The Misty Harbour Page 15

  ‘I promised to pay it back over time and pleaded with him to keep the whole thing quiet. He really did want to call in the police but agreed not to, on one condition: that I leave the country and never set foot in France again! You understand? He wanted Hélène … and he got her.’

  Smiling sadly, Raymond was quiet for a few moments.

  ‘Others head down south or out east, but I went north and set myself up in Norway. I never heard any news from home … The letters I wrote to Hélène went unanswered, and yesterday I learned that she’d never received them.

  ‘I wrote to my cousin, too, with no more success.

  ‘I won’t pretend to be better than I am or try to make you feel sorry for me with a tale of unhappy love. No … In the beginning I didn’t think much about it. There, you can see I’m being sincere! I was working, having all sorts of problems … But at night, I felt a kind of dull, aching nostalgia.

  ‘There were disappointments … I started a business; it ended badly. For years I went through ups and downs in a country where I was an outsider.

  ‘I’d changed my name there. To try tipping the scales in my favour as a businessman, I became a naturalized citizen as well.

  ‘Now and then I’d entertain officers from some French ship, and that’s how I discovered one day that I had a son.

  ‘I wasn’t sure! But when I thought about the dates … I couldn’t stop thinking about it and wrote to Ernest. I begged him to tell me the truth, to let me come home to France, if only for a few days.

  ‘He sent me a telegram: “Arrest at French border”.

  ‘Years went by; I was bent on making money. There’s not much to say about that, except that there was a hollow place in my heart.

  ‘In Tromsö there are three months of endless night every year. Regrets and longings grow sharper … Sometimes I would have attacks of hysterical rage.

  ‘I set myself a goal: to become as rich as my cousin. And I did! Thanks to the cod roe business. But it was when I achieved this success that I felt the most miserable.

  ‘Then suddenly, I came back here. I was determined to act. Yes! After fifteen years! I was looking around Ouistreham and … I saw my boy, on the beach. I saw Hélène, at a distance …

  ‘And I wondered how I had ever managed to live without my son. Do you understand me?

  ‘I bought a boat. If I had acted openly, my cousin would not have hesitated for a moment to have me arrested. Because he had kept all the evidence he needed!

  ‘You saw the men helping me: good men, no matter what they look like. Everything was arranged.

  ‘Ernest Grandmaison and the boy were alone in the house that night. To be even more certain of success, to increase the odds in my favour, I’d asked Captain Joris to help. I’d met him in Norway, when he was still going to sea. He knew the mayor and was to visit him under some pretext and distract him while Big Louis and I were spiriting my son away.

  ‘And that – that was what caused the tragedy. While Joris was with my cousin in the study, Big Louis and I had come in through the back door, but unfortunately, we knocked over a broom in the corridor.

  ‘Grandmaison heard the noise, thought someone was after him and got his revolver from the desk drawer.

  ‘What happened next … I truly don’t know, there was such confusion! Joris followed Grandmaison out to the corridor, which was completely dark. A shot – and of all the bad luck, Joris was hit!

  ‘I was beside myself with anguish. I didn’t want any scandal, especially for Hélène’s sake. How could I have told that whole story to the police!

  ‘Big Louis and I carried Joris aboard the Saint-Michel. He needed medical attention, so we headed for England and arrived there a few hours later. But we couldn’t go ashore without passports! There were police officers and watchmen on the quay.

  ‘I’d studied a little medicine once upon a time and did my best for Joris on the ship, but it was nowhere near enough. We set out for Holland. That’s where the surgeons cleaned up the wound. The clinic could not keep him there, however, without informing the authorities.

  ‘We sailed on, a ghastly voyage! Can you imagine us all on the ship, and Joris at death’s door? He needed weeks of rest and care. I almost took him to Norway on the Saint-Michel, but then we encountered a schooner bound for the Lofoten islands. I moved Joris with me to that schooner; we were safer at sea than on land.

  ‘He stayed a week at home with me in Tromsø. Again, though, people began to wonder who my mysterious guest was, and we had to set out again. Copenhagen, Hamburg … Joris was getting better; the wound had scarred over, but he’d lost his reason and was unable to speak.

  ‘What could I do with him, I ask you? And wouldn’t he stand a better chance of recovering his reason in his own home, in familiar surroundings, instead of while running from pillar to post?

  ‘I wanted at least to secure his material comfort. I sent three hundred thousand francs to his bank, signing his name for deposit to his account.

  ‘I still had to get him home! It was too risky for me to bring him here to Ouistreham myself. Releasing him in Paris … Would that not bring him inevitably to the attention of the police, who would identify him and send him home?

  ‘And that’s what happened. There was only one thing I couldn’t have anticipated: that my cousin, terrified that Joris might one day reveal who’d shot him, would do away with the captain in that cowardly way.

  ‘Because he is the one who put the strychnine in the water carafe. He simply went in the cottage through the back door when he was going off duck hunting.’

  ‘And you got back to work,’ said Maigret slowly.

  ‘What else could I do! I wanted my son! But now my cousin was on his guard. The boy was back at Stanislas, beyond my reach.’

  Maigret knew about that part. And now, looking around at the setting he had come to know so well, he understood more clearly what was at stake in the secret battle between the two men.

  And not just between the two of them! A struggle against him, Maigret!

  The police had to be kept in the dark, for neither one of the cousins could afford to tell the truth.

  ‘I came here on the Saint-Michel …’

  ‘I know! And you sent Big Louis to the mayor’s house.’

  Raymond couldn’t help smiling as the inspector went on.

  ‘A Big Louis primed for battle, who took revenge on Grandmaison for all the powerful men who’d persecuted him! He could pound him to his heart’s content, knowing that his victim would never let out a peep to the police. He must have forced him to write a letter authorizing you to take the boy out of school.’

  ‘Yes. I was behind the villa with your colleague on my heels. Big Louis left the letter in a pre-arranged spot, and I shook off your man. I took a bicycle; I bought a car in Caen. I had to move fast. While I was getting my son, Big Louis stayed with the mayor to keep him from alerting the school. A waste of time, as it turned out, since he’d already sent Hélène to pick up the boy ahead of me.

  ‘Then you had me arrested.

  ‘It was all over … I couldn’t go after her while you were stubbornly digging up the truth.

  ‘Our only recourse was to escape. If we stayed, you would inevitably work everything out.

  ‘And that explains last night. Bad luck just wouldn’t let us go … The schooner grounded on the shoal, and we had a hard time of it, swimming ashore. To cap it all, I lost my wallet.

  ‘No money! The police on our track … All I could do was call Hélène to ask her for a few thousand francs, enough to get the four of us to the border … In Norway, I could pay my companions what I owed them. And Hélène came at once.

  ‘But so did you! You, whom we constantly found blocking our way. You, relentless, to whom we could say nothing, whom I could hardly warn that you might provoke more harm through your inquiry!’

  His eyes now betrayed a sudden misgiving, and in a faltering voice he asked:

  ‘Did my cousin really kill himself?’ />
  Had Maigret lied to him, perhaps, to induce him to speak?

  ‘Yes, he did kill himself, when he realized that the truth would come out in the end. And he understood that when I arrested you. He guessed that I’d done that simply to give him time to think things over.’

  The two men had been walking as they talked; now they stopped abruptly together on the jetty. The Saint-Michel was going slowly past, with an old fisherman proudly at the wheel.

  Someone ran up, pushing his way roughly through the gawking crowd, the first man to leap on to the schooner’s deck.

  Big Louis!

  He had given his captors the slip, snapped the chain between his handcuffs! Hustling the fisherman aside, he grabbed the wheel.

  ‘Slow down, for God’s sake!’ he yelled to the men aboard the tug. ‘You’ll bash her up!’

  ‘And the other two?’ Maigret asked Raymond.

  ‘This morning you passed within a metre of them. They’re hiding out in the village, in the old woman’s woodshed.’

  Lucas was making his way through the crowd towards Maigret, looking surprised.

  ‘Listen, we’ve got them!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lannec and Célestin …’

  ‘They’re here?’

  ‘The Dives police have just brought them in.’

  ‘Well, tell them to let those two go. And have them both come to the harbour.’

  They stood facing Captain Joris’ cottage and his garden, its last roses stripped of their petals by the storm. Behind a curtain, someone looking out: it was Julie, wondering if the man at the wheel on the schooner was really her brother. Near Captain Delcourt, the lock workers and harbour men stood together, watching.

  ‘Those fellows … The trouble they caused me, with their half-truths and evasions!’ sighed Maigret.

  Raymond smiled.

  ‘They’re sailors!’

  ‘I know! And sailors don’t like a landlubber like me sticking my nose into their business.’

  He filled his pipe with little taps of his index finger. Puffing gently on the fresh pipe, he frowned.

  ‘What will we tell them?’

  Ernest Grandmaison was dead. Must they reveal that he was a murderer?

  ‘Perhaps we could …’ Raymond began.

  ‘I don’t know … Claim that it was some old feud? A vengeful sailor, a foreigner, who’s gone back to his country …’

  The crew of the tug was tramping off to the Buvette de la Marine, beckoning the lock workers to join them.

  And Big Louis was bustling about his boat, patting and touching it as if he were checking a lost dog come home, making sure she wasn’t hurt.

  ‘Hey there!’ Maigret called to him.

  Big Louis gave a start but hesitated to step forwards – or more likely, to leave his schooner again. When he noticed Raymond standing there too, he seemed as surprised as Lucas had been.

  ‘What the …?’

  ‘When can the Saint-Michel go back to sea?’ asked Maigret.

  ‘Right away if need be! No damage anywhere! She’s a trim little ship, I promise you.’

  Big Louis was looking questioningly at Raymond, who announced, ‘In that case, take off on a sail-about with Lannec and Célestin …’

  ‘They’re here too?’

  ‘They’re coming … Go on a sailing spree for a few weeks. And far enough away that they forget about the Saint-Michel around here.’

  ‘Well, I might take my sister along as ship’s cook … She’s fearless, you know, our Julie.’

  Still, he was a bit hangdog around Maigret. He hadn’t forgotten the ship’s run for it the night before and had no idea if he could treat it lightly.

  ‘You weren’t too cold, at least, were you?’ he asked the inspector.

  Big Louis was now standing at the edge of the dock, off which Maigret sent him splashing with one push.

  ‘I believe I’ve got a train at six o’clock,’ he observed pleasantly.

  Still, he made no move to leave. He looked around him with a pang of nostalgia, as if he had already grown fond of the little harbour town.

  Didn’t he know it in all its nooks and crannies, in all its moods, in shivery morning sunshine and blustery tempest, fogbound or streaming with rain?

  ‘Will you be going to Caen?’ he asked Raymond, who was sticking close to his side.

  ‘Not right away. I think it would be better … to let …’

  ‘Some time pass … Yes.’

  When Lucas returned fifteen minutes later and asked after Maigret, he was waved over to the Buvette de la Marine, which had just lit its lamps.

  He could see the inspector through the misted-over windows. An inspector solidly straddling a cane-seated chair, pipe clenched in his teeth, a glass of beer within reach, listening to the stories being told around him by men in rubber boots and sailor caps.

  And on the ten o’clock train that evening, that same inspector sighed, ‘They must be snug and warm in the cabin, all three of them …’

  ‘What cabin?’

  ‘Aboard the Saint-Michel! With the gimballed lamp, the nicked-up table, those thick glasses and that bottle of Dutch gin … And the purring stove … Say, have you got a match?’

  1. The Dead Man and His Two Women

  It all began with a holiday feeling. When Maigret stepped off the train, half of the railway station at Antibes was bathed in sunlight so intense that the people coming and going were reduced to shadows. Shadows in straw hats and white trousers, carrying tennis racquets. The air was humming. There were palm trees and cactuses along the quayside, a strip of blue sea beyond the streetlamps.

  Someone was running to meet him.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, I believe? I recognized you from a photo that was in the papers … Inspector Boutigues …’

  Boutigues! Even the name was comical! Boutigues had already picked up Maigret’s suitcases and was dragging them towards the subway. He was wearing a pearl-grey suit with a red carnation in his buttonhole and shoes with fabric uppers.

  ‘Is this your first visit to Antibes?’

  Maigret mopped his brow and tried to keep up with his cicerone as he threaded his way between the groups of people, overtaking everyone. Eventually, he found himself standing before a horse-drawn carriage with a cream-coloured canvas roof, its small tassels bobbing about. Another forgotten sensation: the bounce of the springs, the coachman’s crack of the whip, the muffled sound of hoofs on softened bitumen.

  ‘We’ll go and have a drink first … No, no, I insist … The Café Glacier, coachman …’

  It was nearby. Boutigues explained:

  ‘Place Macé … In the centre of Antibes …’

  A pretty square with a garden, and cream or orange canopies on all the houses. They simply had to sit out on a terrace and drink a Pernod. Opposite was a shop window full of sports outfits, swimming costumes, beach robes … To the left, a photographer’s studio … A few smart cars parked along the pavement … That holiday feeling again!

  ‘Would you like to see the prisoners first or visit the scene of the crime?’

  And Maigret replied without really knowing what he was saying, as if someone had asked him what he was drinking:

  ‘The crime scene.’

  The holiday continued. Maigret smoked a cigar that his colleague had offered him. The horse trotted along the promenade. To the right, villas hidden away among the pines; to the left, a few rocks, then the blue of the sea dotted here and there with white sails.

  ‘Have you got your bearings yet? Behind us is Antibes … Where we are is the start of Cap d’Antibes, which is nothing but villas, some very expensive villas at that …’

  Maigret nodded, blissfully. His head was befuddled by all this sunshine, and he squinted at Boutigues’ red flower.

  ‘Boutigues, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I’m a Niçois. Or rather, I’m Nicene …’

  In other words, pure Niçois, Niçois squared, cubed!

  ‘O
ver here. Can you see that white villa? That one there.’

  It wasn’t intentional, but Maigret observed all this in disbelief. He just couldn’t get into work mode, couldn’t convince himself that he was here to investigate a crime.

  He had, however, received some very particular instructions:

  ‘A man called Brown has been killed in Cap d’Antibes. It’s all over the papers. Best if you avoid any dramas.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘During the war, Brown worked for military intelligence.’

  ‘Ditto.’

  And here they were. The carriage drew to a halt. Boutigues took a small key from his pocket and opened the gate, then crunched along the gravel of the path.

  ‘It’s one of the least attractive villas on the cape!’

  However, it wasn’t that bad either. The mimosas filled the air with a sickly scent. There were still a few golden oranges hanging on the miniature trees. Then there were some odd-looking flowers that Maigret didn’t even know.

  ‘The property opposite belongs to a maharajah … He’s probably in residence right now … Five hundred metres further along, on the left, there is a member of the Academy … Then there is that famous dancer who lives with an English lord …’

  Yes! And so what? Maigret wanted to settle down on the bench next to the house and sleep for an hour. He had, after all, been travelling all night.

  ‘I’ll fill you in on the bare bones of the situation.’

  Boutigues had opened the door, and they found themselves in a cool hallway whose picture windows looked out over the sea.

  ‘Brown lived here for about ten years …’

  ‘Did he work?’

  ‘No … he must have had a private income … People used to call them Brown and his two women …’

  ‘Two?’

  Only one of them was actually his mistress: the daughter … Her name was Gina Martini.’

  ‘She’s in prison?’

  ‘Her mother too … The three of them lived together without a maid …’

  That much was evident from the state of the house, which was far from clean. There were maybe one or two beautiful things, some valuable items of furniture, some objects that had had seen better days.