‘On the other hand the banknotes, which in theory are anonymous, didn’t leave their hiding place, or if they did briefly leave it they were returned … do you like these ceps à la bordelaise?’
‘Allow me to say, inspector, that you’re not as observant as you might be, or you would have noticed me helping myself three times. As for the Beaujolais, I’m afraid it may make me a slightly inattentive companion this afternoon …’
‘Wait till you try the coq au vin! Mélanie was cook for twenty years to one of our ministers. He went to the bad, but he appreciated good cooking … Would you have guessed that Juliette was once a rather beautiful woman? There’s a photograph of her in the apartment … I wonder if by any chance her husband was jealous …’
These simple words were enough to lead him into a new deep abyss of reflection, from which he did not emerge until Mélanie appeared to ask if they liked her coq au vin. Maigret glanced at the door now and then.
‘Are you expecting someone?’
‘Yes, a gentleman whom I don’t much like. It seems that he’s been hanging around Quai des Orfèvres for a good two hours, so I asked him to come and see me here.’
A few minutes later a taxi drew up beside the pavement, and Maître Leloup, stout and self-important, paid the driver and came into the bistro.
‘I’ve brought you what I promised,’ he announced, putting his morocco leather briefcase on a free table. ‘As you will see, the claims of my client, who is an honourable man, are not exaggerated.’
The lawyer couldn’t have had lunch yet, but the inspector did not invite him to share their meal, or to take off his coat.
‘I’ll look at the material soon.’
‘How are your inquiries going?’
‘Slowly, Maître Leloup, slowly.’
‘I’d like to point out a detail that may have escaped you … And please note that I am not criticizing the methods that have won you a certain celebrity. I have sent someone trustworthy to Fontenay, to question persons of a certain age who knew Madame Boynet when she was a girl, and was still Juliette Cazenove.’
Maigret was eating steadily, as if indifferent to this gossip, and the American watched him with curiosity.
‘I have learned,’ said Maître Leloup, ‘some things which will certainly surprise you …’
At this the inspector murmured very quietly, ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’
‘Juliette Cazenove was regarded as rather reckless when she was a girl – reckless with her body, to be more precise …’
‘And she was said to be Charles Dandurand’s mistress, wasn’t she?’
‘Someone has told you?’
‘No, but I thought as much. Dandurand was some ten years older than her … even then, I imagine, he liked unripe fruit.’
‘It was a scandal at the time.’
‘But it didn’t keep Juliette from marrying her building contractor and going to live with him in Paris. I know all that, Maître Leloup.’
‘And what do you conclude?’
‘I don’t conclude anything. It’s too soon for conclusions … Wait! I bet that phone call is for me!’
And he hurried to the phone kiosk with a hopeful expression on his face. It was indeed for him, since he stayed on the phone for some time, and when he came back he looked relieved.
‘Let’s have some more of Mélanie’s coq au vin,’ he said to the proprietor.
You would have thought that he hadn’t eaten any lunch yet. His appetite came back to him. He drank a full glass of Beaujolais and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. His eyes were sparkling.
‘They’ve picked up Gérard!’ he said at last. ‘Poor boy!’
‘Why do you say poor boy?’
‘Because he acted like the idiot he is. Let’s have another bottle, Désiré. Guess what? Yes, he got on a train for the Belgian border, as I foresaw. Once there, he saw some local gendarmes making a more thorough search of the carriages than usual … whereupon he lost his head, climbed out of the train on the wrong track and started running across country, wading through clay and mud, with the gendarmes on his heels. He saw a farm and made for it. Where do you think they found him? Hiding in the lavatory. He struggled so hard and so long that they had to half knock him out. He’s on his way back to us … he’ll be back in Paris at three-fifty.’
‘Has he confessed?’ asked Maître Leloup.
To which Maigret replied in a supposedly ingenuous tone, ‘Confessed what? Good heavens, I almost forgot the most important thing! Maître Leloup, would you be kind enough to send your client a telegram on my behalf? I’m wondering whether by any chance, given the good relations between your client and his aunt Boynet, she told him certain embarrassing things … Well, how would I know? For instance, perhaps she gave him presents? You have no idea how interested I would be to know that!’
At last they were rid of the potentially shady lawyer and could enjoy Mélanie’s coffee at their leisure, together with the old Armagnac brought out by Désiré, who came from Gers and still had friends among the wine-growers there. They were now the only guests left in the neat, simple room with its steamed-up windowpanes. The table had been wiped clean, and they had placed the letters brought by the lawyer on it. They were all written on the black-bordered notepaper that old Juliette had used ever since she was widowed.
My dear cousins,
I have received your good wishes, and I send you mine, with my love. It is hard for an old woman like me to live with ungrateful people. When I think of all I did for my sister’s children, and how …
Maigret read the letters one by one and passed them to his companion, who looked at them in turn. They were all alike. They were dated 2 or 3 January, written in reply to New Year greetings from the Monfils family.
… They’ll get their deserts, because if they think they’re going to inherit my fortune one day …
And in another letter:
Gérard is good for nothing, and never comes to see me without asking for money … as if I could manufacture it out of nothing!
Berthe fared no better.
… I’m glad she has left, because I was always expecting to see her in a condition, and that would have been a real scandal in this house …
‘A condition?’ asked Monsieur Spencer, puzzled.
‘An … er … interesting condition. A discreet way of saying that she expected her niece to get pregnant.’
They were warm and felt good. The Armagnac perfumed the air and tickled their palates.
It’s a terrible thing to be old and infirm and to think that all people want of me is my money … I can’t help thinking that I may have an accident one of these days …
You may well be happy, living in your little town, without all the anxieties that make me ill. Cécile pretends to be devoted to me, but she is more like her own brother than mine …
There is in fact someone who owes me a great deal, but of whom I can’t be too sure either …
Maigret showed this passage to his companion.
‘She wasn’t sure of anyone,’ he murmured.
‘She was right, wasn’t she?’
‘Read the last bit.’
Luckily I am no more stupid than the rest of them, and I have taken precautions. If anything were to happen to me, I promise you that they won’t get away with it and find themselves well off.
‘“They”,’ sighed Maigret. ‘She lumped everyone together, everyone who approached her, everyone she suspected of having an eye on her money, Monsieur Dandurand included. Do you begin to understand it?’
‘Understand what?’
Maigret smiled. ‘You’re right, I sound almost as vague as she does … Understand what, indeed? I should have asked if you begin to feel it. You must be disappointed if, as you said this morning, you were hoping to study my methods. I take you trudging round in the rain, I sweep you off to a very boring town hall, then I make you eat coq au vin … How can I explain it to you? I feel it … When Dandurand comes out of prison, he goes to live in furnishe
d accommodation in Paris. He meets Juliette again; she isn’t widowed yet. What was her husband like? All we have of him is his photographs. A man of about forty-five, tall, broad, with a certain presence … So Juliette and Dandurand resume their old relationship. I expect they meet in the former lawyer’s lodgings in Rue Delambre … The husband dies, and Dandurand soon makes his way into the apartment building owned by his mistress, whom he continues to see only in secret …’
‘I don’t understand the reason for the secrecy,’ objected the American.
There was a long silence. Maigret looked at his glass, finally sighed, swallowed some Armagnac and said, abruptly changing the subject, ‘We’ll see! Désiré, the bill, old fellow … And if I can’t get any work done this afternoon then you and your wife are to blame … I do wonder what that bastard went into Juliette’s bedroom for. Help me out, can’t you, Monsieur Spencer? Think, if we can only find a satisfactory answer to that question …’
Like a model secretary, Spencer Oats was putting the black-bordered letters scattered over the table in order.
‘The precautions,’ he ventured to suggest.
‘The precautions?’ Maigret frowned. Yes, hadn’t the old miser spoken in one of her letters about taking precautions against those who were after her money? She distrusted everyone, including her former lover.
‘Did you enjoy your lunch, Monsieur Maigret?’ asked the down-to-earth Mélanie, who had more than one celebrity among her clientèle and treated them all with maternal familiarity. ‘I copied the recipe out once for Madame Maigret. Has she ever tried it?’
The inspector wasn’t listening. Hand in his trouser pocket, where he had just put his change, he was staring at Mélanie’s apron as if in suspense, and finally said, ‘I wonder why Cécile is dead. Do you see what I mean, Monsieur Spencer? All the rest can be explained, it was easy. But Cécile is dead, and … Forgive me, Mélanie. It was an excellent lunch, thank you, and if he doesn’t have any other memories my friend here can tell them about it in Philadelphia …’
He was in a state of great agitation. On the pavement he said only a single word, and once they reached the corner of Avenue d’Orléans he raised his arm to hail a taxi.
‘Quai des Orfèvres, and fast.’
He had to change his mind on the way. ‘No, go to Gare du Nord first. The Arrivals area, where the main lines come in. It’s later than I thought.’
Was it the effect of the coq au vin, the Beaujolais, a melting mocha gâteau made by Mélanie and Désiré’s Armagnac? In any case, Spencer Oats was looking affectionately at his heavyweight companion. He felt as if for some hours he had been watching a progressive transformation. The inspector, wrapped in his overcoat, bowler hat tilted backwards on his head, the stem of his pipe clenched between his teeth, was inhabiting the lives of all the characters in this case he was trying to illuminate: the unpleasant ones, the mean ones and the sympathetic ones.
‘His wife could be having the baby at this very moment …’
He was pink-cheeked as if he were the husband himself. Maigret was there in the train between two gendarmes, where Gérard should be. He was close to Gérard’s wife, along with Berthe. He was in the apartment building in Bourg-la-Reine, his feet on old Juliette’s tapestry-covered footstool, and at the same time he was a floor below, where Monsieur Charles could hear everything that went on overhead.
From time to time, at a crowded crossroads, Maigret saw the pale face of an electric clock, or the white baton of a police officer in a cape, and he counted the minutes, leaning forward and half-rising from his seat, as if to relieve the taxi of his weight and let it go faster.
They reached Gare du Nord just in time, almost too late. There was a group of curious onlookers, and a police officer was calling, ‘Move along, please.’
Two gendarmes were pushing a thin young man ahead of them. His trousers were muddy, his raincoat was torn, and he was lashing out as far as the handcuffs would allow, like a horse between the shafts. And so far as the public were concerned Gérard, feverish and belligerent, was the incarnation of the hunted criminal everyone was after!
His lips quivered when he caught sight of the inspector.
‘Think you’re so clever, don’t you?’
‘Get into this taxi, gentlemen,’ Maigret told the gendarmes, showing them his badge.
They didn’t wait to be asked twice. They were feeling hot; all the way they’d lived in fear that their prisoner would throw himself out of the carriage door.
‘I don’t suppose anyone’s thought of my wife for a moment!’
Large tears welled out from under his eyelids, but he couldn’t wipe them away because of the handcuffs.
11.
‘What’s your brigade?’
‘Feignies, sir.’
‘There’s a train leaving at seven minutes past five … I expect you’d rather spend the night at home than in Paris? Give me your record slips, boys.’
Maigret got the taxi to stop beside the pavement on the corner of Rue La Fayette. Passers-by, leaning forward to keep their umbrellas above their heads in the gusts of wind, glanced curiously at the car with the gendarmes in it. The inspector put their record slips on his knees and signed them. The two gendarmes got out and disappeared into a bar. Then Maigret slid aside the pane between the passengers and the driver and spoke to the latter in an undertone. When the car had begun moving again, he took a small key out of his pocket and removed Gérard Pardon’s handcuffs.
‘You’re going to do me the favour of keeping quiet, aren’t you? A few dozen more innocent men like you, and the Police Judiciaire would have to recruit three times its present force.’
Gérard, who was watching the streets go past as if he hadn’t seen Paris for years, shuddered, and his ever-suspicious gaze was turned on the inspector.
‘Why did you say “innocent men”?’
Maigret could not suppress a smile. ‘Are you going to change tack and claim to be guilty now?’
‘If you think I’m innocent, then why did you have me arrested?’
‘And if you really are innocent why did you run for it? Why, at the sight of the gendarmes, did you gallop away like a foal and shut yourself up in the smallest room, where no one spends hours on end from choice?’
Spencer Oats, leaning slightly back, was taking all this in with the beatific if vague smile of those who have dined well and are now indulgently watching the twists and turns of a theatrical spectacle. The taxi was as dimly lit as a lantern with its glass in need of cleaning. Through the windows, figures seemed distorted, and the umbrellas thronging the pavements took on bizarre shapes. When the car stopped at a roadblock you could see the passengers in a bus sitting as still as waxworks in a museum.
‘Listen, young man … I know who killed your aunt.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘I know who killed your aunt, and I’ll prove it to you in the near future.’
‘But that’s impossible,’ insisted Gérard, shaking his head. ‘No one can know …’
‘No one except you, am I right? All the same, I’d bet that you were asleep when it happened!’
This time Cécile’s brother shivered and looked at the inspector in terror, unable to believe his ears.
‘There! As you can see …’
‘But … but where are we going?’
Through the film of rain, Pardon had just recognized Place de la Bastille. The one-way system meant that the car was going along Rue Saint-Antoine to bypass Place des Vosges.
‘Listen carefully. A reward of twenty thousand francs has been offered to anyone who identifies the murderer. For reasons that need not concern you, the Police Judiciaire would not dream of accepting that reward in any case …’
‘But … you must know that I …’
‘Shut up! I believe that your wife is still at your lodgings, with your sister Berthe keeping her company. Since you have a certain distaste for the maternity hospital, here’s the authorization for a payment on account, to be
set against the twenty thousand for which you are about to qualify. Go on, get in there quickly! We’ll wait for you in this taxi. Suppose Cécile had been able to give you enough money, what hospital were you thinking of?’
‘The Clinique Saint-Joseph.’
‘Right, Berthe will only have to take your wife to the Clinique Saint-Joseph, and you can join them there later this evening.’
Somewhat surprised, the American looked from one to the other of them.
‘And don’t do anything silly, will you?’
The car had stopped, and Gérard, dazed and perhaps still suspicious, hesitated.
‘Oh, go on, you stupid idiot!’
During the following ten minutes, Maigret smoked his pipe without saying a word, and at the moment when Pardon reappeared on the threshold of the building into which Maigret had sent him, mopping his eyes, the inspector contented himself with a glance at Spencer Oats.
‘Quai des Orfèvres, driver … come to think of it, Gérard, when did you last eat?’
‘They gave me a sandwich in the train, but I’m not hungry … I’m thirsty rather than hungry. The … I …’
His throat felt so tight that he had difficulty articulating his words.
They stopped once again, outside a bar, and Maigret himself had no objection to drinking a beer, by way of helping down the coq au vin and above all the mocha gâteau.
Ten minutes later, he was adding all the fuel to his stove that it would take, and he switched on the desk lamp with the green shade.
‘Sit down and take off that raincoat; it’s soaked. Sit in front of the stove to get your trousers dry … how on earth can anyone get into such a state?’
It was not yet fully dark outside. The garlands of lights marking out the course of the Seine could be seen through the window. The Police Judiciaire was at its busiest at this time of day; you could hear doors opening and closing, footsteps hurrying along the corridor, telephones ringing and the constant clicking of typewriters.
‘Torrence! I had a list of all the people who came to the Police Judiciaire on the morning of 7 October drawn up. Go and find it for me, please.’
Cécile is Dead Page 12
