Maigret's Childhood Friend Page 7
That was a place for the inspectors to start. There couldn’t be that many season tickets on the Paris–Bordeaux line.
‘You see. I’m doing my best to cooperate.’
Maigret understood, and he too pulled his wallet from his pocket and took out a hundred-franc note.
‘Try and make it last a while.’
‘Are you still going to have me followed?’
‘Yes.’
He opened the door to the inspectors’ room a crack.
‘Leroy.’
He gave him instructions and couldn’t avoid the hand that his old schoolmate extended to him.
4.
It was three o’clock, and Maigret was standing by the open window, pipe in his mouth, hands in his pockets, in a familiar pose.
The sun was shining, the sky was a solid blue, there wasn’t a cloud, and yet long drops of rain had started falling diagonally, a long distance apart, splattering on the ground and leaving broad black marks.
‘Come in, Lucas,’ he said without turning round, when the door half opened.
He had sent him up to the attics of the Palais de Justice to check in Records and find out whether Florentin had a criminal file.
‘Three convictions, chief, nothing really serious.’
‘Fraud?’
‘The first, twenty-two years ago, for a bad cheque. He was living in a furnished apartment on the Avenue de Wagram and had rented offices on the Champs-Élysées. It was something to do with importing exotic fruits. Six months suspended.
‘Eight years later he was sentenced to a year for fraud and using counterfeit money. His address was in Montparnasse, in a small hotel. It wasn’t suspended. So he’s done time.
‘Bad cheque again five years ago. No fixed abode …’
‘Thank you.’
‘Anything else for me?’
‘Go to Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette to question the shopkeepers. Janvier’s done it already, but not with the same goal. I’d like to know whether yesterday, between three and four, anyone saw a sky-blue Jaguar convertible parked in the street or somewhere nearby. Question the mechanics too.’
He was left alone, frowning. Moers’ specialists had had hardly any success. Joséphine Papet’s prints all over the apartment, as might have been expected.
And yet there were none on the door handles; they had all been carefully wiped.
There were prints from Florentin, including some in the wardrobe and the bathroom, but nothing on the bedside table drawer, from which the murderer must in all likelihood have taken the revolver.
Maigret had been struck, entering the apartment for the first time, by how clean it was. Joséphine Papet did not employ a maid or a housekeeper. He imagined her, all morning, tidying the rooms with a headscarf covering her hair, while the radio played faintly.
He was wearing his grumpy face, as he did when he wasn’t contented with himself, and indeed he did have concerns.
If Florentin hadn’t been his fellow pupil in Moulins, wouldn’t he already have instructed the examining magistrate to issue a warrant against him?
The pastry-chef’s son had never been what one calls a friend. Even at school, young Maigret had had mixed feelings about him.
Florentin was funny and made the class laugh and was willing to risk punishment to amuse his classmates.
But hadn’t there been something like defiance, even aggression, in his attitude?
He mocked everyone, giving comic imitations of the teachers’ tics and expressions.
His retorts were funny. He gauged their effect on the faces of his audience and he would have been put out if the laughter hadn’t come.
Wasn’t he already on the margins? Didn’t he feel different? And wasn’t that why his humour so often had an edge to it?
In Paris, as an adult, he hadn’t changed, as he went through ups and downs and dark times, including prison.
He refused to be beaten, he was still a handsome man, with a natural elegance even in a threadbare suit.
He lied without noticing. He had always lied and he wasn’t embarrassed when his interlocutor noticed. He seemed to be saying:
‘That was plausible, though! Shame it didn’t work.’
He must have frequented Fouquet’s, other bars on the Champs-Élysées and the surrounding area, the cabarets, all the places where people go to forget their troubles.
Basically Maigret suspected that he was an anxious person. Playing the comedian was only a façade to defend himself against a pitiful truth.
He was a failure, a stereotypical failure, and more seriously, more painfully, he was an ageing failure.
Was it out of pity that Maigret hadn’t arrested him? Or because Florentin had accumulated too much evidence against him, even though he was intelligent?
Taking Josée’s savings away, for example, and wrapping the biscuit tin in that morning’s newspaper. Couldn’t he have found a hiding place other than his hovel on Boulevard Rochechouart, which the police were bound to search?
The quarter of an hour that he had spent waiting in the wardrobe after the shot was fired …
Was he afraid to find himself face to face with the murderer?
Choosing Maigret, while it would have been so easy to alert the local chief inspector …
Maigret had every reason to arrest him. For a few weeks there had also been the visits from the redhead, a young man, perhaps likely to take his place, and thus steal his livelihood.
Janvier knocked, came in without waiting and slumped on a chair.
‘We’ve got him at last, chief.’
‘The limping man?’
‘Yes. I can’t remember how many phone calls I’ve made, including a good half dozen to Bordeaux. When I spoke to the railways, I almost had to go down on my knees to get them to look among their season-ticket holders straight away.’
He lit a cigarette and stretched his legs.
‘Now I hope that my limping man is the right one. I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing, but I’ve asked him to call in and see you. He’ll be here in a quarter of an hour …’
‘I would rather have met him at his home.’
‘He lives in Bordeaux. In Paris, he has an apartment at the Hôtel Scribe, a stone’s throw from his offices on Rue Auber.’
‘Who is he?’
‘If my information is correct, in Bordeaux he’s an important figure in the Chartrons, the district where all the old families have grand homes on the waterfront. He is a wine dealer, of course, working mostly with Germany and the Scandinavian countries.’
‘Have you seen him?’
‘I called him.’
‘Did he seem surprised?’
‘At first he became very arrogant and asked me if it was a joke. When I assured him that I was really from the Police Judiciaire and you wanted to see him, he declared that he had nothing to do with the police, and that they should leave him in peace if they knew what was good for them. I told him about the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.’
‘Did he react?’
‘There was a silence, then he muttered:
‘“When does Detective Inspector Maigret want to see me?”
‘“As soon as possible.”
‘“When I’ve finished going through my mail, I’ll call in at Quai des Orfèvres.”’
Janvier added:
‘His name is Lamotte, Victor Lamotte. If you like, while you are seeing him, I’ll call the Police Judiciaire in Bordeaux for some additional information.’
‘Good idea.’
‘You don’t seem happy.’
Maigret shrugged. Wasn’t it always like this at a certain point in an inquiry, when nothing precise was known? The previous day he hadn’t known these people, apart from Florentin.
That morning, he had received a podgy little man who had seemed quite dreary. If Courcel hadn’t had the good luck to be the son of a ball-bearing manufacturer, what would he have been? Travelling salesman? Or another Florentin, half parasite, half crook?
&nbs
p; Joseph came and announced his visitor and walked ahead of him. The man did in fact walk with a limp. Maigret was surprised by his white hair, by the softness of his face, and guessed that he was about sixty.
‘Come in, Monsieur Lamotte. I’m sorry for bothering you. I hope the guards let you park your car in the courtyard?’
‘That’s a matter for my chauffeur.’
Obviously! He was the sort of man who had a chauffeur and probably, in Bordeaux, a whole house full of servants.
‘I imagine you know why I want to talk to you?’
‘One of your inspectors mentioned Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. I didn’t understand what he was getting at.’
Maigret was sitting at his desk stuffing a pipe while the other man sat on a chair opposite him, facing the window.
‘You knew Joséphine Papet.’
There was quite a long pause.
‘I wonder how you were able to discover that.’
‘As you must imagine, we have certain means of investigation, or else the prisons would be empty.’
‘I don’t appreciate your choice of words. If you are suggesting …’
‘Not at all. Have you read this morning’s paper?’
‘Like everyone else.’
‘So you know that Joséphine Papet, more familiarly known as Josée, was murdered yesterday afternoon in her apartment. Where were you?’
‘Not at Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, anyway.’
‘Were you in your office?’
‘At what time?’
‘Let’s say between three and four.’
‘I was walking on the Grands Boulevards.’
‘On your own?’
‘Does that seem strange to you?’
‘Do you often go walking like that?’
‘When I’m in Paris, for an hour in the morning, at about ten, and an hour in the afternoon. My doctor will confirm that he’s the one who recommended that I take some exercise. I used to be much fatter than I am now, and I was at risk of heart failure.’
‘You realize that you have no alibi?’
‘Do I need one?’
‘Like Josée’s other lovers.’
He didn’t flinch, he remained imperturbable and simply asked:
‘Were there many of us?’
There was a note of sarcasm in his voice.
‘Four, to my knowledge, not counting the one who lived with her.’
‘Because someone lived with her?’
‘If my information is correct, your day was Saturday, because everyone had his day, more or less.’
‘I have my habits. I follow a certain routine. On Saturday, after visiting Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, I take the Bordeaux express so that I can be home by late evening.’
‘Are you married, Monsieur Lamotte?’
‘Married with children. One of my sons works with me, in our Bordeaux warehouses. Another is our representative in Bonn and takes frequent trips to the north. My son-in-law lives in London with my daughter and my two grandchildren.’
‘Had you known Joséphine Papet for a long time?’
‘Four years, more or less.’
‘What did she mean to you?’
He said condescendingly, with a hint of contempt:
‘A distraction.’
‘You mean that you had no affection for her?’
‘The word affection would seem to overstate the case.’
‘Would fondness be more accurate?’
‘She was pleasant company and she seemed discreet. So discreet that I’m surprised you’ve identified me. Can I ask you who gave you my name?’
‘Someone mentioned a man with a limp who came on Saturday.’
‘A riding accident when I was seventeen.’
‘You have a railway season ticket.’
‘I get it … Find the man with the Paris–Bordeaux season ticket who walks with a limp …’
‘There’s one thing that surprises me, Monsieur Lamotte. You stay at the Hôtel Scribe and you could meet plenty of pretty, available women in any of the bars nearby.’
The man from Chartrons did not back down, and answered the questions patiently, with a certain loftiness. Isn’t Chartrons the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Bordeaux, the neighbourhood where one finds genuine dynasties?
For Lamotte, Maigret was a policeman. They were needed, certainly, to protect citizens’ property, but this was the first time that he had come into contact with such people.
‘What’s your name again?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Maigret, if you insist.’
‘First of all, Monsieur Maigret, I am an orderly man, a man who was brought up according to certain principles that barely apply these days … It is not my custom to visit bars. As strange as it may seem, I have never set foot in a café in Bordeaux, except when I was a student.
‘As for bringing one of the women of whom you speak into my apartment at the Scribe, you must admit that it would be less than respectable, and that it would also present certain dangers.’
‘Do you mean blackmail?’
‘It’s a risk in my position.’
‘But you went to see Josée every week at Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.’
‘It was less risky, wasn’t it?’
Maigret was growing impatient.
‘And yet you knew nothing about her.’
‘Would you rather I had come and asked you to investigate her?’
‘Where did you first meet her?’
‘In the restaurant car.’
‘Was she going to Bordeaux?’
‘Coming back. We found ourselves sitting opposite one another at a two-person table. She seemed very respectable, and when I offered her the bread basket she looked at me suspiciously at first. As it happened, we found ourselves in the same compartment.’
‘Did you already have a mistress?’
‘Don’t you find the question impertinent, and entirely irrelevant to your inquiry?’
‘Would you rather not answer?’
‘I have nothing to hide from you. I did have one, one of my former secretaries, whom I had put up in a studio on Avenue de la Grande Armée. She had told me a week before that she was going to get married.’
‘Creating a vacancy.’
‘I don’t appreciate your irony, and I am tempted not to answer your questions.’
‘Then you would risk being kept here longer than you would wish.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘A warning.’
‘I won’t take the trouble to call my lawyer. So ask away.’
He was becoming increasingly arrogant, increasingly curt.
‘How long after meeting Josée did you go to Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette?’
‘Three weeks. Perhaps a month.’
‘Did she tell you she was working?’
‘No.’
‘What did she claim she lived on?’
‘A small allowance left to her by one of her uncles.’
‘And by the way, where did she tell you she came from?’
‘From near Grenoble.’
It seemed that Joséphine Papet had the same need to tell lies as Florentin. To each man she had given a different place of birth.
‘Did you give her a large monthly allowance?’
‘That’s not a very delicate question.’
‘I would like you to reply.’
‘I gave her two thousand francs every month, in an envelope, or rather I left it on the mantelpiece.’
Maigret smiled. He felt as if he had been taken back to his earliest days in the police, when one still saw old gentlemen on the Boulevards, wearing monocles and with polished shoes and white gaiters, following the pretty women.
It was a time of furnished mezzanines, of kept women, who must have been as gentle, discreet and good-humoured as Joséphine Papet.
Victor Lamotte was not in love. His life was in his family, in Bordeaux, in his austere house, the occasional weekdays at the Hôtel Scribe and in his offices on Rue Auber.
‘You don’t know any of the other visitors?’
‘She didn’t introduce them to me.’
‘You might accidentally have found yourself face to face with one of them.’
‘But that never happened.’
‘Did you go out with her?’
‘No.’
‘Did your chauffeur wait in the street?’
He shrugged, as if he found Maigret very naive.
‘I always went to see her by taxi.’
‘You know she bought herself a building in Montmartre?’
‘If you say so.’
These questions didn’t concern him and left him indifferent.
‘And forty-eight thousand francs were found in her apartment.’
‘Part of that probably comes from me, but don’t worry, I won’t try and claim it back.’
‘Were you affected by her death?’
‘To tell the truth, no. Millions of people die every day.’
Maigret got to his feet. He had had enough. If he had continued this interrogation any longer he would have found it difficult to conceal his disgust.
‘You’re not going to make me sign a statement?’
‘No.’
‘Will I have to wait to be heard by the examining magistrate?’
‘I can’t yet answer that question.’
‘If the case goes to court.’
‘It will.’
‘As long as you find the murderer.’
‘We will find him.’
‘I should warn you that I won’t testify. I have friends in high places.’
‘I have no doubt.’
And Maigret walked towards the door, which he held wide open. As he crossed the threshold, Lamotte turned round, hesitated to say goodbye and finally left without a word.
That made three! Leaving only the redhead. Maigret was in a bad mood and needed a bit of time to calm down. The rain had stopped long ago. A fly, perhaps the same one as yesterday, flew into the room as he sat down and began mechanically scribbling on a sheet of paper.
The scribbles turned into words.
Premeditation.
Unless the murderer was Florentin, premeditation was unlikely: the murderer had come without a weapon. It was someone who knew the victim, because he was aware that there was a loaded revolver in the bedside table.