Maigret Has Scruples

  Maigret has Scruples

  LES SCRUPULES DE MAIGRET

  THE 80TH EPISODE IN THE MAIGRET SAGA

  1958

  Georges Simenon

  Translated from the French by

  Robert Eglesfield

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  A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

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  Contents

  |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|

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  Penguin Books

  In Association With Hamish Hamilton

  Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex

  Australia: Penguin Books Pty Ltd, 76a

  Whitehorse Road

  ,

  Mitcham, Victoria

  Les Scrupules de Maigret first published 1958

  This translation first published by Hamish Hamilton 1959

  Published in Penguin Books 1962

  Reprinted 1962, 1963

  Copyright © Georges Simenon, 1958

  Made and printed in the Netherlands by N.V. Drukkerij Bosch

  Utrecht Set in Linotype Garamond

  All characters in this book are fictitious and are not intended to represent any actual persons living or dead

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise disposed of without the publisher’s consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published

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  Chapter 1

  ^ »

  This scarcely happens more than once or twice a year at the Quai des Orfèvres, and sometimes it is over so soon that no one has time to notice it: suddenly, after a period of feverish activity, during which cases follow one after another without a breathing-space, when they are not cropping up three or four at a time, working the whole staff so hard that the inspectors, for want of sleep, end up haggard and red-eyed, suddenly there is a dead calm, a blank, one might say, barely punctuated by a few telephone calls of no importance.

  This had been the case the day before, a Monday, it is true, a day which is always slacker than the rest, and at eleven o’clock in the morning this was still the atmosphere on Tuesday. In the vast corridor, there were at most two or three seedy-looking informers, who had come to make their reports and were hanging about uneasily, while in the inspectors’ office everyone, except for those who were suffering from influenza, was at his post.

  Whereas in an emergency Maigret was generally short-handed and had the utmost difficulty in finding enough men to put on to a case, he could have drawn, today, on almost his entire squad.

  It is true that it was the same nearly everywhere in Paris. It was 10 January. People, after the holidays, were living at a slower pace, with a vague hang-over, and the prospect of rent to pay and income-tax returns to make close at hand.

  The sky, in keeping with their consciences and their spirits, was a dull grey, more or less the same grey as the pavements. There was a chill in the air, but not enough to be interesting and to be mentioned in the papers, an unpleasant chill, nothing more, which you only noticed after you had been walking in the streets for some time.

  The radiators, in the offices, were burning hot, making the atmosphere closer than ever, and from time to time there were gurgling sounds in the pipes, mysterious noises which came from the boiler-room.

  Like schoolboys in their classrooms after the examinations, all and sundry were attending to those little jobs which are usually put off until later, finding in their drawers forgotten reports, statistics to be worked out, dreary administrative tasks.

  The people who are talked about in the papers were nearly all on the Côte d’Azur or at winter sports.

  If Maigret had still been in possession of his stove, which had been left long after the central heating had been installed but which had finally been removed, he would have broken off from time to time to stoke it up, poking the fire so as to produce a rain of red ashes.

  He was not feeling out of sorts, but he was not in good form either, and he had wondered for a moment, in the bus bringing him from the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, whether he might not be sickening for the influenza.

  Perhaps it was his wife who was worrying him? The day before, his friend Pardon, the doctor in the rue Picpus, had telephoned him unexpectedly.

  ‘Hullo, Maigret… Now don’t tell Madame Maigret that I’ve told you about this… ’

  ‘Told me about what?’

  ‘She has just been to see me and she insisted that I wasn’t to speak to you about it… ’

  It was less than a year since the chief-inspector himself had been to see Pardon and had asked him to say nothing to his wife about his visit.

  ‘Above all, don’t go and start worrying. I’ve examined her carefully. There’s nothing seriously wrong… ’

  Maigret had been as dull-witted, the day before, when he had had this telephone call, as he was this morning, with the same administrative report in front of him, waiting to be put into shape.

  ‘What does she say is the matter with her?’

  ‘For some time now, she has been getting out of breath going upstairs, and her legs feel heavy too, especially in the morning. Nothing to worry about, as I said before. Only, her circulation isn’t quite what it ought to be. I’ve prescribed some tablets for her to take with every meal. I ought to tell you too, so that you won’t be taken by surprise, that I’ve put her on a diet. I should like her to lose ten or twelve pounds, because that would ease the strain on her heart.’

  ‘You are sure that… ’

  ‘I swear to you there’s absolutely no danger at all, but I thought it best to let you know about it. If I were you, I should pretend I hadn’t noticed anything. What frightens her most of all is the thought of your worrying about her… ’

  Knowing his wife, he felt sure that she had gone and bought the prescribed medicine at the first chemist’s she had come to. The telephone call had come in the morning. At midday, he had watched Madame Maigret, who had taken no tablets while he was there. In the evening it was the same. He had hunted for a bottle or a pillbox in the sideboard drawers, and then, in a casual way, in the kitchen.

  Where could she have hidden her tablets? She had eaten less, and had not taken any dessert, though she usually enjoyed it.

  ‘I think I must start slimming a bit,’ she had said jokingly. ‘I’m beginning to burst out of my dresses… ’

  He had every confidence in Pardon. He was not alarmed. All the same it worried him, or rather, to be more precise, it made him sad.

  He had been the first, the year before, with three weeks of complete rest. Now it was his wife’s turn. This meant that they had arrived almost imperceptibly at the age of petty tribulations, when minor repairs are necessary, rather like cars which, all of a sudden, need to be sent to the garage nearly every week.

  Only, for cars, you can buy spare parts. You can even put in a new engine.

  When the porter knocked at his door, which he opened as usual without waiting for an answer, Maigret was not conscious of these thoughts. He raised his head from his file, and looked at old Joseph with big eyes that you might have thought were asleep.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Somebody who insists on seeing you personally.’

  And Joseph, who made no noise as he walked, put a form on the corner of the desk.

  Maigret read a name written in pencil but, as this name meant nothing to him, took no notice of it. Later he would only remember that it was a two-syllabled name, which probably began with an M. Only the Christian name, Xavier, stuck in his memory, because it was that of his first chief at the Quai des Orfèvres, old Xavier Guichard.

  Under the printed words: ‘Purpose
of Call’, there was something like: ‘Urgently needs to talk to Chief-Inspector Maigret.’

  Joseph waited, impassively. It was gloomy enough in the office for the lamps to be lit, but the chief-inspector had not thought of it.

  ‘Will you see him?’

  He said yes with a nod of the head, shrugging his shoulders slightly. Why not? The next moment, a visitor of about forty was shown in, whose appearance had nothing special about it and who could have been any one of the thousands of men you see, at six o’clock in the evening, walking hurriedly towards the nearest métro station.

  ‘I must apologize for troubling you, Chief-Inspector… ’

  ‘Sit down.’

  His visitor was a little nervous, though not inordinately so, overawed rather, like so many others who entered this same office. He was wearing a dark overcoat, which he unbuttoned before sitting down, keeping his hat on his knees at first, then, a little later, putting it by his feet on the carpet.

  He smiled then, a mechanical smile, no doubt a sign of timidity. After giving a little cough, he said:

  ‘The hardest thing is getting started, isn’t it? Of course, like everybody else, I’ve repeated to myself I don’t know how many times what I was going to say to you, but, now the time had come, it’s all getting muddled up… ’

  Another smile, angling for some sign of approval or encouragement from the chief-inspector. But the latter’s interest had not been awakened. The man had come at the wrong time, when his mind was asleep.

  ‘You must have lots of calls of this sort, from people who come to talk to you about their little troubles, convinced that they are interesting.’

  He was dark, and not bad-looking, although his nose was a little crooked and his lower lip too fleshy.

  ‘I can assure you that that isn’t the case with me and that I hesitated a long time before bothering a man as busy as you are.’

  He must have expected to find a desk littered with files, with two or three telephones ringing at once, inspectors coming and going, and witnesses or suspects slumped on chairs. That was indeed more or less what he would have found on any other day, but his disappointment failed to amuse the chief-inspector, who looked as if he were thinking of nothing in particular.

  In fact, he was looking at his visitor’s suit, and thinking that it was made of a good cloth and that it must have been cut by a local tailor. A suit of a grey colour that was almost black. Black shoes. A quiet tie.

  ‘Let me asuure you, Chief-Inspector, that I’m not mad. I don’t know if you know Dr Steiner, in the Place Denfert-Rochereau. He’s a neurologist, which, I believe, is more or less the same as a psychiatrist, and he has appeared several times as an expert witness in the assize courts.’

  Maigret’s thick eyebrows rose a little way, but not unduly far.

  ‘You’ve been to see Steiner?’

  ‘Yes, I went and asked him to examine me, and incidentally I might say that his examinations last a full hour and that he leaves nothing to chance. He found nothing wrong. He regards me as completely normal. As for my wife, whom he hasn’t seen… ’

  He stopped, because his monologue was not exactly the one he had prepared, and he tried to remember the precise wording. With a mechanical gesture, he had taken a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and did not dare to ask permission to smoke.

  ‘You may,’ said Maigret.

  ‘Thank you.’

  His fingers were somewhat clumsy. He was nervous.

  ‘I beg your pardon. I ought to control myself better than this. I can’t help being agitated. This is the first time I’ve seen you in the flesh, all of a sudden, in your office, with your pipes… ’

  ‘May I ask what your occupation is?’

  ‘I ought to have begun with that. It isn’t a very common occupation and, like so many people, you are probably going to smile. I work at the Grands Magasins du Louvre, in the rue de Rivoli. My official title is head salesman in the toy department. So you can imagine that in the holiday season I was worked to death. Actually, I have a special job which takes most of my time: you see, I’m in charge of the electric trains.’

  It was as if he had forgotten where he was, and why he was there, and was letting himself go on his favourite topic.

  ‘Did you go past the Magasins du Louvre in December?’

  Maigret said neither yes nor no. He could not remember. He vaguely recalled a gigantic luminous design, on the façade, but he could not have said what the multicoloured moving figures represented.

  ‘If you did, you must have seen, in the third window on the rue de Rivoli, an exact reconstruction of Saint-Lazare Station, with all its tracks, its suburban trains and its expresses, its signals, its signal-boxes. It took me three months’ work and I had to go to Switzerland and Germany to buy some of the material. It may seem childish to you, but if I told you the amount of money we make on electric trains alone… Above all, don’t imagine that our customers are just children. There are grown-ups, including men with important positions, who are passionately interested in electric trains, and I’m often called to private residences to… ’

  He broke off again.

  ‘Am I boring you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re listening?’

  Maigret nodded. His caller must have been between forty and forty-five years old and wore a broad, flat wedding-ring in red gold, almost the same as the chief-inspector’s. He also had a tie-pin representing a railway signal.

  ‘Now I’ve forgotten what I was saying. Of course, it wasn’t to talk to you about electric trains that I came to see you, and I realize that I’m wasting your time. However, it is essential that you should be able to place me, isn’t it? That I should tell you too that I live in the Avenue de Châtillon, near the church of Saint-Pierre de Montrouge, in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, and that I’ve been in the same place for eighteen years. No: nineteen… Anyhow, it will be nineteen years in March… I’m married… ’

  He was upset at not being any clearer, at having too many details to give. One felt that as ideas came to him he considered them carefully, asking himself whether they were important or not, then expressed them or rejected them.

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘It’s precisely because I’m married… ’

  He smiled apologetically.

  ‘It would be easier if you asked the questions, but you can’t do that, because you don’t know what it’s all about… ’

  Maigret came close to reproaching himself for being so static. It was not his fault. It was something physical. He found it difficult to take an interest in what he was being told and felt sorry that he had allowed Joseph to introduce the caller.

  ‘I’m listening… ’

  He filled a pipe, for something to do, and threw a glance at the window, behind which there was nothing but a pale grey colour. It was like a worn-out back-cloth in some provincial theatre.

  ‘Above all I must stress that I’m not making any accusations, Chief-Inspector. I love my wife. We’ve been married now for twelve years, Gisèle and I, and we’ve never really had a quarrel. I talked about her to Dr. Steiner, after he’d examined me, and he looked anxious and said:

  ‘ “I’d rather like you to bring your wife along to see me.”

  ‘Only, on what pretext can I ask Gisèle to accompany me on a visit to a neurologist? I can’t even say for certain that she’s mad, because she goes on with her work without anybody complaining about her.

  ‘You see, I’m not very well educated. I’m a ward of the Board of Guardians, and I’ve had to teach myself. Anything I know, I’ve learnt out of books, in my spare time.

  ‘I’m interested in everything, not just in electric trains, as you might imagine, and I consider that knowledge is man’s most precious possession.

  ‘I must apologize for going on like this. What I wanted to explain was that, when Gisèle began behaving differently towards me, I went to various libraries, among them the Bibliothèque Nationale, to consult works w
hich I couldn’t afford to buy. Apart from that, my wife would have been worried if she’d found them at home… ’

  The proof that Maigret was following this speech more or less closely was that he asked:

  ‘Works on psychiatry?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t claim to have understood everything. Most of them are written in a language which is too learned for me. All the same I found some books on neuroses and psychoses which made me think. I suppose you know the difference between neuroses and psychoses? I’ve also made a study of schizophrenia, but I believe, in all conscience, that it doesn’t go as far as that… ’

  Maigret thought of his wife, of Pardon, and noticed a little brown mole at the corner of his visitor’s mouth.

  ‘If I’ve not misunderstood you, you suspect your wife of not being in her normal condition?’

  The moment had come and the man went rather pale, swallowed his saliva two or three times, and then, looking as if he were choosing his words carefully and weighing their meaning, declared:

  ‘I am convinced that for several months, five or six at least, my wife has been meaning to kill me. That, Chief-Inspector, is why I came to see you personally. I haven’t got any positive proof, otherwise I would have begun with that. But I’m ready to give you what evidence I have, which is of two sorts. First of all the moral evidence, the most difficult to set out, as you will understand, because it consists above all of trifles , which are not important in themselves, but which taken all together end up by meaning something.

  ‘As for the material clues, there is one piece of evidence, which I’ve brought here to show you, and which is the most worrying of all… ’