Signed, Picpus Read online

  ‘Oh yes, sir … When the ladies have visitors the old man is shut in because they are so terrified he’ll suddenly barge in on them … If he gets back late for his dinner, he gets punished by being locked up for a day or two …’

  A closet rather than a room, looking out, not on to Boulevard des Batignolles but on a dark, narrow courtyard. Even then the windows were covered with an opaque adhesive film which made it even dimmer inside.

  A naked, dusty 25-candle-power bulb dangled from an electric wire. An iron bed. A three-legged washstand and a chipped ewer on the floor. In a corner, the item of furniture which justified the grandiose name of office given to the room: a desk made of dark wood, a huge affair and much too big for the space available, doubtless bought second-hand at a public auction.

  Le Cloaguen had come back to his room without making a sound and now stood waiting, the way a schoolboy waits for the inevitable cane. Soon Maigret would go and then …

  The inspector felt almost guilty at the thought of leaving him alone with these two women. He remembered the hand with the missing finger joint, an old hand which …

  ‘Spartan, isn’t it?’ remarked Madame Le Cloaguen, pleased to have come up with the word. ‘He has only to say and he could have a much more comfortable room, but he does like his simplicity. And it’s he who insists on wearing that old overcoat winter and summer. You couldn’t persuade him to do otherwise for all the tea in China …’

  And what about the kitchen, madame? Is he also the one who insists that it should be in such a mess, with a pile of dirty dishes on a wobbly table, pans that never get scoured, empty cupboards, a few withered vegetables left to fester and the coagulated remains of a stew which will presumably be served up for dinner?

  Gisèle’s room is exactly like her mother’s: comfortable, well-furnished, but with the same oppressive, antiquated feel to it.

  And to think that outside, the whole of Paris is making the most of a fine August evening, enjoying a sun that sets in a purple haze and coolness which is to be savoured like a fragrant sorbet, and that here, not two minutes from the world’s most exciting streets, these people live in a kind of necropolis!

  ‘Have you lived long in this apartment?’

  ‘Ten years, inspector. Ever since we left Saint-Raphaël. It’s especially since then that my husband has gone into a decline. In fact, it was to get better treatment for him that we moved to Paris.’

  Now that was, at the very least, strange! As if there weren’t enough notable doctors on the Côte d’Azur! As if the hustle and bustle of Paris could be of any help in recovering a poor man’s wits!

  Le Cloaguen has remained in his room the way a well-trained dog stays in its kennel when there are visitors. Maigret would like to see him again, talk to him. ‘Fellow-feeling’ is not quite the correct expression. Yet he is drawn to the man, he feels he is beginning to understand him, or rather to glimpse something of the mystery of his wretched existence.

  The wife on the other hand is as transparent as before.

  ‘As you see, there are no mysteries in our home, and if my husband took it into his head to have his fortune told, then … But can we ever know what goes on in enfeebled minds? … I do hope, inspector, that it won’t be long before the murderer is found and that this dreadful business will not have any consequences …’

  Consequences for whom exactly? For her, of course! For her and for her daughter, who is so like her that they form a single entity!

  In fact, what is it that is missing in this apartment? Two or three times, Maigret has had the impression of an absence, as when a familiar object has been moved from its place. Yet all the usual pieces of furniture are there. He looks around him, feeling tense as people do when there is something they just can’t put their finger on …

  ‘I’ll say good evening, inspector. If there’s anything else you’d like to know …’

  What will happen once the door is closed? He walks down the stairs. He can’t help thinking about the man in his room, about the woman who bursts in, fuming, her face twisted by anger, by fury …

  And then it suddenly strikes him. What was absent from the apartment, the thing that had given him the impression of something missing, was that he had seen no photographs anywhere on the walls or furniture! Nothing! Not even one of those enlargements you find in the lowliest homes, no amateur snaps, souvenirs of holidays on beaches or in the mountains.

  Bare walls, implacably bare!

  Maigret spends a quarter of an hour in the concierge’s lodge, then finds himself once more on the pavement. Inspector Janvier approaches.

  ‘What do you want me to do, chief?’

  ‘Stay here … I’d be curious to know what those people …’

  When he gets to Place Clichy, he walks into a bar, phones Madame Maigret to say he doesn’t know when he’ll be home and finally sits down with a beer in front of him.

  The business of the key is bizarre. Did Mademoiselle Jeanne, when she pushed the old man into the kitchen – always assuming that what Le Cloaguen’s said is true – lock him in?

  Really, it looks as if the old man is fated to keep getting himself locked up, the proof being the bolt fixed outside his room on Boulevard des Batignolles …

  But who removed the key? The murderer? So did he know there was somebody on the other side of the door?

  Earlier, Maigret had blundered when he looked around the apartment in Rue Coulaincourt. Had there been a hat in the clairvoyant’s living room? It was possible, probable even. Finding himself alone with a woman, Le Cloaguen would have certainly taken his hat off. If it was left in the room, the murderer could have seen it and taken the key out of the kitchen door …

  Now, when they had found the former ship’s doctor in the clairvoyant’s kitchen, did he have his hat with him?

  Maigret took his notebook out of his pocket and wrote down the word hat.

  He should have questioned everyone who had been there. But in all the excitement of the first hours of an investigation …

  Le Cloaguen could have locked himself in and got rid of the key by throwing it out of the window or by dropping it down the lavatory.

  ‘Here’s to him!’ Maigret growls, finishing a second beer. He hesitates between taking a bus or a taxi.

  The bustle in the streets around him seems slightly unreal now. The Rue Coulaincourt mystery is slowly getting under his skin. The streetlamps come on, passers-by are not much more than blue shadows against a lighter blue background.

  ‘Quai des Orfèvres …’

  ‘Right you are, Monsieur Maigret!’

  It’s childish, but it’s human: it pleases him that the driver recognizes him and gives him a friendly word.

  Signed, Picpus.

  To whom had the note written by an unknown man or woman in the Café des Sports on Place de la République been addressed? Isn’t it strange that Joseph Mascouvin, the scrupulously honest clerk who had just, for the first time in his life, stolen a thousand francs from his employers, should ask for writing materials, put his pince-nez down on the blotter and become interested in ink stains?

  ‘So, Monsieur Maigret, hunting big game, are we?’

  Maigret sighs, pays the taxi, walks heavily up the steps of the Police Judiciaire building. François, the aged doorman, doesn’t even give him time to go up to his office.

  ‘They’re waiting for you, detective chief inspector …’

  A swift glance at the commissioner’s baize door. Maigret gets the message.

  The lamp with a green shade on the desk is lit, but the curtains have not been drawn. The windows are wide open and give on to a vista of wharves. Waves of cool, damp air waft into the room at intervals.

  The commissioner of the Police Judiciaire looks up. Lucas is standing next to him, a Lucas who averts his eyes and looks like a whipped cur.

  ‘It’s you who’s got it right, Maigret … It was obviously this Picpus who killed the clairvoyant …’

  The inspector scowls. He does not see wh
ere this preamble might be leading.

  ‘Unfortunately, it will be several days before the main suspect can be questioned …’

  Why does Maigret have a sudden sinking feeling? He’s only known Octave Le Cloaguen for a few hours. Can he even claim to know him? The serious expression on the commissioner’s face … Lucas’s embarrassment … Maigret scents trouble … Has the old man …?

  Lucas mutters:

  ‘It’s my fault.’

  When are they going to come to the point?

  ‘I questioned him for a good hour …’

  Ah! This isn’t about the former ship’s doctor … It’s about Mascouvin. Lucas had been told to question him again.

  ‘I was intending to take him to Rue des Pyramides. It was worth a go. I thought that if I brought him face to face with his famous countess, I might get something out of him. Up to that point, he’d been quiet as a lamb. I wondered for a moment about taking a taxi. But there weren’t any on the Quai. We started making for the Pont-Neuf. There were lots of people about. The Belle Jardinière had just closed and hundreds of counter staff and other employees …’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to stop him … Suddenly he jumped clean over the parapet of the bridge …’

  Maigret fills his pipe and says nothing.

  ‘He didn’t have a chance … Before entering the water, he hit one of the piers …’

  All too easy to picture the scene in the glorious evening light: hundreds, thousands of people leaning over the parapet and lining both banks, something floating, a grey hat, a dark shape re-emerging from time to time, an onlooker takes off his coat and dives in …

  ‘A tug happened to be passing and …’

  The crowd watching the scene unfold holds its collective breath. The tug manoeuvres, the propeller thrashes water streaked with red reflections of the sun, a boathook is held out to the rescuer, and at last Mascouvin, an inert Mascouvin, is hauled up the black iron hull of the boat.

  ‘He’s not dead, but he’s as good as … His skull struck the stone work … He’s been taken to hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, and it’s Chesnard, their top surgeon who …’

  Maigret strikes a match and puffs on his pipe.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ asks the commissioner. ‘Wouldn’t you say that this changes everything?’

  ‘Changes what exactly?’ growls the inspector.

  Can anyone know anything at the start of an investigation? Mademoiselle Jeanne … She at least is dead, there’s nothing more certain in this whole business … Stabbed twice in the back, died as she was quietly leaning over her Louis XV table … Obviously she suspected nothing …

  Le Cloaguen in the kitchen … Mascouvin and his countess …

  ‘What’s been done about the woman?’ asks Maigret drawing on his pipe.

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘The one from Morsang … What’s her name again? Landlady of the Beau Pigeon …’

  ‘She had a train to catch …’

  ‘Anyone ask if she knew Mascouvin?’

  A woebegone Lucas replies:

  ‘I didn’t think to … She was in a hurry. It seems their inn is full …’

  The proof that Maigret always thinks of everything is that he now mutters, and it brings a smile to the commissioner’s lips:

  ‘What happened to the tench?’

  Anyone would have thought he was intending to take them home to Madame Maigret for their supper.

  3. The Girl in the Red Hat

  Every quarter of an hour or so, Maigret, grunting and blowing, strove as mightily as if he were trying to move a mountain, but it was only himself he was trying to free from the clammy sheets, just long enough to turn over from one side on to the other and sink back into a sleep full of nightmarish shapes. And every time it happened, Madame Maigret would wake up and, taking as always a long time to get back to sleep, would fix her eyes on the blind which swelled in the breeze like a balloon.

  It was a crystal-clear night. It was so clear that from here on Boulevard Richard Lenoir you could hear, or thought you could, the rumble of activity coming from the markets of Les Halles.

  A window was also open at 21, Place des Vosges, but there was no one in the room, no one on the bed, though the concierge had made it up.

  In a room at the Hôtel-Dieu, a nurse with horsey features was knitting at the bedside of Joseph Mascouvin, whose face was mostly hidden by bandages.

  No one was sitting up with Mademoiselle Jeanne, presently lying in an icy drawer of her own in the Forensic Institute. On Boulevard des Batignolles, near Place Clichy, Inspector Janvier got up off his bench from time to time, walked a few steps under the trees and watched the moon loom up between two gable ends covered with advertisements, and then the unlit windows of number 13.

  At first, women had approached him in the dark – it was an odd thing, that evening in that part of town they were all very tall – but they soon understood and now they kept their distance, they became fewer, and the bars closed one after the other while a sudden coolness, long before a paling of the sky, indicated that the new day was not far away.

  In Rue des Pyramides, in the countess’s club rooms, the last of the gamblers did not leave until five in the morning, after staying themselves with sandwiches.

  The papers were rolling off the presses. The iron gates of the Métro stations were being rolled back, gas was being lit under percolators and in cafés counters were piled high with warm croissants.

  Torrence, still heavy with sleep, ran his eyes along Boulevard des Batignolles, looking for his colleague whom he had come to replace.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Maigret, in his shirtsleeves, was having breakfast. Life was beginning to flow again in the streets, where a luminous mist still lingered.

  Having tidied her flat – two rooms plus kitchen – in the district of Les Ternes, the girl in the red hat walked down the street, heading towards the Métro, and bought her usual morning paper on the way.

  Instead of going to the travel agency on Boulevard de la Madeleine where she worked, she continued on to Châtelet and, her mind in a ferment and her lips trembling as if she were mumbling prayers of supplication, made her way towards the gloomy buildings of the Palais de Justice.

  Maigret was in his office, standing in front of the window, busily cleaning both his pipes.

  ‘There’s a young woman asking for you. She hasn’t given her name. She says it’s very important …’

  And that was how, that morning, Saturday morning, the drama resumed. The young woman was wearing a navy-blue suit and a red hat. Normally, she would have been all smiles, with dimples in her cheeks and one in her chin, but her distress changed all that.

  ‘Where is he, inspector? … Is he dead? … He’s my brother, or rather half-brother …’

  She was talking about Mascouvin, whose picture was on the front page of her paper, next to one of Maigret, the same photograph which for more than fifteen years the newspapers always used whenever there was a new case.

  ‘Hello? … Hôtel-Dieu? …’

  No, Mascouvin wasn’t dead. They were expecting at any moment the consultant who would examine him again. The patient was still in a coma, and no visitors were allowed.

  ‘Tell me about your half-brother, mademoiselle … Mademoiselle who, may I ask?’

  ‘Berthe … Berthe Janiveau. Everyone calls me Mademoiselle Berthe. I work as a shorthand typist in a travel agent’s. My father was a joiner in a village in the Oise. I was born when my parents were quite old. They’d stopped hoping they could have a child of their own and had adopted a boy from the local orphanage, Joseph Mascouvin …’

  Next to this fresh-faced young woman, Maigret looks like a fond, indulgent old father.

  ‘Tell me … Would you mind coming with me to your brother’s apartment in Place des Vosges?’

  He takes her there in a taxi, and she talks, talks without stopping, so that
he has no need to prompt her with questions. Inside, under the central stairwell, several women who live in the building have gathered round the concierge, who is holding a newspaper in her hand.

  ‘Such a sober, steady man, and so polite to every-body! …’

  The first floor is occupied by a former government minister, and the second by the owner of the building. It’s only on the third floor that the visitor becomes aware of the human warmth of several families living cheek-by-jowl, ordinary folk who have rooms off both sides of a long corridor lit by the sun through a skylight.

  ‘Why would he have wanted to do away with himself? … He’s never had any sort of trouble in his whole life …’

  To Maigret, Joseph Mascouvin has until now been just a rather odd, if somewhat disturbing, individual. But Mademoiselle Berthe is talking, and the apartment is also speaking: a meticulously neat room, books on serious subjects in stern bindings in a bookcase, a gramophone bought recently, a closet with a washstand and a minute kitchen.

  ‘The truth is, inspector, he never felt he was a man like all the rest. The village children called him the kid from the orphanage. In school he was the cleverest pupil. At home, he made it a point of honour to work harder than everyone else. He was always afraid of being a nuisance, of not being wanted. He had the feeling that people only put up with him out of charity … My parents had to make him stay on at school … Then they died … Against all expectation, they hardly left him a thing, and because I was too young to work, it was Joseph Mascouvin who provided for me for many years …’

  ‘Why weren’t you still living together?’

  She blushed.

  ‘He didn’t want us to … I mean, we weren’t really brother and sister …’

  ‘Tell me … Was your brother just a little bit in love with you?’

  ‘I think so … But he never said anything … He wouldn’t have dared …’

  ‘Did he have any friends or a girlfriend?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge … Sometimes we used to go out together, on a Sunday …’

  ‘Did he ever take you down to Morsang?’

  She tried to remember.