Maigret and the Old People Read online

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even your grandmother?’

  ‘I didn’t want to bother her. I would swear, in retrospect, that the count felt threatened. He wasn’t the kind of man to worry about nothing. In spite of his age he was still exceptionally lucid, and his philosophy sheltered him against unjustified worries.’

  ‘If I understand correctly, you think he predicted what happened to him.’

  ‘He predicted a misfortune, yes. I preferred to come and talk to you because it’s been bothering me since yesterday.’

  ‘Did he ever talk to you about his friends?’

  ‘About his dead friends, yes. He had no living friends left, but that didn’t affect him unduly.

  ‘ “All in all,” he said, “it isn’t disagreeable to be the very last one.”

  ‘He added in a melancholy voice:

  ‘ “There’s always a memory in which the others go on living.” ’

  ‘He didn’t talk to you about his enemies?’

  ‘I’m sure he never had any. Perhaps some people who were jealous at the start of his career, when he was a rising star. They’re in the cemetery too.’

  ‘Thank you. You did the right thing in coming.’

  ‘You still don’t know anything?’

  Maigret hesitated and almost mentioned Jaquette, who at that very moment must have been shut away in his office with Abbé Barraud.

  Sometimes at police headquarters they called Maigret’s office ‘the confessional’, and yet this was the first time that it had really served that purpose.

  ‘Nothing definite, no.’

  ‘I need to get back to Rue d’Ulm.’

  Maigret led him to the top of the stairs.

  ‘Thanks again.’

  For a moment he paced the huge corridor, his hands behind his back, then lit his pipe and went into the inspectors’ office. Janvier was there, apparently waiting.

  ‘Is the priest next door?’

  ‘He has been for some time.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  And Janvier replied with slightly bitter irony:

  ‘He’s the oldest of the lot!’

  8.

  ‘Call Lucas.’

  ‘Rue Saint-Dominique?’

  ‘Yes. I sent him to take over from Lapointe.’

  He was starting to get impatient. The murmur of conversation continued in the adjacent office, and when they approached the door they could only hear a whisper, as if they were outside a real confessional.

  ‘Lucas? … Everything quiet over there? … Only phone calls from journalists? … Keep telling them there’s no news … What? … No! She hasn’t spoken … She’s in my office, yes, but not with me, or any of our men … With a priest …’

  A moment later it was the examining magistrate on the end of the line, and Maigret repeated more or less the same words.

  ‘I’m not being rough with her, no, don’t worry. Quite the contrary …’

  He couldn’t remember being so gentle, so patient in his life. The article that Pardon had read to him came back to his memory and made him smile ironically.

  The contributor to the Lancet had been mistaken. It wasn’t a teacher, at the end of the day, or a novelist, nor even a policeman who would solve Jaquette’s problem, but an octogenarian priest.

  ‘How long have they been in there?’

  ‘Twenty-five minutes.’

  He didn’t have the consolation of a glass of beer, because the tray was still in the next room. Soon it would be lukewarm. If it wasn’t already. He was tempted to go down to the Brasserie Dauphine, but reluctant to leave at that moment.

  He felt that the solution was near at hand and tried to guess what it was, less as an inspector with the Police Judiciaire who had been entrusted with the task of catching a criminal and persuading him to confess, than as a man.

  Because it was as a man that he had conducted this investigation, as a personal matter, so much so that he had mixed in his own childhood memories.

  Wasn’t he slightly involved himself? If Saint-Hilaire had been ambassador for several decades, if his and Isabelle’s platonic affair dated back almost fifty years, he, Maigret, had twenty-five years in the Police Judiciaire behind him, and as recently as the previous day he had been convinced that he had seen every possible category of human being pass in front of him.

  He didn’t consider himself as superhuman, he didn’t think he was infallible. On the contrary, he began his investigations with a certain humility, even the simplest ones.

  He was suspicious of evidence, of hasty judgements. He patiently tried to understand, bearing in mind that the most obvious motives are not always the deepest.

  While he might not have a lofty notion of men and their possibilities, he still believed in mankind.

  He looked for weak points. And when at last he put his finger on them, he didn’t celebrate his victory but on the contrary felt a certain despondency.

  He had lost his confidence since the previous day, unprepared in the face of people whose existence he hadn’t even suspected. All their attitudes, their ideas, their reactions were alien to him, and he tried in vain to classify them under any particular category.

  He wanted to like them, even Jaquette, who was driving him mad.

  He found in their lives a grace and harmony, a certain naivety that charmed him.

  All of a sudden he said to himself coldly:

  ‘Saint-Hilaire still got killed.’

  By one of them, it was almost certain. By Jaquette, if the scientific tests meant anything at all.

  For a few moments he took a sudden dislike to them all, including the dead man, including that young man who had made him feel more strongly than ever a longing for fatherhood.

  Why couldn’t they have been like other people? Why couldn’t they have had the same sordid interests and the same passions?

  All of a sudden he was exasperated by that overly innocent love story. He stopped thinking about it and looked for something else, a different explanation, one that conformed more fully to his experience.

  Surely two women who have loved the same man for many years must end up hating each other?

  Doesn’t a family related to most of the crowned families of Europe react to the threat of a marriage as ridiculous as the union envisaged by the two old people?

  None of them levelled accusations. None of them had any enemies. They all lived together in apparent harmony, except Alain Mazeron and his wife, who had ended up separating.

  Irritated by the endless whispering, Maigret was close to violently opening the door, and what stopped him was perhaps the reproachful look that Janvier darted at him.

  He too was charmed!

  ‘I hope you’re keeping an eye on the corridor?’

  He was almost considering the possibility of the old priest making off with his penitent.

  And yet he felt that he was close to touching the truth that escaped him. It was very simple, he knew. Human tragedies are always simple when we reconsider them in retrospect. Several times since the previous day, and particularly since this morning, he couldn’t have said exactly when he had been on the brink of understanding.

  Some discreet knocks on the communicating door made him jump.

  ‘Shall I come with you?’ Janvier asked.

  ‘That would be better.’

  Abbé Barraud was standing there, very old, in fact, and skeletal, with very long, wild hair in a halo around his skull. His cassock was shiny and worn, and had been badly mended in places.

  Jaquette seemed not to have left the chair, where she was still sitting as straight as before. Only the expression on her face had changed. It was no longer tense, it had given up struggling. It no longer expressed defiance, or the fierce determination to remain silent.

  While she wasn’t smiling, she still radiated serenity.

  ‘Forgive me, inspector, for keeping you waiting so long. You see, the question that Mademoiselle Larrieu asked me was quite delicate, and I had to c
onsider it seriously before giving it an answer. I confess that I almost asked your permission to telephone the Monseigneur to ask his advice.’

  Janvier, seated at the end of the table, was taking the discussion down in shorthand. Maigret, as if he needed to regain his composure, had sat down at his desk.

  ‘Have a seat, reverend.’

  ‘Are you letting me stay?’

  ‘I should imagine your penitent still needs your services?’

  The priest sat down on a chair, brought out a box-wood case from his cassock and took a pinch of snuff. This action, and the grains of tobacco on the greyish cassock, brought old memories back to Maigret.

  ‘Mademoiselle Larrieu, as you know, is very devout, and her piety dictated an attitude which I thought it my duty to make her abandon. Her concern was that the Count of Saint-Hilaire would not be allowed a Christian burial, and that was why she decided to wait until the funeral had taken place before she spoke.’

  For Maigret it was like a child’s balloon suddenly bursting in the sun, and he blushed to have been so close to the truth without reaching the end.

  ‘The Count of Saint-Hilaire committed suicide?’

  ‘Unfortunately that’s the truth. As I said to Mademoiselle Larrieu, there is no proof that he didn’t repent of his action at the very last moment. No death is instantaneous in the eyes of the Church. Infinity exists in time as it does in space, and an infinitely small period of time, beyond the measurement of doctors, is enough for contrition.

  ‘I don’t believe the Church would refuse the Count of Saint-Hilaire its final blessing.’

  For the first time Jaquette’s eyes darkened, and she took a handkerchief from her bag to wipe them, while a girlish pout appeared on her lips.

  ‘Speak, Jaquette,’ the priest said encouragingly. ‘Repeat what you told me.’

  She swallowed her saliva.

  ‘I had gone to bed. I was asleep. I heard a report and dashed to the office.’

  ‘You found your master stretched out on the carpet, with half his face blown away.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where was the pistol?’

  ‘On the desk.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I went to my bedroom to fetch a mirror to check that he had stopped breathing.’

  ‘So you checked that he was dead. And then?’

  ‘My first idea was to telephone the princess.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘First of all because it was almost midnight.’

  ‘You weren’t afraid that she would disapprove of your plan?’

  ‘I didn’t think about it straight away. I said to myself that the police were going to come, and all of a sudden I thought that because of the suicide the count would have a civil burial.’

  ‘How long passed between the moment when you knew the count was dead and the moment when you fired in your turn?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps ten minutes? I knelt down beside him and prayed. Then, standing up, I grabbed the pistol and fired it, without looking, asking forgiveness of both the dead man and heaven.’

  ‘You fired three bullets?’

  ‘I don’t know. I pulled the trigger until it stopped working. Then I noticed some gleaming dots on the carpet. It’s not something I know about. I worked out that they were the cartridge cases and I picked them up. I didn’t sleep that night. Early in the morning I went to throw the gun and the cartridge cases in the Seine, from Pont de la Concorde. I must have waited for a certain amount of time, because there was a policeman posted outside the Chamber of Deputies who seemed to be looking at me.’

  ‘Do you know why your boss killed himself?’

  She looked at the priest, who gave her a sign of encouragement. ‘He had been anxious and discouraged for a while.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘A few months ago, the doctor had advised him to stop drinking wine and spirits. He loved wine. He did without it for several days, then began to drink it again. That gave him stomach pains, and he had to get up at night to take bicarbonate of soda. In the end I was buying him a packet every week.’

  ‘What’s the name of his doctor?’

  ‘Dr Ourgaud.’

  Maigret picked up the receiver.

  ‘Put me through to Dr Ourgaud, please.’

  And to Jaquette:

  ‘Had he been his doctor for a long time?’

  ‘For ever, you might say.’

  ‘How old is Dr Ourgaud?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. More or less my age.’

  ‘And he still practises?’

  ‘He sees his old patients. His son is in the same surgery, on Boulevard Saint-Germain.’

  Right up until the end they stayed not only in the same neighbourhood, but among people of the same kind.

  ‘Hello! Dr Ourgaud? Inspector Maigret here.’

  He was asked to speak louder and closer to the receiver, and the doctor apologized for being a little hard of hearing.

  ‘As you suspect, I would like to ask you some questions about one of your patients. Yes, it’s about him, Jaquette Larrieu is in my office and she has just told me that the Count of Saint-Hilaire committed suicide … What? … You were waiting for me to pay you a visit? The idea had occurred to you? … Hello! I’m speaking as close to the receiver as possible … She claims that for a few months the Count of Saint-Hilaire had suffered from stomach pains … I can hear you perfectly … Dr Tudelle, the pathologist who carried out the post-mortem, said he was surprised to find an old man’s organs in such good condition …

  ‘What? … That’s what you kept telling your patient? He didn’t believe you?

  ‘Thank you, doctor. I will probably be obliged to disturb you to take your statement … Absolutely not! It’s very important, on the contrary …’

  He hung up with a serious expression, and Janvier thought he seemed moved.

  ‘The Count of Saint-Hilaire’, he explained in quite a bleak voice, ‘had got it into his head that he was suffering from cancer. In spite of the reassuring words of his physician, he began to have himself examined by other doctors and was convinced each time that they were hiding the truth from him.’

  Jaquette murmured:

  ‘He had always been so proud of his health! He often repeated to me, in the old days, that he wasn’t afraid of death, that he was prepared for it, but that he would find it hard to bear living with a disability. When he had flu, for example, he hid away like a sick animal and tried to keep me out of his room as much as possible. That was his vanity. A few years ago, one of his friends died of a cancer that had kept him in bed for almost two years. He was made to undergo complicated treatments, and the count said impatiently, “Why don’t they just let him die? If I was in his place, I’d ask them to help me to go as soon as possible.” ’

  Isabelle’s grandson, Julien, didn’t remember the exact words that Saint-Hilaire had uttered a few hours before dying. Thinking he would be happy to see his dream close to realization, he had had before him a worried and anxious old man, who seemed to be afraid of something.

  That, at least, was what Julien had believed, because he himself wasn’t yet an old man. Jaquette had understood straight away. And Maigret, who was halfway there, closer to the old people than to students in the Rue d’Ulm, understood as well: Saint-Hilaire expected, any day, to be bedbound.

  And he expected that to happen just as an old love that nothing had tarnished for fifty years was on the point of becoming real life.

  Isabelle, who saw him only in the distance, and who had retained in her mind the image of their youth, would become a caregiver at the same time as she became a wife, and would know only the miseries of an exhausted body.

  ‘Will you excuse me?’ he said suddenly, heading for the door.

  He reached the corridors of the Palais de Justice, climbed to the third floor and spent half an hour locked away with the examining magistrate.

  When he came back to his office, the three figures were s
till in the same place, and Janvier was chewing on his pencil.

  ‘You are free,’ he told Jaquette. ‘We’ll have you driven back. Or rather, I think I should have you driven to Aubonnet, the notary, where you have an appointment. As to you, Monsieur l’Abbé, we will have you dropped off at the presbytery. Over the next few days there will be some formalities to accomplish, some papers to sign.’

  And, turning to Janvier:

  ‘Do you want to take the wheel?’

  He spent an hour with the commissioner of the Police Judiciaire, and he was then seen in the Brasserie Dauphine, where he had two large glasses of beer at the counter.

  Madame Maigret must have been expecting him to call and tell her that he wouldn’t be coming home for dinner, as so often happened in the course of an investigation.

  She was surprised, at 6.30, to hear his footsteps on the stairs and she opened the door just as he reached the landing.

  He was more serious than usual, with a serene seriousness, but she didn’t dare to question him when, as he kissed her, he held her to him for a long time without saying a word.

  She couldn’t have known that he had just been immersed in a distant past, and a future that was a little less distant.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked at last, as if rousing himself.

  1.

  There was a noise not far from his head, and Maigret, reluctantly, almost fearfully, began to move, one of his arms beating the air outside the sheets. He was aware that he was in his bed, aware, too, of the presence of his wife, who, wider awake than he was, was waiting in the darkness without daring to say a word.

  What he was mistaken about – at least for a few seconds – was the nature of this insistent, aggressive, imposing noise. And that was a mistake he always made in winter, when it was very cold.

  It seemed to him that it was the alarm clock ringing, even though there hadn’t been an alarm clock on his bedside table since he had got married. It all went back even further than his adolescence: to his childhood, in fact, when he had been an altar boy and had served at the six o’clock mass.

  And yet he had served at the same mass in spring, summer and autumn, too. Why was the memory that remained with him, that automatically came back to him, a memory of darkness, of frost, of numb fingers, of shoes crunching a thin layer of ice on the way to church?