Félicie Read online

  The deputy mayor looks for a simpler explanation and, while he tots up his score, murmurs as if it is an answer to every question:

  ‘What could you expect? He was an odd character …’

  Agreed – but he is dead! Someone killed him! And Félicie, who looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, managed to give the police the slip immediately after the funeral to go to Paris, where she window-shopped as if nothing had happened, ate cream cakes, drank a glass of port and then rode around on the Métro!

  ‘I wonder who’ll move into the house …’

  The card-players talk nineteen to the dozen, and Maigret, who is not listening, hears it only as a vague background hum. He doesn’t say that it will be Félicie. His mind wanders. Images surface and disappear. He scarcely has any idea of time and place … Images of Félicie who by now must be in bed reading. She isn’t afraid of being alone in that house where someone killed her employer … Of the brother, Ernest Lapie, who is angry because of the will. He doesn’t need money, but it’s beyond his understanding that his brother …

  ‘… the most solidly built house in the whole of the development …’

  Whose voice is that? Most probably Forrentin’s.

  ‘You couldn’t want for a pleasanter house. Just big enough so you’ve got everything you want within easy reach and …’

  In his mind’s eye, Maigret sees the waxed staircase. Say what you like about Félicie, the way she keeps the house clean is exemplary. As Maigret’s mother used to say, you could eat off the floor …

  A door on the right, the old man’s bedroom. A door on the left, Félicie’s bedroom. Beyond Félicie’s bedroom there’s another quite large room which is a jumble of furniture …

  Maigret furrows his brow. You couldn’t call it a presentiment exactly, even less an idea. He has a vague feeling that perhaps there’s something not quite right there.

  ‘When that young fellow was there …’ Lepape is saying.

  Maigret gives a start.

  ‘Do you mean the nephew?’

  ‘Yes. He lived with his uncle for six months, maybe more, about a year since. He wasn’t very strong. Seems he’d been recommended to get some country air, but he couldn’t, being always stuck in Paris …’

  ‘What room was he in?’

  ‘There you have it. That’s the strangest part of it …’

  Lepape gives a knowing wink. Forrentin is not best pleased. It’s clear the manager of the estate doesn’t like stories being spread about the development, which he considers to be his own personal domain.

  ‘It doesn’t mean a thing,’ he protests.

  ‘Maybe it does, maybe it don’t, but the old man and Félicie … Listen, inspector. You know the house. To the right of the stairs there’s only one room, Pegleg’s. Opposite there are two, but you have to go through one to get to the other … Well, when the young fellow arrived, his uncle gave him his own room, and he moved across the way, that is, on Félicie’s side. He had the first room and the girl slept in the second, which meant she had to pass through her employer’s bedroom to get to her own or come out of it …’

  Forrentin objects:

  ‘So it would have been better to put a young man of eighteen next to a young woman?’

  ‘I’m not saying that, I’m not saying that at all,’ repeats Lepape with a sly look in his eye. ‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just saying that the old man was on Félicie’s side of the landing while the nephew was shut away on the other. But as to saying that there was anything going on …’

  Maigret gives that possibility short shrift. Not that he has any illusions about middle-aged or even old men. Anyway, Pegleg was only sixty and still sprightly …

  No, it simply doesn’t correspond to the picture he has formed of him. He feels he is beginning to understand the grouchy loner whose straw hat he tried on just hours ago.

  It’s not his relationship with Félicie that bothers him. So what exactly is it? This business of the rooms troubles him.

  He repeats to himself over and over, like a schoolboy trying to make his lessons stick in his head:

  ‘The nephew on the right … by himself … The uncle on the left, then Félicie …’

  Which means the old man has put himself between the pair of them. Did he want to ensure that the two young people did not get together behind his back? Was he trying to prevent Félicie wandering off the straight and narrow? No, because once his nephew had gone he again left her by herself on the other side of the staircase.

  ‘Your deal, patron!’

  He stands up. He is going up to bed. He is impatient for it to be tomorrow so he can go back up to the construction set village, see the houses glowing pink in the sunshine and look at those three bedrooms … And first thing, he’ll phone through to Paris and tell Janvier to find out what he can about the young nephew.

  Maigret has paid scarcely any attention to him. No one saw him in Jeanneville on the morning the crime was committed. He is tall, thin and shy and hasn’t amounted to much good but he doesn’t seem cut out to be a murderer.

  According to the reports Maigret has received, his mother, Lapie’s sister, married a violinist who played in the brasseries in their part of town. He died young. To raise her son, she found a job as cashier in a shop selling fabrics in Rue du Sentier. She also died, two years ago.

  A few months after her death, Lapie took the young man in. They did not get on. It was only to be expected. Jacques Pétillon was a musician like his father, and Pegleg was not the sort who could put up with hearing a violin being scraped or a saxophone being blown under his roof.

  So now, to earn a crust, Jacques Pétillon works as a saxophonist in a club in Rue Pigalle. He lives in a sixth-floor furnished room in Rue Lepic.

  Maigret falls asleep in a feather bed, into which he sinks, and mice dance all night above his head. The place smells pleasantly of the country, of straw, of mildew too, and cows wake him by lowing, the morning bus stops outside the Anneau d’Or, and Maigret breathes in the aroma of coffee with a little drop of something in it.

  Now this business of the bedrooms … But first phone Janvier …

  ‘Hello … Rue Lepic … Hôtel Beauséjour … bye for now …’

  He trudges up the hill towards Jeanneville, whose roofs seem to grow directly out of vast fields of waving oats. As he plods on in this fashion, a curious change comes over him. He quickens his step, he keeps watching out for the windows of Cape Horn to appear, he … Yes, he is eager to catch up with Félicie, already he is picturing her in her kitchen with those sharp features, turning that nanny-goat forehead in his direction, giving him as frosty a reception as possible with an indefinable look from those transparent pupils.

  Was he missing her already?

  He understands, he senses, he is certain that Pegleg needed his closest enemy as much as the glass of wine he would go into the store room and pour himself, as much as the air he breathed, as the games of cards every evening and his arguments with his partners over a three-card trick or a trump.

  From a distance he spots Lucas, who is kicking his heels at the end of the alley. He couldn’t have been very warm during the night. Then, through the open window of her room, he makes out dark hair, now held in place by a kind of turban, and a bustling figure giving the bedclothes a good shake. Someone has seen him, someone has recognized him, someone must already be thinking the kind of welcome which that someone intends to give him.

  He smiles. He can’t help it. That’s Félicie for you!

  3. Secrets in a Diary

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p; ‘Hello? Is that you, sir? … It’s Janvier …’

  A sweaty sort of day. It’s not just because the weather is stormy that at times Maigret’s face breaks out in a faint rash of perspiration and his fingers tremble with impatience. It reminds him of when he was a boy and feeling scared when he found himself in a place where he shouldn’t have been, knowing full well that he didn’t belong there.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Rue des Blancs-Manteaux … In a watch-maker’s shop … I’m phoning from there … Our guy is in a nasty-looking bistro across the road … He looks as if he’s waiting for somebody or something … He’s just finished another glass of spirits …’

  Then a silence. Maigret knows exactly what the young inspector will say next.

  ‘I’m wondering, chief, if it wouldn’t be better if you came back …’

  It’s been going on all morning, and all morning Maigret has been saying no.

  ‘Just carry on as you are. Phone the minute there’s anything new.’

  He wonders if he might be wrong, if this is really the way he should be conducting the investigation, but he can’t bring himself to leave, something is holding him back, though he’d been hard put to say what exactly.

  And a very strange case it’s turning out to be! Fortunately, the papers aren’t interested in the death of Pegleg. He has murmured to himself at least twenty times so far:

  ‘But the old man was murdered!’

  As if the crime has taken a back seat, as if he couldn’t help being sidetracked by something else – and that something is Félicie!

  The landlord of the Anneau d’Or has loaned him a bike. On it, Maigret looks like a performing bear. It allows him to come and go as he pleases, from Orgeval to the village and from the village to Orgeval.

  The weather continues fair and bright. It seems impossible to imagine the landscape here other than lit by spring sunshine, with flowers blooming all along low walls and round the edges of vegetable patches, and pensioners gardening and looking up idly as the inspector or Sergeant Lucas, whom Maigret has kept with him, pass by.

  Though he doesn’t say so, Lucas also thinks that this is a strange kind of investigation. He finds walking up and down outside Cape Horn extremely tedious. What is he actually supposed to be doing? Watching Félicie? All the windows in the house are open. All her movements are visible. She’s done her shopping as usual. She knows the sergeant is following her. Is the chief afraid she will disappear again?

  Lucas wonders if this is the case but doesn’t dare say so to Maigret. Instead, he keeps it to himself and smokes one pipe after another. Every now and then, for want of something better to do, he kicks a stone with the toe of his shoe.

  Since that morning, however, the focus of their inquiries seems to have shifted. The first phone call came from Rue Lepic. Maigret, who was sitting outside on the terrace of the inn next to a laurel bush in a green-painted planter, was expecting it.

  Maigret has already settled into a routine. He settles into a routine wherever he goes. He has arranged with the woman in the post office that she should call him through the window the minute there is a phone call for him from Paris.

  ‘That you, sir? … It’s Janvier … I’m phoning from a bar on the corner of Rue Lepic …’

  Maigret pictures the sloping street, women with handcarts selling fruit and vegetables, housewives in slippers, the colourful bustle of Place Blanche and, between two shop fronts, the entrance to the Hôtel Beauséjour, where he had once made inquiries about another case.

  ‘Jacques Pétillon got back home at six this morning, completely done in. He collapsed on to his bed fully dressed. I went to the Pelican, the club where he works. He hadn’t shown up there all night. What do I do now?’

  ‘Hang on there … Follow him if he goes out.’

  Is the nephew really as innocent as he looks? Would it be better if Maigret, instead of hanging around Félicie, concentrated his efforts on him? He can guess that this is what Janvier thinks. And it is this view that Janvier slips into his second phone call:

  ‘Hello … It’s Janvier … Our man has just gone into the tobacconist’s in Rue Fontaine … He looks washed out … He seems nervy, anxious … He kept looking over his shoulder as if he was afraid of being followed, but I don’t think he spotted me …’

  So, Pétillon has had only a few hours’ sleep and here he is, on the move again. The tobacconist’s in Rue Fontaine is used mainly by shady characters.

  ‘What’s he doing now?’

  ‘He’s not speaking to anyone … He’s keeping an eye on the door. … Looks like he’s waiting for someone …’

  ‘Carry on.’

  Meanwhile, Maigret has received a little more information about old Lapie’s nephew. Why did he never manage to work up any interest in the boy who wanted to become a serious performer and has ended up earning just enough to live by playing the saxophone in a Montmartre nightclub?

  Pétillon has seen hard times. He has been reduced to working nights loading vegetables in Les Halles. He has not always had enough to eat. Several times he was forced to leave his violin at the pawnshop.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s odd, chief, that he should have stayed out all night without setting foot in the Pelican and that now … You should see him … I think it would be good if you saw him for yourself … I get the feeling that he’s worried sick, that he’s scared … Maybe if you were here …’

  But he always gets the same response:

  ‘Carry on as you are!’

  In the meantime, Maigret, perched on his bike, shuttles to and fro between the terrace of the Anneau d’Or, where he waits for phone calls, and the pink house, where he calls on Félicie.

  He walks into the house, comes and goes and makes himself at home. She pretends to pay no attention to him, gets on with the housework, makes her meals. She has gone shopping every morning at Madame Chochoi’s and bought provisions. Sometimes she looks straight at the inspector, but he finds it impossible to read any sort of feeling whatsoever in those eyes.

  She’s the one Maigret wants to scare. From the start, she has been too sure of herself. It’s impossible that this attitude is not concealing something and he watches for the moment when she will eventually weaken.

  But the old man was murdered!

  It’s her, she is the one who occupies all his thoughts, it’s her secret he wants to draw out. He has been prowling round the garden. He has been in the wine store five or six times and each time has poured himself a glass of the rosé which has become a habit with him too. He has made a discovery. Dragging a fork through the layer of leaf-mould which has collected under the hedge, he trawled up a liqueur glass, the twin of the one he found on that first day on the table in the arbour. He showed it to Félicie.

  ‘All you need do now is look for fingerprints on it,’ she told him disdainfully without being the least disconcerted.

  When he went up to the rooms on the first floor, she did not follow. He searched every nook and corner of Lapie’s room. He crossed the landing, entered Félicie’s room and began opening all the drawers. She must have heard his comings and goings over her head. Had she been afraid?

  And still the weather remains ideal: the softness of the air, the scents wafting in on the breeze and the song of birds coming through the open windows.

  And then he manages to find the diary at the back of Félicie’s wardrobe, among the tangled knot of stockings and underwear. Pegleg had been quite right to call his housekeeper a cockatoo. Even under her day clothes her taste is for colours, aggressive pin
ks and acid-sharp greens, and for lace inserts as wide as a hand even though they aren’t hand made.

  To get a reaction out of her, Maigret goes down to the kitchen to run through the pages of her diary for the previous years. Félicie is busy peelings potatoes, which she then drops into a blue enamel bucket:

  13 January – Why didn’t he come?

  15 January – Plead with him.

  19 January – Tormented by uncertainty. Is she his wife?

  20 January – Feeling blue.

  23 January – At last!

  24 January. – The ecstasy returns.

  25 January. – Ecstasy.

  26 January. – Still him. His lips. Bliss.

  27 January. – The world is an unkind place.

  29 January. – Ah! Can’t stay here! … Must get away! …

  From time to time Maigret glances up, while Félicie pretends to ignore him.

  He tries to be jocular, but his laughter rings as false as that of the traveller who attempts to take liberties with a hotel chambermaid and keeps the tone light with suggestive banter.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Married, is he?’

  An angry glare, like a cat defending her kittens.

  ‘Was it love? The real thing?’

  She does not reply, but he persists and hates himself for persisting. He keeps telling himself he’s wrong, he thinks of Rue Lepic, Rue Fontaine, of the scared young man who has been going backwards and forwards since last night and keeps crashing into walls like a panic-stricken bumble-bee.

  ‘So tell me, was it here that you met this man?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Did your employer know?’

  No. He can’t go on like this, interrogating this girl who does not give a damn about him or his questions. Still, going round to see Madame Chochoi, as he does next, is not much more clever. He leans his bike against the shop front and waits until a woman who is buying a tin of peas has gone.