The Misty Harbour Read online

  ‘There are none.’

  They return to the kitchen; she opens a cupboard.

  ‘May I offer you a drop of something?’

  And it is now, amid these ritual movements, while pouring a liqueur into tiny glasses decorated with painted flowers, that she feels her anguish most deeply and begins to sob.

  She looks furtively at the captain, who is back in his armchair. The sight of him is so painful that she looks away and, stammering with the effort to pull herself together, tells Maigret, ‘I’ll make the guest room ready for you.’

  She can hardly get the words out. She takes an apron hanging on the wall to wipe her eyes.

  ‘I would rather stay at the hotel. I suppose there is one …’

  Julie looks up at a small china clock, the kind often won at a fairground, a clock that ticks along like the comforting soul of the household.

  ‘Yes! You’ll still find someone there at this hour. It’s on the other side of the lock, just behind the Buvette de la Marine.’

  She wishes he would stay, however, and seems afraid to be left alone with the captain, whom she no longer dares look at.

  ‘You don’t think there’s anyone in the house?’

  ‘As you saw for yourself.’

  ‘You’ll come back tomorrow morning?’

  She goes with him to the front door, which she shuts firmly behind him.

  And Maigret finds himself plunging into fog so dense that he cannot even see his feet. He does manage to find the gate. He can feel that he is walking on grass, then on the rough, stony road. He also becomes aware of a distant noise that he will need some time to identify.

  It resembles the lowing of a cow, but sadder, more desolate.

  ‘Idiot!’ he finally growls between his teeth. ‘It’s only the foghorn …’

  He’s no longer sure where he is. And now, right in front of his feet, he looks down at water that appears to be steaming. He is on the wall of the lock! He hears the screech of cranks turning somewhere. He can’t remember where the taxi crossed the water and, spotting a narrow footbridge, he is about to step on to it.

  ‘Watch out!’

  He is stunned: the voice is so close to him! Just when Maigret was feeling absolutely alone, a man has turned up within three metres of him – and the inspector must strain to make out even his silhouette.

  Now he understands that warning: the footbridge he was about to cross is moving. It’s the gate of the lock itself that is opening, and the sight becomes even more hallucinatory because quite close by, a few metres away, it’s no longer a man that appears but an entire wall, as high as a house. On top of this wall are lights shining fitfully through the mist.

  A ship is passing – and Maigret could reach out to touch it! When the end of a hawser thuds down near him, someone picks it up, lugs it to a bollard and makes it fast.

  ‘Slow astern! … Stand by!’ shouts someone up on the bridge of the steamer.

  A few moments earlier, the place had seemed dead, deserted. And now Maigret, walking the length of the lock, sees that the mist is full of human figures. Someone is turning a winch. Another man runs up with a second mooring line. Customs officials are waiting for the gangway to be lowered to allow them aboard. And none of them can see a thing, in the thick mist that pearls in droplets on the men’s moustaches.

  ‘You want to cross over?’

  The voice is quite close. Another lock-gate.

  ‘Hurry up, or you’ll have to wait a good fifteen minutes …’

  He goes across holding on to the handrail, hears water boiling beneath his feet and, still in the distance, the moaning of the foghorn. The more Maigret advances, the more this world of mist fills with teeming, mysterious life. A light draws him on; approaching, he sees a fisherman, in a boat moored to the dock, lowering and raising a net attached to some poles.

  The man glances at him without interest, then begins to sort through a basket of small fish.

  The lights illuminating the mist around the ship make it easier to see what is going on. Up on deck, they’re speaking English; a man in an officer’s cap is initialling documents at the edge of the quay.

  The harbourmaster! The replacement for Captain Joris …

  Like Joris, the man is short, but he’s thinner, more lively, and jokes around with the ship’s officers.

  The world has dwindled to a few square metres of patchy illumination and a vast black hole where water and terra firma make their invisible presence felt. The sea is over there, to the left, barely murmuring at all.

  Wasn’t it on a night like this that Joris suddenly vanished from the scene? He was checking papers, like his colleague now, and probably cracking jokes, too. He was keeping track of the sluicing water and all the activity. He had no need to see everything; a few familiar sounds would have been enough. Look at the way no one here watches where he’s going!

  Maigret has just lit a pipe and begins to scowl; he does not like to feel clumsy. He’s angry with himself for being a ponderous landlubber for whom the sea is a source of fear or wonder.

  The lock-gates open. The ship enters a canal almost as wide as the Seine in Paris.

  ‘Forgive the interruption: are you the harbourmaster? … Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, of the Police Judiciaire. I’ve just brought home your colleague.’

  ‘Joris is here? So it really is he? … I heard about it this morning … But, is it true he’s …’

  And he gently taps his forehead.

  ‘For the moment, yes. Will you spend all night here?’

  ‘Never more than five hours at a stretch. As long as the tide lasts, basically! There are five hours during each tide when the ships have enough water to enter the canal or set out to sea, and this window shifts every day. Tonight, we’ve just begun and we’ll be busy here until three in the morning …’

  A straightforward man, who treats Maigret as a colleague, a public servant like himself.

  ‘Would you excuse me?’

  Then the harbourmaster looks out towards the open water, where there is nothing to see, and remarks, ‘A sailing ship from Boulogne has tied up at the jetty to wait her turn at the canal.’

  ‘Do you always know what ships to expect?’

  ‘Most of the time. Especially the steamers. They’re generally on a regular schedule, bringing coal from England, heading back from Caen loaded with ore.’

  ‘Will you join me in a drink?’

  ‘I can’t, not until the tide has ebbed. I have to stay here.’

  And the harbourmaster shouts orders to invisible men, knowing exactly where they are.

  ‘You are conducting an inquiry?’ he asks.

  Just then they hear footsteps, coming from the village. A man goes across one of the lock-gates and as he passes a light, it gleams on the barrel of a rifle.

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘The mayor, off to hunt ducks. He has a blind down by the Orne. His assistant must already be there getting things ready for tonight.’

  ‘You think I’ll find the hotel still open?’

  ‘The Hôtel de l’Univers? Yes, but you’d best hurry … The owner will soon finish playing cards and head off to bed. And once there, he stays there!’

  ‘Until tomorrow, then.’

  ‘Fine. I’m due back here at ten, for the morning tide.’

  They shake hands, like two phantoms in the mist. And life goes on in the fog, where one may suddenly bump into an invisible man.

  The experience does not feel sinister, really; it’s something else: a vague uneasiness, a faint oppressive anxiety, the impression of an unknown world with its own life going on all around you. A world in which you are a stranger.

  That darkness peopled by invisible beings … That sailing ship, for example, waiting nearby for its turn, although you would never even guess it was there.

  About to pass the fisherman again, sitting motionless under his lantern, Maigret tries to think of something to say.

  ‘They biting tonight?’

&nb
sp; And the other man merely spits into the water as Maigret walks on, kicking himself for having said something so stupid.

  The last thing he hears before entering the hotel is the slamming of the upstairs shutters over at Captain Joris’ cottage.

  Julie, who is frightened! The cat escaping when they entered the house …

  ‘That foghorn going to wail all night?’ grumbles Maigret impatiently, as the landlord comes to greet him.

  ‘As long as there’s fog about … You get used to it …’

  Maigret slept fitfully, the way one does with indigestion or as a child tosses and turns the night before some great event. Twice the inspector got up to lean his face against the cold windowpanes and saw nothing but the empty road and revolving lighthouse beam, which seemed to keep stabbing at a cloudbank. The eternal foghorn sounded harsher, more aggressive.

  The second time, he checked his watch: four o’clock, and fishermen with baskets on their backs were clattering off to the harbour in their clogs.

  Almost immediately there was a frantic pounding on his door, which opened without waiting for his response and revealed the anguished face of the landlord.

  Some time had passed, however: although the foghorn was still going strong, sunshine now gleamed at the windows.

  ‘Hurry! The captain is dying …’

  ‘What captain?’

  ‘Captain Joris … Julie’s just rushed to the harbour to send for both you and a doctor.’

  Maigret, his hair unbrushed, was already pulling on his trousers. He jammed his feet into his shoes without lacing them up and forgot to attach the stiff collar to his shirt before putting on his jacket.

  ‘You’ll have nothing before you go? A cup of coffee? A tot of rum?’

  No – he hadn’t time! It was sunny outdoors, but quite chilly. The road was still damp with dew.

  Hurrying across the lock, Maigret caught a glimpse of the sea, but only a small strip of it, perfectly still and pale blue; the rest was hidden by a long fogbank hanging just offshore.

  Someone called to him from the bridge.

  ‘Are you the detective chief inspector from Paris? I’m with the local police. I’m glad you’ve come … Have you already heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘They say it’s awful! … Wait a minute … There’s the doctor’s car …’

  Fishing boats in the outer harbour were rocking gently, casting red and green reflections across the water. Some sails were set, probably to dry, and showed their black identity numbers.

  Two or three women waited out by the lighthouse, in front of the captain’s cottage. The door was open.

  The doctor’s car passed Maigret and the policeman, who was sticking close to the inspector.

  ‘They’re talking about poison,’ the officer continued. ‘It seems he’s turned a greenish colour …’

  Maigret entered the cottage just when Julie was coming slowly downstairs in tears, her eyes swollen, her cheeks flushed. She had been shooed out of the bedroom so the doctor could examine the dying man.

  Under a hastily donned coat, she still wore a long white nightgown and her feet were bare in their slippers.

  ‘It’s terrible, inspector! You can’t imagine … Go up, quickly! Maybe …’

  The doctor had been bending over his patient and was just straightening up when Maigret entered the bedroom. The inspector could see from his face that it was hopeless.

  ‘Police …’

  ‘Ah! Well, it’s the end. Maybe two or three minutes more … Either I’m way off course, or it’s strychnine.’

  Joris seemed to be straining to breathe, so the doctor opened a window. And there again was that dreamlike tableau: the sun, the harbour, the boats and their unfurled sails, fishermen pouring brimming baskets of glittering fish into crates.

  What a contrast: the dying man’s face seemed yellower, or greener, an indescribable colour. A neutral tone incompatible with any ordinary conception of flesh. His limbs were writhing, jerking spasmodically, yet his face remained calm, in seeming repose, as he stared at the wall in front of him.

  Holding one of his patient’s wrists, the doctor was tracking the weakening pulse when Maigret saw a look come over his face that said, ‘Watch closely! He’s going now …’

  Then something amazing and quite poignant happened. The captain’s face had been so empty that no one could tell if the wretched man had recovered his reason, but now this face came back to life. As if he were a boy on the verge of tears, his features crumpled into a pitiful expression of misery so deep that it cannot go on.

  And two great tears welled up, about to spill over …

  Almost at the same instant, the doctor announced softly, ‘It’s over.’

  Could that have happened? Could death have come at the very moment Joris was weeping?

  And while those tears were still alive, trickling down to vanish within his ears, the captain himself was dead.

  They heard footsteps in the stairwell. Surrounded by women, Julie was sobbing and gasping below. Maigret went out to the landing.

  ‘No one,’ he said slowly, ‘is to enter this room!’

  ‘Is he …?’

  ‘Yes!’ he replied firmly.

  And he went back to the sunny room, where the doctor, for his own peace of mind, was preparing to administer a heart injection.

  Out on the garden wall, there was a pure white cat.

  2. The Inheritance

  Somewhere downstairs, probably in the kitchen, they could hear Julie’s shrill cries as she struggled with her grief, restrained and surrounded by women from the neighbourhood.

  The window was still wide open, and Maigret saw villagers arriving at a kind of half-run. Kids on bikes, women carrying babies, men in clogs – it was a disorganized and lively little procession that poured over the bridge and on towards the captain’s house, just as if they had been drawn there by a travelling circus or a traffic accident.

  Maigret soon had to close the window against the noise outside, and the muslin curtains softened the light. The atmosphere in the bedroom became milder, more subdued. The wallpaper was pink. The furniture of pale wood was well polished. A vase full of flowers held pride of place on the mantelpiece.

  The inspector watched the doctor as he held up to the light a glass and a carafe of water he had taken from the bedside table. He even dipped a finger into the water and touched it to his tongue.

  ‘That’s what did it?’

  ‘Yes. The captain must have liked to have a glass of water handy at night. As far as I can tell, he drank some at around three this morning, but I don’t understand why he didn’t call for help.’

  ‘For the very good reason that he couldn’t speak or even make the slightest sound,’ muttered Maigret.

  He summoned the policeman and told him to inform the mayor and the public prosecutor at Caen of what had happened. People were still coming and going downstairs, while outside, on that bit of road leading nowhere, the local folk were standing around in groups. A few, to be more comfortable, were sitting on the grass.

  The tide was coming in, already invading the sandbanks by the entrance to the harbour. Smoke on the horizon betrayed a ship waiting for the right time to head in to the bay.

  ‘Do you have any idea of …’ the doctor began, but fell silent when he realized that the inspector was busy. Maigret had opened a mahogany writing desk that stood between the two bedroom windows and was making a list of what was in the drawers, with the obstinate frown he always wore on such occasions. Seen like that, the inspector looked somewhat brutish. He had lit his fat pipe, which he smoked in slow puffs, and his big fingers handled the things he was finding without any apparent care or respect.

  Photographs, for example. There were dozens. Many were of friends, almost all of them in naval uniform and about the same age as Joris would have been at the time. Evidently he had kept in touch with his classmates at the marine academy in Brest, and they wrote to him from every corner of the world. Photos in
postcard format, artless and banal, whether they arrived from Saigon or Santiago: ‘Hello from Henry,’ or ‘At last! My third stripe! Hooray! Eugène.’

  Most of these cards were addressed to ‘Captain Joris, aboard the Diana, Compagnie Anglo-Normande, Caen’.

  ‘Had you known the captain long?’ Maigret asked the doctor.

  ‘For a good while. Ever since he came here. Before that, he sailed on one of the mayor’s ships. Captained her for twenty-eight years.’

  ‘The mayor’s ships?’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur Ernest Grandmaison! The chairman of the Compagnie Anglo-Normande. In effect, the sole owner of the company’s eleven steamships.’

  Another photograph: Joris himself this time, at twenty-five, already stocky, with a broad, smiling face, but a hint of stubbornness, too. A real Breton!

  Finally, in a canvas folder, certificates, from his school diploma all the way to a master’s certificate in the Merchant Navy, as well as official documents, his birth certificate, service record, passports …

  Maigret picked up an envelope that had fallen to the floor. The paper was already yellowing with age.

  ‘A will?’ asked the doctor, who was at a loose end until the examining magistrate arrived.

  The household of Captain Joris must have been run on trust, because the envelope was not even sealed. Within was a sheet of paper; the writing was in a neat, elegant hand.

  I the undersigned Yves-Antoine Joris, born in Paimpol, a captain in the Merchant Navy, do hereby bequeath all my property, real and personal, to Julie Legrand, in my employ, in recompense for her years of devoted service.

  I direct her to make the following bequests:

  My canoe to Captain Delcourt; the Chinese porcelain dinner service to his wife; my carved ivory-headed cane to …

  Almost everyone in that little harbour-town world, which Maigret had seen bustling in the fog the night before, had been remembered. Even the lock-keeper, who was to receive a fishing net, ‘the trammel lying under the shed’, as the captain had put it.

  Just then there was a strange noise in the house. While the women in the kitchen were busy fixing Julie a hot toddy ‘to buck her up’, she had dashed upstairs and now entered the bedroom, looking wildly all around her. She then rushed towards the bed only to draw back, speechless before the spectacle of death.