‘I hope you’re not insinuating …’
‘Me? Not a bit. Listen! There’s a car coming. I bet it’s Madame Grandmaison arriving from Caen. Would you do me the favour of not telling her anything?’
The doorbell. The maid’s footsteps in the hall. The sounds of low voices in conversation, then the maid’s face looking in through the half-open door. But why wasn’t she saying anything? Why such anxious looks at the master of the house?
‘Well?’ said he, impatiently.
‘It’s just that …’
Maigret pushed her aside and saw no one in the hall but the uniformed chauffeur.
‘You’ve lost Madame Grandmaison en route?’ He demanded bluntly.
‘Well … Well, she …’
‘Where did she get out of the car?’
‘At the crossroads linking Caen and Deauville. She did not feel well.’
In his study, the mayor was on his feet, breathing heavily. The look on his face was grim.
‘Wait for me!’ he shouted to the chauffeur.
And finding his way blocked by Maigret’s massive form, he hesitated.
‘I suppose you’re ready to confess …’
‘Everything. You’re right. We must go there together.’
12. The Unfinished Letter
The car stopped at a bare crossroads. The chauffeur looked back over his shoulder for instructions. Ever since leaving Ouistreham, Monsieur Grandmaison had not been the same man.
On his home ground he had always managed to control himself, trying to maintain his dignity even under the most distressing circumstances.
Not any more! He was now in a state close to panic, which his battered face made even more obvious. His restless gaze roamed constantly around the passing countryside.
When the car stopped, he looked at Maigret expectantly, but the inspector simply asked, with quiet mischief, ‘What shall we do now?’
Not a soul on the road or in the orchards nearby. Madame Grandmaison had clearly not left her car intending to sit down by the roadside. If she had sent her chauffeur on, after alighting there, it was because she was meeting someone or had suddenly seen a person with whom she wished to speak in private.
The trees were dripping with rain. The air smelled strongly of damp earth. Cows stared at the car, chewing their cud …
The mayor peered all around, perhaps expecting to spot his wife behind a hedge or tree trunk.
‘Look closely!’ said Maigret, as if training a rookie.
There were some recognizable tracks on the road to Dives. A vehicle had stopped there, had some trouble turning around on the narrow road and driven off again.
‘An old van. Let’s go, driver!’
They did not drive far. Well before Dives, the tracks vanished near a stony side road. Monsieur Grandmaison was still tense, his eyes glittering with both anxiety and hatred.
‘What do you think?’
‘There’s a small village that way, about five hundred metres on.’
‘In which case, we’d best leave the car here.’
Exhaustion gave Maigret a look of inhuman indifference. He was literally asleep on his feet. He seemed to advance thanks only to his own momentum. Anyone watching them walk along that road would have thought the mayor was in charge, and the inspector, some underling following placidly in his wake.
They passed a little house surrounded by chickens, where a woman stared at the two men in amazement. Then they arrived at the back of a church not much bigger than a thatched cottage and, to the left, a tobacconist’s shop.
‘You don’t mind?’ asked Maigret, bringing out his empty pouch.
He stepped inside the little shop, which sold groceries and all sorts of household items. An elderly man emerged from a room with a vaulted ceiling and summoned his daughter to bring Maigret his tobacco. While the door was open, the inspector glimpsed a wall telephone.
‘At what time did my friend come here to place a call this morning?’
‘A good hour ago,’ replied the girl promptly.
‘So the lady has arrived?’
‘Oh, yes. She even came in here for directions. They’re not complicated, it’s the last house, the lane on the right.’
Maigret left, still moving like a sleepwalker. He found Monsieur Grandmaison standing in front of the church, looking all around in a manner certain to arouse the suspicions of the entire village.
‘It occurs to me,’ murmured Maigret, ‘that we should split up. You search off to the left, by the fields, while I look on the right.’
He caught a gleam of delight in the man’s eye. The mayor could not hide his hope of finding his wife on his own and talking privately with her.
‘Good idea,’ he replied, feigning indifference.
The hamlet consisted of no more than twenty poky little houses that clumped together enough in one area to give the illusion of a street, which did not prevent real manure from piling up there. It was still raining, a rain so fine it was almost a mist, and no one was outdoors. Curtains were twitching, however. One could just imagine, behind them, the usual wrinkled old women peering out from their dimly lit homes.
At the very end of the hamlet, in front of the fenced-in meadow where two horses were galloping around, there was a single-storey building with a crooked roof and two front steps. Maigret looked back, heard the mayor’s footsteps at the other end of the village, then walked into the house without knocking.
Something moved in the shadows that pressed in on the glowing hearth. A black shape; the white patch of an old woman’s house cap.
She hobbled over, bent almost in two.
‘What d’you want?’
The stuffy room smelled of straw, cabbage and chicken coops. There were even chicks pecking around by the fireplace.
Maigret’s head almost touched the ceiling. Noticing a door at the far end of the room, he realized that speed was in order. Without a word, he marched over and opened the door: Madame Grandmaison was busy writing, with Jean Martineau standing next to her.
There was a moment of surprise and dismay. The woman rose from her straw-bottomed chair. Martineau’s first impulse was to grab and crumple up her piece of paper. Both of them instinctively drew close together.
The cottage had only these two rooms, and this was the old woman’s bedroom. On the whitewashed walls, two portraits and some cheap chromos in black-and-gold frames. A very high bed. The table where Madame Grandmaison had been writing was the wash stand, from which the basin had been set aside.
‘Your husband will be here in a few minutes!’ announced Maigret, by way of an introduction.
‘Is that your doing?’ demanded Martineau angrily.
‘Hush, Raymond.’
She had used his first name – and called him not Jean, but Raymond. Reflecting on these details, Maigret went to listen briefly at the front door.
‘Will you give me the letter you were writing?’
The couple looked at each other. Madame Grandmaison was pale and wan. Maigret had seen her once before, but only in the performance of her most sacred duties as a woman of her social standing: receiving guests at home.
At that time he had been impressed by her perfect performance and the conventional graciousness with which she could offer a cup of tea or respond to a compliment.
He had imagined her life: the cares of a household in Caen, the social occasions, the children’s upbringing. Two or three months spent at health spas or luxury resorts. A certain level of vanity, but more concern about her dignity than her beauty.
Something of all that doubtless remained in the woman now before him, but there was a new element. She was in fact showing more sang-froid, even more raw nerve than her companion, who seemed on the verge of real collapse.
‘Give him the paper,’ she said, as Martineau was about to tear it up.
There was almost nothing on it.
Dear Headmaster,
Would you be kind enough to …
The large, backwards-slopi
ng hand of every girl educated at boarding school at the turn of the century.
‘You received two telephone calls this morning, didn’t you? One from your husband … Or rather, you were the one who called, to tell him you would be arriving in Ouistreham. Then a call from Monsieur Martineau, asking you to come here. He had you picked up at the crossroads by a small van.’
Just then Maigret saw something he hadn’t noticed before, on the table, behind the ink pot: a neat pile of thousand-franc bills.
Martineau followed his eyes … Too late to do anything! And too much for him: he collapsed in sudden lethargy on the edge of the old woman’s bed and stared despondently at the floor.
‘Are you the one who brought him that money?’
And once again, there was the same feeling that had marked this entire case. The same atmosphere as when Maigret had caught Big Louis beating the mayor in his villa in Ouistreham – and both men had refused to talk! The same atmosphere as when the crew of the Saint-Michel had refused to answer him the night before!
A fierce refusal, an absolute determination not to explain anything at all.
‘I suppose this letter is addressed to the headmaster of a boarding school. Your son is at Stanislas, so the letter probably concerns him. As for the money … Of course! Martineau must have abandoned the grounded schooner to swim to shore, and in his hurry he probably left his wallet behind. You brought him some money so that—’
Maigret abruptly changed the subject, and his tone:
‘And the others, Martineau? All safe and sound?’
The man hesitated, but could not keep himself, in the end, from blinking in affirmation.
‘I won’t ask you where they’re hiding. I know you won’t tell.’
‘True!’
‘What’s true?’
Someone had just pushed the front door wide open. The outraged voice was the mayor’s – and he was unrecognizable. Panting with anger, fists clenched, tensed to spring at the enemy, he glared at his wife, at Martineau, at the money still lying on the table.
But the menace in his eyes betrayed fear, too, and the dread of disaster.
‘What’s true? What did he say? What new lies is he telling? … And her? She’s the one …’
Choking, he couldn’t get the words out. Maigret watched, prepared to intervene.
‘What’s true? What’s going on! … Are they plotting something? … And whose money is that?’
The old woman was bustling about in the front room, calling her chickens to the door.
‘Here, chick-chick! Chick-chick!’
The scattered corn clattered softly down on the bluestone steps. A neighbour’s hen was fended off with a foot.
‘G’won home with you, Blackie …’
In the bedroom, nothing. Heavy silence. As pallid and depressing as the sky that rainy morning.
People possessed by fear. Because they were afraid! All of them! Martineau, the woman, the mayor … It was as if each one of them were alone with that fear … Each one afraid in a different way!
Then Maigret spoke slowly and solemnly, like a judge.
‘I have been instructed by the public prosecutor to find and arrest the murderer of Captain Joris, wounded by a bullet to the head and, six weeks later, poisoned in his bed with strychnine. Does anyone here wish to make a statement regarding this crime?’
Until that moment, no one had noticed that the room was unheated. Yet suddenly, they felt cold … Each syllable had rung out as if in a church. The words still seemed to linger in the air. Poisoned … Strychnine …
Especially Maigret’s last question.
Does anyone here wish to make a statement? …
Martineau was the first to hang his head. Madame Grandmaison, her eyes gleaming, kept looking back and forth between him and her husband.
But no one said a thing. No one dared face the look in Maigret’s eyes, which seemed to grow darker.
Two minutes … Three minutes … The old woman put a few logs on the fire in the next room.
Then Maigret’s voice, again, deliberately curt and stripped of all emotion.
‘In the name of the law, Jean Martineau, I arrest you.’
A woman’s scream. Madame Grandmaison flung herself desperately at Martineau but fell in a faint almost at the same instant.
With a savage look, the mayor turned towards the wall.
And Martineau heaved a sigh of weary resignation, not daring even to go to help the unconscious woman.
It was Maigret who bent down to her, then looked around for the water jug from the wash stand.
He went to ask the old woman for some vinegar, the smell of which now mingled with the already complex odour of the cottage.
A few moments later Madame Grandmaison came to, and, after a few uncontrollable sobs, sank into an almost complete state of prostration.
‘Do you think you can walk?’
She nodded. She could walk, but in a jolting, uneven way.
‘You will follow me, gentlemen, will you not? I trust that I may count, this time, on your compliance?’
The old woman watched them cross her kitchen in some consternation. Only after they were outside did she rush to the door.
‘You’re coming back for lunch, then, Monsieur Raymond?’
Raymond! It was the second time he had been called that. The man shook his head.
The four of them walked on through the village. Martineau stopped in front of the little shop, hesitated, and turned to Maigret.
‘Please forgive me, but as I’m not sure I’ll ever return here, I don’t wish to leave any unpaid debts behind. I owe these people for a phone call, a grog and a pack of cigarettes.’
It was Maigret who paid. They walked around the church and at the end of the stony road found the car waiting for them. After telling them all to get in, the inspector paused to think before speaking to the driver.
‘To Ouistreham. There you will stop first at the police station.’
The journey took place in complete silence. Rain still fell from a sky of solid grey as a freshening wind shook the dripping trees.
Outside the police station, Maigret had Martineau get out and gave instructions to Lucas.
‘Keep him in the lock-up. You’re responsible for him! Anything new here?’
‘The tug’s arrived. They’re waiting for the tide to come in.’
The car drove away. When they swung by the harbour, Maigret made another short stop.
It was noon. The lock workers were at their posts, because a steamer was due in from Caen. The strip of sand along the beach had narrowed and the foaming waves were almost licking at the dunes.
On the right, a crowd watched a fascinating spectacle: the tug from Trouville was anchored not 500 metres off the coast. A dinghy was fighting its way over to the Saint-Michel, now half righted with the incoming tide.
Maigret noticed that the mayor was also watching the drama, from inside the car. Then Captain Delcourt came out of the bar.
‘Will it work?’ asked Maigret.
‘I think we’ll save her. For the last two hours we’ve been lightening her, removing ballast. If we can keep her from breaking adrift …’
And he looked up at the sky as if reading the vagaries of the wind on a map.
‘It’s just that we have to finish before the tide turns again.’
Glimpsing the mayor and his wife inside their car, he nodded to them deferentially, then gave Maigret a questioning look.
‘Anything new?’
‘Don’t know.’
Lucas was approaching, and he did have news, but he drew his chief aside before delivering it.
‘We’ve got Big Louis.’
‘What?’
‘He slipped up! This morning the police in Dives found tracks through some fields. The footsteps of a man walking straight ahead and clambering over the hedgerows. The trail led to the Orne, to the place where a fisherman kept his rowing boat hauled up on the bank. Except that the boat was on the other s
ide of the river.’
‘The officers followed him?’
‘Yes, and came to the beach, more or less opposite the Saint-Michel. At the edge of the dunes over there is a—’
‘Ruined chapel!’
‘You already know?’
‘Notre-Dame-des-Dunes.’
‘Right. They nabbed Big Louis there. He was holed up, watching the salvage operation. When I arrived he was begging the officers not to take him away yet, so that he could watch from the beach until the job was done. I gave permission. He’s still there, in handcuffs. And shouting instructions! He’s afraid they’ll lose his boat … Don’t you want to see him?’
‘I don’t know … maybe, in a little while.’
For the Grandmaisons were still waiting in the car.
‘You think we’ll ever get to the bottom of this?’
No reply.
‘Personally,’ continued Lucas, ‘I’m beginning to think we won’t. They’re all liars! And the ones who aren’t lying won’t talk, even though they know something! It’s as if everyone around here were responsible for Joris’ death …’
But the inspector simply shrugged and walked away muttering, ‘See you later …’
Back in the car, he surprised the chauffeur by telling him, ‘Back to the house, now,’ as if he were speaking of his own home.
‘The house in Caen?’
To tell the truth, the inspector hadn’t meant that, but the chauffeur had given him an idea.
‘Yes, in Caen!’
Monsieur Grandmaison scowled. His wife, though, could not react at all. She seemed to be allowing events to carry her along and offered not the slightest resistance.
Between the city gates and Rue du Four, a good fifty hats were doffed. Everyone appeared to recognize Monsieur Grandmaison’s car. And the greetings were respectful. The ship-owner was like a nobleman travelling through his domain.
‘A simple formality,’ said Maigret casually when they arrived at the house. ‘Please excuse me for having brought you here, but as I mentioned this morning, this affair must be resolved by tonight.’
A calm street, lined with imposing mansions of a kind found only in the provinces these days. The house, its stones dark with age, was fronted by a courtyard. And on the gate was a brass plaque with the name of the family’s shipping company.
The Misty Harbour Page 13