‘I think I understand.’
‘Thank you, Frémiet. I’ll send someone to you straight away.’
He went into the inspectors’ office, sent one of them to the Champs-Élysées and asked Lapointe to follow him into his office.
‘You look quite perky, chief.’
‘Not really! Not really! There’s still a chance that I may be mistaken.’
He told Lapointe the story of the photograph cut from the newspaper and the ‘No!’ written in green ink.
‘I’m even quite pleased about this green ink.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the person who struck seven times, in two rounds, if one might put it like that, under lashing rain, while a couple was walking along the pavement and a woman was looking through the window, isn’t entirely a man like any other.
‘I’ve often noticed that people who use green ink, or red ink, feel a profound need to distinguish themselves. For them it’s only one way of doing it.’
‘Do you mean that he’s a madman?’
‘I wouldn’t go that far. A lot of people would say: an oddball. They exist on various levels.’
Van Hamme stepped into the office, carrying a thick bundle of photographs, some of which were still wet.
‘Have you found the man in the raincoat anywhere else?’
‘Only three people apart from family and close friends appear in all three places: Quai d’Anjou, outside the church and finally not far from the vault, in Montparnasse Cemetery …’
‘Show me.’
‘First of all, there’s this woman.’
A young woman of about twenty-five with a dramatic facial expression. She looked uneasy, tormented. She wore a badly cut black coat, and her hair fell untidily on either side of her face.
‘You told me only to pay attention to the men, but I thought …’
‘I understand.’
Maigret looked at her intensely, as if to penetrate her secret. She looked like a working-class girl who paid little attention to her outward appearance.
Why was she as upset as the members of the family, more upset than Minou, for example?
Minou had told him that her brother had probably never slept with a woman. Was she sure of that? Might she have been mistaken? And wasn’t it possible that Antoine had a girlfriend?
In the state of mind revealed by his pursuit of human voices in the most working-class districts, might not a girl like that have been the kind to interest him?
‘In a moment, Lapointe, when we have finished, go back to Ile Saint-Louis. I don’t know why, but I can see her as a sales-girl in a grocer’s shop, or a dairy, what do I know? Perhaps a waitress in a café or a restaurant.’
‘The second individual,’ Van Hamme announced, showing the enlarged photograph of a man in his fifties.
Had his clothes been slightly untidier, he might have been taken for a tramp. He looked straight ahead, with a resigned appearance, and one wondered why the funeral was interesting to him.
It was hard to imagine him stabbing a young man seven times and then running off. The murderer hadn’t come to the area in a car, that was more or less certain. It was more likely that he had taken the Métro at Voltaire station, very close to the place where the crime had been committed. The Métro clerk had only confused memories, because six or seven people had arrived at the station entrance in the space of one or two minutes. He had been punching tickets without looking up. It was mechanical.
‘If I were to look at everyone who came through, my head would be spinning … Faces and more faces … Almost all of them grumpy …’
Why had this shabbily dressed man stayed in front of the house, and then in front of the church, and why had he gone to Montparnasse Cemetery after that?
‘What about the third one?’ Maigret asked.
‘You know him. He’s the one I showed you this morning. You’ll notice that he doesn’t hide. He must have noticed that I was at all three places. Here, in the avenue at the cemetery, he’s looking at me curiously, as if wondering why I was photographing the crowd and not the coffin or the family.’
‘It’s true. He doesn’t look worried, or preoccupied. Leave these photographs with me. I’m going to look at them in my own time. Thanks, Van Hamme. Tell Moers I’m very happy with the work you’ve done.’
‘In that case,’ Lapointe asked once he was on his own with Maigret, ‘shall I go to the Ile Saint-Louis and show people the photograph of the girl?’
‘It’ll probably turn out to be pointless, but it’s worth a try. Check if Janvier is back.’
Janvier quickly stepped into the office and glanced curiously at the pile of photographs.
‘There you are, Janvier. I’d like you to go to the Sorbonne. I think it’ll be easy for you to go to the office and find out what courses Antoine Batille attended most assiduously.’
‘So I’m to question his fellow students?’
‘Exactly. He may not have had any real friends, but he must sometimes have chatted to other students.
‘Here, first of all, is a photograph showing a girl who seemed to be upset at the funeral this morning, and who followed the coffin all the way to the cemetery. Someone might have met him with her. Maybe they’ve just heard of her.’
‘I get it.’
‘This one shows a man in a raincoat who was at Quai d’Anjou, then opposite the church and finally at Montparnasse Cemetery. Show them that one too, just in case. I hope there’s a class this afternoon and you’ll be able to wait for them coming out.’
‘You don’t want me to question the professor?’
‘I don’t think they get to know their students. But hang on! Here’s another photograph. It may have nothing to do with the case, but we mustn’t neglect anything.’
A quarter of an hour later, Maigret was brought the newspaper cutting with the word ‘No!’ added in green ink. The word had been written in block letters almost two centimetres high, and underlined with a firm stroke. The exclamation mark was a good centimetre longer.
It looked like a vehement protest. Whoever had written those characters must have been indignant at the idea that a pathetic character like the former sailor could have been taken for the Rue Popincourt murderer.
Maigret sat motionless over the newspaper cutting and the photographs for more than a quarter of an hour, drawing gently on his pipe, after which, almost automatically, he picked up the phone.
‘Hello … Frémiet? … I was worried you might have left. Thanks for the document, which seems really interesting. At first I thought of putting a small advertisement in tomorrow’s morning paper, but it’s possible that he doesn’t read classifieds.
‘There’s bound to be another article on the case.’
‘Our reporters are studying previous burglaries. I have a number of them working within a radius of fifty kilometres of Paris, showing the photographs of the gangsters to all the neighbours in the villas they’ve visited.’
‘Could you publish the following lines below the article or articles:
‘“Detective Chief Inspector Maigret would like to know what the sender of this message to the newspaper bases his claim upon. He asks him, if he has interesting information, to be so kind as to contact him either by letter or by telephone.”’
‘I understand. Could you repeat it, so that I’m sure of every word?’
Maigret repeated patiently.
‘Fine! Not only will I publish this announcement on the first page, I’ll put it in a frame. You must realize that you’re going to be receiving letters or phone calls from lunatics.’
Maigret smiled.
‘I’m used to it. You are too. The police and newspaper offices.’
‘Right. You’ll be so good as to keep me informed.’
And the inspector immersed himself in the evening newspapers which had just been brought to him, groaning every time he found a new inaccuracy. There was an average of one, or at the very least an exaggeration, per paragraph, and the art thieves were
becoming one of the most mysterious and best organized in Paris.
Last headline:
When will the mastermind be arrested?
It was like the television news!
He had sent the article and the photograph of the sailor with the ‘No!’ in green letters to the anthropometry department for any fingerprints that they might be able to take from it. The reply came quickly.
‘A thumb on the photograph, and a very good image of the index finger on the back of the paper. They don’t correspond to any prints on file.’
That meant, obviously, that Antoine Batille’s murderer had never been arrested and, more to the point, that he had never been convicted.
Maigret wasn’t surprised, and he was about to resume reading his papers, when Lapointe came rushing in, very excited.
‘A lucky break, chief. And you were right. Crossing the footbridge, I notice that I’ve run out of cigarettes. I go to Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile. I go into the café on the corner, and who do I see?’
‘The girl whose photograph I gave you.’
‘Exactly. She’s a waitress. Black dress and white apron. There was a table of people playing cards: the butcher, the grocer, the landlord and a man with his back to me. I got my cigarettes and went and sat down.
‘When she asked me what I wanted to drink, I ordered a coffee, and she went behind the counter to make me an espresso.
‘“What time do you close in the evening?”
‘She looked at me with surprise.
‘“It depends on the evening. I finish at seven, because I open up in the morning.”
‘She gave me my change and went off without paying me any more attention. I preferred not to talk to her in front of the landlord. I said to myself that you’d rather do it yourself.’
‘You’re right.’
‘She seems constantly about to burst into tears. She comes and goes as if she’s in a daze and her nose is red.’
Janvier didn’t get back to headquarters until six o’clock.
‘There was a Sociology class, and apparently he never missed that one. I waited in the courtyard. I saw the students at their desks and, once the class was finished, they hurried into the open air.
‘I questioned one, two, three, without success.
‘“Antoine Batille? … The one who’s in the papers? … I see, yes, but we didn’t spend time together. If you could find a person called Harteau.”’
The third student to be questioned had looked around, and suddenly called out, turning towards a young man who was walking away:
‘Harteau! Harteau! It’s for you.’
And, to Janvier:
‘I’ve got to go. I have a train to catch.’
Others were leaving on motorbikes and scooters.
‘You want to talk to me?’ asked a tall young man with a pale face and light-grey eyes.
‘I gather you were Antoine Batille’s friend.’
‘Friend is too strong a word. He didn’t make friends easily. Let’s say that I was a classmate, and we occasionally chatted in the courtyard and sometimes went for a drink together. I only went to his place once and I didn’t feel comfortable. I should say that I’m the son of a concierge on Place Denfert-Rochereau. I’m not ashamed of it. At his place I didn’t know where to put myself.’
‘Were you at the funeral this morning?’
‘Only at the church. After that I had an important class.’
‘Do you know if your classmate had any enemies?’
‘I’m sure he didn’t.’
‘Was he popular?’
‘He wasn’t popular either. Nobody paid him any attention, and he minded his own business too.’
‘What about you? What did you think of him?’
‘He was a decent guy. He was a lot more sensitive than he wanted to let on. I think he was too sensitive and he tended to close himself away.’
‘Did he talk to you about his tape recorder?’
‘I think he even asked me to come with him one day. He was wild about it. He claimed that people’s voices were more revealing than their picture as it appeared in photographs. I remember one thing he said:
‘“There are lots of picture-hunters. I’m not yet aware of any sound-hunters.”
‘He hoped to be given one of those miniature tape recorders made in Japan for Christmas. The ones you can hold in the palm of your hand. They don’t yet have them in France, but apparently they’re waiting for them. He would only have known them from magazine articles.’
Janvier hadn’t neglected to ask Harteau if Batille had any girlfriends.
‘No girlfriends, no. At any rate not that I knew of. It wasn’t his style. And he was shy and reserved. But he’d been in love for a few weeks …
‘He couldn’t help talking to me about it. He had to confide in somebody, and his sister used to make fun of him, claiming that he was the girl and she was the boy of the house.
‘I didn’t see the girl, but she works on Ile Saint-Louis, and he saw her at eight o’clock every morning. That was the time when she was alone in the café. The landlord was still asleep, and the landlady was doing the housework on the first floor.
‘They were constantly interrupted by customers, but they did still manage to have some time to themselves.’
‘Was it really serious?’
‘I think so.’
‘What were his intentions?’
‘From what point of view?’
‘How did he see his future, for example?’
‘He planned to take classes in Anthropology next year. His dream was to be appointed professor in Asia, in Africa, in South America, one after the other, so that he could study the different human races. He wanted to prove that they were all essentially the same, that differences would vanish as living conditions balanced out on all latitudes.’
‘Did he plan to marry?’
‘He wasn’t yet talking about that. It’s too recent. In any case, he didn’t want to marry a girl from the same social class as himself.’
‘Was he rebelling against his parents, against his family?’
‘It wasn’t even that. I remember he said to me one day:
‘“When I go back home I feel as if I’m in 1900.”’
‘Thank you. Sorry for taking up your time.’
And Janvier concluded:
‘What do you say, chief? What if that girl has a brother? What if they went further than young Harteau thinks? What if the brother got it into his head that the son of Mylène Perfumes would never marry his sister? You see what I’m getting at …’
‘You’re starting to sound a bit nineteenth-century, Janvier, old man.’
‘These things still happen, don’t they?’
‘Haven’t you read the statistics? So-called crimes of passion have declined by over half and will soon seem like a quaint anachronism.
‘In fact Lapointe has found her, and she does work on Ile Saint-Louis. I’ll try and have a chat with her tonight.’
‘What should I do now?’
‘Nothing. Anything. Everyday tasks. We’ll wait.’
At 6.15, Maigret was having an early-evening drink at the Brasserie Dauphine, where he met up with two of his colleagues. At the office they sometimes spent whole weeks without seeing each other, each one confined in his own department. The Brasserie Dauphine was the neutral terrain where everyone finally met up.
‘So, that murder in Rue Popincourt? Are you starting to work for Rue des Saussaies now?’
At 6.50 Maigret took a stroll along Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile and could see the girl in the café, serving the customers.
The landlady was at the till, the landlord was serving at the bar. It was the brief flurry of early-evening aperitifs.
At 7.05 the girl went through a door and came back out a few moments later in the coat that she was wearing in the photograph. She said a few words to the landlady and left. She made straight for Quai d’Anjou, without looking around, and Maigret had to quicken his pace to catch
up with her.
‘Excuse me, mademois—’
She misunderstood and started to run.
‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Maigret. I’d like to talk to you about Antoine.’
She stopped dead and looked at him with an anxious expression.
‘What did you say?’
‘That I wanted to talk to you about …’
‘I heard you. But I don’t understand. I don’t …’
‘There’s no point denying it.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Your photograph, or rather your photographs. You were outside the dead boy’s house this morning, with a handkerchief clenched in your fingers. You were there when the funeral service started and when it ended and then you were at the cemetery.’
‘Why was my photograph taken?’
‘If you would take a moment and walk with me, I’ll explain. We’re looking for Antoine Batille’s murderer. We don’t have any serious trails, no useful clues.
‘In the hope that this murderer would be attracted by the funeral of his victim, I had photographs taken of the rows of onlookers. Then the photographer looked to see who could be found at Quai d’Anjou, outside the church and at the cemetery.’
She bit her lips. They walked quite naturally along the embankment and passed in front of the building where the Batilles lived. The black drapes with their silver tassels had disappeared. The windows were lit on every floor. The house had resumed its usual rhythm of life.
‘What do you want from me?’
‘I want you to tell me everything you know about Antoine. You were the person closest to him.’
She blushed suddenly.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘He said it, in a different way. He had a classmate at the Sorbonne.’
‘The concierge’s son?’
‘Yes.’
‘He was the only one. He didn’t feel at ease with the others. He always had a sense of being different.’
‘Well, he gave this fellow Harteau to understand that one day he was going marry you.’
‘Are you sure he said that?’
‘Didn’t he say it to you?’
‘No. I wouldn’t have accepted. We were from different worlds.’
‘Perhaps he wasn’t from any world except his own.’
Maigret and the Killer Page 10