‘Why him in particular?’
‘Because he was in league with the police. I can see now that that’s not true. He conned me out of a hundred thousand.’
Maigret thought for a moment.
‘Listen. Somebody is going to be shown into this office in a moment. Don’t talk to him. Just take a look at him and then go next door with the inspector.’
‘I’m sorry, you know … They’d made me think it was normal …’
Maigret managed a smile.
‘Hello, Torrence? Will you bring him in? I’ve got someone in my office I want you to keep over there in case I need him. Now, yes.’
He smoked, outwardly completely calm, but there was a sort of lump in his throat. He stared at the door until it opened and saw the lawyer, elegantly dressed in a light-grey suit, quickly take three or four steps into the room, an annoyed look on his face, open his mouth to speak, to protest, then suddenly catch sight of Gaston Mauran.
Torrence couldn’t make any sense of this silent scene. Jean-Charles Gaillard had stopped dead. His expression had changed. The young man got up uneasily from his chair and, avoiding eye contact with the newcomer, made for the door.
The two men were left alone, facing one another. Resting both hands flat on his desk, with a great effort Maigret resisted the temptation to get up, march over to his visitor and, despite him being taller and sturdier, slap him about the face.
Instead, in a strangely weak voice he said:
‘Sit down.’
He must have been even more intimidating than when he had grabbed the young mechanic by the shoulders because the lawyer obeyed automatically, forgetting to protest against the removal of his car and the fact that two inspectors had brought him to Quai des Orfèvres without a warrant and kept him waiting there like a petty suspect.
‘I suppose you’ve understood the situation,’ Maigret began wearily, as if the case was closed as far as he was concerned.
As the lawyer tried to answer, he continued:
‘Let me do the talking. I will be as brief as I can because it’s hard for me being alone in the same room as you.’
‘I don’t know what that boy—’
‘I told you to be quiet. I haven’t brought you in here to question you. I’m not going to ask you for an explanation either. If I had acted on my first instincts, I would have sent you to the cells without seeing you, and you would have waited for the results of the expert assessments there.’
He drew the third list towards him, the list of Gaillard’s clients who had gone to trial and either been acquitted or given light sentences.
He read out the names monotonously, as if he was reciting a litany. Then he looked up and added:
‘Needless to say, these people will be questioned. Some won’t talk, or rather, they’ll keep quiet at first. When they find out that the sums they paid for a specific purpose never reached their destination …’
Gaillard’s face had changed too, but he tried to stand his ground. He started to say, ‘I don’t know what that young thug—’
Maigret slammed his fist down on the desk, making everything on it jump.
‘Shut up!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t you dare open your mouth until I tell you to.’
They had heard the thump from the inspectors’ office, and everyone was looking at each other.
‘I don’t need to tell you how you did it. And I understand now why you picked your clients carefully. Knowing that they would be acquitted, or given a light sentence, it wasn’t hard to make them believe that if they paid …’
No! He couldn’t talk about it any more.
‘I have every reason to believe that my name wasn’t the only one you used. You dealt with people’s tax returns. I got in touch with Monsieur Jubelin just now and I shall be having a long talk with him.’
His hand was still shaking a little as he lit his pipe.
‘The investigation will be a long, complicated one. What I can tell you is that it will be very thorough.’
Gaillard had given up trying to stare him down and lowered his head. His hands were resting on his knees, with a gap where the four fingers of his left hand were missing.
Maigret’s gaze fell on that hand and he hesitated slightly.
‘When the case goes to the Assizes, your lawyer will bring up your conduct during the war, and probably also your marriage to a woman accustomed to a glamorous life, the illness that has isolated her almost completely from society …’
He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes.
‘Mitigating circumstances will be found for you. Why did you need money so badly when your wife was housebound and you apparently led a solitary life, devoted to work? I’ve no idea and I’m not asking you either.’
‘Other people will ask you these questions, you may understand why. This is the first time, Monsieur Gaillard, that …’
He choked up again. He unashamedly got up, went over to the wardrobe and grabbed the bottle of brandy and glass, which were intended for suspects struggling during long, fraught interrogations.
He drained the glass in one, returned to his seat and relit his pipe, which had gone out.
That calmed him down a little, and he spoke in a casual tone of voice now, as if the case no longer concerned him personally.
‘Right now experts are going over your car with a fine-tooth comb. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know when I say that if it has been used to move a body, there will most likely be traces. That struck you so forcefully that after my visit this morning you felt the need to get it cleaned.
‘Don’t say anything! For the last time, I’m ordering you to keep your mouth shut otherwise you’ll be taken straight to a cell.
‘I should also tell you that a team of specialists is on its way to Rue La Bruyère.’
Gaillard gave a start and stammered:
‘My wife …’
‘They’re not going there to bother your wife. Looking out of the window this morning, I saw a sort of shed in your courtyard. That will be examined square centimetre by square centimetre. As will the cellar. And the rest of the house, right up to the attic if necessary … I’ll question your domestic help this evening … Be quiet, I said!
‘Whoever you choose as a lawyer will have no trouble establishing a lack of premeditation. The fact that your car happened to have broken down leaving you with no means of transport to get rid of the body proves that. You had to wait for the car to be brought back, and it can’t have been pleasant spending two days and three nights with a body in the house.’
He had started talking to himself, without even looking at the lawyer. All the little details he had gathered in the past few days came back to him and fell into place. All the questions he had asked himself found an answer.
‘Mazotti was shot dead on 17 May and we questioned all the people who had recently been victims of his protection racket. At least one of your clients, Émile Boulay, was called in for preliminary questioning.
‘Did he get in touch with you there and then, because you dealt with his financial affairs and had already helped out in a couple of relatively minor matters?
‘Either way, he came here on 18 May and was asked the routine questions.
‘He was then called in a second time on the 22nd or the 23rd, I don’t know why, probably because Inspector Lucas wanted to clear up a few points.
‘So, the afternoon of the 22nd was when Boulay took five hundred thousand francs out of his bank. He needed cash immediately. He couldn’t wait until the evening to take it out of the till in one of his nightclubs.
‘We haven’t found any trace of this money …
‘I’m not asking if he gave it to you. I know he did.’
He said these words with a contempt he had never shown anyone in his life.
‘On 8 or 9 June, Boulay received a third summons for Wednesday the 12th. He took fright because he dreaded scandal. Despite his job, or perhaps precisely because of it, respectability meant more than anything
else in the world to him …
‘On the evening of 11 June, the day before he is due at police headquarters, he is feeling both anxious and furious because he has paid five hundred thousand francs to have peace of mind …
‘At ten in the evening, he starts telephoning your house and gets no answer. He calls back several times, and when he finally gets through, you agree to see him in a quarter or half an hour.
‘It’s not hard to imagine what he said to you in the privacy of your study. He had paid a lot of money not to get mixed up in the Mazotti affair, not to see his name in the papers.
‘But now, rather than leave him in peace as he had every right to expect, the police want to question him again and there’s every chance he’ll run into journalists and photographers in the corridors of the Police Judiciaire.
‘He feels he’s been tricked. He’s as outraged as Gaston Mauran just now. He tells you that he’s going to have a heart-to-heart with the police and remind them of the deal he has struck with them.
‘And that’s it …
‘If he left your house alive, if he came here the following morning, gave vent to his resentment …
‘The rest is none of my concern, Monsieur Gaillard. I have no desire to hear your confession.’
He picked up the telephone.
‘Torrence? You can let him go. Don’t forget to get his address, the examining magistrate will need him. Then come and get the person here in my office.’
He stood and waited, impatient to be rid of the lawyer’s presence.
After a moment Jean-Charles Gaillard, his head bowed, muttered in a barely audible voice:
‘Haven’t you ever had a passion, Monsieur Maigret?’
He pretended not to have heard.
‘I’ve had two …’
Maigret turned his back on the lawyer, determined not to feel sorry for him.
‘First my wife, who I tried to make happy in every way I could …’
His voice was bitter. There was a silence.
‘Then, when she was confined to her room and I felt the need for distraction, despite everything, I discovered gambling …’
They heard footsteps in the corridor. There was a quiet tapping on the door.
‘Come in!’
Torrence remained standing in the doorway.
‘Take him to the back office until I’m done at the Palais.’
He didn’t watch Gaillard leave the room. Picking up the telephone, he called the examining magistrate and asked if he could see him right away.
Moments later, he went through the little glass door that separates the police’s domain from that of the judiciary.
He was gone from the Police Judiciaire for an hour. When he came back, he was holding an official document. He opened the door of the inspectors’ office and found Lucas impatiently waiting for news.
Without any explanation, he gave him Jean-Charles Gaillard’s arrest warrant.
‘He’s in the back office, with Torrence. Drive them both to the cells.’
‘Shall we handcuff him?’
That was the regulation procedure, but there were some exceptions. Maigret didn’t want to seem to be taking revenge. The lawyer’s last words were starting to trouble him.
‘No.’
‘What should I say to the guard? Should they take away his tie, his belt, his laces?’
More regulations, more special cases!
Maigret hesitated, shook his head and then was left alone in his office.
When he got home a little late for dinner that evening, Madame Maigret noticed that his eyes were glistening and slightly staring, and that his breath smelled of alcohol.
He hardly opened his mouth during the meal. At one point he got up to turn off the television, which was annoying him.
‘Are you going out?’
‘No.’
‘Is your case over?’
He didn’t answer.
He had a restless night, woke up feeling irritable and decided to walk to Quai des Orfèvres, as he sometimes did.
He had barely entered his office before the inspectors’ door opened. Lucas closed it behind him with a grave, mysterious expression.
‘I’ve got something to tell you, chief …’
Did he guess what the inspector was going to say? Lucas often asked himself that question and never knew the answer.
‘Jean-Charles Gaillard has hanged himself in his cell.’
Maigret didn’t flinch, didn’t say a word, just stood there looking at the open window, the rustling leaves on the trees, the boats gliding over the Seine, the pedestrians swarming like ants across Pont Saint-Michel.
‘I don’t have any details yet. Do you think that—’
‘Do I think what?’ Maigret asked, suddenly aggressive.
Lucas backed out of the room, stammering:
‘I was just wondering …’
He slammed the door, and Maigret didn’t reappear until an hour later, seemingly relaxed and busy with routine matters.
1. Inspector Lognon’s Strange Nights and Solange’s Ailments
It was just after one o’clock in the morning when the light went out in Maigret’s office. Puffy-eyed with tiredness, Maigret pushed open the door to the inspectors’ office, where young Lapointe and Bonfils were on duty.
‘Good night, boys,’ he grunted.
In the vast corridor the cleaning women were sweeping the floor, and he gave them a little wave. As always at that hour, there was a draught, and the staircase he descended in the company of Janvier was damp and freezing.
This was mid-November and it had rained all day. Maigret hadn’t left the stiflingly hot atmosphere of his office since eight o’clock the previous morning. Before crossing the courtyard, he turned up the collar of his overcoat.
‘Shall I drop you off somewhere?’
A taxi, ordered by telephone, was stationed in front of the entrance to Quai des Orfèvres.
‘At any Métro station, chief.’
It was pouring down, the rain bouncing off the pavements. Janvier got out of the car at Châtelet.
‘Good night, chief.’
‘Good night, Janvier.’
It was a moment like so many others they had shared, and they both felt the same slightly weary sense of satisfaction.
A few minutes later, Maigret noiselessly climbed the stairs up to his apartment in Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, fumbling in his pocket for his key. He turned it quietly in the lock, and almost at once heard Madame Maigret stir in bed.
‘Is that you?’
She had asked that same question sleepily hundreds, if not thousands, of times when he came home in the middle of the night, groping for the bedside light and then getting up in her nightdress and glancing at her husband to gauge his mood.
‘Is it over?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did the boy talk in the end?’
He nodded.
‘Are you hungry? Do you want me to make you something to eat?’
He had hung up his wet overcoat on the coat-stand and was loosening his tie.
‘Is there any beer in the refrigerator?’
He had almost stopped the car at Place de la République to down a beer in a brasserie that was still open.
‘Did it turn out to be what you thought?’
A run-of-the-mill affair, as much as a case implicating several people can be described as run-of-the-mill. The newspapers had dubbed them ‘The Bike Gang’.
The first time, two motorbikes had pulled up in front of a jeweller’s in Rue de Rennes in broad daylight. Two men had jumped off one, and a third off the other, their faces masked with red bandanas. All three had dashed into the shop and emerged minutes later, brandishing guns, with jewels and watches snatched from the window and the counter.
In the heat of the moment, the bystanders had been numb with shock, and when motorists eventually reacted and thought to give chase to the thieves, it had caused such a traffic jam that the culprits were able to get away.
<
br /> ‘They’ll strike again,’ Maigret had predicted.
The haul was meagre, because the jeweller’s, owned by a widow, only sold cheap goods.
‘They wanted to perfect their technique.’
This was the first time that motorbikes had been used in a hold-up.
Maigret was not mistaken, because three days later the scenario was repeated, this time in a luxury jeweller’s in Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The result was the same, only this time the bandits had looted jewellery worth several million old francs, two hundred million according to the newspapers, one hundred said the insurance company.
But, as they made their getaway, one of the robbers had lost his bandana and he had been arrested two days later at the locksmith’s where he worked, in Rue Saint-Paul.
By that evening all three were behind bars, the eldest aged twenty-two and the youngest, Jean Bauche, nicknamed Jeannot, just eighteen.
He was blond, his hair too long, and was the son of a cleaning woman in Rue Saint-Antoine. He too worked in a locksmith’s.
‘Janvier and I took turns all day,’ an irritable Maigret told his wife.
Drinking beer and eating sandwiches.
‘Listen, Jeannot. You think you’re a tough guy. They had you believe you were. But it was neither you nor your little friends who planned those robberies. There’s someone behind you, someone who orchestrated the whole thing, taking care not to get his hands dirty. He was released from Fresnes two months ago and isn’t keen to go back to prison. Admit he was at the scene, in a stolen car, and that he covered your getaway by faking a clumsy manoeuvre and holding up the traffic …’
Maigret undressed, taking the occasional sip of beer, bringing his wife up to date in terse sentences.
‘Those kids are the toughest … They have a very strong code of honour instilled into them …’
He’d had three repeat offenders arrested, including a certain Gaston Nouveau. As was to be expected, he had a watertight alibi; two people had stated that, at the time of the heist, he’d been in a bar in Avenue des Ternes.
For hours, the questioning had stalled. Plump Victor Sidon, nicknamed ‘Granny’, the eldest of the three bikers, looked at Maigret contemptuously. Saugier, known as ‘Banger’, cried, swearing he knew nothing.
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