‘Did these three people have any visitors apart from you? I imagine you went to question them, as you did me in Avenue du Parc-Montsouris.’
‘Alvaredo went to see them in the late afternoon.’
Switching roles, Ouéni then said curtly:
‘That’s enough. From now on I’ll only talk in the presence of my lawyer.’
‘There’s a question I’ve already asked you, though, and I insist on doing so again: what was the exact nature of your relationship with Madame Nahour?’
Ouéni gave an icy smile. His eyes were darker and brighter than ever as he spat:
‘Non-existent.’
‘Thank you. Lapointe, will you call two inspectors?’
He had got up, walked round the desk and was standing in front of Ouéni, who was still sunk in his armchair. Looking him up and down, Maigret asked bitterly:
‘Revenge?’
After checking they were alone in the room and that the door was shut, Fouad said:
‘Possibly.’
‘Stand up.’
He obeyed.
‘Hold out your wrists.’
He did so, still smiling.
‘I arrest you on a warrant from Examining Magistrate Cayotte.’
Turning to the two inspectors who had come in, Maigret went on:
‘Take this man to the cells.’
8.
It had become ‘the Nahour case’. For a week it was deemed worthy of the front pages of all the newspapers and several columns in the scandal sheets. Journalists haunted Avenue Parc-Montsouris, gathering tittle-tattle, and Madame Bodin, the cleaner, had her hour of glory.
Maquille went to Amsterdam, then Cannes, returning with an interview with the nanny and a photograph of her and the children. He questioned the casino managers and croupiers while he was at it.
In the meantime men from Criminal Records went over the Nahours’ house with a fine-tooth comb in the hope of finding a clue. The garden likewise; even the drains were searched in the hope of finding the pistol that had been used to kill Nahour.
The meeting at the lawyer’s took place on Monday afternoon, with Pierre Nahour, his father and Lina attending.
Maître Leroy-Beaudieu telephoned Maigret to fill him in. In his second will, Félix Nahour left his wife the bare legal minimum. Everything else went to his children, and he expressed the wish that they would be entrusted to his brother’s care, or, if that was impossible, that he would be made a surrogate guardian.
‘Didn’t he leave anything to Ouéni?’
‘I was struck by that. I can tell you now that, in his first will, which was voided by the second, Nahour left a sum of five hundred thousand francs to his secretary “for his devotion and services”. The name Ouéni isn’t even mentioned in the final will.’
Had Nahour found out about Fouad’s affair with Lina in the meantime?
Thirty-six of the Saint-Michel’s regulars, along with its manager and its croupiers all testified before the examining magistrate.
Journalists were waiting for them as they came out, which led to incidents after some of the witnesses rushed furiously at the photographers.
There were some mistakes too. A Cambodian student claimed to have seen Ouéni sitting in the corner from 11 p.m. onwards. It took two days of patient checking to establish that the student had got confused with the previous Wednesday and hadn’t been in the club on Friday.
Various neighbours, who had come back from the cinema at around 11.30, swore they hadn’t seen any cars parked outside the bar.
Examining Magistrate Cayotte was a meticulous, patient man. For three months he called Maigret into his office almost every day with new questions for him to investigate.
Politics reasserted its hold over the newspapers, and the Nahour case was relegated to the third, then the fifth page, before disappearing completely.
Lina, Alvaredo and Nelly were forbidden to leave Paris without permission, and it was only after the investigation was finished that they were allowed to retreat to a little house near Dreux.
The Court of Indictment confirmed Ouéni’s indictment, but the Assizes Court was so busy the trial only took place in January the following year, a year after Doctor Pardon had seen the mute shooting victim and her lover in his surgery on Boulevard Voltaire.
Strangely, in the interim the two men had avoided referring to the Nahours at their monthly dinners.
Finally the day came when a slightly flushed Maigret had to give evidence in court. Until then nothing had been said about Lina’s affair with the defendant.
Maigret answered the presiding judge’s questions as briefly and factually as possible. When he saw the prosecutor get to his feet, he knew the young woman’s secret was in danger.
‘Will Your Honour allow me to put a question to the witness?’
‘The state prosecutor has the floor.’
‘Can the witness tell the jury if it has come to his knowledge that, at an as yet unspecified time, the defendant and Madame Nahour were intimate with one another?’
Maigret was testifying under oath; he couldn’t conceal anything.
‘Yes.’
‘Has the defendant denied this formally?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nevertheless his attitude suggests it was the truth?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did the witness believe in this relationship?’
‘Yes.’
‘Didn’t this conviction play a part in Ouéni’s arrest by shedding new light on his motives?’
‘Yes.’
That was all. The spectators had listened in silence, but now there was an uproar in court, and the presiding judge had to use his gavel.
‘If order is not restored immediately, I shall clear the court.’
Maigret could have gone and sat next to Cayotte, who had kept him a seat, but he preferred to leave the court.
When he was alone in the deserted corridor, his footsteps echoing in the silence, he slowly filled a pipe without realizing what he was doing.
A few moments later he was sitting in the refreshment room of the Palais, where he gruffly ordered a glass of beer.
He couldn’t face going home. He drank another glass, almost in one, then slowly made for Quai des Orfèvres.
There was no snow this year. The air was mild. It felt like early spring, and the sun was so bright you expected to see the buds bursting into flower.
When he got to his office, he opened the door to the inspectors’ room.
‘Lucas! Janvier! Lapointe!’
It was as if all three had been waiting for him.
‘Put on your coats and come with me.’
They set off without asking where he was taking them. A few minutes later they were climbing the worn steps of the Brasserie Dauphine.
‘Well, Monsieur Maigret, what about this Nahour case, then?’ the landlord asked him.
He regretted it immediately. Maigret just looked at him with a shrug, and he quickly added:
‘We’ve got andouillette today, you know.’
There was going to be no trip to Bogotá for the couple now. And after the morning’s hearing would Lina and Alvaredo’s relationship ever be the same again?
The Nahour case was back on the front pages. The evening papers were already talking about a ménage à quatre.
If it hadn’t been for the new motive, which was the centrepiece of the prosecution’s summing-up, the jury might have voted to acquit.
The gun hadn’t been found. Everything rested on the testimony of more or less interested parties.
The following evening, Fouad Ouéni was sentenced to ten years in prison, while Lina and Alvaredo, who had been taken out through a side door, got into the Alfa Romeo and drove off to an unknown destination.
Maigret heard nothing more about them.
‘I failed,’ he had to admit to Pardon the following Tuesday at dinner at the doctor’s apartment.
‘Maybe if I hadn’t called you that night …’
&
nbsp; ‘Events would have still run their course, it just would have taken a little longer.’
Reaching for his glass of Marc de Bourgogne, Maigret added:
‘Ouéni won, really.’
1.
‘Sorry, monsieur.’
‘Not at all.’
It was at least the third time since the corner of Boulevard Richard-Lenoir that she had lost her balance, bumping into him with her bony shoulder and crushing her string bag full of groceries against his thigh.
She apologized automatically, neither embarrassed nor genuinely sorry, then carried on gazing straight ahead of her with a calm and determined expression.
Maigret took no offence. It was almost as if it amused him to be jostled. That morning, he was in a mood to take everything light-heartedly.
He had had the good fortune to catch a bus with a rear platform, which was in itself a source of great satisfaction. These buses were becoming more and more infrequent, since they were gradually being withdrawn from use, and soon he would be obliged to tap out his pipe before being enclosed in one of the huge modern vehicles inside which you feel imprisoned.
The same older buses with platforms had been in circulation when he had first arrived in Paris, forty years earlier, and in those days he had never tired of taking one along the large shop-lined boulevards on the Madeleine–Bastille line. That had been one of his first discoveries. That and the café terraces. He had never tired of the terraces either, where you could sit in front of a glass of beer and watch the ever-changing sights of the street.
Another source of wonder in that first year: by the end of February, you could go out without an overcoat. Not every day, but some of the time. And the buds were beginning to swell along certain avenues, especially Boulevard Saint-Germain.
These memories reached him in waves, because this was another year when spring was early, and that morning he had left home without his overcoat. He felt as light as the sparkling air. The colours of the shops, the food stalls, the women’s dresses were all bright and cheerful.
He was not thinking of anything in particular. Just a few disconnected little thoughts. At ten o’clock, his wife would be having her third driving lesson.
This was an unexpected, even amusing turn of events. He could not have said how they had reached the decision. When Maigret was a young police officer, it had been out of the question for them to afford a car. Back then, such a thing was inconceivable. Once the years had gone by, he had seen no need for one. It was too late to learn to drive. Too many things were going through his head. He wouldn’t notice a red light, or would stamp on the brake instead of the accelerator.
But it would be nice, on Sundays, to be able to drive out to Meung-sur-Loire, and their little house there.
They had made their minds up recently, on an impulse. His wife had protested with a laugh:
‘You can’t mean that … Learning to drive, at my age!’
‘I’m sure you’ll make a very good driver.’
And now she was on her third lesson and as nervous as a girl about to sit the baccalauréat.
‘How did it go?’
‘The instructor is very patient.’
The woman standing next to him on the bus presumably couldn’t drive. So why had she gone to do her food shopping on Boulevard Voltaire, when she must live in a different neighbourhood? One of life’s intriguing little mysteries. She was wearing a hat, something else that was becoming rare, especially in the morning. Her string bag contained a chicken, butter, eggs, celery, leeks …
And something hard, lower down, that kept bumping his thigh with every jolt of the bus: potatoes, no doubt.
Why take the bus to go far from home to buy such ordinary groceries, of a kind to be found in every district of Paris? Perhaps she had once lived on Boulevard Voltaire and, since she was used to the tradesmen there, had remained faithful to them.
To his right, a small young man was smoking a pipe that was too short, too thick and thus badly balanced, which obliged him to clamp his jaws on it. Young men almost always choose a pipe that’s too short and thick.
The passengers travelling on the platform were closely packed together. That woman should have gone to sit down inside the bus. Look! Whiting for sale in a fishmonger’s on Rue du Temple. It was a long time since he’d eaten whiting. Why was it that, in his mind, whiting was associated with the spring?
Everything was spring-like today, including his mood, and never mind that the woman with the chicken was staring fixedly ahead, prey to problems that did not trouble ordinary mortals.
‘Sorry.’
‘Not at all.’
He didn’t have the courage to say to her:
‘Instead of being a nuisance to everyone, why don’t you go and sit down inside, with your shopping?’
He could read the same thought in the blue eyes of a bulky man wedged between himself and the conductor. They understood each other. The conductor, too, gave an imperceptible shrug of his shoulders. A sort of freemasonry between men. It was amusing.
The street stalls, especially those laden with vegetables, spilled out over the pavements. The green and white bus had to weave its way through the crowd of housewives, typists and clerks hurrying to their offices. Life was sweet.
Another jolt. The shopping bag yet again, and whatever that solid thing was, potatoes or some such. Stepping back, he bumped unavoidably into someone behind him.
‘Sorry.’
He too murmured an apology, tried to crane round, and glimpsed the face of a young man, a face marked by an emotion that was hard to read.
He would be about twenty-five, unshaven and hatless, and his dark hair was tousled. He looked as if he had not slept, and had recently been through some difficult or painful ordeal.
Threading his way towards the step, the same young man jumped from the bus as it was still moving. They had reached the corner of Rue Rambuteau, not far from Les Halles, the central market, whose strong smells pervaded the air. The young man was walking quickly now, turning round as if afraid of something, then he vanished down Rue des Blancs-Manteaux.
And suddenly, for no precise reason, Maigret clapped his hand to his hip pocket where he usually kept his wallet.
He almost jumped off the bus in turn, because the wallet had gone.
His face flushed, but he managed to stay calm. Only the fat man with blue eyes seemed to realize something had happened.
Maigret’s own smile was ironic, not so much because he had just been the victim of a pickpocket, but because it was completely impossible for him to give chase.
On account of the spring, precisely, and of the air like champagne that he had started to breathe in the day before.
Another tradition, an obsession dating to his childhood, was new shoes. Every spring at the first fine days, he would buy slip-on shoes, the lightest available. Which he had done the previous day.
This morning he was wearing them for the first time. And they pinched. Just walking along Boulevard Richard-Lenoir had been agony and he had reached the bus stop on Boulevard Voltaire with relief.
He would have been quite incapable of running after the thief. And the latter had in any case had plenty of time to disappear into the narrow streets of the Marais.
‘Sorry, monsieur.’
Again! That woman and her shopping bag! This time, he almost burst out with:
‘Why can’t you stop banging into other people with your wretched potatoes?’
But he confined himself to a nod and a smile.
In his office too he encountered that special light of the first fine days, while over the Seine hung a slight mist without the thickness of fog, a mist of millions of bright dancing drops, peculiar to Paris.
‘Everything all right, chief? Nothing to report?’
Janvier was wearing a light-coloured suit that Maigret had not seen before. He too was celebrating spring a little early, since it was only 15 March.
‘No. Or rather yes. I’ve just been robbed.’
‘My wallet.’
‘In the street?’
‘On the platform of the bus.’
‘Was there much money in it?’
‘Only about fifty francs. I don’t carry more than that as a rule.’
‘Your identity papers?’
‘Not just my papers, but my badge!’
The famous badge of the Police Judiciaire, a nightmare for any inspector. In theory, they were supposed to carry it at all times, so that they could prove at any moment that they were members of the criminal investigation department.
It was a splendid badge, made of silver, or rather silver-plated bronze, since the thin layer of silver quickly wore off, leaving it a reddish-brown colour.
On one side was an image of Marianne in a Phrygian bonnet, the initials RF, for République Française, and the word ‘Police’ framed in red enamel. On the other side, the Paris coat of arms, a number and, engraved in small letters, the holder’s name.
Maigret’s badge had the number 0004, since number 1 was for the prefect of police, number 2 for the director of the Police Judiciaire, and number 3, for some reason, that of the head of Special Branch.
Everyone was reluctant to carry the badge in a pocket, despite the rules, since the same regulations provided for the suspension of a month’s pay if the badge was lost.
‘Did you see the thief?’
‘Quite clearly. A young man, thin, tired-looking, someone who hadn’t slept, judging by his eyes and his complexion.’
‘You didn’t recognize him?’
In the days when he worked on Street Patrol, Maigret had known by sight all the pickpockets, not only those of Paris, but some who came from Spain or London when there were festivals or major public events.
It was a rather exclusive speciality, with its own hierarchy. Topnotch pickpockets stirred themselves to travel only if the journey was worth it, but then did not hesitate to cross the Atlantic, for a World’s Fair, for example, or the Olympic Games.
Maigret had rather lost sight of them now. He searched his memory. He was not taking the incident too tragically. The light-heartedness of the morning was still influencing his mood and, paradoxically, it was the woman with her shopping bag with whom he felt the most annoyed.
Maigret and the Nahour Case Page 13