Maigret's Secret Read online

  ‘You know, I could tell there was something fishy about this from the start. First of all, he wasn’t the sort of guy who propped up a bar for an hour at a time. He ordered a mineral water, and I was just about to pour it when he changed his mind.

  ‘ “You know what, I think I’ll have …”

  ‘He looked at the bottles but couldn’t make his mind up.

  ‘ “A spirit … It doesn’t matter which one.”

  ‘It’s unusual for someone to order spirits at aperitif time.

  ‘ “Brandy? Calvados?”

  ‘ “A calvados please.”

  ‘It made him splutter. It was easy to see he wasn’t used to drinking. He kept looking at the door across the street and the Métro exit further down. Two or three times I saw him moving his lips, as if he was talking to himself.’

  The landlord paused and gave a frown.

  ‘Aren’t you Inspector Maigret?’

  And as Maigret did not demur:

  ‘Hey, you lot, look, it’s the famous Inspector Maigret … So did that pharmacist confess? I’ve had my eye on that one too for a while. It’s that car of his. You don’t see many sports cars round here.

  ‘I mainly used to see him in the mornings, when he came to pick up the girl. He would park at the edge of the pavement and look up. The young woman would wave to him from the window, then join him a few moments later.’

  ‘How many glasses of calvados did your customer drink?’

  ‘Four. Every time he ordered one he looked sheepish, as if he was worried we’d think he was a drunk.’

  ‘Did he come back later on?’

  ‘I didn’t see him again. I saw the young woman this morning. She stood waiting for a while by the roadside, then headed off alone towards the Métro.’

  Maigret paid for his drink, then walked in the direction of Place Clichy, keeping an eye out for a taxi. He found one free just as he was passing the top of Montmartre cemetery.

  ‘Boulevard Richard-Lenoir.’

  Nothing else happened that evening. He had dinner with his wife and made idle conversation. Familiar with his moods, she was careful not to ask him any questions.

  Meanwhile, the investigation was taking its course. The cogs of the police machine kept turning, and the next morning Maigret found a certain number of reports on his desk.

  Contrary to his normal practice, and for no obvious reason, he was going to compile a sort of personal file of this case.

  The chronology in particular seemed important, and he set about reconstructing the chain of events, hour by hour.

  As the crime had been uncovered in the morning, or more exactly in the small hours, the early newspapers hadn’t mentioned it; it was the radio that had first announced the dramatic events in Rue Lopert.

  At the time the radio broadcast was going out the journalists were positioned outside the Josset residence in Auteuil, where the men from the public prosecutor’s office had arrived.

  Between midday and one o’clock the first editions of the afternoon papers spoke about the event, albeit in brief terms.

  Only one of the dailies, tipped off by the concierge in Rue Caulaincourt, printed the story of Duché’s visit to his daughter and his encounter with Annette’s lover in its third edition.

  Meanwhile, the town clerk was on a train heading back to Fontenay-le-Comte, out of reach of any fresh news.

  Later, they would track down one of his travelling companions, a grain merchant from the Niort area. The two men didn’t know each other. On leaving Paris, the compartment was full, but after Poitiers it was just the two of them.

  ‘I thought I knew him by sight. I couldn’t for the life of me remember where we had met, but I gave him a discreet nod of recognition anyway. He responded with a surprised, almost suspicious look and huddled into his corner.

  ‘He seemed out of sorts. His eyes were puffy, as if he hadn’t slept all night. At Poitiers he went to the buffet for a bottle of water, which he gulped down.’

  ‘Was he reading?’

  ‘No. He was just idly watching the landscape go by. At times his eyes closed, and then finally he fell asleep … When I got home, I suddenly remembered where I had seen him before: in the sub-préfecture at Fontenay, where I had to go to sign some papers.’

  Maigret, who had travelled specifically to meet the grain merchant – his name was Lousteau – made an effort to get more out of him. It was as if he was chasing an idea he couldn’t express.

  ‘Did you notice his clothes?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you what colour they were; just dark, rather cheap.’

  ‘Were they crumpled, as if he had been sleeping rough?’

  ‘I didn’t pay any attention to that. I was mainly looking at his face. Hold on … There was a raincoat in the luggage rack, on top of his case.’

  It had taken a bit of time to locate the hotel where Annette’s father had stayed, the Hôtel de la Reine et de Poitiers near Gare d’Austerlitz.

  It was a second-rate hotel, dimly lit and a bit run-down but respectable, with a regular clientele. Martin Duché had stayed there a few times. His previous visit had been two years earlier, when he had brought his daughter to Paris.

  ‘He stayed in number 53. He didn’t take any meals at the hotel. He arrived on Tuesday on the 15.53 train and then went out again as soon as he had filled in his registration form, saying that he was only going to stay one night.’

  ‘What time did he get back in the evening?’

  At this point they drew a blank. The night clerk, who had his camp bed set up in the office, was a Czech who spoke only a little French and who had been committed to Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital on two occasions. The name Duché didn’t ring a bell; nor did his description. When room 53 was mentioned, he looked at the key board and scratched his head.

  ‘He comes, he goes, he comes back, he goes …’ he muttered irritably.

  ‘What time did you go to bed?’

  ‘Not before midnight. I always lock up and go to bed at midnight. That’s orders …’

  ‘Do you know if number 53 had returned?’

  The poor man did what he could, but what he could didn’t amount to very much. He wasn’t working at the hotel two years earlier, when Duché had last visited.

  They showed him a photograph.

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked, anxious to please the people who were asking him questions.

  Maigret had obstinately gone as far as finding the people who had stayed in the rooms on either side of number 53. One lived in Marseille and was on the telephone.

  ‘I don’t know anything. I got back at eleven and I didn’t hear a thing.’

  ‘Were you alone?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The man was married. He had come to Paris without his wife. And it was almost certain that he hadn’t spent the night on his own.

  As for number 51, that was a Belgian who was just passing through France who proved impossible to trace.

  In any case, at 7.45 in the morning, Duché had been in his room and had rung down to order his breakfast. The maid hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, except that the guest had ordered a triple coffee.

  ‘He seemed tired …’

  It was all a bit vague. It was impossible to get any more out of her. At 8.30, without taking a bath, Duché had come downstairs and paid his bill to the cashier, who knew him.

  ‘He was much as he normally was. I’ve never seen him look happy. He never seemed to be in good health. He would sometimes stop as if he was listening to his own heartbeat. I knew another one like him, a good customer who came every month. He had the same look about him, behaved in the same way, and one morning he dropped dead on the staircase without even managing to call for help …’

  Duché had taken his train. He was on it, sitting opposite the grain merchant, as Maigret was questioning Josset at Quai des Orfèvres.

  At the same time a reporter from a morning newspaper, after hurrying round to Rue Caulaincourt, was calling his
correspondent in Fontenay-le-Comte.

  The concierge had not told Maigret about this visit by the journalist, to whom she gave the name and address of Annette’s father.

  These small details were all jumbled together, and it required time and patience to derive a more or less coherent picture from them.

  As the train drew into the station at Fontenay-le-Comte that afternoon, Martin Duché was still unaware of what had happened. So were the people of Fontenay, as the radio had not yet given out the name of their fellow citizen, and it was only through guesswork that they could have made a connection between the chief clerk at the sub-préfecture and the drama in Rue Lopert.

  Only the newspaper correspondent knew what was going on. He had alerted a photographer. They were both waiting on the platform, and as Duché got out of the train he was surprised to be greeted by a flashbulb.

  ‘If we could have a word with you, Monsieur Duché …’

  He blinked, bewildered and confused.

  ‘I guess you haven’t heard the news yet?’

  The reporter stated categorically that the town clerk had seemed like a man who had no idea what had hit him. Suitcase in hand and raincoat draped over his arm, he made his way to the exit and handed his ticket to the station guard, who touched his cap in greeting. The photographer took another picture. The reporter stuck close to Annette’s father.

  The three of them came out into a sunlit Rue de la République.

  ‘Madame Josset was murdered last night …’

  The journalist, whose name was Pecqueur, had a round face and chubby cheeks, and the same protuberant blue eyes as Annette. He was redheaded and shabbily dressed and smoked an overly large pipe to give himself a certain gravitas.

  Maigret interviewed him too, in the back room of the Café de la Poste, next to an unused billiard table.

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘He came to a halt and looked me in the eyes as if he thought I was trying to catch him out.’

  ‘Catch him out?’

  ‘No one in Fontenay knew that his daughter was involved with a married man. He must have thought I had found out and was trying to get him to talk about it.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘After a pause, he said in a hard voice:

  ‘ “I don’t know Madame Josset.”

  ‘So I told him that my paper would be talking about it in the morning and would be giving all the details of the case. I added that I had just heard about it by telephone:

  ‘ “An evening paper has already run a piece on your meeting with your daughter and Adrien Josset in Rue Caulaincourt.” ’

  Maigret asked:

  ‘Did you know him well?’

  ‘As well as anyone in Fontenay, from having seen him at the préfecture and around town.’

  ‘Did he ever stop suddenly when he was walking around?’

  ‘Well, at shop windows, yes.’

  ‘Was he ill?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. He lived alone, he didn’t go to cafés and he didn’t speak much.’

  ‘Did you manage to get the interview you were after?’

  ‘He carried on walking in silence. I asked him anything that came into my head:

  ‘ “Do you think Josset killed his wife?”

  ‘ “Is it true that he intended to marry your daughter?”

  ‘But he remained surly and just ignored me. On two or three occasions he growled:

  ‘ “I’ve got nothing to say.”

  ‘ “Yet you did meet Adrien Josset?”

  ‘ “I’ve got nothing to say.”

  ‘We reached the bridge. He turned left along the riverbank, where he lives in a little brick house that is looked after by a cleaning lady. I took a photo of the house, as the paper never has enough photographs.’

  ‘Was the cleaning lady there?’

  ‘No. She only worked in the mornings.’

  ‘Who cooked his meals?’

  ‘He normally had lunch at the Trois Pigeons. He cooked his own dinner in the evening.’

  ‘Did he ever go out?’

  ‘Rarely. Once a week he went to the cinema.’

  ‘On his own?’

  ‘Yes, always.’

  ‘Did anyone hear anything that evening, or during the night?’

  ‘No. A cyclist who was passing at one in the morning noticed a light on, that’s all. The next morning, when the cleaning lady arrived, the light was still burning.’

  Martin Duché had not undressed, had not eaten anything. Nothing was out of place in the house.

  As far as it is possible to reconstitute the sequence of events, he had gone to get a photo album from a drawer in the kitchen. The first few pages contained faded portraits of his parents and his wife, one of him in his gunner’s uniform when he did his military service, a wedding photo, baby pictures of Annette on a bearskin rug, some of her at five, at ten, at her first communion, then in a class photo at the convent school she attended.

  The album, open at this page, was lying on a side table in front of an armchair.

  How long had Duché sat there before he made his mind up? He must have gone up to his bedroom on the first floor to fetch his revolver from the night table, which he had left open.

  He had come back downstairs, sat down in the armchair again and put a bullet in his head.

  The next morning, the newspaper headlines announced:

  THE JOSSET CASE CLAIMS ITS SECOND VICTIM

  In the minds of the readers it was as if Josset had killed Annette’s father himself.

  There was talk about his years as a widower, his dignified, solitary life, his love for his only daughter, the shock he had received when he went to her apartment in Rue Caulaincourt and learned of the relationship between Annette and her employer.

  Josset was already a condemned man. Even Coméliau, who should have seen things from a purely professional point of view, was quite wound up as he spoke to Maigret on the telephone.

  ‘Have you read this?’

  It was Thursday morning. Maigret had just arrived at work, having read the newspapers standing up on the bus.

  ‘I hope Josset has found a lawyer, because I am going to summon him to my chambers and bring this to a swift conclusion … The public won’t accept this being dragged out any longer …’

  That meant that Maigret could say nothing more. The examining magistrate was taking the matter in hand, and the inspector, in theory, could only act under his instructions from now on.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t see Josset again, except in court. And he would know only what the magistrate deemed fit to tell him about any further interrogations.

  That couldn’t have been the day he went to Niort and Fontenay, because Coméliau wouldn’t have failed to hear about it and given him a stern reprimand.

  According to regulations, he wasn’t allowed the shortest excursion outside of Paris.

  Even his first telephone call to Doctor Liorant, who lived in Rue Rabelais in Fontenay-le-Comte and whom he had met previously in the town, hadn’t strictly been by the book.

  ‘Maigret here … Do you remember me, doctor?’

  The reply was cool, cautious, and this immediately set Maigret on alert.

  ‘Could I pick your brains, in a personal capacity?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘I was wondering whether Martin Duché was, by chance, one of your patients.’

  Silence.

  ‘I don’t imagine that is in breach of patient confidentiality.’

  ‘He did have reason to come to see me.’

  ‘Was he seriously ill?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Just a moment, doctor … Forgive me for insisting, but a man’s life is at stake. I have been told that Duché would come to a sudden halt, in the street or somewhere else, like someone suffering from angina.’

  ‘Was it a doctor who told you that? If that’s so, he was wrong to do so.’

  ‘It wasn’t a doctor.’

&nb
sp; ‘In that case, it is merely unfounded speculation.’

  ‘Can’t you tell me whether his life was in danger?’

  ‘I have absolutely nothing to add. If you will excuse me, inspector, I have a dozen patients waiting.’

  Maigret would see him again, no more successfully, on his trip to Niort and Fontenay, while between trains, out of sight of Coméliau and even of Quai des Orfèvres.

  6. The Old Insomniac

  Rarely had spring been so radiant. The newspapers were vying with each other to announce record temperatures and an unbroken spell of dry weather. Rarely, too, at Quai des Orfèvres, had Maigret seemed so sombre and touchy. It got to the point where those who weren’t in the know began to express concern about his wife’s health.

  Coméliau had seized the initiative and applied the letter of the law, more or less spiriting Josset away, with the result that Maigret did not even have the opportunity to speak to him again.

  Every day, or almost, the drug manufacturer was brought from the Santé prison to the examining magistrate’s chambers, where his lawyer, Maître Lenain, awaited him.

  He was not a good choice. If Maigret had been able, he would have advised against his appointment. Lenain was one of the three or four leading lights of the bar. He specialized in high-profile trials and once he took on a spectacular case he filled as many column inches in the newspapers as a film star.

  The reporters hung on his almost daily pronouncements, his rather cutting, off-the-cuff remarks. Because he had brought off two or three acquittals that were thought impossible he was known as the counsel for lost causes.

  Following these interrogations, Maigret would be handed baffling orders by Coméliau, usually without any explanation: witnesses to chase up, details to be checked, tasks all the more irksome because they seemed to bear very little relation to the crime in Rue Lopert.

  The magistrate wasn’t doing this out of personal animosity. Even though Coméliau had always distrusted Maigret and his methods, that had more to do with the gulf between their ways of seeing things than anything else.

  In the end it boiled down to social class. The magistrate had remained a man of his milieu even as the world changed around him. His grandfather had been president of the Court of Appeal in Paris, and his father still sat on the State Council, while one of his uncles was the French ambassador in Helsinki.