Maigret's Mistake

by Georges Simenon

‘All day?’

  ‘Yes. Her sister came to see her and stayed until half past eleven.’

  ‘What about the professor?’

  ‘He left for the hospital about eight.’

  ‘When did he get back?’

  ‘At about a quarter past eleven. Just before his sister-in-law left.’

  ‘Does he often go to the hospital in the evening?’

  ‘No, not often. Only when there’s an emergency.’

  ‘Is he at home now?’

  ‘No. He almost never gets back before dinnertime. He has an office in the apartment but he never sees patients there, except in exceptional cases.’

  ‘Then I’ll go up and question his wife.’

  She let him stand and walk to the chair on which he had put his coat. He was about to open the door when she said in a low voice:

  ‘Monsieur Maigret!’

  He had rather been expecting it and turned with a slight smile. As she was searching for her words, with an almost imploring look on her face, he said:

  ‘Is it him?’

  She misunderstood. ‘You don’t mean it’s the professor who …?’

  ‘No, that’s not what I mean. What I’m almost sure of, though, is that it was Professor Gouin who set Louise Filon up in this building.’

  She nodded reluctantly.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘You didn’t ask.’

  ‘I asked you if you knew the man who—’

  ‘No. You asked me if I ever saw anyone go upstairs apart from the musician.’

  It was pointless to argue.

  ‘Did the professor ask you to keep quiet?’

  ‘No. He doesn’t care.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t hide.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me—’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see any point in dragging him into it. He saved my son. He operated on him for free and treated him for more than two years.’

  ‘Where is your son?’

  ‘In the army. In Indochina.’

  ‘Does Madame Gouin know?’

  ‘Yes. She isn’t jealous. She’s used to it.’

  ‘In other words, the whole building knows that Lulu was the professor’s mistress?’

  ‘If any of them don’t know, it’s because they don’t want to know. In a place like this, tenants mind their own business. He often went down to the third floor in his pyjamas and dressing gown.’

  ‘What kind of man is he?’

  ‘Don’t you know him?’

  She was looking at Maigret with an air of disappointment. He had often seen Gouin’s photograph in the newspapers but had never had the opportunity to meet him personally.

  ‘He must be about sixty, isn’t he?’

  ‘Sixty-two, but he doesn’t look it. Besides, for men like him, age doesn’t matter.’

  Maigret vaguely remembered a powerful face with a large nose, a strong chin, but cheeks that were already sagging and bags under the eyes. It was amusing to see the concierge talk about him with the same enthusiasm as a girl from the Conservatoire talking about her teacher.

  ‘You don’t know if he saw her last night before leaving for the hospital?’

  ‘I told you it was only eight, and the young man came later.’

  The only thing that concerned her was to place Gouin beyond suspicion.

  ‘And after he got back?’

  She was visibly searching for the best answer to give.

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because his sister-in-law came down a few minutes after he went up.’

  ‘You think he saw his sister-in-law?’

  ‘I assume she waited to see him before she left.’

  ‘You’re defending him quite fervently, Madame Cornet.’

  ‘I’m simply telling the truth.’

  ‘Since Madame Gouin knows about it, there’s no reason I shouldn’t see her.’

  ‘Do you think that’s tactful?’

  ‘Maybe not. You’re right.’

  Nevertheless, he headed for the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Upstairs. I’ll leave the door ajar, and when the professor gets back I’ll ask to have a word with him.’

  ‘If you really must.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He liked her. Once the door was closed, he turned to look at her through the window. She had got to her feet and, on seeing him, seemed to think better of having stood up so quickly. She headed for the kitchen, as if she had something urgent to do there, but he was convinced it wasn’t the kitchen she had been planning to rush to, but rather the side table by the window, where the telephone was.

  3.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ Maigret asked Lucas.

  ‘On the highest shelf of the cupboard in the kitchen.’

  It was a white cardboard shoe box, and Lucas had left on the side table the red string that had been around it when he discovered it. Its contents reminded Maigret of other ‘treasures’ that he had seen so often in the country or among poor people: a marriage licence, a few yellowed letters, sometimes a receipt from a pawnshop, not always in a box but in a soup tureen from the best dinner set or in a fruit bowl.

  Louise Filon’s treasure wasn’t so different. It didn’t include a marriage licence, but part of a birth certificate issued by the town hall of the eighteenth arrondissement, stating that Louise Marie Joséphine Filon was born in Paris, daughter of Louis Filon, slaughterhouse worker, living in Rue de Cambrai, near the La Villette abattoir, and of Philippine Le Flem, laundress.

  It was probably the mother who appeared in a photograph taken by a local photographer. The traditional backdrop showed a park with a balustrade in the foreground. The woman, who must have been about thirty when the photograph was taken, had been incapable of smiling to order and was staring straight ahead. She had presumably had other children apart from Louise, because her body was already shapeless, her breasts empty in her blouse.

  Lucas had sat down in the armchair he had been occupying before going to open the door to Maigret. The latter had been unable to stop himself smiling as he came in, because near the ashtray, in which was a burning cigarette, lay one of Lulu’s cheap novels: the sergeant must have grabbed it out of boredom and had already read almost half of it.

  ‘She died,’ Lucas said, pointing to the photograph. ‘Seven years ago.’

  He handed his chief a press cutting from the births, deaths and marriages column, which listed the people who had died that day, among them Philippine Filon, née Le Flem.

  The two men had left the door ajar, and Maigret was listening out for the noise of the lift. The only time it had been in operation, it had stopped on the second floor.

  ‘What about her father?’

  ‘Just this letter.’

  It was written in pencil, on cheap paper, and the handwriting was that of someone who hadn’t had much schooling.

  Dear Louise,

  This is just to tell you that I’m in hospital again and I’m very unhappy. Maybe you’ll be kind enough to send me a bit of money so that I can buy tobacco. They say eating makes me sick and they’re letting me die of hunger. I’m sending this letter to the bar where someone who is here claims he saw you. I suppose they know you there. I won’t make old bones.

  Your father

  In the corner was the name of a hospital in Béziers in the Hérault. The letter was undated, so there was no way of knowing when it had been written, probably two or three years earlier, to judge by how much the paper had yellowed.

  Had Louise Filon received other letters? Why had she only kept this one? Was it because her father had died soon afterwards?

  ‘Make inquiries in Béziers.’

  ‘All right, chief.’

  Maigret didn’t see any other letters, just photographs, most taken at fairgrounds, some showing Louise on her own, others with Pierrot. There were also some identity photographs of the yo
ung woman taken with automatic cameras.

  The rest consisted of trifling objects, also won at the fair: an earthenware dog, an ashtray, a drawn glass elephant, even paper flowers.

  It would have been normal to unearth a treasure like this one somewhere in the area of Barbès or Boulevard de La Chapelle. Here, in an apartment on Avenue Carnot, the cardboard box took on an almost tragic aspect.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Just as Lucas was about to reply, the phone rang, making them both jump. Maigret hastened to pick up the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘Is Monsieur Maigret there?’

  The voice was a woman’s.

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. I phoned your office, and they told me you were probably here, or that you would drop by. This is Madame Gouin speaking.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘May I come down and have a brief word with you?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if I came upstairs?’

  The voice was firm. It remained so now as the reply came:

  ‘I’d rather come down, to avoid my husband finding you in our apartment when he gets home.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  ‘I’ll be right there.’

  Maigret had time to whisper to Lucas:

  ‘The wife of Professor Gouin, who lives upstairs.’

  A few moments later, they heard footsteps on the stairs, then someone coming through the first door, which had been left open, and closing it behind her. Then there was a knock at the door communicating with the entrance hall, which had remained ajar, and Maigret stepped forwards.

  ‘Come in, madame,’ he said.

  She did so naturally, as she might have come into any apartment, and, without looking round the room, her gaze immediately settled on Maigret.

  ‘Let me introduce Sergeant Lucas. If you’d like to sit down …’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She was tall and quite sturdy, without being fat. Gouin was sixty-two, but she was probably forty-five and seemed no older.

  ‘I assume you were rather expecting my phone call?’ she said with a hint of a smile.

  ‘Did the concierge tell you?’

  She hesitated for a moment, without taking her eyes off him, and her smile intensified.

  ‘Yes, she did. She just phoned me.’

  ‘So you knew I was here. The reason you called my office was to make your coming to see me appear spontaneous.’

  She barely blushed and lost nothing of her self-confidence. ‘I should have suspected you would guess. I would have got in touch with you in any case, believe me. I’ve been meaning to talk to you since this morning, when I found out what happened here.’

  ‘Why didn’t you do so?’

  ‘Perhaps because I’d rather my husband wasn’t mixed up in this business.’

  Maigret had not taken his eyes off her. He had noticed that she hadn’t even glanced at her surroundings, that she had shown no curiosity.

  ‘When were you last here, madame?’

  This time, again, there was a slight blush on her cheeks, but she continued to play the game well.

  ‘So you know that, too? Though I can’t see who could have told you. Not even Madame Cornet.’

  She thought it over and soon found the answer to her own question.

  ‘I suppose I haven’t behaved like someone coming into an apartment for the first time, especially an apartment where a murder has been committed?’

  Lucas was sitting now on the sofa, almost in the place that Louise Filon’s body had been occupying that morning. Madame Gouin had settled into an armchair, and Maigret remained standing, his back to the fireplace, in which there were only fake logs.

  ‘Anyway, I’ll answer you. One night, seven or eight months ago, the girl who lived here called me in a panic because my husband had just had a blackout. It was his heart.’

  ‘Was he in the bedroom?’

  ‘Yes. I came down and gave him first aid.’

  ‘You’ve studied medicine?’

  ‘Before our marriage, I was a nurse.’

  Ever since she had come in, Maigret had been wondering what her background was, but had been unable to figure it out for himself. Now he better understood that self-confidence of hers.

  ‘Carry on.’

  ‘That’s about it. I was going to phone a doctor who’s a friend of ours when Étienne came round and forbade me to call anybody.’

  ‘Was he surprised to find you at his bedside?’

  ‘No. He’s always told me everything. He’s never hidden anything from me. That night, he came back upstairs with me and finally fell asleep peacefully.’

  ‘Was it his first attack?’

  ‘He’d had another one three years earlier, but that was milder.’

  She was still calm and self-controlled, just as you imagined her in her nurse’s uniform by a patient’s bedside. Of the two men, Lucas was the more surprised, as he wasn’t yet familiar with the situation and couldn’t understand how a woman could speak so calmly about her husband’s mistress.

  ‘Why did you want to speak to me this evening?’ Maigret asked.

  ‘The concierge told me you intended to talk to my husband. I wondered if it wasn’t possible to avoid that, if a conversation with me wouldn’t provide you with the same information. Do you know the professor?’

  ‘Only by reputation.’

  ‘He’s an extraordinary man. You find only a few like him in a generation.’

  Maigret nodded.

  ‘He devotes his whole life to his work, which he regards as a true vocation. Apart from his classes and his duties at the Cochin hospital, he sometimes performs three or four operations on the same day, and I’m sure you know these are extremely difficult operations. Is it any surprise that I should make every effort to spare him any worries?’

  ‘Have you seen your husband since the death of Louise Filon?’

  ‘He came home for lunch. This morning, when he left, there were already comings and goings in this apartment, but we didn’t know anything.’

  ‘How did he seem at lunch?’

  ‘It was a blow to him.’

  ‘Did he love her?’

  She looked at him for a moment without replying. Then she glanced at Lucas, whose presence she seemed to find disagreeable.

  ‘I think, Monsieur Maigret, from what I know of you, that you’re a man capable of understanding. It’s precisely because other people wouldn’t understand that I’d like to avoid this story getting out. The professor is a man who shouldn’t be the object of gossip, and his activities are too valuable to everyone to risk undermining them by pointless worries.’

  In spite of himself, Maigret glanced at the place Lulu’s body had occupied that morning, and it was a kind of comment on the words ‘pointless worries’.

  ‘Do you mind if I try to give you some idea of his character?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You probably know that he was born into a family of poor peasants in the Cévennes.’

  ‘I knew he came from a peasant family.’

  ‘What he’s become, he’s become by force of will. It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that he was never a child, or a young man. You understand what I mean?’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘He’s a kind of force of nature. Even though I’m his wife, I don’t mind saying that he’s a man of genius, because others have said it before me and continue to say it.’

  Maigret was still nodding.

  ‘People in general have a strange attitude to geniuses. They’re prepared to admit that they’re different from other people as far as intelligence and professional activities are concerned. Any patient of his thinks it’s only natural that Gouin should get up at two o’clock in the morning for an emergency operation that only he can perform, and that by nine o’clock he should be at the hospital, dealing with other patients. But those same patients would be shocked to learn that he’s d
ifferent from them in other ways, too.’

  Maigret could guess what was coming next but he preferred to let her talk. She did so with persuasive calm.

  ‘Étienne has never bothered with the little pleasures of life. He has no real friends. I don’t remember him ever taking a proper holiday. His expenditure of energy is incredible. The only way he’s ever found to relax is with women.’

  She glanced at Lucas, then turned again to Maigret.

  ‘I hope I’m not shocking you?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? He’s not the kind of man to flirt with women. He wouldn’t have the patience, or the inclination. What he asks of them is some quick relief, and I don’t think he’s ever been in love in his life.’

  ‘Not even with you?’

  ‘I’ve often wondered that. I really don’t know. We’ve been married for twenty-two years. Before our marriage he was a bachelor and lived with an old housekeeper.’

  ‘In this building?’

  ‘Yes. He just happened to rent our apartment when he was thirty, and it’s never occurred to him to move, not even when he was appointed to Cochin, which is on the other side of the city.’

  ‘Were you in his department?’

  ‘Yes. I imagine I can speak to you frankly?’

  It was still the presence of Lucas that embarrassed her, and Lucas, who sensed it, was ill at ease and kept crossing and uncrossing his short legs.

  ‘For months, he paid no attention to me. I knew, as did the whole hospital, that most of the nurses had their turn eventually, and that it never led to anything. By the next day he always seemed to have forgotten. One night when I was on duty, and we had to wait for the result of an operation that had lasted three hours, he had me, without a word.’

  ‘Did you love him?’

  ‘I think I did. I certainly admired him. A few days later, I was surprised when he asked me out to lunch with him in a restaurant on Faubourg Saint-Jacques. He asked me if I was married. He hadn’t shown any interest in that before then. Then he asked me what my parents did, and I told him my father was a fisherman in Brittany. Am I boring you?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I really would like you to understand.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid he’ll come back and be surprised not to find you upstairs?’