“Now, now! Keep calm. The doctor will be here in a minute.”
He hadn’t appeared the previous evening, so Maigret had not seen him since he’d come to collect his wife. The prospect of seeing him again banished for the moment all other preoccupations.
“You’ll leave me alone with him.”
“And we’ll go to Leduc’s, shan’t we?”
“No, we won’t . . . There’s his car now. Leave now.”
As a rule, Rivaud took the stairs three at a time and strode into his patient’s bedroom. Today he mounted step-by-step and came in rather stiffly, though he bowed quite graciously to Madame Maigret as she left the room. Coming over toward Maigret, he put his bag down on the bedside table without so much as a word.
The routine in the morning was always the same. He would put the thermometer under Maigret’s tongue and then start undoing the bandages.
That was the situation this morning when the conversation started.
“As a matter of course,” began the doctor, “nothing could affect my attitude to a patient. I’ll give you exactly the same attention as before. Only, from now on, I should like our relations to end there. And, considering you have no official status here, I forbid you to bother my family anymore.”
It wasn’t difficult to guess that the speech had been prepared beforehand. Maigret didn’t flinch. He was naked from the waist up. The doctor took the thermometer out of his mouth, and muttered:
“A hundred point two.”
It was high. He knew it. Rivaud frowned and, without looking at his patient, went on:
“If it hadn’t been for yesterday, I should have no hesitation in telling you to go and finish your cure in some quiet country place. But if I tell you so now, it’s liable to be misconstrued . . . Am I hurting you?”
He was probing the wound as he spoke.
“No. Go on.”
But Rivaud had nothing more to say, and not another word was spoken. He bandaged Maigret up again, put his things away, and washed his hands. At the door, however, he turned and looked the detective in the face.
A difficult look to interpret. Difficult even to say what side of the man was uppermost. Was it the surgeon, the husband of the enigmatic Madame Rivaud, or the brother-in-law of Françoise?
Only one thing was certain. It was a worried look. For a moment he seemed on the point of saying something, but he thought better of it and went out into the passage, where a whispered conversation took place between him and Madame Maigret.
The trouble was that Maigret could now remember his dream perfectly. Was it a bad omen? There certainly were others. When his wound was dressed, for instance, it had hurt much more than on the last two days, though he hadn’t admitted it. Another bad sign was that persistent temperature.
He reached for his pipe on the bedside table, but then put it down again.
His wife came in heaving a sigh.
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t want to say anything. But I plied him with questions, and he finally told me he had advised you to have a complete rest.”
“Quite so. And now tell me how the case is proceeding.”
Madame Maigret sat down with an air of resignation, though every line of her body expressed disapproval and misgiving. She deplored his obstinacy and doubted his judgment.
“The postmortem?”
“As near as they can tell the man must have died soon after shooting you.”
“They haven’t found another revolver?”
“No . . . They’ve no clue to his identity. There’s a photograph of the corpse in the morning papers, as no one can identify him. It’s even in the Paris papers.”
“Let’s see.”
She handed him the paper, and it was with a rather queer sensation that he looked at the picture. For, unreasonable though it was, he had the feeling that he was the one person in the world who had known the man.
It’s true he’d never seen him properly; but they’d spent a night together. He recalled his companion’s troubled sleep—that is, if he’d slept at all—his deep sighs, and those sounds that Maigret had taken for sobs . . .
And the two legs hanging down from the upper couchette, the patent-leather boots, the thick gray socks . . .
The photograph was horrible, like all police photographs of corpses, touched up as they are to make them look more like a living person and thus facilitate identification.
A dull face. Glassy eyes. And Maigret was not surprised to see a gray beard. Why had he always thought of him with a beard? Even in the railway carriage he had never pictured him otherwise.
And a beard he had, or at least an inch or so of stubble all over his face.
“All the same, this case is no business of yours.”
Madame Maigret was at him again, though she spoke very gently and apologetically. She was genuinely concerned about his condition. By the way she looked at him, you’d have thought he was seriously ill.
“At dinner last night I was listening to what the people were saying. One and all, they’re against you. You could question them till you’re blue in the face, you wouldn’t get a thing out of them. And if that’s the case, surely . . .”
“Get a pen and paper, will you?”
He dictated a telegram to a friend of his who was now in the Algiers police:
Urgent please cable Bergerac information Dr. Rivaud at Algiers hospital five years ago greetings thanks.
Madame Maigret’s face spoke volumes. She did whatever he asked, but she had no faith in this investigation.
He was conscious of the fact and it infuriated him. Skepticism in other people did not offend him, but in her it was intolerable.
“I’m not asking your advice,” he said bitingly as the blood mounted to his cheeks. “All I ask you to do is send off this telegram and bring me any information you hear. You can leave the rest to me.”
She threw him a contrite look, but he was too angry to respond.
“From now on, you can keep your thoughts to yourself. In other words, you needn’t go shaking your head over me when you talk to Leduc or the doctor or any other of those precious fools.”
He turned over onto his side, but so clumsily that once more his mind went back to the seal floundering in the sand.
He was using his left hand, which made his writing heavier and clumsier than usual. He breathed uneasily, being in an uncomfortable position. Two boys were playing marbles under his window, and half a dozen times he nearly shouted out to them to shut up.
1st Crime: The daughter-in-law of the farmer at Moulin-Neuf strangled on the high road. Long needle driven through heart.
Maigret sighed and added.
(Time? Exact spot? How strong was the victim?)
And he sighed again to think how quickly, in the ordinary way, he’d have had such questions answered. Running a case from a sickbed was indeed a laborious business. But he plodded on.
2nd Crime: Stationmaster’s daughter assaulted, strangled, and has her heart pierced with a needle.
3rd Crime (abortive): Rosalie attacked.
Aggressor routed. Fiancé says she dreams and reads novels.
4th Crime: Man jumps out of train as it starts slowing down before the station. Shoots me when I follow. Note that this takes place in
the Moulin-Neuf Wood, like the three other incidents.
5th Crime: The man shot through the brain, in the same wood.
6th Crime (doubtful): Françoise assaulted in Moulin-Neuf Wood. Gets the better of the aggressor.
He crumpled up the sheet of paper, and with a shrug of his shoulders threw it into a corner. Then he took another and began again.
Possibly mad:
Duhourceau?
Rivaud?
Françoise?
Madame Rivaud?
Rosalie?
Inspector?
Landlord?
Leduc?
Man in the train?
But why was there any need for a lunatic in the story? Maigre
t frowned suddenly, thinking back to his first few hours in Bergerac. Who was it who had spoken of a madman? Who had suggested that the two crimes could only have been committed by a madman?
Doctor Rivaud!
And who had concurred immediately, who had pointed the official investigation in this direction?
Public Prosecutor Duhourceau!
Suppose one dropped the madman out of the picture? Suppose there was some other logical explanation for this chain of events?
That needle, for instance. Couldn’t it have been introduced for no other purpose than to make people think it was a madman or a sadist, at any rate somebody with an unbalanced mind?
Maigret took another sheet, and in capital letters wrote: QUESTIONS. He tried to ornament the letters with fancy squiggles, like a schoolboy dawdling over his work.1. Was Rosalie really assaulted or did she only imagine it?
2. Was Françoise really assaulted?
3. If they were, was it by the same man who murdered the first two?
4. Is the man in the train the murderer?
5. Who murdered the murderer?
Madame Maigret returned as he was slowly wading through the last words. She merely glanced at the bed, took off her coat and hat, and sat down beside him.
“Here! I can do that for you,” she sighed, mechanically taking the pencil and paper from his hands.
He was at a loss to know how to interpret the gesture. Was she returning to the charge? Or, on the contrary, was she trying to make it up? He couldn’t make up his mind whether to flare up again or to melt.
He turned his head away, feeling awkward, as he always did in these situations, while she glanced through what he had written.
“Have you any idea?” she asked gently.
“Not the ghost of one!”
He spoke the words savagely. And they were no more than the truth. He hadn’t the ghost of an idea. In fact, he would really have liked to do just what they all wanted him to do—chuck the thing up altogether and go and have a real holiday at Leduc’s, where, among the clucking of hens and other nice country noises, he could forget all about being a detective . . .
But he wasn’t going to walk back. He wasn’t going to take advice from anybody . . .
Did she understand at last? Was she really going to help him instead of stupidly urging him to take it easy? . . . Those were the questions that his troubled eyes were asking.
And she answered with a word she rarely used:
“My poor Maigret!”
For she only called him Maigret on rather special occasions. It implied recognition of his superiority as the man, the mastermind and head of the house. Her tone this time was not one of great conviction, perhaps. But he wasn’t out to cavil. He was simply dying for a few crumbs of consolation and encouragement.
“Shove another pillow under my back, will you?”
There! It was all over! No more silly flare-ups, sulks, and makings-up.
“And now the pipe, please.”
The two boys below were quarreling now, and one of them got his face slapped and went off to a low house across the square, where he started crying as soon as he found his mother.
“What we need is a plan of action. I think the best thing is to proceed as if we won’t receive any new information. In other words, build on what we know already and try out every hypothesis until one of them rings true . . .”
“I met Leduc in the street.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“Of course,” she answered, smiling. “He once more begged me to use all my influence to induce you to go to La Ribaudière. He had just left the prosecutor’s.”
“Oh!”
“He rattled on rather volubly, like a man trying to cover his embarrassment.”
“Did you go to the mortuary to have another look at the body?”
“There’s no mortuary here. It’s lying at the police station. There was a queue of at least fifty people lined up to see it. I had to wait my turn.”
“You noticed the socks?”
“They’re of good wool and certainly hand-knitted.”
“Which goes to show the man had some sort of domestic background—a wife, a sister, or a daughter to look after him. Unless he was a tramp. They often get hand-knitted socks from charities, knitted by young ladies of good family.”
“Only tramps don’t travel second-class—if they go by train at all.”
“For that matter, there aren’t so many people who do go second-class. A second-class couchette suggests someone who travels a lot. What about the boots?”
“The police looked for a trademark. They found the name of a firm that has branches all over the country.”
“And the suit?”
“Of very good black cloth, but it was worn almost threadbare in places. I should think he’d had it quite three years. The overcoat too.”
“A hat?”
“They didn’t find one. The wind may have blown it away.”
Maigret tried to remember whether he had seen the man in a hat. He couldn’t be sure.
“Did you notice anything else?”
“The police told me the shirt was mended at the neck and both cuffs. Neatly done, they said.”
“The domestic background again . . . And now, what did they find in his pockets? Wallet, papers, bits and pieces?”
“Absolutely nothing except a short ivory cigarette holder.”
They were talking it over like two partners, as naturally as could be. Both were relieved that hostilities were over. Maigret puffed away contentedly at his pipe.
“Here’s Leduc.”
They watched him cross the place du Marché. His hat was tipped slightly backward and he walked with almost a slouch. When he came into the room, he was too preoccupied even to greet Madame Maigret.
“I’ve been seeing the prosecutor.”
“I know.”
“Yes, of course . . . We met in the street . . . Then I went to the police station to make sure it was true—what he told me . . . It’s simply bewildering . . . ?”
“Let’s hear it.”
Leduc mopped his forehead and drank half the glass of lemonade that had been prepared for Maigret.
“You don’t mind, do you? . . . I’ve never been so flabbergasted in my life . . . They sent the fingerprints to Paris, as a matter of course . . . Well, the answer’s just come.”
“Go on.”
“The man whom you jumped out of the train after died years ago.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I say that officially this corpse that’s lying at the police station has been a corpse for years. He was a man called Meyer—though known by the name of Samuel—who was condemned to death at Algiers, and . . .”
Maigret was leaning forward in the bed.
“And executed?”
“No. He died in the hospital a few days before.”
Madame Maigret couldn’t help smiling maternally as she watched the glow of happiness that spread over her husband’s face. He noticed it and nearly smiled back, but dignity got the upper hand and he kept a grave face.
“And what had he done, this Samuel?”
“We don’t know. It was only a short telegram in code, but it said further particulars would follow. We ought to hear by this evening . . . Of course they may be making a mistake. And there’s always the chance of two men’s fingerprints being alike. One in a hundred thousand—isn’t that what Bertillon says? It is possible this is one of those cases.”
“And how is Duhourceau taking the blow?”
“He’s annoyed, naturally. Thinks he may have to call in outside help. But he’s afraid they might send chaps who’d take their orders from you. That’s what he wanted to see me about. Wanted to know whether you had a lot of influence at headquarters.”
“Fill me another pipe,” said Maigret to his wife.
“That’s the third.”
“Never mind. I’ll bet anything you like my temperature’s right down to norma
l . . . Samuel. Meyer. Sounds Jewish to me. The family counts a lot with the Jews, so we needn’t be surprised he wore hand-knitted socks. They’re thrifty too, which can explain why a man who could afford a second-class sleeper should wear a threadbare suit . . .”
He interrupted himself:
“Don’t mind me. I don’t mind telling you I’ve had a wretched few hours. Nothing in my head but that dream. But now the seal—that is, if it is a seal and not a whale—is on the move again. And just you watch him go!”
He burst out laughing at the look of pained bewilderment on Leduc’s face.
7
SAMUEL
The same evening brought news from two sources. The time for the doctor’s visit was approaching when a telegram arrived from Algiers.
Doctor Rivaud unknown all hospitals here greetings Martin
Maigret had hardly glanced at it when Leduc appeared. The telegram caught his eye at once, but he asked no questions. Maigret, however, held it out to him.
“Have a look at this.”
Leduc read it.
“What can you expect?”
He shrugged his shoulders, and though he said no more, his whole attitude expressed what he was thinking:
“It’s no use hoping to understand anything in this case. Every day brings further complications, and if you had a grain of sense you’d let me take you off to La Ribaudière.”
Madame Maigret was out. In spite of the gathering twilight, Maigret did not think of switching on the light. The streetlamps were lit, and he liked to look out at the ring of lights that encircled the place du Marché, and the windows of the houses as they lit up one by one. The first was always the same, a window in the second house to the left of the garage; and, by the lamp inside, the same dressmaker was always sitting in the same position, bending over her work.
“The police have had news too,” grunted Leduc.
The Madman of Bergerac Page 7