Maigret's Secret Page 2

  ‘Anything might be important.’

  ‘I understand … I wondered whether I had any particular vocation … I’d heard about career opportunities in laboratories … Most pharmaceutical companies have their own research laboratories … When I got to Paris with my pharmacy diploma in my pocket I tried to find one of these jobs …’

  ‘Without success?’

  ‘All I could find was a job as a temporary stand-in at a chemist’s, then another …’

  He was feeling hot. So was Maigret, who was now pacing up and down in the room, pausing occasionally by the window.

  ‘Did they ask you all these questions at Auteuil?’

  ‘No. Not the same questions. I can see that you are attempting to understand who I am. As you see, I’m trying hard to give you honest answers. Deep down, I see myself as no better or no worse than anyone else …’

  He had to wipe his brow.

  ‘Are you thirsty?’

  ‘A bit …’

  Maigret opened the door to the inspectors’ room.

  ‘Janvier? Could you get us something to drink?’

  Then, to Josset:

  ‘Beer?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  Without waiting for a reply he turned again to Janvier:

  ‘Beer and sandwiches.’

  Josset gave a sad smile.

  ‘I read about that …’ he murmured.

  ‘You read what?’

  ‘Beer, sandwiches. The chief and his inspectors taking it in turns to ask questions. It’s common knowledge, isn’t it? I never thought that one day …’

  He had fine hands and he sometimes wrung them nervously.

  ‘You know when you get here, but …’

  ‘Don’t be alarmed, Monsieur Josset. I can promise you that I have no preconceived ideas about you …’

  ‘The inspector at Auteuil certainly did.’

  ‘Was he rough with you?’

  ‘He didn’t treat me well. He used some words which … Anyway, who knows? If I were him …’

  ‘Let’s get back to those early days in Paris. How long was it before you met the woman who would become your wife?’

  ‘About a year … I was twenty-five and working in an English chemist’s on Faubourg Saint-Honoré when I met her …’

  ‘Was she a customer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was her maiden name?’

  ‘Fontane, Christine Fontane. But she was still using the name of her first husband, who had died a few months earlier – Lowell – from the English brewing family. You’ll have seen the name on beer bottles.’

  ‘So she had been a widow for a few months and she was … what age?’

  ‘Twenty-nine.’

  ‘Any children?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rich?’

  ‘Indeed. She was a regular customer of all the luxury shops on Faubourg Saint-Honoré …’

  ‘Did you become her lover?’

  ‘She had a free and easy lifestyle.’

  ‘Even when her husband was alive?’

  ‘I believe that was the case.’

  ‘What was her background?’

  ‘Bourgeois … Not wealthy, but comfortably well off … She grew up in the sixteenth arrondissement, and her father was chair on a number of company boards …’

  ‘Did you fall in love with her?’

  ‘Head over heels.’

  ‘Had you already split up with your girlfriend from Montpellier?’

  ‘Several months earlier.’

  ‘Did you and Christine Lowell discuss the prospect of marriage from the very start?’

  The briefest of hesitations.

  ‘No.’

  There was a knock at the door. It was the waiter from the Brasserie Dauphine, bringing some beer and sandwiches. This gave them an excuse to take a break. Josset didn’t eat but merely drank half of his beer, while Maigret continued to pace up and down, nibbling on a sandwich.

  ‘Can you tell me how it happened?’

  ‘I will try. It’s not easy. Fifteen years have passed. I was young, I can see that now. With hindsight, life was different then. Certain things didn’t seem as important as they do now.

  ‘I wasn’t earning a lot of money. I was living in furnished lodgings, near Place des Ternes, and I had all my meals in cheap restaurants, except when I would make do with some croissants. I spent more money on clothes than I did on feeding myself …’

  He still had a taste for fashion: the suit he was wearing was by one of the finest tailors in Paris; his monogrammed shirt had been made to measure, as had his shoes.

  ‘Christine lived in a different world, which I knew nothing about and which dazzled me. I was still the son of a small-town schoolteacher, and the students I mixed with in Montpellier weren’t much better off than me.’

  ‘Did she introduce you to her friends?’

  ‘Much later. That was an aspect to our relationship that took me a long time to figure out.’

  ‘Can you give me an example?’

  ‘We often hear about businessmen, industrialists or bankers having a fling with a shopgirl or a model. It was much the same for her, in reverse. She was dating an inexperienced, penniless pharmacist’s assistant. She insisted on knowing where I lived, a cheap furnished hotel with earthenware tiles on the walls of the stairwell, and walls so thin you could hear every noise. It delighted her. On Sundays she would take me out in the car to some country inn.’

  His voice had become muted, tinged with both sadness and resentment.

  ‘In the beginning I too thought it was just a fling that wouldn’t last.’

  ‘Were you in love?’

  ‘I grew to love her.’

  ‘Were you jealous?’

  ‘That’s how it all began. She would speak to me about her friends and even her lovers. She enjoyed telling me all the details. At first I didn’t say anything. Then, in a fit of jealousy, I called her every name under the sun and ended up giving her a slap. I was convinced she was making fun of me and that once she left my iron bed she gossiped to everyone about how awkward and naive I was. We had lots of arguments along those lines. I once stopped seeing her for a month.’

  ‘Was she the one who patched things up?’

  ‘Her or me. Either one of us might ask for forgiveness. We really did love each other, inspector.’

  ‘Who first raised the question of marriage?’

  ‘I can’t recall. To be honest, it’s impossible to say. We reached the point where we were hurting each other deliberately. Sometimes she’d turn up at three in the morning, half drunk, and knock on the door of my room. If I was in a sulk and didn’t answer straight away the neighbours would be up in arms about the racket. I don’t know how many times she threatened to kick me out. They did at the chemist’s too, because some mornings I’d turn up late, still half asleep.’

  ‘Did she drink a lot?’

  ‘We both drank. I don’t really know why. We just did it without thinking. It made us even more exhilarated. In the end we realized that I couldn’t do without her, and she couldn’t do without me.’

  ‘Where was she living at this time?’

  ‘In the house you saw, in Rue Lopert. It was around two or three in the morning one night, we were sitting in a cabaret bar when we looked each other in the eye and, suddenly sobered up, asked ourselves in earnest where we were going.’

  ‘You don’t know who first raised it?’

  ‘No, in all honesty. It was the first time the word “marriage” was mentioned, and on that occasion it was just a throwaway remark, more or less. It’s hard to say after all this time.’

  ‘She was five years older than you?’

  ‘Yes, and a few million francs better off than me. Once we were married I couldn’t go on working behind the counter in a chemist’s. She knew someone called Virieu, who had inherited a modest pharmaceutical concern from his parents. Virieu wasn’t a pharmacist. He was thirty-five but
had spent most of his adult life in Fouquet’s, Maxim’s and the casino in Deauville. Christine invested some money in his company, and I became the managing director.’

  ‘So in fact you finally achieved your ambition?’

  ‘It appears that way, I admit. When you look at the sequence of events, it’s as if I carefully planned each stage. However, I assure you that was very far from the case.

  ‘I married Christine because I loved her passionately and because if I’d had to do without her I’d probably have killed myself. For her part, she begged me to make our union legal.

  ‘For a long time afterwards she had no more affairs and began to be jealous herself; she came to hate my customers and would drop by to check up on me.

  ‘An opportunity came along to provide me with a position in keeping with her lifestyle. The money she invested in the business was in her name, and the marriage followed the convention of separate assets.

  ‘Some people saw me as a gigolo, and I wasn’t always accepted with open arms in this new milieu in which I was to lead my life.’

  ‘Were you happy together?’

  ‘I suppose so. I worked hard. I took on this relatively obscure laboratory and turned it into one of the four major centres in Paris. We socialized a lot too, so you could say I didn’t have a spare moment, day or night.’

  ‘Don’t you want to eat?’

  ‘I’m not hungry. If you don’t mind, I’ll have another glass of beer.’

  ‘Were you drunk last night?’

  ‘That’s what they asked me this morning. Doubtless I was at one point, but I still remember everything.’

  ‘I didn’t want to read the statement you made at Auteuil, which I have here.’

  Maigret idly flicked through the pages.

  ‘Is there anything there you would like to change?’

  ‘I told the truth. Maybe I overdid it, because of the inspector’s attitude. From his opening questions I realized that he regarded me as a murderer. Later on, when the prosecutor’s men turned up in Rue Lopert, I got the impression that the magistrate shared that opinion.’

  He was silent for a few moments.

  ‘I can understand that. I was wrong to get worked up about it.’

  Maigret asked blandly:

  ‘So you didn’t kill your wife?’

  And Josset shook his head. He was no longer protesting vehemently. He looked weary, deflated.

  ‘I know it will be difficult to explain …’

  ‘Would you like to take a break?’

  The man hesitated. He rocked gently on his chair.

  ‘I think it would be better to go on. But would you allow me to get up and walk around a bit?’

  He too wanted to go to the window, to see the city outside going about its everyday business in the sunlight.

  The previous evening he was still part of it. Maigret followed him with his eyes, lost in thought. Lapointe sat with his pencil poised in his hand.

  Back in the peaceful living room in Boulevard Voltaire – a little too peaceful, in fact, almost oppressively calm – where the women were still knitting and chatting, Doctor Pardon listened carefully to Maigret’s every word.

  Maigret, however, could sense that there was still an invisible link between his listener and the telephone on the console table, between the doctor and the Polish tailor who was fighting his last battle alongside his five children and his hysterical wife.

  A bus went by, stopped and then set off again, having deposited two dark figures, and a drunk bumped along the walls without ever interrupting the tune he was humming.

  2. The Geraniums in Rue Caulaincourt

  ‘Heavens!’ Alice cried suddenly as she bounded to her feet. ‘I forgot the liqueurs!’

  She had changed quite a lot. When she was a young girl, she rarely attended these dinners; she must have found them boring. She wasn’t much in evidence in the first few months of her marriage either, maybe one or two appearances, to show off her new role as wife, on a par, so to speak, with her mother.

  But since she had been expecting, she had paid frequent visits to Boulevard Voltaire, where she happily assumed the role of hostess and suddenly started to take an even closer interest than her mother in the minutiae of housework.

  Her husband, a newly qualified veterinarian, leaped up from his seat, made his wife sit down again and went into the kitchen in search of some brandy for the men and, for the women, that Dutch liqueur that was no longer found anywhere except at the Pardons’ house.

  Like most doctors’ waiting rooms, this one was badly lit, and the furniture was worn and shabby. Maigret and Pardon, sitting by the open window, had a good view of the glaring streetlights on the boulevard, where the leaves of the trees were starting to rustle. Was there a storm on the way?

  ‘Brandy, inspector?’

  Maigret smiled at the young man distractedly; though he was well aware of where he was, his thoughts nonetheless were back in his office, bathed in sunshine, on that memorable Tuesday when the interrogation took place.

  He had more on his mind than at dinner, his mood matching the doctor’s serious demeanour. He and Pardon could almost read each other’s thoughts, even though they had got to know each other late in life, and both were well advanced in their respective careers. They had hit it off from the start, and soon a strong mutual respect had developed between them.

  Perhaps this was due to the fact that they applied the same standards of honesty, not just towards other people but also towards themselves. They didn’t play games, they didn’t sugar the pill, they both called a spade a spade.

  This evening, when Maigret suddenly began to hold forth, it was less to distract his friend than because the telephone call had reawakened in him similar feelings to those that were currently exercising Pardon.

  It wasn’t that he had a guilt complex – he hated that expression anyway. Nor was it that he felt remorse.

  Both of them, because of their profession, a profession they had been drawn to, sometimes found themselves in a situation where they had to make a choice, and that choice had implications for someone else’s fate: in Pardon’s case, whether a man lived or died.

  Neither of them romanticized this responsibility. Neither was oppressed by it or rebelled against it. They simply treated it with a certain melancholy seriousness.

  Young Bruart wasn’t sure he could sit near them. He would have liked to know what they were whispering about and was aware that he was still an outsider in this little clan. So he went back to sit with the women.

  ‘There were three of us in my office,’ said Maigret. ‘Lapointe, who was recording the interview and casting me the occasional glance, Adrien Josset, who was sometimes on his feet, sometimes sitting in his chair, and me, mainly sitting with my back to the open window.

  ‘I realized how tired the man was. He hadn’t slept a wink. He had had a lot to drink, firstly the previous evening, then again in the middle of the night. I could sense the waves of exhaustion washing over him; sometimes he seemed a bit dizzy. Sometimes his worried eyes became fixed and expressionless, as if, sinking into a torpor, he was trying to struggle back to the surface.

  ‘It may seem cruel to have pushed on with this first interrogation: it would end up lasting more than three hours.

  ‘However, it was as much for his sake as out of a sense of duty that I stuck to the task. For one thing, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to extract a confession, if there was one to be had. And besides, short of giving him an injection or a sedative, he would not have been able to rest anyway, given that his nerves were shot.

  ‘He needed to talk, to talk there and then. If I’d sent him off to the cells, he’d have sat there talking to himself.

  ‘The reporters and photographers had gathered in the corridor. I could hear their loud voices and laughter.

  ‘It was around then that the afternoon papers came out, and I was sure that they must be talking about the crime at Auteuil, and that the photos of Josset taken that morning i
n Rue Lopert must be plastered all over their front pages.

  ‘It wasn’t long before I got a telephone call from Examining Magistrate Coméliau, who was always anxious to get an early result in the cases under his jurisdiction.

  ‘ “Have you got Josset there with you?”

  ‘ “Yes.”

  ‘ “Has he confessed?”

  ‘Josset was looking at me, aware we were talking about him.

  ‘ “I’m quite busy,” I said, without being specific.

  ‘ “Is he denying it?”

  ‘ “I don’t know.”

  ‘ “Make it clear to him that it would be in his best interests to—”

  ‘ “I’ll try.”

  ‘Coméliau is not a bad man, but he has been called my friendly enemy, because we have clashed so often.

  ‘It’s not really his fault. It springs from how he sees his role, hence his duty. In his view, he is paid to defend society, so he has to show no mercy to anything that threatens to upset the established order. I don’t think that he has ever experienced a moment of self-doubt. He has no compunction in distinguishing the good people from the bad people and seems incapable of conceiving that people can exist in the grey area in between.

  ‘If I’d told him that I hadn’t formed an opinion yet, he wouldn’t have believed me or he would have accused me of being dilatory in the exercise of my duties.

  ‘Nevertheless, after an hour, two hours of interrogation I was no nearer to answering the question that Josset asked whenever he looked at me with his wide eyes: You do believe me, don’t you?

  ‘The previous evening, I didn’t even know him. I’d never heard anyone talk about him. His name was vaguely familiar to me, but that was only because I had used medicine from a box with the name “Josset and Virieu” on it.

  ‘Oddly, I had never even set foot in Rue Lopert before, so I had discovered its existence that morning with some surprise.

  ‘There isn’t usually much crime in the area around the Auteuil church. And Rue Lopert, which is a cul-de-sac, more a private lane than a proper street, has only about twenty houses, of the sort you might find in a provincial village.

  ‘It’s only a short hop from Rue Chardon-Lagache, and yet you feel a long way from the bustle of Paris. The names of the neighbouring streets commemorate writers rather than great statesmen: Rue Boileau, Rue Théophile-Gautier, Rue Leconte-de-Lisle …