Maigret and the Old People Read online

  ‘Yes. I left at about nine thirty after the arrival of Abbé Gauge, whom I’m not fond of. I went back to the hotel to kiss my wife and children goodnight.’

  A silence. Philippe de V—looked straight ahead, hesitant and embarrassed.

  ‘Then I took the air on the Champs-Élysées …’

  ‘Until midnight?’

  ‘No.’

  This time he looked Maigret in the eyes, with a slightly shameful smile.

  ‘It might seem strange to you, given my very recent bereavement. It’s a sort of tradition for me. At Genestoux I’m too well known to allow myself any kind of romantic adventure, and it would never even occur to me. Is it because of my childhood memories? Every time I come to Paris, I have the habit of spending an hour or two with a pretty woman. Since I insist that it goes no further, and doesn’t complicate my life, I merely …’

  He waved his hand vaguely.

  ‘On the Champs-Élysées?’ Maigret asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t say it in front of my wife, who wouldn’t understand. For her, outside of a certain world …’

  ‘What’s your wife’s maiden name?’

  ‘Irène de Marchangy … I might clarify, if it’s of any use to you, that my companion of yesterday is a brunette, not very tall, that she was wearing a pale-green dress and has a beauty spot under her breast. I think it’s the left breast but I’m not sure.’

  ‘Did you go to hers?’

  ‘I assume she lives in the hotel on Rue de Berry that she took me to, because there were clothes in the wardrobe and personal objects in the bathroom.’

  Maigret smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry to rush you, and thank you for your patience. Has that removed any doubts you might have had about me? This way! I’ll let you go down on your own, because I’m in a hurry to …’

  He looked at his watch and held out his hand.

  ‘Let me wish you good luck!’

  In the main courtyard, a chauffeur was waiting by a limousine whose engine was running with a barely audible hum.

  Five minutes later, Maigret literally dived into the thick atmosphere of a bistro and ordered a beer.

  6.

  He was woken by the sun coming in through the slats of the shutters and, with a movement that had become mechanical after so many years, reached towards his wife’s side of the bed. The sheets were still warm. Along with the smell of freshly ground coffee, a faint whistle reached him from the kitchen, the sound of water singing in the kettle.

  Here too, as in the aristocratic Rue de Varenne, birds chirped in the trees, less close to the windows, and Maigret felt a sense of physical well-being, albeit mingled with something vague and unpleasant.

  He had slept fitfully. He remembered having lots of dreams and even, at least once, waking with a start.

  At a certain point, hadn’t his wife whispered something to him, holding out a glass of water?

  It was difficult to remember. Several different stories had become confused, and he kept losing the thread. They had one thing in common: in all of them, he played a humiliating role.

  One picture came back to him, clearer than the others: a place that looked like the V—residence, but much larger, if less opulent. It was like a convent or ministerial offices, with endless corridors and an infinity of doors.

  What he had just done was not clear in his mind. He only knew that he had a goal to reach, and that it was enormously important. And yet he couldn’t find anyone to tell him the way. Pardon had told him as they parted in the street. He didn’t see Dr Pardon in his dream, or in the street. He was no less certain that his friend had warned him.

  The truth was that he wasn’t allowed to ask the way. He had tried to at the beginning, before understanding that it was impossible. The old people merely looked at him, smiling and shaking their heads.

  Because there were old people everywhere. Perhaps it was a retirement home, or an asylum, even though it didn’t look like one.

  He recognized Saint-Hilaire, very straight-backed, his face pink beneath his silky white hair. A very handsome man, who knew it and seemed to be making fun of the inspector. Maître Aubonnet was sitting in a wheelchair and amusing himself by racing it very quickly along a gallery.

  There were many others, including the Prince of V—, with a hand on Isabelle’s shoulder, indulgently observing Maigret’s efforts.

  The inspector’s situation was delicate, because he had not yet been initiated, and they were refusing to tell him what tests he had to pass.

  He was in the position of a new recruit, a new boy at school. They played tricks on him. For example, every time he tried to open a door it closed by itself or, rather than opening on to a bedroom or a drawing room, it revealed the start of a new corridor.

  Only the old Countess of Saint-Fiacre was willing to help him. Since she wasn’t allowed to speak, she tried to communicate to him with gestures, which didn’t work. For example, she pointed to her own knees, and, lowering his eyes, Maigret discovered that he was in short trousers.

  Madame Maigret, in the kitchen, was at last pouring water on the coffee. Maigret opened his eyes, frowning at the memory of this stupid dream. All in all, it was as if he had been trying to enter a circle, which happened to be the circle of old people. And if they hadn’t taken him seriously, it was because they saw him as a little boy.

  Even sitting on his bed, he was still perplexed, vaguely watching after his wife, who had just set a cup of coffee down on his bedside table and was now opening the shutters.

  ‘You shouldn’t have eaten snails last night …’

  To distract himself after a disappointing day, he had taken her to dinner at a restaurant and eaten snails.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Fine.’

  He wasn’t going to let a dream spoil his day. He drank his coffee, went into the dining room and glanced at the newspaper as he had his breakfast.

  It contained a few more details than the previous day’s report on the death of Armand de Saint-Hilaire, and they had found quite a good photograph of him. There was one of Jaquette as well, caught as she was entering a dairy. It was when she had gone to do her shopping with Lapointe on her heels the previous evening.

  Quai d’Orsay is categorically ruling out the suggestion of a political crime. On the other hand, well-informed circles are connecting the death of the count with another, accidental death which happened three days ago.

  That meant that the story of Saint-Hilaire and Isabelle would be told at length in a future edition.

  Maigret still felt sluggish and lacklustre, and it was at such moments that he regretted not choosing another profession.

  He waited for the bus at Place Voltaire and was lucky enough to find one with a platform where he could smoke his pipe while watching the streets passing by. At Quai des Orfèvres he greeted the office boy with a wave of his hand, climbed the stairs, which a cleaning woman was sweeping after scattering a few drops of water to stop the dust from blowing away.

  On his desk he found a large pile of documents, reports and photographs.

  The photographs of the dead man were shocking. Some of them showed his whole body, as he had been found, with a leg of the desk in the foreground and stains on the carpet. There were also photographs of his head, his chest, his belly, when he was still dressed.

  Other numbered shots indicated the entry point of each bullet and a dark bulge under the skin, on the back, where one of the bullets had stopped after breaking the collarbone.

  There was a knock at the door, and a very fresh-looking Lucas appeared, clean shaven and with talcum under his ear.

  ‘Dupeu is here, chief.’

  ‘Show him in.’

  Inspector Dupeu, like Isabelle’s son, had a large family, six or seven children, but it was not out of a sense of irony that Maigret had entrusted him with a certain mission the previous day. He had just happened to be available at the right moment.

  ‘So?’

  ‘The prince’s account is qui
te accurate. I went to Rue de Berry at about ten o’clock in the evening. As usual, there were four or five girls on the street. Among them there was only one little brunette, who told me that she hadn’t been there the previous day because she had gone to see her baby in the country.

  ‘I waited for quite a long time and saw another one coming out of a hotel with an American soldier.

  ‘ “Why are you asking?” she said anxiously when I put my question. “Are the police after him?”

  ‘ “Not at all. It’s just a check.”

  ‘ “Tall, about fifty, quite well built?” ’

  Dupeu went on:

  ‘I asked the girl if she had a beauty spot under her breast, and she said she did, and she had another one on her hip. Of course the man didn’t say his name, but on the evening of the day before yesterday she only went with him because he offered her three times the price that she normally asks.

  ‘ “And yet he only stayed for half an hour …”

  ‘ “At what time did he approach you?”

  ‘ “At ten to eleven. I remember because I was coming out of the bar next door, where I had gone for a coffee, and I looked at the clock behind the counter.” ’

  Maigret observed:

  ‘If he only spent half an hour with her, that means he left her before half past eleven?’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  Isabelle’s son hadn’t lied. No one in this case seemed to be lying. It was true that if he left Rue de Berry at half past eleven he could easily have been at Rue Saint-Dominique before midnight.

  Why would he have gone to his mother’s old lover? And more importantly, why kill him?

  The inspector had had no more luck with the nephew, Alain Mazeron. The previous day, just before dinner, Maigret had called in at Rue Jacob and found nobody at home. Then he had phoned at about eight o’clock and had no reply.

  After that he had told Lucas to send somebody to the antique shop early in the morning. It was Bonfils, who came to the office in turn with equally disappointing information.

  ‘He wasn’t even slightly troubled by my questions.’

  ‘Was his shop open?’

  ‘No. I had to ring. He looked through the first-floor window before coming down, unshaven, in braces. I asked him how he had spent his time the previous afternoon and evening. He told me that he had gone to see the notary first of all.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I’m sure. Then he went to Rue Drouot, where there was an auction of helmets, uniform buttons and weapons from the Napoleonic era. He claims that some collectors are avid for these relics. He bought a lot and showed me a pink piece of paper detailing the objects that he has to collect this morning.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘He went for dinner in a restaurant in Rue de Seine, where he almost always has his meals. I’ve checked.’

  Another one who hadn’t lied! A strange job, Maigret thought, when you’re disappointed that someone hasn’t killed a person! That was the case, and the inspector, in spite of himself, was annoyed with these people for being innocent or seeming as if they were.

  Because, in spite of everything, there was a corpse.

  He picked up his phone.

  ‘Will you come down, Moers?’

  He didn’t believe in the perfect crime. In twenty-five years with the Police Judiciaire, he hadn’t come across such a thing. Certainly, he could remember some crimes that had gone unpunished. Often you knew the guilty man, who had had time to skip abroad. Either that or they were poisonings or crimes motived by financial gain.

  That wasn’t the case this time. A random low-life wouldn’t have got into the flat on Rue Saint-Dominique, fired four bullets at an old man sitting at his desk then left again without taking anything.

  ‘Come in, Moers. Sit down.’

  ‘Have you read my report?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Maigret didn’t admit that he hadn’t felt up to reading it, any more than he had the eighteen pages from the pathologist. The previous day he had given Moers and his men the task of looking for physical clues, and he trusted them, knowing very well that nothing would escape them.

  ‘Has Gastinne-Renette sent his conclusions?’

  ‘They are in the file. It’s a 7.65 automatic pistol, either a Browning or one of the many imitations that you can buy.’

  ‘Are we sure that there wasn’t a single cartridge case in the apartment?’

  ‘My men have searched every square centimetre.’

  ‘No weapon either?’

  ‘No weapon, no ammunition apart from hunting rifles and their cartridges.’

  ‘Any fingerprints?’

  ‘The ones from the previous day, the count’s prints and those of the concierge’s wife. I took them by chance before leaving Rue Saint-Dominique. The concierge’s wife came twice a week to help Jaquette Larrieu clean the flat from top to bottom.’

  Moers looked embarrassed and uneasy.

  ‘I’ve included the inventory of objects found in the drawers and cupboards. But I went over the place for much of the night without discovering anything strange or unexpected.’

  ‘Any money?’

  ‘A few thousand francs in a wallet, some change in a kitchen drawer and, in the office, some chequebooks from the Rothschild Bank.’

  ‘Any cheque stubs?’

  ‘Cheque stubs too. The poor old man was so far from expecting to die that he ordered a suit ten days ago from a tailor on Boulevard Haussmann.’

  ‘No prints on the window-sill?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  They only needed to look at each other to understand. They had worked together for years and had trouble remembering a single case when, going over the scene of the crime with a fine-tooth comb, as the papers say, they didn’t discover some detail that was anomalous, at least at first sight.

  Here, everything was too perfect. Everything had a logical explanation, everything except the old man’s death.

  By wiping the butt of the gun and putting it in the man’s hand, the killer could have tried to make it look like suicide. Obviously provided that he had only fired the first bullet. But why fire three more?

  And why couldn’t they trace the former ambassador’s automatic? He had possessed one, that much was clear. Old Jaquette confessed that she had seen it a few months before, in the chest of drawers in the bedroom.

  The gun was no longer in the flat, and according to the maidservant’s account it was more or less the size and weight of a 7.65 pistol.

  Presumably the former ambassador had allowed someone in … Someone he knew, because he had gone back to sit at his desk, in his dressing gown …

  In front of him, a bottle of cognac and a glass … Why hadn’t he offered his visitor a drink?

  How had the scene played out? That visitor walking towards the bedroom – along the corridor or through the dining room – picking up the pistol, coming into the office, walking up to the count and firing a first shot at point-blank range …

  ‘It doesn’t add up …’ Maigret sighed.

  He also needed a motive, a motive compelling enough for the perpetrator to risk a death sentence.

  ‘I assume you didn’t subject Jaquette to the paraffin test?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have dared without first talking to you.’

  When a firearm is used, particularly a pistol with automatic ejection, the explosion sends out particles which embed themselves in the gunman’s skin, particularly on the edge of the hand, and remain there for a period of time.

  Maigret had thought of that the previous day. But did he have the right to suspect the old housekeeper any more than anyone else?

  Admittedly she was the one best placed to have committed the crime. She knew where to find the gun, she could move around the flat while her employer was working without provoking his suspicion, she could walk over to him and fire, and it was quite possible that while the body lay on the carpet she might have continued to pull the trigger.

&
nbsp; She was so meticulous that she might then have looked around the room for cartridge cases.

  But was it possible that she would, after that, have gone peacefully to bed, a few metres away from her victim? That in the morning, on her way to Quai d’Orsay, she would have stopped somewhere, on the banks of the Seine, for example, or on the Pont de la Concorde, to get rid of the gun and the cartridge cases?

  She had a motive, or something like one. For almost fifty years she had lived with Saint-Hilaire, in his shadow. He concealed nothing from her, and it appeared highly likely that they had had intimate relations in the past.

  The ambassador didn’t seem to attach much importance to that, and neither did Isabelle, who smiled as she spoke of it.

  But what about Jaquette? Was she not the old man’s true companion?

  She knew of his platonic love of the princess, she posted his daily letters, and it was she who had once shown Isabelle into the flat when her master was out.

  ‘I wonder if …’

  Maigret was repelled by the hypothesis, which seemed too easy. While he was able to conceive of it, he didn’t feel it.

  Once the Prince of V—was dead and Isabelle was free, the old lovers would finally be able to marry. They had only to wait for the end of the mourning period to go to the city hall and the church and they would live together in Rue Saint-Dominique or Rue de Varenne.

  ‘Listen, Moers … I’m going to ask you to go over there. Be nice to Jaquette. Don’t frighten her. Tell her it’s only a formality …’

  ‘Shall I try the test?’

  ‘It would put my mind at rest.’

  When he was told a little later that Monsieur Cromières was on the line, he asked his colleagues to say he was out and they didn’t know when he would be back.

  The reading of the Prince of V—’s will was due that morning. Isabelle and her son would shortly find themselves in the presence of the old notary Aubonnet, and the princess would come back later on for the reading of another will.

  The two men in her life, on the same day …

  He called Rue Saint-Dominique. The previous day he had been reluctant to seal the doors of the office and the bedroom. Instead he had chosen to wait, or to keep open the option of revisiting the scene.