Maigret 51 Maigret Travels Read online

  The difference was that here, it was as if you were still at the George-V, you heard every language under the sun being spoken and saw tips given in every imaginable currency. Press photographers, gathered around a large car, were taking pictures of a woman celebrity whose arms were laden with flowers, and most of the suitcases were the same prestigious brand as those of the little countess.

  ‘Shall I wait for you, chief?’

  ‘No. Go back to town and do what I told you. If I don’t leave, I’ll take a taxi back.’

  He edged his way into the crowd in order to avoid the reporters and, by the time he got to the concourse, where the desks of the various airlines stood in a row, two planes had landed and a number of Indians, some in turbans, were crossing the tarmac in the direction of customs.

  There were constant messages coming from the loudspeakers.

  ‘Mr Stillwell is asked to go to the PanAm desk … Mr Stillwell is asked to go …’

  Then the same announcement in English, and another in Spanish, addressed to someone named Consuelo Gonzalez.

  The office of the special chief inspector for the airport was no longer where Maigret remembered it. He found it in the end, however, and opened the door.

  ‘There you are, Colombani!’

  Colombani, whose wedding Maigret had attended, wasn’t part of the Police Judiciaire, but answered directly to the Ministry of the Interior.

  ‘Was it you who sent this through to me?’

  Chief Inspector Colombani looked through the mess on his desk for the piece of paper on which the countess’s name was written in pencil.

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘I passed it on to the security people. I haven’t heard anything from them so far. Let me check the passenger lists …’

  He went into the adjoining office, which had glass walls, and came back with a bundle of papers.

  ‘Let’s see now … Flight 315 to London … Palmieri … Palmieri … P … No, no Palmieris among the passengers … Do you have any idea where she went? … The next plane was Stuttgart … No Palmieri there either … Cairo, Beirut … P … Potteret … No! … PanAm to New York … There’s a Pittsberg, a Piroulet … Still no Palmieri …’

  ‘Were there any planes for the Riviera?’

  ‘Yes, the 10.32 plane for Rome stops in Nice.’

  ‘Do you have the passenger list?’

  ‘I have a list of the Rome passengers, because my men checked their passports. They don’t bother with the people going to Nice, who don’t go in through the same gate and don’t have to pass through customs and police checks.’

  ‘Is it a French plane?’

  ‘British. You’ll need to speak to BOAC. I’ll take you there.’

  The desks on the concourse were lined up like fairground stalls, with signs above them in the colours of the different countries, almost all of them bearing mysterious sets of initials.

  ‘Do you have a list of passengers on Flight 312?’

  The freckled English girl looked in her files and held out a sheet of paper.

  ‘P … P … Parsons … Palmieri … Louise, Countess Palmieri … That the one, Maigret?’

  ‘Could you tell me if this passenger had pre-booked her seat?’ Maigret asked the girl.

  ‘Hold on a moment. It was my colleague who was here for that flight.’

  She left her booth, plunged into the crowd and eventually returned with a tall, fair-haired young man who spoke French with a strong accent.

  ‘Was it you who made out Countess Palmieri’s ticket?’

  He said yes. His neighbour from Alitalia had brought her over. She absolutely had to get to Nice and had missed the morning’s Air France flight.

  ‘It’s complicated, you know. There are airlines that only fly a particular route once or twice a week. On some routes, the stops aren’t always the same either. I told her that if we had a seat at the last minute—’

  ‘Did she get on the plane?’

  ‘Yes. The 10.32.’

  ‘So she should be in Nice by now?’

  He looked at a clock above the desk opposite.

  ‘She arrived half an hour ago.’

  ‘How did she pay for her ticket?’

  ‘By cheque. She told me she’d left in a hurry and didn’t have any money on her.’

  ‘Do you usually accept cheques?’

  ‘When it’s people we know.’

  ‘Do you still have hers?’

  He opened a drawer, fiddled with a few papers and took out a sheet to which a blueish cheque was pinned. The cheque hadn’t been drawn on a French bank, but a Swiss bank that had a branch on Avenue de l’Opéra. The handwriting was nervous and irregular, the handwriting of someone who was very impatient or in a feverish state.

  ‘Many thanks.’ He turned to Colombani. ‘Can I call Nice from your office?’

  ‘You can even send a message by telex and it’ll be received instantaneously.’

  ‘I’d rather speak to someone.’

  ‘Come with me. Is it an important case?’

  ‘Very!’

  ‘But an awkward one?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  ‘Is it the airport police you want to speak to?’

  Maigret nodded.

  ‘It’ll take a few minutes to get through. We have time for a drink. This way … Will you let us know when we have Nice on the line, Dutilleul?’

  At the bar, they squeezed in between a Brazilian family and a group of grey-uniformed pilots speaking French with Belgian or Swiss accents.

  ‘What’ll you have?’

  ‘I just had a whisky. I might as well have the same again.’

  ‘The message we got from the Police Judiciaire didn’t mention passengers for a French airport,’ Colombani said. ‘As we usually only deal with those who have to show their passports …’

  Maigret was already being called to the telephone, so he knocked his drink back in one go.

  ‘Hello, airport police? … Maigret here, from the Police Judiciaire … Yes … Can you hear me? … I’m speaking as clearly as I can … A young woman named Countess Palmieri … Like palm … The trees on the Promenade des Anglais … With ieri at the end … Yes … She probably got off the BOAC plane just over half an hour ago … Yes, the plane from London via Paris … What? … I can’t hear …’

  Colombani kindly went and shut the door to block out the din of the airport, including the noise of a plane approaching the vast picture windows.

  ‘The plane has only just landed? … A delay, yes … All the better … So the passengers are still in the airport? … If you’re quick about it … Palmieri … No, just find some excuse to hold on to her. Her papers need checking, something like that … But be quick.’

  ‘I thought there might be a delay,’ Colombani said, accustomed to such things. ‘They’re reporting storms all along that route. The plane from Casablanca was an hour and a half late and the one from—’

  ‘Hello? … Yes … What? … You saw her? … And? … She’s gone?’

  At the other end of the line, too, engine noises could be heard.

  ‘Is that the plane leaving now? … Is she on it? … No?’

  He finally understood that the officer in Nice had just missed her. The passengers who had come from London were still there, because they had to pass through customs, but the countess, who had got on in Paris, had been first out and had immediately climbed into a waiting car.

  ‘A car with a Belgian number plate, you say? … Yes, I heard that: a large car with a chauffeur … No, nothing … Thank you.’

  From the American Hospital, she had telephoned Monte Carlo, where her second husband, Joseph Van Meulen, was probably at the Hôtel de Paris. Then she’d had herself driven to Orly and had taken the first plane for the Riviera. In Nice, a large Belgian car had been waiting for her.

  ‘Is everything going the way you hoped?’ Colombani asked.

  ‘When’s the next plane for Nice?’

  ‘The 13.19. In p
rinciple, they’re full, even though it’s not the season. At the last minute, though, there are always one or two passengers who don’t show up. Do you want me to book you on it?’

  Without him, Maigret would have wasted a lot of time.

  ‘Done! Now all you have to do is wait. We’ll come and get you when it’s time. Will you be in the restaurant?’

  Maigret had lunch alone in a corner, after phoning Lucas, who had nothing new to tell him.

  ‘Are the press on to it yet?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I saw one reporter prowling the corridors earlier, but it was Michaux, who always hangs around, and he didn’t say anything to me.’

  ‘Make sure Lapointe does what I told him. I’ll call from Nice some time this afternoon.’

  They came for him as promised, and he followed the line of passengers on to the plane, where he sat down in the last row. He had handed the tin of photographs over to Lapointe, but had kept a few that struck him as the most interesting and, instead of reading the newspaper that the stewardess offered him along with some chewing gum, he began looking through them pensively.

  To smoke his pipe and loosen his belt, he had to wait for a sign in front of him to go out. Almost immediately, tea and cakes were served, but he didn’t want any.

  Eyes half-closed, head tilted against the back of his seat, he seemed not to be thinking, as the plane flew over a thick carpet of bright clouds. In reality, he was making an effort to bring names and shadowy figures to life, names and figures that even this morning had been as unknown to him as the inhabitants of another planet.

  How long would it be before the death of the colonel became known and the press seized on the story? That was when the complications would start, as always happened in a case involving celebrities. Would the London papers send reporters to Paris? If John T. Arnold was to be believed, David Ward had business interests all over the world.

  What a curious character! Maigret had only seen him in a pitiful, grotesque position, naked in his bath, with his big pale belly seeming to float on the surface of the water.

  Had Lapointe sensed that Maigret was overwhelmed, not quite up to the task, and had his confidence in his chief been shaken?

  These people irritated him, that much was a fact. Faced with them, he was in the position of a newcomer in a club, for example, or a new pupil in a class who feels awkward and embarrassed because he doesn’t yet know the rules, the customs, the catchphrases, and assumes that the others are laughing at him.

  He was convinced that John T. Arnold, so relaxed and comfortable with bankers and exiled kings in London, Rome, Berlin or New York, had been amused by Maigret’s awkwardness and had treated him with a somewhat pitying condescension.

  Maigret knew as well as anybody, and better than most because of his profession, how some kinds of business were conducted and how people in certain circles lived.

  But it was a theoretical knowledge. He didn’t ‘feel’ it. All sorts of details threw him.

  It was the first time he’d had occasion to deal with this world apart, which you only heard about through gossip in the press.

  There were billionaires, to use the accepted term, who were easy to place, whose lives could be more or less imagined, businessmen or bankers who went to their offices every day and who, in private, didn’t seem any different from ordinary mortals.

  He had known major industrialists in the north and the east, owners of wool mills or ironworks, who were at their desks by eight o’clock every morning, in bed by ten every night, and whose families were similar to those of their department heads or their foremen.

  Now he was starting to realize that people like that weren’t quite at the top of the ladder, that where the rich were concerned, they were merely wage-earners.

  Above them were men like Colonel Ward, perhaps like Joseph Van Meulen, who virtually never set foot in an office, going from one luxury hotel to another, surrounded by pretty women, cruising on their yachts, maintaining complicated relationships among themselves and conducting business, even in hotel lobbies or nightclubs, that brought in much more than any bourgeois financier ever handled.

  David Ward had had three wives, whose names Maigret had written down in his black notebook. Dorothy Payne, the first, was the only one to belong to more or less the same background as him, the only one who was also from Manchester. They hadn’t had children and had divorced after three years. She had remarried.

  Her family may have been bourgeois, but she hadn’t returned to that world after her divorce and had never gone back to Manchester. She had, in a way, married another Ward, a man named Aldo de Rocca, an artificial silks tycoon in Italy, who was crazy about cars and took part in the 24 Hours at Le Mans every year.

  Aldo de Rocca, too, probably stayed at the George-V or the Ritz, the Savoy in London, the Carlton in Cannes, the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo.

  How could these people avoid meeting one another constantly? There were twenty or thirty top-class hotels in the world, a dozen fashionable beach resorts, a limited number of galas, Grand Prix and Derbys. All these people used the same jewellers, couturiers, tailors. The same hairdressers, too, even the same manicurists.

  The colonel’s second wife, Alice Perrin, whose son was in Cambridge, was from a different background, since she was the daughter of a village teacher in the Nièvre and had been working as a model in Paris when Ward met her.

  But didn’t models live somewhat on the edges of the same world?

  After her divorce, she hadn’t gone back to her former work, and the colonel had provided her with a private income.

  What kind of people was she mixing with now?

  The same thing could be asked of the third – Muriel Halligan, daughter of a foreman from Hoboken, New Jersey, who had been selling cigarettes in a Broadway nightclub when David Ward had fallen in love with her.

  She now lived in Lausanne with her daughter, equally free of money worries.

  Incidentally, was John T. Arnold married? Maigret would have sworn he wasn’t. He seemed born to be the factotum, the éminence grise, the confidant of a man like Ward. He probably belonged to a good English family, perhaps a very old family that had suffered reverses of fortune. He had studied at Eton and Cambridge and practised golf, tennis, sailing and rowing. Quite likely, before meeting Ward, he had been in the army or the diplomatic corps.

  He might have been in the colonel’s shadow, but he certainly led the life he was meant for. It was even possible that he took discreet advantage of his patron’s love affairs, as he did of his wealth.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may we ask you to fasten your seat belts and stop smoking. We will shortly be landing in Nice. We hope you have had a pleasant flight.’

  Maigret had difficulty emptying his pipe in the tiny ashtray embedded in the arm of his seat and loosening the buckle of his belt with his thick fingers. He hadn’t noticed that for a short while now they had been flying over the sea. It appeared suddenly in the window, almost vertically, as the plane was banking. There were fishing boats that looked like toys and a two-masted yacht that left a silvery trail in its wake.

  ‘Please don’t leave your seats until the plane has come to a complete stop.’

  The plane touched down, bouncing a little, and the engines grew louder as it taxied to the white airport building. Maigret’s ears were humming.

  Maigret was one of the last to get off, because he was right at the back, and a fat lady ahead of him had left a box of chocolates on her seat and laboriously worked her way back through the line of passengers.

  At the foot of the steps, a young man without a jacket, his shirt dazzling in the sun, touched his straw hat and said:

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Inspector Benoît. I wasn’t the one who got your message at midday, that was my colleague, but I’ve relieved him. The airport chief inspector apologizes for not being here to welcome you. He’s been called to town on an important case.’
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br />   At a distance, he followed the passengers rushing to the buildings. The concrete of the runway was hot. Behind a barrier, you could see a crowd of people waving handkerchieves in the sun.

  ‘We were quite embarrassed about what happened. I asked the chief’s advice and took the liberty of phoning Quai des Orfèvres. I spoke to someone named Lucas, and he told me he knew all about it. The woman you’re interested in …’

  He looked at a piece of paper he had been holding in his hand.

  ‘… Countess Palmieri came back just in time to catch a Swissair plane. As we had no instructions, I didn’t dare detain her off my own bat. The chief wasn’t sure what to do either. So I called the Police Judiciaire urgently and Inspector Lucas—’

  ‘Sergeant.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sergeant Lucas seemed as put out as I was. The woman wasn’t alone. There was an important-looking man with her who had brought her in his car and had phoned half an hour earlier to book her a seat on the plane to Geneva.’

  ‘Van Meulen?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’ll be able to tell you in the office.’

  ‘In other words, you let her go again?’

  ‘Did I do the wrong thing?’

  Maigret did not reply immediately.

  ‘No. I don’t think so,’ he said at last with a sigh. ‘When’s the next plane to Geneva?’

  ‘There isn’t one until tomorrow morning. If you absolutely have to go there, there is another way. Just the day before yesterday, there was someone in the same situation. By taking the 20.40 plane to Rome, you get there in time to catch the Rome–Geneva–Paris–London and—’

  Maigret almost burst out laughing. He suddenly had the impression he was behind the times. To get from Nice to Geneva, all you had to do was go to Rome, and from there …

  In the bar, just as at Orly, he saw pilots and stewardesses, Americans, Italians, Spaniards. A four-year-old boy, who had been travelling on his own from New York, passed from one stewardess to another, was solemnly eating an ice cream.

  ‘I’d like to make a telephone call.’