Maigret's Secret Read online

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you get it?’

  ‘I believe I do.’

  ‘Even the lobster should give you a clue. In my family, when I was a child, we only ever ate lobster on big occasions. It was the same in Annette’s family. When we had our little dinners, as we called them, we looked for dishes that we used to crave during our youth. In fact, I bought her a present in the same spirit: a refrigerator, which hums away in the corner of her not-very-modern apartment and allows us to chill a bottle of white wine, or sometimes open a bottle of champagne. Are you laughing at me?’

  Maigret shook his head to reassure him. It was Lapointe who gave a smile, as if this brought to mind some recent memories.

  ‘It was just before eight when we arrived at Rue Caulaincourt. There’s one thing I should add in passing. The concierge, who was quite motherly towards Annette in the beginning, before I’d set foot in the building, later took a dislike to her. She would mutter offensive words at her when she came in and would turn her back completely on me. We passed in front of the lodge where she and her family were at the dinner table, and I could have sworn that woman looked at us with an evil smile.

  ‘It made enough of an impression that I wanted to turn round and ask her what she had to be so happy about.

  ‘I didn’t, but we would find out only half an hour later. Upstairs, I took my jacket off and laid the table while Annette got changed. I make no secret of it. That’s also part of the pleasure, it helps me feel young again. She spoke to me from the next room, while I cast the occasional glance through the half-open door. Her body is so young, so smooth, so easy on the eye.

  ‘I suppose all this will be trawled over in public. Unless I can find someone who believes me …’

  He closed his eyes with tiredness, and Maigret went to get him a glass of water from the cupboard, deciding not to give him some cognac from the bottle he always kept in reserve.

  It was too soon for that. He feared it might wind him up too much.

  ‘Just as we sat down to eat in front of the open window Annette thought she heard something, and a little later I heard it too: some footsteps on the stairs. There was nothing surprising in that, as the building has five floors, and there are three apartments above our heads.

  ‘Why did she feel embarrassed all of a sudden to be sitting there dressed only in a blue satin dressing gown? The footsteps stopped on our floor. There was a knock on the door, and a voice said: “I know you’re in there. Open the door!”

  ‘It was her father. In the time we had known each other, Annette and I, he had never come to Paris. I had never seen him. She had described him to me as a sad man, severe and withdrawn. A widower for some years, he lived alone, closed in on himself, with no interests in life.

  ‘ “Just a moment, Papa! …”

  ‘There wasn’t enough time to get dressed again. I didn’t think of putting my jacket back on. She opened the door. He looked at me first of all, his eyes hard under his bushy grey eyebrows.

  ‘ “Your employer?” he asked his daughter.

  ‘ “Monsieur Josset, yes …”

  ‘His gaze drifted to the table and landed on the red slash of the lobster, the bottle of Riesling.

  ‘ “It’s just as they said,” he muttered as he sat down in a chair.

  ‘He hadn’t taken his hat off. He sized me up, pursing his lips in disgust.

  ‘ “I suppose you keep your pyjamas and slippers in the wardrobe?”

  ‘What he said was true, and I blushed. If he had gone into the bathroom he would have found a razor, a shaving brush, my toothbrush and my usual choice of toothpaste.

  ‘Annette hadn’t dared to look at him at first. Now she merely observed him and noticed that he was breathing in a strange way, as if the climb up the stairs had left him out of breath. Also, his body was swaying oddly.

  ‘ “Have you been drinking, Papa?” she cried.

  ‘He never drank. Probably he had already come to Rue Caulaincourt during the day and spoken to the concierge. Perhaps she had written to him to put him in the picture.

  ‘Then, while he waited, had he perhaps installed himself in the little bar opposite, from where he had seen us enter the building?

  ‘He had drunk to build up his courage. His complexion was grey, his clothes were loose-fitting, as if he had once been a big man, perhaps even a jovial one.

  ‘ “So, it’s true, then …”

  ‘He looked at us both in turn, searching for the right words, probably just as ill at ease as we were.

  ‘Finally he turned to me and asked in a tone that was both threatening and ashamed at the same time:

  ‘ “What are you planning to do?” ’

  3. The Concierge Who Wanted to Get Her Picture in the Paper

  Maigret condensed this part of the interrogation into twenty or thirty replies that seemed to him the most salient. He rarely spoke continuously. His conversations with Doctor Pardon were punctuated with silences, in which he drew slowly on his pipe, as if allowing the content of his next sentence time to take shape. He knew that his words had the same meaning for his friend, the same resonances as they did for him.

  ‘A situation so banal it is the stuff of hackneyed jokes. There are probably tens of thousands of men in Paris alone in the same circumstances. For the vast majority it all works out more or less well in the end. The drama, if there is any, takes place at home and involves a separation, sometimes a divorce, then life goes on …’

  The man before him in his office, which smelled of spring and of tobacco, was battling for his survival and from time to time he looked at the inspector to see whether he still had a fighting chance.

  The three-handed scene in the lodgings in Rue Caulaincourt had been both dramatic and sordid. It is that very mixture of sincerity and comedy, of the tragic and the grotesque, that is so hard to express, so hard even to visualize, after the event, and Maigret understood Josset’s dismay as he searched for the right words but never managed to find them.

  ‘I’m sure, inspector, that Annette’s father is an honest man. And yet! … He doesn’t drink, I’ve already told you that. He has been living an austere existence since his wife died. He seems like a man who is consumed by something … I don’t know … It’s just a guess … Perhaps it is remorse that he didn’t make her happier?

  ‘But yesterday, as he waited for us to turn up in Rue Caulaincourt, he had had several drinks. He had found himself in a bar, the only place from which he could keep an eye on the building, and had ordered a drink without thinking, or for Dutch courage, and then just unwittingly carried on drinking …

  ‘When he stood in front of me, he hadn’t lost control of himself, but it wouldn’t have been possible to hold a coherent conversation with him.

  ‘What could I say in reply to his question?

  ‘He stared at me with that same serious look and repeated it:

  ‘ “What are you planning to do?”

  ‘And I, who had a clear conscience just a few moments earlier, who was so proud of our love that I couldn’t resist the desire to show it to the world, now suddenly felt guilty.

  ‘We had barely started to eat. I can still picture the red of the lobster and the red of the geraniums, Annette clutching her blue dressing gown over her chest and holding back her tears.

  ‘Genuinely moved, I stammered:

  ‘ “I can assure you, Monsieur Duché …”

  ‘He went on:

  ‘ “You do know, I trust, that she was an innocent young lady?”

  ‘Somehow, coming from him, the words didn’t seem so comical. As it happens, it wasn’t true. Annette was no longer an innocent young lady when I met her and she never made out that she was.

  ‘The funny thing is, it was because of her father, indirectly, that she wasn’t. He was a loner and there was only one person he admired, a man the same age as him, his superior at work. He held him in high regard – looked up to him, really; it was more a sort of hero-worship.

  ‘A
nnette got a job as a typist in this man’s office, and Duché felt the same pride in her as some fathers feel when their sons give their lives for their country.

  ‘Stupid, eh? It was with this man that Annette had her first sexual experience, an incomplete one, as it happens, because of his impotence, but because she was obsessed with the memory of it, and to avoid a repeat performance, she came to Paris.

  ‘I wasn’t brave enough to raise this with her father. I kept quiet as I tried to find the right words.

  ‘With a thick voice, he kept insisting:

  ‘ “Have you told your wife?”

  ‘I told him I had, without thinking, without considering the consequences.

  ‘ “Has she agreed to the divorce?”

  ‘I confess that I said yes to this too.’

  Maigret, who was looking at him hard, asked his own question:

  ‘Did you ever actually consider a divorce?’

  ‘I don’t know … You want the truth, don’t you? Maybe the thought crossed my mind, but I never contemplated it seriously. I was happy … Well, let’s just say that I had enough small pleasures in my life that I thought of myself as a happy man and I didn’t feel brave enough to …’

  He was still trying to find the exact words, but the exactness he was striving for was beyond his reach, so he rather gave up.

  ‘In short, you had no reason to change the status quo?’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that. With Christine life had been … How shall I put it? … Life had been different. More colourful. Do you see what I’m saying? Then, little by little, reality began to intrude. I began to see her in a new light. I didn’t hold it against her. I knew it was inevitable. I was the one who hadn’t seen things as they were from the start.

  ‘This other woman that Christine had become inspired my affection too, perhaps more so than the old Christine. But not rapture, not flights of passion. We were in new territory.’

  He wiped his brow, an action that was starting to become repetitive.

  ‘I really want you to believe me! I’m trying to help you understand everything. Annette is different from how Christine was. I’m different too. And I’m a lot older. I was happy with what she gave me and had no desire to know any more. Maybe you find that selfish, even cynical?’

  ‘So you didn’t want to make Annette your wife and repeat your first experience … Despite this, you told her father …’

  ‘I don’t remember the exact words I said. I felt ashamed with him sitting there in front of me. I felt guilty. Besides, I wanted to avoid a scene. I swore that I loved Annette, which is true. I promised to marry her as soon as I was able to.’

  ‘Did you use those very words?’

  ‘Maybe … In any case, I spoke passionately enough that Duché was moved … It would just be a case of sorting out the formalities, I said … To move on from this episode, I’ll tell you just one detail that was even more absurd than the rest … Towards the end, I’d so much got into the role of the future son-in-law that I cracked open the bottle of champagne that we always kept in the fridge and we drank a toast …

  ‘When I left the building it was already dark. I got into my car and drove around the streets at random.

  ‘I didn’t know if I had done the right thing or the wrong thing. I felt as if I had betrayed Christine … I have never been able to kill an animal. Once, however, I was visiting friends in the country, and they asked me to slit the throat of a chicken. I didn’t want to lose face by refusing. Everybody was looking at me. It took me two attempts, and I felt as if I was carrying out an execution.

  ‘In a way that was what I’d just done … Just because some half-drunk old man had played the offended father, I had denied fifteen years of life with Christine. I had promised, sworn, to sacrifice her.

  ‘I too started drinking, in the first bar I came to. It wasn’t far from Place de la République, as I found to my surprise a bit later. Then I went to the Champs-Élysées. Another bar. I downed three or four glasses one after the other, trying to work out what I was going to say to my wife.

  ‘I composed sentences in my head and spoke them to myself in a soft voice, to check how they sounded.’

  He looked at Maigret, pleadingly all of a sudden.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s probably not the done thing … You wouldn’t have something to drink, would you? I’ve held out up until now. But it’s a physical thing, do you see? When you’ve had a lot to drink the night before …’

  Maigret went to the cupboard, fetched the bottle of cognac and poured Josset a glass.

  ‘Thank you. I still feel ashamed of myself. I’ve been like this since yesterday evening, since that grotesque scene, but it’s not for the reasons people think.

  ‘I didn’t kill Christine. The idea didn’t cross my mind for a moment. I tried to think up all sorts of solutions, I admit, some of them quite improbable ones, because now I was drunk too. But even if I had intended to kill her, I would have been physically incapable of doing it.’

  The telephone still didn’t ring at the Pardons’. So the little tailor wasn’t dead yet, and his wife was still waiting while the children were no doubt asleep.

  ‘At that point,’ Maigret was saying, ‘I thought that there was time …’

  Time for what, he didn’t specify.

  ‘I was struggling to form an opinion, weighing up the pros and cons … My telephone rang. It was Janvier, asking me to come into the inspectors’ room. I excused myself and went.

  ‘Janvier wanted to show me the latest edition of one of the afternoon newspapers – the ink wasn’t yet dry. A bold headline announced:

  ADRIEN JOSSET’S DOUBLE LIFE

  VIOLENT SCENE AT RUE CAULAINCOURT

  ‘What about the other papers?’

  ‘It’s just this one.’

  ‘Phone the newsroom and ask them where they got it from.’

  While he waited, Maigret read the article:

  We are able to provide some details on the private life of Adrien Josset, whose wife was murdered last night in their home in Auteuil (see article above).

  While friends of the couple consider them to be close, in fact this manufacturer of pharmaceutical products has been leading a double life for about a year.

  He has been having an affair with his secretary, Annette D—, 20, whom he has set up in an apartment in Rue Caulaincourt, where he picks her up every morning in his sports car and drops her off again almost every evening.

  Two or three times a week, Adrien Josset had dinner with his mistress and he often spent the night there.

  However, yesterday evening, a dramatic incident took place at Rue Caulaincourt. The young woman’s father, a respectable civil servant from Fontenay-le-Comte, paid his daughter an unexpected visit and came across the couple in a situation of intimacy that left no room for doubt.

  The two men confronted each other in a violent altercation. We have not been able to contact Monsieur D—, who must have left the capital this morning, but the events that played out in Rue Caulaincourt are evidently not unrelated to the drama that would unfold a short time later in the Josset home in Auteuil.

  Janvier hung up.

  ‘I couldn’t get hold of the reporter, because he’s not at the paper at present …’

  ‘He’s probably here, out in the corridor with the others.’

  ‘Possibly. The person I spoke to was pretty tight-lipped. First of all, she mentioned an anonymous phone call to the newsroom around midnight, just after the crime had been announced on the radio. In the end I realized it must have been the concierge.’

  Half an hour earlier, Josset had still had a chance to properly defend himself. He hadn’t been charged. Even though he was considered a suspect, there was no material evidence against him.

  Coméliau was sitting in his office, awaiting the result of the interrogation, and even though he was in a hurry to offer up the guilty party to the public, he would not have acted against Maigret’s advice.

  A concierge
who wanted to get her photo in the papers had just changed the whole situation.

  As far as the public were concerned, Josset would from now on be the man with the double life, and even the thousands of men in the same situation as him would not refrain from seeing that as the motive for the murder.

  So true was this that Maigret could hear the phone in his office ringing already through the door. When he went in, Lapointe, who had picked up the phone, said:

  ‘He’s here, sir, I’ll hand you over.’

  Coméliau, obviously.

  ‘Have you read it, Maigret?’

  ‘I knew about it,’ Maigret replied drily.

  Josset couldn’t fail to notice that it was about him and he cocked an ear.

  ‘Was it you who gave the information to the paper? Did the concierge inform you?’

  ‘No. He told me.’

  ‘Of his own accord?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So he really did meet the girl’s father yesterday evening?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Don’t you think, under the circumstances—?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I’m still interrogating him.’

  ‘Will you be much longer?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Bring me up to date as soon as you can and don’t tell the press anything until you’ve seen me.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Should he tell Josset about it? Would that be the honest thing to do? This phone call had clearly unnerved him.

  ‘I guess the examining magistrate—’

  ‘He won’t do anything until he sees me. Sit down. Try to stay calm. I have a few more questions to ask you.’

  ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Something bad for me?’

  ‘Fairly. I’ll tell you about it in a moment. Where were you? … In a bar in the Étoile area … This will all be checked, not necessarily because we doubt your word, but because it’s routine. Do you know the name of the bar?’

  ‘The Select. Jean, the barman, has known me a long time.’

  ‘What time was it?’

  ‘I didn’t look at my watch, or the clock behind the bar, but I’d say around nine thirty.’