‘Janvier and I concentrated our efforts on young Bauche. We had his mother brought in, and she begged him:
‘ “Talk, Jeannot! You can see that these gentlemen aren’t after you. They know you let yourself be led astray …” ’
Twenty unpleasant hours, relentlessly pushing a kid to the limits of human resistance. It wasn’t pleasant either to see him suddenly crack.
‘ “All right! I’ll tell you everything. Yes, it was Nouveau who approached us at the Lotus and who got us involved in the racket …” ’
A little bar in Rue Saint-Antoine, where young boys and girls went to listen to the jukeboxes.
‘ “Because of you, when I get out of prison, he’ll have me killed by his friends …” ’
That was all! Another day done. Maigret went to bed, his head throbbing.
‘What time do you have to be at the office?’
‘Nine o’clock.’
‘Can’t you sleep in a little?’
‘Wake me up at eight.’
There was no transition to speak of. He didn’t feel as if he’d slept. No sooner had he closed his eyes, it seemed, than the doorbell was ringing and his wife slipping out of bed to go and answer it.
There was whispering in the hallway. He thought he recognized the voice, told himself he must be dreaming and buried his head under the pillow.
Again, his wife’s footsteps padding towards the bed. Was she going to go back to sleep? Had someone rung the wrong bell? No. She touched his shoulder, drew back the curtains and, without needing to open his eyes, he was aware that it was daylight. He asked in a slurred voice:
‘What time is it?’
‘Seven o’clock.’
‘Is someone here?’
‘Lapointe’s waiting for you in the dining room.’
‘What does he want?’
‘I don’t know. Stay in bed for a minute while I make you a cup of coffee.’
Why was his wife talking to him as if she’d just been given bad news? Why had she been loath to answer his question? It was a filthy grey day and the rain was still coming down.
Initially Maigret thought that Jean Bauche, thrown into a panic by his confession, had hanged himself in his police cell. He got up without waiting for his coffee, pulled on his trousers, ran a comb through his hair and opened the dining-room door, still groggy from too deep a sleep.
Lapointe stood by the window, wearing a black overcoat and holding a dark-coloured hat, his cheeks covered in stubble after a night on duty.
Maigret merely gave him a quizzical look.
‘I apologize for waking you up so early, chief … Something happened last night, to someone you’re fond of …’
‘Janvier?’
‘No … Not someone from Quai des Orfèvres …’
Madame Maigret brought in two large cups of coffee.
‘Lognon …’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Seriously wounded. He was taken to Bichat and Monsieur Mingault, the consultant, has been operating on him for the last three hours … I didn’t want to come sooner, or telephone you, because, after the day you’d had yesterday, you needed some rest … Besides, at first, they didn’t think there was much chance that he’d live …’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Two bullets, one in the stomach, the other just below the shoulder.’
‘Where?’
‘Avenue Junot, on the pavement.’
‘Was he alone?’
‘Yes. For the time being, it’s his colleagues from the eighteenth arrondissement who are investigating.’
Maigret sipped his coffee without experiencing the usual satisfaction.
‘I thought you’d want to be there if he regains consciousness. The car’s downstairs …’
‘Do they know anything about the attack?’
‘Almost nothing. They don’t even know what he was doing in Avenue Junot. A concierge heard the shots and called the emergency services. A bullet went through her shutter, smashed the windowpane and lodged itself in the wall above her bed.’
‘I’ll get dressed.’
He went into the bathroom while Madame Maigret set the table for breakfast and Lapointe, having removed his overcoat, waited.
Inspector Lognon didn’t belong to Quai des Orfèvres, even though he was keen to, but Maigret had worked with him often, almost every time there was a major case in the eighteenth arrondissement.
He was a civvy, as they said, one of the twenty plainclothes inspectors whose office was in the Montmartre town hall, on the corner of Rue Ordener and Rue du Mont-Cenis.
Some called him Inspector Hard-Done-By because of his sullen expression. But Maigret called him Inspector Luckless, and it did indeed seem as if poor old Lognon had a talent for attracting misfortune.
Short and scrawny, he had a permanent cold which gave him a red nose and the watery eyes of a drunkard, even though he was probably the soberest man in the police force.
He was afflicted with a sick wife, who dragged herself from her bed to an armchair by the window. When he was off duty, Lognon had to manage the housework, the shopping and the cooking. He could just about afford to pay a woman to come once a week to do the heavy cleaning.
On four occasions he had sat the Police Judiciaire entrance exam, and he’d failed each time because of careless mistakes, whereas he was in fact an outstanding police officer, a sort of bloodhound who, once on a trail, would not give up. Obstinate. Meticulous. The type who could immediately smell something suspicious passing someone in the street.
‘Do they hope to save him?’
‘At Bichat they reckon he has a thirty per cent chance, apparently.’
For a man nicknamed Inspector Luckless, that was not encouraging.
‘Has he been able to speak?’
Maigret, his wife and Lapointe ate the croissants which the baker’s boy had just left outside the door.
‘His colleagues didn’t tell me, and I didn’t want to press them.’
Lognon wasn’t the only one to suffer from an inferiority complex. Most of the neighbourhood inspectors coveted a post at Quai des Orfèvres and, when they had an interesting case likely to make the headlines, they hated the ‘big boys’ taking it away from them.
‘Let’s go!’ sighed Maigret, putting on his overcoat, which was still damp.
His gaze met his wife’s, and he understood that she wanted to speak to him, guessing that the same idea had just occurred to both of them.
‘Do you expect to be back for lunch?’
‘It’s unlikely.’
‘In that case, don’t you think …?’
She was thinking of Madame Lognon, helpless and alone at home.
‘Get dressed quickly! We’ll drop you off at Place Constantin-Pecqueur.’
The Lognons had lived there for twenty years, in a redbrick apartment building with yellow bricks surrounding the windows. Maigret had never been able to remember the street number.
Lapointe took the wheel of the little Police Judiciaire car. This was the second time in so many years that Madame Maigret had got into one of these with her husband.
They drove past crammed buses. On the pavements, people walked fast, leaning forward, clutching their umbrellas, which the wind was trying to snatch from their hands.
They reached Montmartre, Rue Caulaincourt.
‘It’s here …’
In the middle of the square was a stone couple, one of the woman’s breasts emerging from the folds of her robe, and the statue was black on the side exposed to the rain.
‘Telephone me at the office. I hope to be there by late morning.’
One case was barely over when another was beginning, about which he knew nothing yet. He was fond of Lognon. Often, in his official reports, he had highlighted his merits, even crediting him with successes he personally had achieved. But it hadn’t helped. Inspector Luckless!
‘To Bichat first …’
A staircase. Corridors. Rows of beds glimpsed through o
pen doors, the gaze of their occupants following them as they passed.
They were sent the wrong way and had to go back down to the courtyard and up another staircase before reaching, at last, a door marked ‘Surgery’. It was being guarded by an inspector from the thirteenth arrondissement whom they knew, a certain Créac, who had an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth.
‘I think you’d better put out your pipe, inspector. There’s a dragon here who’ll go for you the way she did me when I tried to light my cigarette.’
Nurses went past with bedpans, pitchers, trays of phials and nickel instruments.
‘Is he still in there?’
It was eight forty-five.
‘They set to work on him at four o’clock …’
‘You don’t have any news?’
‘No … I tried to inquire at this office on the left, but the old witch …’
It was the office of the matron, whom Créac had called the dragon. Maigret knocked on the door. A disagreeable voice bade him enter.
‘What is it?’
‘I apologize for disturbing you, madame. I am the head of the Crime Squad at the Police Judiciaire …’
The woman’s frosty glare seemed to say:
‘So what?’
‘I’d like to know whether you have any news of the inspector who’s being operated on at the moment.’
‘I’ll have some when he’s out of surgery. All I can tell you is that he’s not dead, because the consultant hasn’t come out …’
‘Was he able to speak when he was brought in?’
She gave him a withering look for asking such an idiotic question.
‘He had lost almost half his blood and we had to give him an emergency transfusion.’
‘When do you think he’s likely to regain consciousness?’
‘You’ll have to ask Monsieur Mingault.’
‘If you have a private room, I’d be grateful if you would reserve it for him. It is important. An inspector will keep watch at his bedside.’
She pricked up her ears because the operating-theatre door had just opened and a man had appeared in the corridor, a skullcap on his head and a bloodstained apron over his white coat.
‘Monsieur Mingault, this is someone who—’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Is he alive?’
‘For the time being … Barring any complications, I hope to save him.’
His forehead was beaded with sweat, and his eyes betrayed his exhaustion.
‘One more thing … It is important for him to be put in a private room …’
‘See to that, Madame Drasse … Excuse me.’
He strode towards his office. The door opened again. A nurse was pushing a gurney on which the form of a body could be made out beneath the sheet. That of Lognon, stiff and pale, with only the top half of his face visible.
‘Take him to 218, Bernard.’
‘Yes, madame.’
She followed the gurney, Maigret, Lapointe and Créac behind her. In the wan light coming from the high windows, they walked past wards lined with beds. It was like being in a bad dream.
A junior doctor came out of the operating theatre and joined the mournful procession.
‘Are you family?’
‘No … Detective Chief Inspector Maigret.’
‘Oh! It’s you?’
He darted him a curious look, as if to reassure himself that Maigret resembled his mental image of him.
‘Monsieur Mingault says there’s a chance he’ll pull through …’
This was a world apart, where voices didn’t sound the same as elsewhere and questions did not find answers.
‘If he told you so—’
‘You have no idea how long it will take him to come round?’
Was Maigret’s question so ridiculous that they had to gaze at him in that way? The matron stopped the police officers in front of the door.
‘No. Not now.’
They had to settle the wounded patient in, probably administer treatment, because two nurses brought in equipment, including an oxygen tent.
‘Wait in the corridor if you must, although I don’t like that. There are visiting times.’
Maigret glanced at his watch.
‘I think I’ll leave you, Créac. Try to be there when he regains consciousness. If he’s able to talk, note down exactly what he says.’
No, he didn’t feel humiliated. All the same, he felt uncomfortable because he wasn’t used to being brushed off like that. Here his renown did not impress people for whom life and death meant something different to what it did to the average person.
Out in the courtyard he was relieved to be able to light his pipe while Lapointe lit a cigarette.
‘As for you, you’d better go to bed. Just drop me at the town hall of the eighteenth arrondissement first.
‘Won’t you let me stay with you, chief?’
‘You spent the night—’
‘At my age, you know …’
They were just around the corner. In the inspectors’ office, they found three plainclothes officers hunched over their typewriters writing reports, like conscientious clerks.
‘Hello, gentlemen … Which one of you is up to date …?’
He knew them too, if not by name, then at least by sight, and all three had risen to their feet.
‘All of us and no one …’
‘Has someone been to talk to Madame Lognon?’
‘Durantel’s taking care of it.’
There were wet footprints on the floor and the air smelled of stale cigarette smoke.
‘Was Lognon on a case?’
They exchanged hesitant glances. Finally one of them, a short, plump officer, began:
‘That’s precisely what we were wondering … You know Lognon, sir … When he was following up a lead he would sometimes behave mysteriously … It wasn’t unusual for him to work on a case for weeks without talking to us about it.’
Because poor Lognon was used to others getting the credit instead of him!
‘He’d been acting secretive for at least a fortnight, sometimes coming back to the office with the air of someone who’s planning a big surprise …’
‘He didn’t give any hints?’
‘No. Except that he nearly always chose to be on night duty.’
‘Does anyone know which sector he was working in?’
‘The patrols spotted him several times in Avenue Junot, not far from the place where he was attacked … but not recently … He would leave the office at around nine p.m. and come back at around three or four a.m … Some nights, he didn’t come back at all …’
‘He didn’t keep a written record?’
‘I checked the log book. He simply wrote “nothing to report”.’
‘Have you got men at the scene?’
‘Three, led by Chinquier.’
‘The press?’
‘It’s hard to keep an attack on a police inspector from them … Don’t you want to see the superintendent?’
‘Not now.’
Maigret had Lapointe drive him to Avenue Junot. The trees were shedding their last leaves, which were plastered to the damp pavements. It was still raining, but that didn’t stop around fifty people from gathering halfway down the avenue.
Uniformed officers had cordoned off a square of pavement in front of a four-storey apartment building. When Maigret alighted from the car and had to push his way through the curious onlookers and the umbrellas, the photographers caught sight of him.
‘One more, inspector … Take a few steps forward into the crowd …’
He glared at them in the same way that the matron had glared at him at Bichat. On the area of empty pavement, the rain hadn’t been enough to wash away a pool of blood which was slowly being diluted, and, since it wasn’t possible to draw with chalk, the police had formed the outline of a body as best they could using twigs.
Inspector Deliot, from the eightee
nth-arrondissement police station, removed his sopping hat to greet Maigret.
‘Chinquier is with the concierge, inspector. He was the first on the scene.’
Maigret walked into the old-fashioned but very clean and well-maintained building and pushed open the glass door of the lodge just as Inspector Chinquier was putting his notebook back in his pocket.
‘I thought you’d come. I was surprised not to see anyone from Quai des Orfèvres.’
‘I dropped into Bichat first.’
‘The surgery?’
‘It seems to have been successful. The consultant thinks there’s a chance he’ll pull through.’
The lodge too was clean and tidy. The concierge, who must have been around forty-five, was an affable woman with pleasing curves.
‘Have a seat, gentlemen … I’ve just told the inspector everything I know … Look at the floor …’
The green linoleum was strewn with shards of glass from the smashed windowpane.
‘And here …’
She pointed to a hole, about a metre above the bed at the back of the room.
‘Were you alone at the time?’
‘Yes. My husband is a night porter at Le Palace, Avenue des Champs-Élysées, and doesn’t get home until eight in the morning.’
‘Where is he at the moment?’
‘In the kitchen.’
She pointed to a closed door.
‘He’s trying to rest because he’ll have to go back to work this evening, in spite of all this.’
‘I presume, Chinquier, that you have asked all the necessary questions. Please don’t be annoyed if I ask some myself as well.’
‘Do you need me?’
‘Not right away.’
‘In that case I’ll go upstairs for a minute …’
Maigret frowned, wondering where he was going, but didn’t press the matter, not wishing to offend the neighbourhood inspector.
‘Apologies, madame …’
‘Madame Sauget. The residents call me Angèle.’
‘Do please sit down.’
‘I’m so used to being on my feet!’
She went over to draw the curtain which hid the bed during the day, turning the room into a little sitting room.
‘You don’t want anything to drink? A cup of coffee?’
‘No thank you. So last night, you were in bed …’
‘Yes. I heard a voice saying:
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