blue.
‘Hello! Maigret … Don’t tell Madame Maigret that I’ve let you know.’
‘Let me know what?’
‘She came to see me just now and insisted that I wasn’t to talk to you about it …’
Less than a year before, Maigret had gone to see Pardon as well, asking him not to tell his wife about his visit.
‘Most importantly, don’t be anxious. I examined her carefully. There’s nothing serious …’
The previous day, when he took the call, Maigret had been as lethargic as he was this morning, with the same administrative report to complete.
Maigret Travels Page 13
