Signed, Picpus Read online

  Maigret pauses for a moment, because old Picard has got out the broken-stemmed pipe which he had salvaged from God knows where. And then the inspector, who always keeps two pipes in his pocket, offers him one, without a word. The old man fills it. Women’s laughter from a table close by. A man prowls round the terrace, hesitating between the two tarts, whose faces he cannot see.

  ‘She was worried. She said she was having problems because of me and that it could get serious. At one moment, she jumped when she heard a car stop at the kerb and she leaned out over the balcony … It was then she pushed me into the kitchen, but I couldn’t tell you if she turned the key in the lock …’

  ‘So you didn’t see the man who came up?’

  ‘No. I vaguely heard them whispering …’

  ‘So it was a man?’

  ‘Oh yes … But wait … Marie did tell me something else … I’ll try to remember … My memory’s got terrible …’

  Maigret orders two brandies and draws on his pipe while he waits.

  ‘Oh yes … This is more or less what she said: “I know someone who used to see you on the Côte d’Azur. He comes up to Paris every week and he recognized you one day as you were leaving here …”’

  Maigret does not react. He inhales the coolness of the rain, breathes in the Paris night, while his gaze lingers on familiar sights, and in his mind’s eye he conjures up other images in extraordinary detail.

  This is his best, his greatest time, a time that is his very own, the time which makes up for all the monotonous stages of his investigations …

  Old Picard, way down south, wandering around Cannes …

  ‘Tell me, Picard, how did you end up like this? …’

  ‘Dunno … I never amounted to much … I was a packer in a shoe factory in Caen. My wife left me. Who with, I never found out. I never learned what became of her. I started moving around a lot, working at various jobs, and when I’d get too ground down or too drunk I’d get the first train out to anywhere … That’s how! … Then one day I just stopped working. It was at Cannes … When that woman …’

  The mere thought of her still fills him with terror.

  ‘I was getting on a bit … I was losing heart … I told myself it sounded like a easy life, that I’d get to sleep in a bed, that I’d have enough to eat …’

  Then that simple, guileless look returned, and he asked:

  ‘Do you really think she would have killed me?’

  ‘I don’t know, Picard, but it’s possible …’

  Maigret follows the thought through … The old man, who knew all about being poor and was sick of it, had been ready to sell himself for a little security … Antoinette Le Cloaguen had never known poverty but was so afraid of it that in order to provide for her old age and build up a certain sum of money on which she had fixed as her goal with cold calculation, she had been capable of …

  ‘Right! … It’s time … Waiter! … Bill, please!’

  The people all round them live life as it is. They inhabit the present moment. But Maigret lives three, five, ten lives at the same time: he is in Cannes, in Saint-Raphaël, on Boulevard des Batignolles and in Rue Coulaincourt …

  Both of them are now outside, in the rain. The old man asks with disarming candour:

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Listen, Picard, would you mind very much, for just one more night, sleeping in a cell at the Police Judiciaire?’

  ‘Are they there?’

  ‘No … In the morning I’ll send someone to get you … We will come …’

  ‘If you like …’

  ‘Taxi … Police Judiciaire …’

  The dark banks of the river. The red light over the entrance to the cells of the Police Judiciaire …

  ‘Good night, Picard … I’ll see you tomorrow … Sergeant! … Will you take care of this man? …’

  The duty officer who takes the old man off to a small room to be searched has not the slightest inkling of the fact that only shortly before his prisoner had been having a late supper with the inspector in a brasserie on Boulevard de Clichy.

  There is light in only two windows of police headquarters. Maigret pictures mother and daughter sitting, Lucas yawning, and Janvier who will almost certainly have sent out for beer and sandwiches. Should he go up? … Should he …?

  Maigret strides along the riverbank, then stops and leans briefly on his elbows on the parapet. There is only a fine drizzle falling now, and it feels cool on his brow.

  Odd thoughts … Of course! … The clairvoyant was expecting her fate, or at least trouble … She spoke of a man who ‘came up to Paris’ every week, and the expression itself describes the kind of individual involved very clearly …

  On Friday, a car had stopped outside … The green convertible in all likelihood …

  Maigret is now at the Pont-Neuf. An empty taxi drives past.

  ‘Rue Coulaincourt …’

  ‘What number?’

  ‘I’ll stop you …’

  He could leave it until tomorrow. It would be more lawful. What he is about to do is frankly irregular, but it wouldn’t be the first time. And anyway do criminals worry about legality?

  He can’t see himself going to bed and waiting for the morning. He has nothing else to do. He is raring to go …

  ‘One moment … A little further up, on the left … The shop with a white front …’

  He tells the driver to wait and rings a doorbell. He has to ring three times, though the first ring seems to make enough noise inside the sleeping building to wake the dead. At length, there is a click that releases the door lock. He pushes it open and feels for the time-switch. He raps on the window of the concierge’s lodge.

  ‘Excuse me, where will I find the people who run the dairy …’

  ‘What is it? … What’s the matter? …’

  Eventually she is wide awake and appears, a strange face topped with curlers …

  ‘I want to speak to the people who run the dairy … What’s that? … They sleep behind the shop? Isn’t there a bell? … And what about their serving girl, Emma?’

  Good! It’s on the seventh floor, where the owners of the dairy rent a maid’s room for her.

  ‘Thank you, madame … Don’t worry. I won’t make a noise …’

  After the third floor, he fails to locate a time-switch and makes the rest of his way up using matches. Seventh floor, third door along, he’d been told. He knocks gently. He puts one ear to the door. He hears a release of breath like a sigh and then the sound of a body, presumably snug and warm, turning over heavily in a bed.

  He knocks again. A clogged voice:

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  He speaks in a whisper for fear of waking the neighbours:

  ‘Open the door … It’s me, Detective Chief Inspector Maigret …’

  Bare feet on a wooden floor. The light goes on, more footsteps, comings and goings. Eventually in the half-opened door appears a sturdy girl in a nightdress, with scared eyes and features still furred by sleep.

  ‘What do you want?’

  The atmosphere smells of the night, of a woman, of a warm, moist bed, with an underlying redolence of face powder and soapy water.

  ‘What do you want?’

  He shuts the door behind him. Emma slips an old coat over her nightdress through whose flimsy material her large sawdust-doll figure is vaguely discernible.

  ‘He’s been arrested …’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The murderer … The man in the green convertible …’

  ‘What did you say? …’

  She is slow to gather her wits. Her eyes grow steadily more confused.

  ‘He’s just been arrested … I need you to come to Quai des Orfèvres and identify him …’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘Get dressed. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll turn and face the wall …’

  He hears her moving around behind him, searching through the pile of underwear on a chair and looking for her stockings
under the bed.

  ‘Oh my God! … Oh my God! …’ she goes on repeating.

  She is crying, sniffling quietly. Over and over she repeats: ‘Oh my God!’ Then:

  ‘How is it possible? …’

  He turns round while she is still in her pink slip fastening her stockings. Oh, he has seen it all before! Even she forgets that she is in the middle of getting dressed in the presence of a man.

  ‘You will recognize him, won’t you?’

  ‘Will I have to look him in the face, speak to him?’

  And then she flings herself on the bed and starts sobbing, shaking her head, saying over and over:

  ‘No, I don’t want to! … I don’t want to! … It was my fault you arrested him! …’

  If only a photographer had been there at that moment to take a picture of Maigret, a hulking figure standing in this room which is too small for him, leaning over a fat girl in her slip, as he taps her on the shoulder! …

  ‘Calm down, Emma … Come on … It’s time to go …’

  She bites the sheets. She continues to shake her head as if she has made up her mind to cling fast to the bed, in desperation.

  ‘You have been silly enough as it is … If I hadn’t stepped in, you would be in prison too by this time …’

  The magic word sobers her up immediately, and she looks up:

  ‘Prison?’

  ‘Yes, and put away for a long time. Because what you did may well be considered as aiding and abetting. Why didn’t you recognize him when I showed you all those photos?’

  She bites her lower lip until it bleeds, her expression becomes more obstinate.

  ‘Well? … Answer me: why?’

  ‘Because I love him!’

  ‘And meanwhile we have been wasting our time. He might have got away with it! … We might have arrested an innocent man! Get dressed. Don’t make me call the police officer who’s waiting downstairs …’

  It is a strange couple who make their way in silence down the dark stairs. The taxi is still waiting.

  ‘Get in.’

  And in the car, Emma’s pensive voice:

  ‘Why did he kill her? … She was his mistress, wasn’t she? … She had other men … He was jealous …’

  ‘Perhaps …’

  ‘I’m sure that’s why … He loved her …’

  She follows him up the steps into the Police Judiciaire and then along the high, wide corridor, where only one lamp is lit to serve as a night light. Hearing a noise, Janvier emerges from an office and is astonished to see the chief there at this hour with the girl who delivers the milk.

  ‘What are they doing now?’ asks Maigret.

  ‘The daughter is asleep. The other one is waiting.’

  Maigret walks into his office, tells Emma to come in and then closes the door.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Hold on a moment. You’ll see him soon enough. Sit down.’

  Poor fat girl, usually so rosy-cheeked and now, tonight, so ashen as to be almost as pale as the moon.

  ‘Right … When you came here the first time, because your employers had told you to, these are the photos I showed you. Is that correct? …’

  He does not hold out the entire pile, but lays them out one by one. He gives them names, all in no particular order:

  ‘Tattoo Justin … Bébert from Montpellier … La Caille …’

  He is the more tense of the pair of them, because everything now depends on this moment. He does not dare look the girl in the face. He has found a way of not scaring her off: he keeps watching her hands with their podgy fingers and broken nails. One of them is resting down on his desk and the other seems as if it is ready to pounce on the tell-tale photo.

  ‘Little Louis, from Belleville … Justin …’

  He stops breathing, then suddenly his chest swells, at last he can gulp down air and escape that painful paralysis, for the two hands have twitched and closed with one single jerk.

  ‘This is him, isn’t it? … Justin … Justin from Toulon …’

  She shivers as if grown suddenly cold. She looks up, and the expression on her face changes, but is all wide-eyed innocence when she asks:

  ‘You didn’t know! … Where is he?’

  At last she understands, her anger rises, she seems ready to throw herself at the inspector.

  ‘It wasn’t true! … You haven’t arrested him! … You laid a trap for me and it was me who … it was me … it was me … me! …’

  ‘Calm down, Emma … Calm down … Take it from me, Justin is an extremely nasty piece of work …’

  ‘It was me … me! …’

  ‘Come now … You’re tired … You have to be up early … I’ll get a car to take you home …’

  He rings for Janvier.

  ‘Take this young lady home … Go easy on her … And if there’s anything left in the drinks cupboard, pour her a small glass of something to make her feel better …’

  Still, she is the lucky one: she wouldn’t have got off so lightly if Justin had taken more of an interest in her!

  10. The Honest Dishonest Man

  ‘Hello? … Police Judiciaire? … It’s Madame Maigret … Is my husband there?’

  ‘Of course I am, sweetheart …’

  ‘Aren’t you coming home tonight? …’

  ‘No. Maybe tomorrow? … It depends …’

  Kindly, long-suffering Madame Maigret, who has woken with a start at four in the morning and is worried when she realizes there is an empty space next to her.

  ‘No … I won’t be going away … Just a shortish trip … Sleep tight! …’

  Alone in his office, he works through a whole series of phone calls and begins to feel like the conductor of an orchestra.

  ‘Sorry, detective chief inspector … Mascouvin will be in no fit state to be questioned for another three or four days …’

  Next, branches of the Sûreté, first Toulon, then Nice.

  ‘Justin, yes … Whatever it takes? … Understood! …’

  Going through the police station nearest to Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, he contacts Torrence, who is still watching Monsieur Blaise’s apartment.

  He is on his way! … No, perhaps not quite on his way … Peeping through the keyhole, he first relishes the sight of Madame Le Cloaguen sitting ramrod straight on her chair while the all-too-casual Lucas has dropped off and is snoring.

  Day is breaking. The air still smells damp, but it has stopped raining, and the ground is littered with leaves and debris.

  ‘Hey! … Taxi! … Is your tank full enough for a longish trip? …’

  Eight o’clock. Antoinette Le Cloaguen, looking tired and drawn, but with her dignity intact, is speaking to Lucas, who has got up and is washing his face at the drinking fountain in the alcove.

  ‘Is your inspector intending to keep us here for much longer?’

  ‘If you’d rather go straight to jail …’

  ‘I think I would prefer that!’

  Her daughter’s hair flops down over one cheek. Janvier has managed a couple of hours’ sleep on a sofa in the waiting room. The Police Judiciaire is starting to wake up.

  At nine, all the inspectors meet in the office of the commissioner of the Police Judiciaire to give their daily reports. Only Maigret is absent.

  ‘Any of you gentlemen know what’s going on?’

  He reads out a message received by phone from the Sûreté at Nice, reporting that a certain Justin has been arrested at the Promenade Pier Casino, or more specifically just as he was leaving it, at seven this morning. The man protests his innocence.

  ‘It’s probably for Maigret.’

  ‘Is he not in his office?’

  The commissioner opens a door and is surprised to find two women who look as if they have spent the night there. They are being guarded by a rather sour Lucas. He offers a perfunctory greeting:

  ‘Ladies …’

  But he beats a hasty retreat when he sees the older of the two spring to her feet and bear down on him.
r />   ‘Who was that man?’

  Lucas replies:

  ‘The man in charge …’

  ‘Tell him that I demand … that I want …’

  ‘Can’t be done! … It’s time for morning reports …’

  A Paris taxi is driving through the mud of a cart track between Morsang and Fontainebleau, or more precisely between the locks at Morsang and Citanguette. It has now stopped outside two small inns.

  ‘Tell me,’ says Maigret to the landlord of one of them, ‘would you by any chance …’

  He holds up a number of photographs, and one in particular … A shake of the head … Maigret drains a small glass …

  Look! A tree has been blown down by the storm and is lying across the lane. A team of roadmen is already there, and they have started wielding axes.

  ‘Tell me, boys …’

  They stare in amazement at this man with mud on his boots who smokes pipe after pipe to help him to stay awake.

  Eventually, one of the men says:

  ‘This one, I’m sure … Almost every Sunday, near the sandpit, with a car that …’

  It’s the third time the examining magistrate has phoned Maigret’s office.

  ‘No, sir … he’s not back yet but he called to say he’ll be here in a quarter of an hour … Yes … Monsieur Blaise? … He’s in another office with Inspector Torrence … He wants to speak to the minister … Yes … No, I don’t know … The wife? Still carrying on about the same thing … I have indeed, I had coffee and croissants sent up for them … The mother drank the coffee but she wouldn’t touch the croissants …’

  Everyone is waiting for Maigret. The commissioner is not at all happy, he is getting complaints from all sides. Mademoiselle Berthe, whom the inspector has called in by a pneumatic telegram, has arrived in her little red hat and is waiting patiently in the antechamber.

  They would all be very surprised, including old Picard on his bench in the cells of the Police Judiciaire, if they could only see the inspector now.

  He is literally slumped in the back of a taxi. His eyes are closed. No, not shut. Just closed enough for him to see the passing landscape as a blur of wet, dripping foliage.