Maigret's Secret Read online

  A skilful and unscrupulous operator like Lenain could probably get him to say whatever he wanted.

  Of course, the reporters had bombarded the lawyer with questions.

  ‘Are you saying Madame Josset had a lover?’

  The lawyer smiled enigmatically.

  ‘No, gentlemen, not a lover.’

  ‘Lovers plural?’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that; that in itself wouldn’t explain anything.’

  They didn’t follow. Only he knew where he was going with this.

  ‘Madame Josset – and, I hasten to add, she was perfectly entitled to this – had a string of protégés. Her friends, yes, her friends will confirm this; indeed, in some circles these protégés were talked about in much the same way as the racehorses of such and such an owner.’

  He went on in his self-satisfied way:

  ‘When she was very young she married a very famous man, Sir Austin Lowell, who educated her in the ways of the world … The world of the powerful, of those who pull the strings. At the start she was, like many others in her situation, little more than an ornament.

  ‘Let me be clear: she was not Austin Lowell. She was the attractive Madame Lowell, whom he dressed, covered in jewels, displayed at race-courses, premières, cabarets and salons.

  ‘When she was widowed at the age of thirty, she wanted to carry on, but on her own terms, if I might put it that way.

  ‘She had no intention of continuing to be the subordinate half of a couple, the ornamental accessory; she was going to be top dog.

  ‘That is why, instead of marrying a man of her class, which she could have done easily, she went and found Josset behind the counter of a pharmacy.

  ‘She wanted her chance to be in charge, to have someone by her side who owed her everything, who would be her possession.

  ‘She discovered, however, that the young pharmacy assistant was a much stronger character than she had imagined.

  ‘He made such a success of his pharmaceutical business that he became a personality in his own right.

  ‘And that is it. That’s the root of the drama.

  ‘She grew older and began to dread the moment when she would no longer be the object of male attention—’

  ‘Excuse me,’ a journalist butted in. ‘Did she already have lovers?’

  ‘Suffice it to say that she has never lived according to bourgeois norms. The day came when, no longer able to dominate her husband, she sought others to dominate.

  ‘They are those I referred to earlier as her protégés – and that is a word she chose herself and by all accounts pronounced with a satisfied smile.

  ‘And there were many of them. We are familiar with some of them. There have certainly been others we know nothing about but whom, I hope, our investigation will uncover.

  ‘Mostly they were unknown artists, painters, musicians, singers, whom she met God knows where and whom she seemed determined to launch on their careers.

  ‘I can name one quite well-known cabaret singer, still around today, who owes his success entirely to a fortuitous encounter with Madame Josset in the garage where he worked as a mechanic.

  ‘For all those who achieved success, there were many who were revealed to be talentless, and after a few weeks or months she dropped them.

  ‘Need I add that these young people didn’t always take too kindly to being dumped back into obscurity?

  ‘She had introduced them to her friends as rising stars of the theatre, the art world or the cinema. She had dressed them in fine clothes, found them decent places to live. They had lived in her shadow, in her slipstream.

  ‘Then they would wake up one morning and find they were nobody again.’

  ‘Can you name names?’

  ‘I will leave that to the examining magistrate. I gave him a list of names which no doubt includes many fine young men. We are not accusing anyone. All we are saying is that there are a certain number of people who had reasons to want Christine Josset—’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘It would be a good idea to begin searching among her most recent protégés.’

  Maigret had thought about this. From the start he had considered looking into the private life of the victim and her entourage.

  Up until now, he had hit a brick wall. And again, as in the case of Coméliau, it was to do with class, even caste.

  Christine Josset circulated in an even more narrow world than the examining magistrate, a handful of individuals whose names appeared in the papers, whose every move was chronicled, who were the subject of fanciful stories and yet about whom the general public knew next to nothing in reality.

  Maigret was still only a junior inspector when he had made a remark about this, one often repeated to novices at Quai des Orfèvres. Ordered to conduct the surveillance of a banker – one who would be arrested a few months later – he had said to his chief:

  ‘To properly understand how his mind works I should eat soft-boiled eggs and croissants with financiers every morning.’

  Doesn’t every social class have its own language, taboos, moral permissiveness?

  Whenever he asked, ‘What do you think of Madame Josset?’ he was invariably told:

  ‘Christine? Why, she is simply adorable.’ In her own milieu, she was no Josset, she was Christine. ‘She’s interested in everything, passionate, in love with life …’

  ‘And her husband?’

  ‘A fine fellow …’

  But this was said more coldly, which showed that Josset, for all his success in business, had never been fully adopted by his wife’s friends.

  He was tolerated, in the way that the mistress or wife of a famous man is tolerated:

  ‘Well, it’s up to him if he likes …’

  Coméliau must be furious. He would be even more so once he had read all the papers. He had built a case he was satisfied with and was about to send to the Grand Jury.

  Now the investigation had to start all over again. It was not possible simply to ignore Lenain’s accusations, especially as he had made sure to give them maximum publicity.

  It was no longer a matter of questioning concierges, taxi-drivers and neighbours in Rue Lopert.

  It was necessary to engage with a whole new milieu, to elicit confidences, names, to draw up a list of these already notorious protégés, and it would no doubt be Maigret’s task to check their alibis.

  A journalist raised an objection:

  ‘Josset claimed to have gone to sleep on the ground floor, in an armchair, when he got home at five past ten. A reliable witness, who lives in the house opposite, claims that he didn’t get home until ten forty-five.’

  ‘A reliable witness can make a mistake,’ the lawyer retorted. ‘Monsieur Lalinde, the man you are referring to, no doubt did see a man enter the house at ten forty-five, while my client was sleeping.’

  ‘And that would be the killer?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘And he managed to get past Josset without being seen?’

  ‘There were no lights on on the ground floor. The more I think about it, the more I am sure that at the time of the murder there were not two, but three cars parked outside the house. I went to check the scene itself. I didn’t manage to get inside Monsieur Lalinde’s house, as his maid was far from welcoming. But I would argue nevertheless that, from this worthy old gentleman’s window, it is possible to see the Cadillac and any car parked in front of it, but not a car standing behind. I have asked for this hypothesis to be checked out. If I am right, I am prepared to swear that there were three cars there.’

  Madame Maigret was very worked up that evening. She had resisted so far, but now she had become deeply engrossed in this case that was the talk of the town.

  ‘Do you think Lenain was right to go on the offensive?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is Josset innocent?’

  He looked at her without really seeing her.

  ‘I’d say it’s fifty-fifty.’

  ‘Will he be f
ound guilty?’

  ‘Very likely, especially now.’

  ‘Can’t you do anything?’

  This time, he simply shrugged his shoulders.

  7. Monsieur Jules and the Chairwoman

  Maigret witnessed, unable to intervene, a phenomenon he had observed several times before, one which never failed to make an impression on him. His old comrade Lombras, the commissioner of the Municipal Police, who was responsible for controlling crowds and demonstrations on the city’s streets, would often say that Paris, just like a person, sometimes ‘got out of bed on the wrong side’ and started the day in a bad mood, ready to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation.

  It can be a bit like that in criminal cases. A cold-blooded murder carried out in the foulest of circumstances might pass by unnoticed, the investigation and then the trial playing out against a backdrop of public indifference, if not indulgence.

  Then, for no apparent reason, a quite mundane crime can incite public indignation, without anyone being able to work out why.

  There was no organized campaign. There was no one behind the scenes, as those who think they are well informed like to say, orchestrating a campaign against Josset.

  Of course, the papers had talked a lot about the case and continued to do so, but the papers merely reflect public opinion and provide their readers with what they ask for.

  Why had everyone been against Josset from the very start?

  One reason was the twenty-three stab wounds. When a murderer loses his head and continues stabbing a corpse he is regarded as a savage. The psychiatrists might see this as a sign of diminished responsibility, but the public at large consider it rather as an aggravating circumstance.

  Of the various characters in this drama, Josset had from the start been the villain that everyone loved to hate, and perhaps there was an explanation for that too. Even those who had never seen him had picked up from all the press coverage that he was weak and spineless, and such cowardice is not easily forgiven.

  Equally unforgivable is denial of the facts, and as far as most people were concerned Josset’s guilt was a copper-bottomed fact.

  If he had confessed, if he had claimed it was a crime of passion, a mental aberration, and asked for forgiveness with the appropriate remorse, most would have been willing to show some leniency.

  But instead he chose to defy logic and good sense, which seemed like an insult to the intelligence of the public.

  As early as Tuesday, when he was interrogating him, Maigret had seen this coming. Coméliau’s reactions were a giveaway. The early headlines of the afternoon papers were another.

  Since then the antipathy had only grown more acute, and it was rare to hear anyone doubt Josset’s guilt or at least offer, if not excuses, then attenuating circumstances.

  Martin Duché’s suicide had capped off the disaster, as Josset was held responsible not only for one death, but for two.

  Finally, his lawyer, Maître Lenain, had fanned the flames with his ill-judged comments and accusations.

  It was difficult in such conditions to question witnesses properly. Even the most honest ones, totally in good faith, tended to remember only those things that worked against the interests of the accused.

  In the end, Josset was simply unlucky. When it came to the knife, for example, he said he had thrown it in the Seine from the middle of Pont Mirabeau. Since Wednesday a diver had been scouring the mud for hours, watched by hundreds of onlookers leaning over the parapet, while photographers and even TV crews sprang into action every time the large brass-helmeted head emerged from the water.

  But the diver had come up from each dive empty-handed and the next day had continued searching with no further success.

  For those familiar with the riverbed of the Seine, this wasn’t surprising. Next to the pillars of the bridge the current is quite strong and it forms undertows that can carry even a quite heavy object some distance away.

  In other places the mud is quite thick, and any detritus sinks deeply into it.

  Josset had been unable to point out the exact spot where he had stood, which is understandable, given the state of mind he said he was in.

  For the public, however, this was proof that he had been lying. He was accused, for some unknown reason, of hiding the weapon somewhere else. It wasn’t just a matter of the dagger. Monsieur Lalinde, the former colonial administrator, whose word no one doubted, whom no one dared to call a senile or at least addled old man, had described a package of some bulk, whose dimensions were far larger than those of a commando knife.

  What could this package that he carried away from the scene have contained?

  Even a discovery that initially seemed to aid the prisoner, and about which his lawyer was prematurely triumphant, ended up working against him.

  Criminal Records had lifted a certain number of fingerprints from the house in Rue Lopert, which was now known as the glass house because of its futuristic architecture. These prints, classified by category, had been compared with those of Josset, his wife, the two servants and a man from the gas board who had come to read the meter on the Monday afternoon, a few hours before the murder.

  But some prints remained unidentified. They were found on the banister of the stairway and, more abundantly, in the victim’s room and that of her husband.

  They were the prints of a man with a large thumb which had a very characteristic small, round scar.

  When she was questioned about this, Madame Siran stated that neither Madame Josset nor her husband had received a visitor in the previous few days; nor, to her knowledge, had any stranger gone upstairs to the bedrooms.

  Carlotta, who remained on duty in the evenings after the cook had gone home, corroborated this.

  In the newspapers this was presented as:

  A MYSTERY VISITOR?

  Of course, Maître Lenain made a big fuss about this discovery, and he started to build a whole line of defence on it.

  According to him, Doctor Paul could have committed an error of judgement. There is no reason, said the lawyer, why the murder could not have taken place a bit before ten o’clock, that is, before Josset got to Rue Lopert.

  Even if the medical examiner was right, there was no justification in rejecting the hypothesis that a stranger could have got into the house while Josset, who had been drinking heavily, was fast asleep in a chair on the ground floor, where no lights were on.

  Lenain had managed to conduct an experiment in the same location at the same time. He had sat in the chair in which Christine’s husband had sat, and six unsuspecting individuals had been asked to walk one after the other through the dark room to the staircase. Only two of them had noticed someone sitting there.

  The objection to this was that the moon had not been in the same position on the night of the crime and that the sky was overcast.

  And besides, Lalinde refused to change a single word of his initial statement.

  It was Maigret who received a visit from the upholsterer. He had read the papers with some concern and had come into Quai des Orfèvres to tell them what he knew. He frequently did work for the Jossets. He was the one who, a few years earlier, had put up their curtains and wallpaper. A few months earlier he had changed some of the curtains, including those in Madame Josset’s room, which had been refurnished.

  ‘The servants seem to have forgotten that I was there,’ he said. ‘They mentioned the gasman but not me. Three days ago I had to go to Rue Lopert because Madame Josset had told me that the curtain cords had come loose. It is not unusual. I happened to be in the area on Monday around three o’clock so I dropped by.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Madame Siran answered the door to me. She didn’t come up with me as she hates stairs and she knew that I was familiar with the house.’

  ‘Were you on your own?’

  ‘Yes, I’d left my colleague on another job in Avenue Versailles. My work took only a few minutes.’

  ‘Did you see the maid?’

  ‘
She came into the room briefly while I was working, and I said hello.’

  Neither of the two women had remembered the upholsterer when they were questioned.

  Maigret led the man up to Criminal Records. They took his fingerprints, which were a perfect match for the prints of the famous mystery visitor.

  The next day, it was Maigret once more who received the anonymous letter that would stoke public indignation. It was a sheet of paper torn from a school exercise book, folded in quarters and stuffed inside a cheap envelope stained with grease marks, as if it had been written on a kitchen table.

  The postmark showed the eighteenth arrondissement, where Annette Duché lived.

  If Detective Chief Inspector Maigret thinks he’s so clever, he should go and question a certain Hortense Malletier, in Rue Lepic, a backstreet abortionist. The Duché girl visited three months ago along with her lover.

  At this stage in proceedings, Maigret preferred to take the note to Coméliau in person.

  ‘Read it.’

  The examining magistrate read the letter twice.

  ‘Have you checked?’

  ‘I didn’t want to do anything without your instructions.’

  ‘It would be best if you went to see this Hortense Malletier yourself. Is she in your files?’

  Maigret had already consulted the Vice Squad’s most recent lists.

  ‘She was arrested once, ten years ago, but nothing was proved.’

  The Malletier woman lived on the fifth floor of an old building near the Moulin de la Galette. She was in her sixties and suffered from dropsy. She wore felt slippers and could only walk around with the help of a cane. There was a stifling smell in her apartment, and in a large cage by the window there were a dozen or so canaries.

  ‘What do the police want with me? I haven’t done anything. I’m just a poor old woman who is no trouble to anyone.’

  Her pale face was framed by grey hair, so thin on top that her scalp was exposed.

  First, Maigret showed her a photo of Annette Duché.

  ‘Do you recognize her?’

  ‘Her face is all over the papers.’