Maigret Gets Angry Read online

  He hung up and darted a slightly sheepish look at Maigret.

  ‘It’s him. I’d better leave.’

  ‘What did he ask you?’

  ‘If anyone had been to see me. He saw a taxi go past. I told him—’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘Can I leave?’

  What was the point of stopping him? He had worked hard in the past. He had succeeded by the sweat of his brow. He had achieved an enviable position.

  And, for fear of losing his money, for fear of the poverty he had known as a child, he had been scared out of his wits. And now he had reached the end of his life, he was still scared.

  ‘Eugénie! Is the luggage in the car?’

  ‘But you haven’t had dinner!’

  ‘I’ll have something to eat on the way. Where is Jean?’

  ‘By the car.’

  ‘Goodbye, inspector. Don’t say that you’ve seen me. If you carry on down the little path and turn left, you’ll see a stone cross, and you’ll come out on to the main road three kilometres from here. There’s a tunnel under the railway track.’

  Maigret slowly crossed the garden that lay bathed in tranquillity, the cook following him stealthily. The taxi-driver was sitting on the grass bordering the path playing with the wild flowers. Before getting back into the car, he put one behind his ear, the way mischievous boys wedge a cigarette.

  ‘Do we turn round?’

  ‘Straight on,’ grunted Maigret, lighting his pipe. ‘Then left when you see a cross.’

  It was not long before they heard in the darkness the engine of another car going in the opposite direction, that of old Campois heading for safety.

  8. The Skeleton in the Cupboard

  To stoke his ill humour, he asked the taxi to stop at a poorly lit café in Corbeil and ordered two glasses of marc, one for the driver and the other for himself.

  The bitter taste of the brandy made his throat constrict, and he said to himself that marc had been a feature of this investigation. Why? Pure chance. It was probably the drink he least liked. Besides, there had also been old Jeanne’s disgusting Kummel, and that memory, that tête-à-tête with the bloated old alcoholic, still made him feel nauseous.

  Yet she had once been beautiful. He now knew that she had loved Malik, who had used her the way he used everyone and everything. And now it was a curious mixture of love and hatred, of bitterness and animal devotion that she nursed for this man, who only needed to appear and snap his fingers for her to do his bidding.

  There are people like that in the world. There are others, like these two customers in the little bar, the only two customers at this late hour, a fat man, who was a pork butcher, and a shrewd, thin character who likes pontificating, proud of being a clerical worker, maybe at the town hall, both of them playing draughts at ten o’clock at night beside a huge stove pipe against which the pork butcher leaned from time to time.

  The pork butcher was self-confident because he had money and it didn’t matter if he lost the round. The skinny man thought that life was unfair because an educated man with a degree should have a more comfortable existence than a butcherer of pigs.

  ‘Another marc … sorry, two marcs!’

  Campois and his grandson were on their way to Gare Saint-Lazare. He too must be all churned up. He was probably mulling Maigret’s harsh words in his mind and reliving old memories.

  He was heading for Le Havre. He had nearly set sail for the Norwegian fjords, against his wishes, dispatched there like a parcel, because Malik … And he was already a very old man. It is tough telling elderly people like him home truths, as Maigret had just done.

  They were back in the car. Maigret sat in his corner, glum and scowling.

  Bernadette Amorelle was even older. And what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t know, because he wasn’t God Almighty, was that she had seen old Campois drive past in his car laden with trunks.

  She too had understood. Perhaps she was cleverer than Maigret? There are women, old women especially, who have a real gift of second sight.

  If Maigret had been there, beside the railway track, as he had been on the two previous nights, he would have seen her three windows open, with the lights on, and in that rosy glow, the old lady calling her maid.

  ‘He made old Campois leave, Mathilde.’

  He wouldn’t have heard, but he would have seen the two women have a long conversation, each as peevish as the other, then he would have seen Mathilde vanish, Madame Amorelle pacing up and down her room, and finally her daughter Aimée, Charles Malik’s wife, come in looking guilty.

  The drama was unfolding. It had been brewing for over twenty years. For the past few days, since Monita’s death, it had been threatening to explode any minute.

  ‘Stop here!’

  Bang in the middle of the Pont d’Austerlitz. He didn’t feel like going straight back home. The Seine was black. There were little lights on the sleeping barges, shadows roaming the banks.

  His hands in his pockets, Maigret smoked as he walked slowly through the empty streets where the lamps made strings of lights.

  At Place de la Bastille, at the corner of Rue de la Roquette, the lights were brighter, lurid, with that pallid glare typical of poor neighbourhoods – like those fairground stalls where you can win packets of sugar or bottles of sparkling wine – lights to lure the people out of their dark, narrow, suffocating streets.

  He too walked towards those lights, towards the too vast and too empty café where an accordion was playing and where a few men and a few women were drinking and waiting for who-knows-what.

  He knew them. He had spent so many years dealing with people’s everyday doings that he knew them all – even people like Malik, who think they are more powerful or cleverer than the rest.

  With that type, there’s a difficult moment to get through, when, despite yourself, you allow yourself to be impressed by their beautiful house, their car, their servants and their airs.

  You have to see them like the others, to see them naked …

  Now, it was Ernest Malik who was frightened, as frightened as a small-time pimp from Rue de la Roquette who has been carted off in the meat wagon at two o’clock in the morning.

  Maigret did not see the two women in Bernadette’s bedroom acting out a heart-breaking scene. He did not see Aimée drop to her knees on the rug and drag herself kneeling over to her mother’s feet.

  This no longer mattered. Every family has a skeleton in the cupboard.

  Two beautiful houses, down there by the river, on an attractive bend where the Seine widened, two beautiful houses surrounded by greenery against the gentle hills, the sort of houses that make people sigh longingly as they gaze at them from trains.

  Those living in them must be so happy!

  And long lives, like that of Campois, who had worked hard, and who was now worn out and being shunted aside.

  And that of Bernadette Amorelle, who had dispensed so much frantic energy.

  He walked furiously. Place des Vosges was deserted. There was a light at his windows. He rang the bell and growled his name as he passed the concierge’s lodge. His wife, who recognized his step, came and opened the door.

  ‘Shh! He’s asleep. He’s only just dropped off.’

  So what? Wasn’t he going to wake him up, grab him by the shoulders and shake him?

  ‘Come on, young man, this is no time to make a fuss.’

  Let’s put an end once and for all to this skeleton in the cupboard, to this vile business, which, from start to finish, was all a filthy matter of money.


  For that is all there was behind those beautiful houses with their immaculate gardens: money!

  ‘You look grumpy. Have you had dinner?’

  ‘Yes … No.’

  Actually, he hadn’t had dinner and he ate while Mimile stood at the window, smoking cigarettes. When Maigret started walking towards the guest room, where Georges-Henry was sleeping, Madame Maigret protested:

  ‘You shouldn’t wake him.’

  He shrugged. A few hours more or less … Let him sleep! Not to mention that he was tired too.

  He could not guess that Bernadette Amorelle had stolen out of her house alone, in the middle of the night, and that her younger daughter, Aimée, her eyes crazed, tried in vain to telephone, while Charles, behind her, kept repeating:

  ‘What on earth’s wrong with you? What did your mother say to you?’

  Maigret did not wake up until eight o’clock the next morning.

  ‘He’s still asleep,’ his wife announced.

  Maigret shaved, dressed and had breakfast on a corner of the table, then filled his first pipe. When he went into the young man’s room, Georges-Henry began to stir.

  ‘Get up,’ he said in that calm, slightly weary voice that he used when he was determined to put an end to something.

  It took him a few moments to realize why the boy wouldn’t get out of bed. He was naked under the sheets and didn’t dare show himself.

  ‘Stay in bed if you like. You can get dressed later. How did you find out what your father had done? It was Monita who told you, wasn’t it?’

  Georges-Henry stared at him in genuine horror.

  ‘You can talk, now that I know—’

  ‘What do you know? Who told you?’

  ‘Old Campois knew too.’

  ‘Are you sure? He couldn’t have. If he’d known—’

  ‘That your father killed his son? Only he didn’t kill him with a knife or a bullet. And those murders—’

  ‘What else have you been told? What have you done?’

  ‘Well, there are so many vile doings in this business that one more or one less …’

  He felt sick. That often happened to him when he reached the end of an investigation, perhaps because of the strain, perhaps because, when a man is stripped naked, what you find tends to be ugly and depressing.

  A pleasant smell of coffee filled the apartment. You could hear the birds and the fountains of Place des Vosges. People were going off to work in the cool, gentle morning sunlight.

  In front of him, a pale kid who had pulled the blankets up to his chin and was gazing steadfastly at him.

  What could Maigret do for him, for the others? Nothing! You don’t arrest a Malik. The law didn’t deal with those crimes. There would only be one solution …

  It is funny that he thought of it just before the telephone call. He was standing there, puffing on his pipe, ill-at-ease with this boy who did not know what to do, and for a second he had a vision of Ernest Malik with someone handing him a pistol, calmly giving him the order:

  ‘Shoot!’

  But he wouldn’t shoot! He would never agree to kill himself! He would need help.

  The telephone rang insistently. Madame Maigret answered then knocked at the door.

  ‘It’s for you, Maigret.’

  He went into the dining room and grabbed the receiver.

  ‘Hello …’

  ‘Is that you, chief? Lucas here. When I arrived in my office I found an urgent message for you from Orsenne, yes … Last night, Madame Amorelle …’

  Probably no one would have believed him if he had claimed that, from that moment, he knew. And yet it was true.

  She had followed more or less the same reasoning as him, of course! She had reached the same conclusions, almost at the same time. Except that unlike him, she had seen things through to the bitter end.

  And, since she knew that a Malik wouldn’t shoot, she had calmly pulled the trigger.

  ‘… Madame Amorelle killed Ernest Malik with a pistol shot. At his home, yes … in his study. He was in his pyjamas and dressing gown. The gendarmerie telephoned here at dawn asking us to inform you, because she’s asking to see you.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ he said.

  He went back into the bedroom where the young man had put on his trousers, his bare chest painfully thin.

  ‘Your father is dead,’ said Maigret, averting his gaze.

  A silence. He turned round. Georges-Henry was not crying, but stood stock still, looking at him.

  ‘Did he kill himself?’

  So they weren’t two but three of them to have thought of the same solution. Who knows whether the kid hadn’t been tempted, at one point, to pick up the gun?

  There was still a trace of incredulity in his voice as he asked again:

  ‘Did he kill himself?’

  ‘No. It was your grandmother.’

  ‘Who told her?’

  He was biting his lips.

  ‘Who told her what?’

  ‘What you know … Campois?’

  ‘No, son. That’s not what you were thinking of.’

  And the boy turned red, proving Maigret right.

  ‘There’s something else, isn’t there? It’s not because in the past your father drove the Campois boy to commit suicide that Bernadette Amorelle killed him.’

  He paced up and down. He could have pressed the matter. He would have defeated an opponent who was not an equal match for him.

  ‘Stay here,’ he said at last.

  He went to fetch his hat from the dining room.

  ‘Keep an eye on him,’ he shouted to his wife and Mimile, who was now having his breakfast.

  It was a glorious day, the air so delicious in its morning freshness that you felt like biting into it, like a fruit.

  ‘Taxi … Route de Fontainebleau. I’ll direct you.’

  There were three or four cars on the towpath, those of the public prosecutor, no doubt. A few curious onlookers in front of the gate, where an indifferent gendarme stood guard. He greeted Maigret, who walked down the drive and was soon mounting the steps.

  The detective chief inspector from the Melun Flying Squad was already there, his hat on his head, a cigar in his mouth.

  ‘Pleased to see you again, Maigret … I didn’t know you were back in the job. A curious business, eh! She’s waiting for you. She refuses to talk before she’s seen you. It was she who telephoned the gendarmerie at around one o’clock this morning to announce that she had just killed her son-in-law.

  ‘You’ll see. She’s as calm as if she had just made jam or cleaned out her cupboards.

  ‘Actually she spent the night tidying up her things and, when I got here, her suitcase was packed.’

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Her second son-in-law, Charles, is in the drawing room with his wife. The deputy public prosecutor and the examining magistrate are questioning them. They claim they know nothing, that the old lady had been acting strangely for a while.’

  Maigret lumbered up the stairs and, something he rarely did, he emptied his pipe and put it in his pocket before knocking at the door, where a second gendarme stood guard. It was a simple gesture, but it was a sort of homage to Bernadette Amorelle.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret.’

  ‘Let him come in.’

  She had been left alone with her maid and, when Maigret went in, she was sitting at a pretty little writing desk, busy penning a letter.

  ‘It’s for my lawyer,’ she said,
apologizing. ‘Leave us, Mathilde.’

  The sun was streaming in through the three windows of this bedroom where the old woman had spent so many years. There was a joyful glint in her eyes and even – goodness knows if the moment might seem incongruous – a sort of playfulness.

  She was pleased with herself. She was proud of what she had done. She had a slightly mocking attitude towards the burly inspector who, unlike her, would not have been capable of finishing things off.

  ‘There was no other solution, was there?’ she said. ‘Sit down. You know that I hate talking to someone who is standing.’

  Then, rising herself, blinking a little because of the dazzling sun in her eyes:

  ‘Last night, when I finally got Aimée to tell me everything …’

  He made the mistake of registering surprise. A flicker. A start at the mention of Aimée, Charles Malik’s wife. Madame Amorelle was as clever as Maigret and understood.

  ‘I should have realized that you didn’t know that. Where is Georges-Henry?’

  ‘At my place, with my wife.’

  ‘At your house in Meung?’

  And she smiled at the memory of Maigret, whom she had mistaken for the gardener when she had gone to fetch him, having entered through the little green garden door.

  ‘In Paris, in my apartment in Place des Vosges.’

  ‘Does he know?’

  ‘I told him before coming here.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s calm.’

  ‘Poor boy! I wonder how he found the courage not to say anything. Don’t you think it’s funny, going to prison at my age? These gentlemen, by the way, are very kind. At first, they wouldn’t believe me. They thought I was confessing to protect the real culprit. They nearly demanded proof.

  ‘It went very well. I don’t know exactly what time it was. I had my pistol in my bag. I went over there. There was a light on the first floor. I rang the bell. Malik asked me what I wanted from the window.