Maigret Enjoys Himself Page 4

  Maigret hadn’t chosen the route back to Boulevard Richard-Lenoir but instead was following the Grands Boulevards, which he had rarely seen so deserted. Near Porte Saint-Denis, he went into a bar, sat down inside, ordered a beer and asked for a pen and paper.

  As he was now just a member of the public he would play the role to the hilt and he had an ironic smile on his lips as he wrote in block capitals:

  BUT WHY ON EARTH WAS SHE NAKED?

  On the envelope he put Janvier’s name and the address of Quai des Orfèvres. He didn’t sign it, of course. People who gave advice to the police very rarely signed their messages. He could picture Moers’ face, in Forensics, if they asked him to analyse the block capitals, as he possessed samples of the inspector’s handwriting.

  But this letter would be too anodyne for Janvier to go to such trouble. More likely he would simply shrug it off.

  It was, nevertheless, the key question. Either the young woman had got undressed herself or she had been undressed after her death.

  As the body had no wounds, the clothes would not be stained with blood, and thus Maigret could see no valid reason to undress her.

  On the other hand, what reason could she have had to strip entirely naked between four in the afternoon and six in the evening? To change her clothes? She would have done that in the apartment across the landing, where her bedroom and all her things were.

  It wasn’t to take a bath either. One of the papers had published a detailed plan of the premises.

  The right-hand apartment comprised an entrance hall, a large drawing room, a smaller sitting room that they called the boudoir, three bedrooms, a dining room, a kitchen and a bathroom.

  The one on the left, which was reserved for Jave’s medical practice, was more or less conceived on the same plan, but the rooms were put to different uses.

  This surely must be one of the most luxurious medical establishments in Paris. The drawing room served as the waiting room and was furnished, according to the paper, in pure Empire style. The boudoir, in Empire style too, was Jave’s office, where he received his patients before going into another room to examine them.

  Beyond the consulting room, and corresponding to one of the bedrooms opposite, there was a room dedicated to X-ray examinations and minor operations.

  Then, finally, there was the laboratory, walled with cupboards from floor to ceiling. The decommissioned bathroom now served as a store room for the household’s trunks and suitcases, and the kitchen contained cleaning implements and other objects for which there was no other obvious place.

  There remained one bedroom, with a bed and the other usual furnishings, which was used, it seems, when the Javes had a friend staying over or when the doctor had been working too hard and felt the need for a short nap.

  It wasn’t said whether the bed was unmade or not. Supposing Éveline had been murdered in the apartment opposite, why take the risk of carrying the body across the landing, since there were cupboards there in which the body could have been hidden?

  Why take away her clothes?

  Did the murderer intend, for example, to come back for the body in order to dispose of it in the Seine or in some wood outside Paris?

  This begged another question. Jave had driven from Cannes in his car, which he had left at Nice airport. Did Négrel own a car?

  The papers were silent on this point.

  If the assassin intended to make the body disappear, it was likely he had access to a vehicle ...

  Maigret set off walking again and stopped automatic­ally in front of the familiar shop windows, as the cinema across the road was the one he visited the most frequently with his wife.

  Outside a jeweller’s, he caught sight of himself in a mirror, frowning, looking quite fierce with the effort of thinking so hard, and he laughed at himself.

  This was, after all, just meaningless speculation. He had nothing to base it on. He suddenly got an insight into how it must feel to be a member of the public, knowing nothing about criminal matters other than what he reads in the papers.

  The vehicle was a red herring. Had he not, three times at least in his career, seen murderers – one of them a woman – carry away their victims in a taxi to a railway station left-luggage office? All you needed was a sufficiently large trunk or a wicker basket such as those used by tradesmen.

  In the present instance, did the murderer intend to disfigure the corpse before this last journey to make her unrecognizable and to prevent identification?

  If it had been Négrel, why hadn’t he returned on Sunday, when the coast was clear, while Josépha was at her daughter’s?

  There was an answer to that one too: he had no reason to be at Boulevard Haussmann on a Sunday, and the concierge would not fail to notice him coming in and out, especially if he was carrying a large trunk when he left.

  ‘You seem in a good mood,’ his wife said as she opened the door to their apartment.

  It was because he was having a laugh at himself. Here he was, playing the amateur detective when he had always made fun of them. At police headquarters they worked with known facts, and whenever a hypothesis presented itself, they had ways of testing it.

  Madame Maigret was almost ready. She just needed her hat and gloves. He had decided to take her to lunch in an Italian restaurant on Boulevard de Clichy.

  He wasn’t just improvising here, strange though it may seem. If he didn’t have a precise plan for how he would use his days, if he more or less followed his whims, it all rested nonetheless on a basic underlying idea.

  As he had said to his friend Pardon the night before, he was indulging in the small pleasures his daily work never allowed him to experience.

  That is why he had returned to Père Jules, where he had eaten fried whitebait and grilled sausage. Maybe it hadn’t been as good as twenty years earlier, but he had enjoyed it all the same.

  He was also content standing at his window in the mornings and watching the comings and goings on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and the lorries driving in and out of Catoire et Potut.

  He had never eaten at the Italian restaurant on Boulevard de Clichy where he was taking his wife. He had never set foot there, but had often walked past it and glanced into its dark interior, noting to himself that it would be a good place to eat some spaghetti.

  There was something else that he wanted to do, but he wouldn’t tell his wife about it, for fear that she would laugh at him. Perhaps he would be forced to find a quieter spot. Place des Vosges, for example, or the Parc Montsouris.

  He wanted to sit on a bench and stay there for a long time, peaceful, not thinking of anything, smoking his pipe and watching the children play.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Madame Maigret asked as she pulled on a white glove.

  She had put on some perfume, as on a Sunday or on trips to the cinema, and she was wearing a floral dress.

  ‘Just a moment.’

  He just had to cut out that morning’s articles and file them in his manilla folder.

  After lunch they would slowly amble up to the Sacré-Cœur, like tourists, and on the way up Rue Lepic Madame Maigret would pause now and then to get her breath back.

  3. The Lovers’ Opinion

  They had chosen a blue and white striped parasol. There were three cafés competing for territory on Place du Tertre, each one pushing out as far as they could, and their parasols were like flags: orange, dark blue, or blue and white stripes. The iron chairs were the same, as were the tables and no doubt the vin gris they served in jugs. It was like a never-ending festival, with coaches squeezing in through alleyways, almost forcing the walls apart, tourists armed with cameras, painters – mainly women – in front of their easels. There was even a fire-eater who also swallowed swords as a side-line.

  Here too, Maigret and his wife exchanged the occasional look. They never spoke much when they were together. And in the looks they exchanged today, for example, there was nostalgia and recognition.

  It was no longer the Place du Tertre that they had kn
own when Maigret had first started out as a desk clerk at a police station, of course, but it was fun nonetheless. Now it was a multi-coloured fairground, noisy and more aggressively vulgar. But hadn’t they changed too? Why demand that the rest of the world stays the same while we get older?

  It was that, more or less, that they said to each other by batting their eyelids – that, and also ‘thank you’.

  The vin gris was young, and a bit acidic. The folding chair creaked under the bulk of Maigret, who had a tendency to tilt backwards. Sitting next to them, two lovers, whose joint age couldn’t have been more than forty, held hands and watched the comings and goings of the tourists. The boy’s hair was too long; the girl’s, too short. The houses were brightly painted like the set of a comic opera. One of the tour guides, with a megaphone to his mouth, was explaining something in English, then in German.

  At that moment a newspaper seller appeared, but the only words audible in the confusion of noise were:

  ‘... sensational revelations ...’

  Maigret raised his arm and clicked his fingers, as if at school. He bought two rival afternoon newspapers, while the young lovers next to him settled for just one.

  He kept the paper that Lassagne worked on for himself and passed the other to his wife. On the front page there was a large photograph of a girl in a bathing suit leaning on the side of a boat. The girl had very skinny legs and two small, pointed breasts, barely formed. She was smiling awkwardly and shyly at the camera.

  What was it that gave her the look of a victim predestined by fate? The print was blurred – the newspaper had blown up a snapshot taken on a beach in bad light.

  The caption read: ‘Éveline Jave, photographed by her brother the year she met Doctor Jave’.

  A young woman from the provinces, well-mannered but sad-looking, who must have lived in a strict household and longed for a different existence.

  It was Yves Le Guérec himself, the paper went on to say, who had provided the picture to young Lassagne.

  DOCTOR NéGREL SPEAKS EXCLUSIVELY

  So one of the two men had agreed to meet, if not the whole of the press, at least one journalist. Lassagne, a lean redhead, sharp as a knife, must have passed a few nerve-racking hours, and Maigret could picture him dashing back to the newspaper office and rushing to his desk to file his report, which the office juniors would carry off section by section to be typeset.

  If it wasn’t quite as sensational as the newspaper seller was making out, and if there weren’t any actual revelations in the proper sense of the word, the piece was nonetheless interesting. In his usual style, Lassagne first painted the scene:

  It was in his lodgings in Rue des Saints-Pères, in an old building a short walk from Saint-Germain-des-Prés, that Doctor Négrel granted us this exclusive interview.

  The house, a former private mansion, still bears on its façade the arms of the distinguished French family who lived here, but this somewhat dilapidated building was long ago converted into apartments where several families live.

  The courtyard is full of mopeds, bicycles and prams. A carpenter’s workshop occupies the ground floor, and the steps of the staircase, with its magnificent wrought-iron banister, are worn smooth.

  We climbed to the fourth floor, with its dormer windows, which once served as staff quarters, and, at the end of a dark corridor, we knocked at a door with a simple visiting card attached to it with a drawing pin.

  We were expected. The door opened to reveal a young man with dark hair, a smooth complexion and matinée idol looks.

  Doctor Négrel, as he would tell us later on, comes from the south of France, from Nîmes, where his family has lived for many generations. The family has had its ups and downs. One Négrel was a ship’s doctor under Napoleon. Another was a public prosecutor under Louis-Philippe.

  Doctor Négrel’s father, who is still alive, is a photo­grapher. The doctor studied at Montpellier University.

  The doctor ...

  Maigret stopped reading to crane an ear. The young lovers at the next table were reading the same paper more or less simultaneously with him, and the girl murmured:

  ‘What did I tell you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a love affair.’

  ‘Let me read the rest of it.’

  Maigret smiled vaguely and read onwards too.

  The doctor, despite his physical attributes, came across as a modest and serious man, and the events of the last few days appear to have hit him hard.

  His lodgings looked more like those of a student than a doctor at the start of a brilliant career. He welcomed us in a room that serves as an office, a sitting room and a dining room. Through other doors we caught sight of a plain-looking bedroom and a tiny kitchen.

  ‘I don’t understand anything that has happened,’ were his first words as he sat in the window recess, having shown us to an antique armchair in red plush. ‘The police and then the examining magistrate questioned me for a long time and asked me questions I couldn’t possibly answer. It seems they suspect me of killing Madame Jave. But why on earth would I do such a thing?’

  He frowned with his thick eyebrows, which gave his face a deep look. On the table were the leftovers of a meal that the concierge must have bought for him locally. He was unshaven and wasn’t wearing a tie or a jacket.

  I asked him:

  ‘Will you permit me to ask you a number of questions, for the benefit of our readers?’

  ‘I’ll reply to the best of my ability.’

  ‘Even if the questions are indiscreet?’

  He shrugged, like a man who had already been asked the most indiscreet questions.

  ‘To begin with, how long have you known the Javes?’

  ‘I’ve known Doctor Jave for three years. “They” asked me that too.’

  ‘Where did you meet him?’

  ‘While working for my employer, Professor Lebier. I’m his assistant. Jave sometimes brought us patients for consultation, and once, when I was in a hurry to get into town, he gave me a lift in his car.’

  ‘Did you become friends?’

  ‘He said that one day he’d like to invite me for dinner.’

  ‘Did you go?’

  ‘Six months later, by chance. At the end of a consultation with Professor Lebier he asked me if I was free that evening, as he had invited a few interesting people, so I went round to Boulevard Haussmann.’

  ‘Is that when you met Madame Jave?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was your first impression of her?’

  ‘I was the least important among the guests so I ended up at the foot of the table. I didn’t have much chance to talk to her.’

  ‘Did she seem like she was happy?’

  ‘Neither happy nor unhappy. She behaved like any hostess.’

  ‘Did you often go back to Boulevard Haussmann as a guest?’

  ‘Fairly often.’

  ‘According to your colleagues, you don’t go out much and rarely dine in town.’

  At this point in the conversation, Négrel appeared a little embarrassed, but finally he gave a smile.

  ‘The Javes,’ he explained, ‘entertained a lot, at least once a week, and there were always fifteen or so people there. Sometimes there was a woman or girl too many, and they telephoned me at the last minute to come and even up the numbers.’

  ‘Why did you go along with this?’

  ‘Because they were nice people.’

  ‘Both of them?’

  ‘Both of them, yes.’

  ‘What did you think about Jave?’

  ‘That he was an excellent practitioner.’

  ‘As a man, I mean.’

  ‘I’ve always considered him a decent man, and indeed a man of great integrity.’

  ‘Yet you surely don’t hold society doctors in high regard.’

  ‘He was more than just a society doctor.’

  ‘Did you eventually become a family friend?’

  ‘ “Friend” is perhaps overstating it
. Despite the difference in our ages, Philippe and I got on very well.’

  ‘Did you address him in the familiar form?’

  ‘I do that with very few people. That’s not how we do things in Protestant Nîmes, where I was born and grew up.’

  ‘And did you address Éveline Jave in the familiar form?’

  ‘No.’

  And that ‘No’ was rather curt.

  ‘How would you describe your relationship with her?’

  ‘Cordial. I’d go as far as to say friendly.’

  ‘Did she ever confide in you?’

  ‘She merely said to me, and I’d heard this from her husband too, that she hadn’t had a life like other women.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Because of her health.’

  ‘Was she in poor health?’

  ‘I don’t think I am betraying any confidences, as I am not her doctor, if I say that she suffered from Stokes-Adams disease, more commonly known as a chronic slow pulse. Her heart has been beating at a rate of forty or forty-five beats a minute, as opposed to the more normal seventy, since she was a child.’

  ‘What are the effects of this condition?’

  ‘The patient can lead an apparently normal life. But at any moment there is a risk of fainting, convulsions or even sudden death.’

  ‘Did she know that?’

  ‘Since the age of twelve. She had a consultation with a top specialist. She overheard him talking at the door and understood everything.’

  ‘Was she afraid?’

  ‘No. Rather, resigned.’

  ‘Was she happy in spite of this?’

  ‘In a suppressed sort of way, if I can put it like that. It was as if she always feared that too much exuberance would bring about an attack.’

  ‘Was she afraid to have a baby?’

  ‘No. On the contrary, she was happy to leave something behind her, even if it ended up costing her her life.’

  ‘Did she love her husband?’

  ‘I guess so, since she married him.’

  ‘Did he love her?’

  ‘He always seemed very attentive.’

  ‘Did you ever meet her in private, I mean without her husband around?’