‘I don’t know.’
‘I do. You thought about the forty-eight thousand francs that were in the biscuit tin and you wrapped that tin in a newspaper, without thinking that it was that morning’s paper.
‘As you left, you remembered the letters and stuffed them in your pocket.
‘You were going to be rich. Now you had someone to blackmail, not over a liaison, but over a murder …’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘The fact that you wiped the furniture and the door handles. If only your prints alone had been there, they wouldn’t have mattered, because you could have denied that you were in the apartment. It was the other man that you were protecting by doing what you did because once he was in prison he wouldn’t be worth a fig.’
Maigret sat down heavily again and stuffed a new pipe.
‘You went home to put the biscuit tin on top of the wardrobe. At the time you weren’t thinking about the letters that were in your pocket. You remembered me and you thought that a former schoolmate wouldn’t risk beating you up. You were always afraid of being hit. You remember? There was a little kid, Bambois, if I remember correctly, who scared you just by threatening to pinch your arm.’
‘You’re cruel.’
‘What about you? If you hadn’t behaved like a scoundrel, Josée wouldn’t be dead.’
‘I’ll never forgive myself.’
‘That won’t bring her back to life. And your remorse doesn’t concern me. You came to act out your little play and, from the first few words, I knew that something wasn’t quite right.
‘In the apartment, too, everything seemed fake, twisted, but I couldn’t find the thread that would have led me to the truth.
‘It was the concierge who intrigued me the most. She’s much stronger than you.’
‘She could never stand me.’
‘And you could never stand her either. By saying nothing about the visitor, she not only earned her two thousand two hundred francs but got you in a terrible mess. As for jumping into the Seine, you made a mistake, because that’s what made me think of the letters.
‘Obviously you weren’t trying to drown yourself. A good swimmer doesn’t drown himself by throwing himself off Pont-Neuf, a few metres away from a barge, when the pavements are crammed with people.
‘You had just remembered that you had the letters in your pocket. One of my inspectors was on your heels. You could have been searched at any moment.’
‘I wouldn’t have expected you to guess.’
‘I’ve been in this job for thirty-five years,’ Maigret muttered.
He passed into the adjacent office to say a few words to Lucas.
‘Don’t on any account let them wind you up,’ he added.
He came back into his office, where Florentin seemed to have deflated. He was now nothing but a big empty body, a hollow face with evasive eyes.
‘If I understand correctly, I’m going to be prosecuted for blackmail?’
‘That will depend …’
‘On what?’
‘On the examining magistrate … And partly on me too. Don’t forget that you wiped the prints so that we wouldn’t find the murderer. That could implicate you as an accomplice.’
‘You won’t do that, will you?’
‘I’ll talk to the magistrate.’
‘A year in prison, two at most, I might be able to bear, but if I have to be locked up for years I’ll leave feet first. Even now my heart sometimes shows signs of weakness …’
He was bound to ask to be put in the infirmary. This was the boy who had made them laugh in Moulins. When a class had become boring, they turned to him to play the fool.
Because they egged him on. They knew it was what he wanted to do. He would pull new faces, come up with new pranks.
The clown … Once he had pretended to drown in the Nièvre, and it took them a quarter of an hour to find him behind some reeds to which he had swum underwater.
‘What are we waiting for?’ he asked, worried again.
On the one hand, he was relieved to be done with it, while on the other he was worried about seeing his former schoolmate changing his mind.
There was a knock at the door. It was old Joseph, who came and set down a visiting card on Maigret’s desk.
‘Bring him in. And go and tell Inspector Janvier to bring me the person who is with him.’
He would have given anything for a glass of cold beer, or even another sip of cognac.
‘My lawyer, Monsieur Bourdon.’
One of the star figures of the bar, a former president of the association, who had been considered for the Académie Française. Cold and dignified, Victor Lamotte, limping slightly, sat down on one of the chairs and gave Florentin only a distracted glance.
‘I assume, inspector, that you have sound reasons for summoning my client? I have learned that on Friday you organized a confrontation whose legality I reserve the right to question.’
‘Take a seat, Maître Bourdon,’ Maigret replied.
Janvier pushed into the room an agitated Madame Blanc, who immediately froze in front of the lame man.
‘Come in, Madame Blanc. Please sit down.’
It looked as if she suddenly found herself faced with a new problem.
‘Who’s this?’ she asked, pointing at Maître Bourdon.
‘Your friend Monsieur Lamotte’s lawyer.’
‘Have you arrested him?’
Her eyes were bulging more than ever.
‘Not yet, but I will in a few moments. You acknowledge, do you not, that it was he who, last Wednesday, on his way down from Mademoiselle Papet’s apartment, gave you two thousand two hundred francs to keep quiet?’
She gritted her teeth without replying.
‘You were wrong to give her that money, Monsieur Lamotte. The size of the sum gave her a taste for it. She thought if her silence had been bought at that price, it must be worth even more.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The lawyer frowned.
‘Let me explain why it was you that I ended up choosing among several suspects. On Saturday, Madame Blanc, whom I had left under the surveillance of an inspector, managed to lose him by going into a shop with two exits. She wanted to see you to demand an extra payment. And she was in a hurry, because she was afraid that I would arrest you at any moment.’
‘I didn’t see that woman on Saturday.’
‘I know. What matters is that she looked for you. Three of you each had your day: François Paré on Wednesday, Courcel from Thursday evening until Friday … Jean-Luc Bodard was more irregular.
‘Generally speaking a provincial tradesman who comes and spends a few days on business in Paris every week goes home on Saturday. And yet that wasn’t true in your case, because your Saturday afternoon was devoted to Mademoiselle Papet.
‘The concierge knew it, and that’s why she tried to see you. She didn’t know that since you no longer had an appointment you had left Paris the previous day.’
‘Ingenious,’ the lawyer said, ‘but I doubt that a jury will be satisfied with such slender evidence.’
The concierge said nothing, heavier and more motionless than ever.
‘Of course, I won’t arrest your client on that basis. Léon Florentin here has confessed everything.’
‘I thought he was the alleged culprit.’
Florentin, shoulders hunched, no longer dared to look at anyone.
‘Not the culprit,’ Maigret replied. ‘The victim.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
Victor Lamotte had followed him and shifted on his chair.
‘He was the one at whom, in theory, the gun was being pointed. He was the one that Monsieur Lamotte threatened, in order to get hold of some compromising letters. As it happens, he is a very bad marksman, and the gun wasn’t very accurate either.’
‘Is that true?’ the lawyer asked his client.
He hadn’t expected the discussion to take such a turn. Lamotte di
dn’t reply and glared fiercely at Florentin.
‘I should add, for the sake of your argument, that I am not sure your client killed deliberately. He is a man who doesn’t like opposition, and being contradicted puts him in a rage. Unfortunately, he had a gun in his hand, and the shot went off …’
This time Lamotte trembled and turned towards Maigret in astonishment.
‘If you would wait for me for a moment.’
Maigret repeated the journey along the corridors of the Palais that he had made on Saturday. He knocked at the door of the examining magistrate and found him immersed in a thick folder, while the clerk had taken over the tidying of the back room.
‘Finished!’ Maigret announced, slumping on a chair.
‘He confessed?’
‘Who?’
‘Well … that fellow Florentin, I assume …’
‘He didn’t kill anybody. But I need an arrest warrant in his name. Grounds: attempted blackmail …’
‘And the murderer?’
‘He’s waiting in my office with his lawyer, Maître Bourdon.’
‘That will give us a headache. He’s one of the most—’
‘He will be very compliant. I won’t go so far as to say that it was an accident, but there are many extenuating circumstances.’
‘Which of the two …’
‘The lame one, Victor Lamotte, a wine dealer from Chartrons, Bordeaux, where matters of dignity, precedence and, incidentally, morality are not taken lightly.
‘This afternoon I will draw up my report, and I hope to be able to give it to you before the end of the day. It’s almost lunchtime and …’
‘You’re hungry?’
‘Thirsty!’ Maigret admitted.
A few minutes later, in his office, he was handing the documents signed by the magistrate to Lapointe and Janvier.
‘Take them to Criminal Records to get the formalities out of the way and then drop them off at the cells.’
Janvier asked, pointing at the concierge who had risen to her feet:
‘What about her?’
‘We’ll see about that later. In the meantime, let her go home. The lodge can’t be left empty for ever.’
She looked at him, her eyes blank. Her lips began to move, like water bubbling on a stove, but she said nothing and made for the door.
‘Will you join me at the Brasserie Dauphine, boys?’
It was only afterwards that it occurred to him that it might have been cruel to mention this arrangement with his colleagues out loud in front of two men who were going to be locked up.
Five minutes later, at the bar of the familiar little restaurant, part of which was a bistro, he said:
‘A beer. In the biggest glass you have.’
In thirty-five years, he hadn’t met a single one of his fellow pupils from the Lycée Banville.
And of all people it had to be Florentin!
1.
For the first time since they had been going for dinner with the Pardons once a month, Maigret had a memory of the evening at Boulevard Voltaire that was almost painful. It had started in Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. His wife had phoned for a taxi, because for three days it had, according to the radio, been raining harder than at any time in the past thirty-five years. The rain was coming down in sheets, frozen, lashing people’s hands and faces, making their wet clothes stick to their bodies.
On the stairs, in lifts and offices, feet left dark prints, and everyone was in a terrible mood.
They had gone downstairs and spent almost half an hour on the doorstep, increasingly numb with cold, waiting for the taxi to arrive. Then, on top of everything, they had had to haggle for the driver to agree to take them such a short distance.
‘I’m sorry. We’re late.’
‘Everybody’s late these days. Would you mind if we sat down at the table straight away.’
The apartment was warm and intimate, and they felt all the better for the sound of the storm rattling the shutters. Madame Pardon had made her unparalleled boeuf bourguignon, and the dish, filling yet refined, had been the focus of their conversation.
Then they had talked about provincial cookery, about cassoulet and potée Lorraine, about tripes à la mode de Caën and bouillabaisse.
‘Basically most of these recipes were born of necessity. If they had had refrigerators in the Middle Ages …’
What else had they talked about? The two women, as usual, had ended up going to sit in a corner of the sitting room, where they chatted in low voices. Pardon had taken Maigret into his surgery to show him a rare edition given to him by one of his patients. They had sat down in their usual places, and Madame Pardon had come to bring them coffee and calvados.
Pardon was tired. For quite a long time his features had been drawn, and sometimes a kind of resignation appeared in his eyes. He still worked fifteen hours a day, without a word of complaint or recrimination, in his surgery in the morning, and spent part of the afternoon lugging his heavy medical bag from street to street, then back home, where the waiting room was always full.
‘If I had a son and he’d told me he intended to become a doctor, I think I would try to dissuade him.’
Maigret nearly looked away out of modesty. Coming from Pardon, these words were most unexpected, because he was passionate about his profession, and it was impossible to imagine him practising another one.
This time, though, he was discouraged and pessimistic, and most importantly he was going so far as to express that pessimism.
‘They’re turning us into civil servants, and transforming medicine into a big machine for producing basic treatment.’
Maigret studied him, lighting his pipe.
‘Not only civil servants,’ the doctor continued, ‘but bad civil servants, because we can no longer devote the necessary time to each patient. Sometimes I’m ashamed as I guide them to the door, nearly pushing them. I see their worried, even imploring faces. I feel that they expected something from me, questions, words, minutes, in short, during which I would attend to their case.’
He raised his glass.
‘Your good health.’
He tried to smile, a mechanical smile that didn’t suit him.
‘Do you know how many patients I’ve seen today? Eighty-two. And that’s not exceptional. After which they make us fill in various forms that take up our evenings. I’m sorry for boring you with that. You must have worries of your own at Quai des Orfèvres.’
What had they talked about after that? The sort of mundane matters that you don’t remember the next day. Pardon was sitting at his desk, smoking his cigarette, Maigret in the stiff armchair reserved for the patients. The air was filled with a particular smell with which he was very familiar, because he encountered it every time he visited. A smell that in a way reminded him of the offices at the station. A smell of poverty.
Pardon’s patients were local, almost all of them from a very modest background.
The door opened. Eugénie, the maid, who had worked at Boulevard Voltaire for so long that she was more or less part of the family, announced:
‘It’s the Italian, sir.’
‘Which Italian? Pagliati?’
‘Yes, sir. He’s in a terrible state. Apparently it’s very urgent.’
It was 10.30. Pardon got to his feet and opened the door of the sad waiting room, in which magazines were scattered over a pedestal table.
‘What’s wrong, Gino?’
‘It’s not me, doctor. Nor my wife. There’s a wounded man on the pavement who seems to be dying.’
‘Where?’
‘Rue Popincourt, less than a hundred metres from here.’
‘Was it you who found him?’
Pardon was already in the doorway, putting on his black overcoat, looking for his doctor’s bag, and Maigret, quite naturally, put on his coat as well. The doctor opened the door to the sitting room.
‘We’ll be back right away. An injured man on Rue Popincourt.’
‘Take your umbrella.’
&nb
sp; He didn’t take it. It would have seemed ridiculous, holding an umbrella as he leaned over a man dying in the middle of the pavement in the pelting rain.
Gino was a Neapolitan. He kept a grocer’s shop on the corner of Rue du Chemin-Vert and Rue Popincourt. More precisely, it was his wife, Lucia, who kept the shop while he made fresh pasta in the back room, ravioli and tortellini. The couple were popular in the area. Pardon had treated Gino for high blood pressure in the past.
The pasta-maker was a short man with a heavy, thick body and a flushed face.
‘We were coming back from my brother-in-law’s in Rue de Charonne. My sister-in-law is going to have a baby, and we’re expecting to drive her to the maternity hospital at any moment. We were walking in the rain when I saw …’
Half of his words were lost in the storm. The gutters were real torrents that you had to jump over, and the few cars sent dirty water spraying several metres.
The spectacle that awaited him in Rue Popincourt was unexpected. There were no pedestrians from one end of the street to the other, and only a few windows, apart from that of a small café, were still lit.
About fifty metres from that café, a stout woman stood motionlessly beneath an umbrella shaken by the wind, and the light from a streetlamp revealed the shape of a body lying at her feet.
It brought back old memories for Maigret. Even before he had been at the head of the Crime Squad, while he had only been an inspector, he had sometimes been first on the scene of a brawl, a settling of scores, a knife attack.
The man was young. He looked barely twenty, he was wearing a suede jacket, and his hair was quite long at the back. He had fallen forwards, and the back of his jacket was stained with blood.
‘Have you called the police?’
Pardon, crouching beside the injured man, interrupted:
‘Tell them to send an ambulance.’
That meant that the stranger was alive, and Maigret moved towards the light that he could see fifty metres away. Inscribed on the faintly lit display window were the words: ‘Chez Jules’. He pushed the glass door, hung with a cream-coloured curtain, and stepped into an atmosphere so calm that it was almost unreal. It was like a genre painting.
It was a bar in the old style, with sawdust on the floor and a strong smell of wine and spirits. Four middle-aged men, three of them fat and red-faced, were playing cards.
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