Maigret and the Old People

by Georges Simenon

  As so often, he knocked over his glass. Madame Maigret lit the bedside lamp just as his hand reached the telephone.

  ‘Yes, this is Maigret …’

  It was 3.50, and the silence outside was the silence peculiar to the coldest winter nights.

  ‘Fumel here, detective chief inspector …’

  ‘What was that?’

  He couldn’t hear well. It was as if the person at the other end was talking through a handkerchief.

  ‘Fumel, from the sixteenth …’

  The man was muffling his voice as if afraid to be heard by someone in an adjoining room. As Maigret did not react, he added:

  ‘Aristide.’

  Aristide Fumel, right! Maigret was awake now and wondering why on earth Inspector Fumel from the sixteenth arrondissement was waking him at four in the morning.

  And why, in addition, did his voice sound so mysterious, almost furtive?

  ‘I don’t know if I did the right thing calling you. I immediately informed my direct superior, the local chief inspector. He told me to call the prosecutor’s office. I was put through to the deputy prosecutor on duty.’

  Madame Maigret, even though she could only hear her husband’s replies, was already getting up, searching for her slippers with her toes, wrapping herself in her quilted dressing gown and heading for the kitchen, where the hissing of the gas was soon heard, followed by water running into the kettle.

  ‘Nobody’s quite sure what to do. The deputy ordered me to go back to the scene and wait for him. I wasn’t the one who found the body, it was two officers on bicycles.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I asked you, where?’

  ‘In the Bois de Boulogne. Route des Poteaux. Do you know it? It leads to Avenue Fortunée, not far from Porte Dauphine … He’s a middle-aged man. More or less my age. As far as I can see, he doesn’t have anything in his pockets, no papers. Of course I haven’t moved the body. I don’t know why, but I get the feeling there’s something strange about it and that’s why I chose to phone you. It’s best if the people from the prosecutor’s office don’t find out.’

  ‘Thanks, Fumel.’

  ‘I’m going straight back there, in case they get there faster than they usually do.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At the police station in Rue de la Faisanderie. Are you thinking of coming?’

  Maigret hesitated, still buried in the warmth of his bed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What will you say?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll think of something.’

  He was humiliated, almost furious. Not that this was the first time in the last six months. It wasn’t good old Fumel’s fault.

  ‘Wrap up warm,’ Madame Maigret advised him, from the doorway. ‘It’s freezing out there.’

  Drawing back the curtains, he discovered flowers of frost on the window panes. The street lamps had a special kind of glow that was only seen when it was very cold. There wasn’t a soul about on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, there was no noise, and only one lighted window opposite, presumably in a sickroom.

  So now they were being forced to lie! All because of the prosecutor’s office, the people from the Ministry of the Interior, all these new lawmakers with their elite education, who had got it into their heads to organize the world according to their own ideas.

  As far as they were concerned, the police were merely a cog – a lowly, somewhat shameful cog – in the machine of Justice with a capital J. They weren’t to be trusted, had to be closely supervised, given only a subordinate role.

  Fumel was still part of the old order, as were Janvier and Lucas and about twenty of Maigret’s colleagues, but the others were getting used to the new methods and the new rules, concerned only with preparing for exams in order to rise more quickly through the ranks.

  Poor Fumel! He had never been able to rise through the ranks, because he could never learn to spell or write a report!

  The prosecutor, or one of his deputies, now had to be the first person informed, the first on the scene, in the company of an examining magistrate who hadn’t quite woken up, and these gentlemen gave their opinions as if they had spent their lives discovering bodies and knew more about criminals than anyone else.

  As for the police, they were issued with letters of request.

  ‘Do this and that. Apprehend such and such a person and bring him to my office. But whatever you do, don’t ask him any questions! Everything has to be done according to the rules …’

  There were so many rules, the Official Journal published so many decrees, often contradictory, that they themselves couldn’t make sense of them and lived in fear of being caught out and giving the lawyers an excuse to object.

  Sullenly, he got dressed. Why, whenever he was woken on a winter night like this, did the coffee have a particular taste? The smell of the apartment was different, too, reminding him of his parents’ house when he woke up at 5.30 in the morning.

  ‘Are you going to phone the office to send you a car?’

  No! If he arrived there in a police car, he might be asked to explain himself.

  ‘Phone the taxi rank …’

  They wouldn’t reimburse him for the ride, unless – if this turned out to be murder – he tracked down the killer within a very short time. These days, they only reimbursed taxi fares if you got results. And you still had to prove that you wouldn’t have been able to get there any other way.

  His wife handed him a thick woollen scarf.

  ‘Do you have your gloves?’

  He searched in the pockets of his overcoat.

  ‘Don’t you want a bite to eat?’

  He wasn’t hungry. He seemed to be sulking, and yet, deep down, these were the times he liked, perhaps those he would miss the most when he retired.

  He went downstairs and found a taxi waiting for him at the door, white fumes emerging from the exhaust pipe.

  ‘Bois de Boulogne. Do you know the Route des Poteaux?’

  ‘It’d be a bad thing if I didn’t know it after thirty-five years in this job.’

  This was how veterans consoled themselves for getting older.

  The seats were icy. There were only a few cars on the streets, a few empty buses heading for the termini. The first bars hadn’t yet opened. On the Champs Elysées, cleaning women were busy in the offices.

  ‘Another girl who’s got herself killed?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  ‘I was thinking she wouldn’t have found many clients in the Bois de Boulogne on a night like this.’

  His pipe, too, had a different taste. Burying his hands in his pockets, he calculated that he hadn’t seen Fumel for at least three months, and that he had known him since … pretty much since he himself had first joined the police and was working in a local station.

  Fumel was already ugly then, and people already felt sorry for him, while at the same time making fun of him, firstly because his parents had had the idea of calling him Aristide, and secondly because, in spite of his appearance, he was always getting into amorous tangles.

  He had got married, and after a year his wife had left him without leaving a forwarding address. He had moved heaven and earth to trace her. For years, a description of her had been in the pocket of every policeman and gendarme in France, and Fumel would rush to the morgue every time a female corpse was fished out of the Seine.

  It had become legendary.

  ‘I can’t get it out of my head that something terrible happened to her and it was all my fault.’

  He had one eye that was fixed. It was brighter than the other, almost transparent, which made his gaze unsettling.

  ‘I’ll always love her. And I know I’ll find her again one day.’

  Did he still hope that, at the age of fifty-one? Not that it prevented him from falling in love periodically. Fate continued to be unkind to him, because all of his affairs were incredibly complicated and ended badly.

  He ha
d even, apparently with every justification, been accused of pimping, because of a slut who had played with his affections, and he had narrowly avoided being dismissed from the police force.

  Naive and incompetent as he was in his personal life, how did he nevertheless manage to be one of the best inspectors in Paris?

  The taxi drove through Porte Dauphine and turned right into the Bois de Boulogne. The light of a torch was already visible. Soon afterwards, shadowy figures could be seen at the side of a path.

  Maigret got out of the taxi and paid the fare. One of the figures approached.

  ‘You got here before them,’ Fumel sighed, stamping his feet on the icy ground to warm himself.

  Two bicycles were leaning against a tree. The officers in their capes were also stamping their feet, while a small man in a pearl-grey bowler hat was impatiently checking the time on his watch.

  ‘Dr Boisrond, from the registry office …’

  Maigret shook his hand distractedly and walked over to a dark shape at the foot of a tree. Fumel aimed his torch at it.

  ‘I think you’ll see what I mean, detective chief inspector,’ he said. ‘Seems to me there’s something not quite right …’

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘Those two officers on bicycles, while they were making their rounds.’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘Twelve minutes past three. They thought at first it was a bag someone had thrown at the side of the road.’

  The man was indeed nothing but a shapeless heap on the ground, in the frost-hardened grass. He wasn’t lying full length, but huddled, almost rolled into a ball. One hand stuck out, still clenched, as if he had been trying to grab hold of something.

  ‘What did he die of?’ Maigret asked the doctor.

  ‘I hardly dared touch him before the prosecutor’s people get here, but as far as I can tell, his skull was fractured by one or several blows with a very heavy object.’

  ‘His skull?’ Maigret insisted.

  Because by the light of the torch, all he could see of the face was a swollen, bleeding mass of flesh.

  ‘I can’t say for certain before the post-mortem, but I’d swear those blows were struck afterwards, when the man was dead, or at least dying.’

  ‘You see what I mean, chief?’ Fumel said, looking at Maigret in the semi-darkness.

  Without being especially smart, the man’s clothes were of good quality, the kind of clothes worn by civil servants or pensioners, for example.

  ‘You say there’s nothing in the pockets?’

  ‘I touched them carefully and couldn’t feel anything … Now look around …’

  Fumel shone his torch at the ground around the head. There were no bloodstains.

  ‘He wasn’t attacked here. The doctor agrees, because, given his wounds, he would have lost a lot of blood. So he was brought into the woods, probably by car. I’d even say, from the way he’s all bunched up, that he was pushed out of the car without the people transporting him bothering to get out.’

  The Bois de Boulogne was as silent and motionless as a theatre set. Here and there, the streetlights cast well-defined circles of white light.

  ‘Look, I think they’re here.’

  A long black car was coming from the direction of Porte Dauphine. Fumel waved his torch to light the way and rushed towards the car door.

  Maigret, taking small puffs at his pipe, stood aside.

  ‘This way, sir. My chief has had to go to the Hôpital Cochin for a statement. He’ll be here in a few minutes …’

  Maigret had recognized Deputy Prosecutor Kernavel, a tall, thin, well-dressed man in his thirties. He recognized the examining magistrate, too, someone he had rarely had occasion to work with and who in a way straddled the veterans and the new intake, a brown-haired man in his forties named Cajou. As for the clerk of the court, he kept as far away from the body as possible, as if fearing that the sight of it might make him vomit.

  ‘Who—’ the deputy prosecutor began.

  Then he noticed Maigret and frowned.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t see you at first. How come you’re here?’

  Maigret responded with a vague gesture and an equally vague phrase:

  ‘Pure chance …’

  Not at all pleased, from this point on Kernavel made a show of only addressing Fumel.

  ‘What exactly is this all about?’

  ‘Two bicycle officers on their rounds noticed the body just over an hour ago. I alerted my chief, but as I mentioned, he first had to go to the Hôpital Cochin for an urgent statement and he asked me to inform the prosecutor’s office. Immediately after that, I called Dr Boisrond here …’

  Kernavel looked around for the doctor.

  ‘What have you found, doctor?’

  ‘Fractured skull. Probably multiple fractures.’

  ‘Could it have been an accident? Could he have been knocked down by a car?’

  ‘He was struck several times, first on the head, then on the face, with a blunt instrument.’

  ‘So you’re certain it was murder?’

  Maigret could have kept silent and let them carry on. But he took a step forwards.

  ‘Maybe we could save time by alerting the specialists from Criminal Records?’

  It was again to Fumel that the deputy prosecutor gave his instructions.

  ‘Send one of the officers to phone …’

  He was pale with cold. Everyone was cold, standing around the motionless body.

  ‘A prowler?’

  ‘He isn’t dressed like a prowler, and in this weather, there are hardly any in the woods.’

  ‘Was he robbed?’

  ‘As far as I can see, there’s nothing in his pockets.’

  ‘So he was on his way home and got attacked?’

  ‘There’s no blood on the ground. Like the doctor, I don’t think the murder was committed here.’

  ‘In that case, it was probably a gangland killing.’

  Kernavel was categorical, pleased to have found a solution appropriate to the problem.

  ‘The murder was probably committed in Montmartre, and the perpetrators brought the body here to get rid of it.’

  He turned to Maigret.

  ‘I don’t think, inspector, that this is a case for you. I’m sure you have a number of important investigations in progress. Talking of which, how far have you got with the post office hold-up in the thirteenth?’

  ‘Nowhere yet.’

  ‘What about the previous hold-ups? How many have we had, just in Paris, in the last two weeks?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Which is why I’m quite surprised to find you here dealing with an unimportant case.’

  It wasn’t the first time Maigret had heard this refrain. The gentlemen of the prosecutor’s office were alarmed by the latest crime wave, as they called it, and especially by the spectacular robberies which, as periodically happens, had been on the increase recently.

  That meant that a new gang had recently formed.

  ‘Still no clues?’

  ‘None at all.’

  It wasn’t quite true. Although he had no clues, strictly speaking, he nevertheless had a theory that held up and which the facts seemed to confirm. But that was nobody’s business, especially not that of the prosecutor’s office.

  ‘Listen, Cajou. I want you to deal with this case. If you’ll take my advice, make sure it’s talked about as little as possible. It’s a horrible crime but of no great importance. I mean to say, if these underworld characters start killing each other, it’s better for everyone. Do you understand me?’

  He turned again to Fumel.

  ‘You’re an inspector in the sixteenth, is that right?’

  Fumel nodded.

  ‘How long have you been in the police?’

  ‘Thirty years. Twenty-nine, to be exact.’

  To Maigret:

  ‘Is he well thought of?’

  ‘He knows his job.’

  Kernavel drew the exam
ining magistrate aside and spoke to him in a low voice. When the two men came back, Cajou seemed a little embarrassed.

  ‘Well, detective chief inspector, I thank you for having put yourself out. I’m going to stay in contact with Inspector Fumel here and will give him my instructions. If at any moment, I consider that he needs help, I’ll issue a letter of request or summon you to my office. You have an important task that requires your urgent attention, so I won’t keep you any longer.’

  It wasn’t just the cold that was making Maigret pale. He gripped his pipe so hard between his teeth that there was a slight cracking of the vulcanite.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, as if to take his leave.

  ‘Do you have transport?’

  ‘I’ll find a taxi at Porte Dauphine.’

  Kernavel hesitated, almost offered to drive him there, but Maigret was already walking away, with a little wave of the hand to Fumel.

  Half an hour later, he would probably be able to tell them quite a lot about the dead man. But he wasn’t yet sure, which is why he had said nothing.

  From the moment he had bent over the body, he had had the impression that he knew who it was. Even though the face had been reduced to a pulp, he would have sworn he had recognized the man.

  He only needed one little item of evidence, which they would discover when they stripped the body.

  Admittedly, if he was right, they would reach the same conclusion with the fingerprints.

  At the taxi rank, he found the same driver who had brought him.

  ‘Finished already?’

  ‘Take me home, to Boulevard Richard-Lenoir.’

  ‘Got it. All the same, it was quick work … Who was it?’

  A bar was open on Place de la République, and Maigret almost asked the driver to stop, so that he could have a quick drink. Out of a sense of decency, he didn’t do so.

  Even though his wife had gone back to bed, she heard him climb the stairs and came and opened the door to him. She, too, was surprised.

  ‘So soon?’

  Then, immediately afterwards, in an anxious voice:

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing. Those gentlemen don’t need me.’

  He told her as little as he could. It was rare for him to talk about the affairs of Quai des Orfèvres at home.