‘What happened?’
‘More or less the same as last night, but more violent. She began shivering, mumbling incoherently … I sent for the doctor and he tells me she has a temperature of nearly forty.’
‘Is she delirious?’
‘You can’t understand anything she says, I tell you! We need ice and a rubber pouch to place on her forehead.’
‘Do you want me to stay here while you go to the pharmacy?’
Monsieur Martin was about to say no, then he resigned himself.
He put on an overcoat and left, gesticulating, a tragic and grotesque figure, and then came back because he had forgotten to take any money.
Maigret had no ulterior motive for remaining in the apartment. He showed no interest in anything, didn’t open a single drawer, didn’t even glance at a pile of correspondence sitting on a table.
He could hear the patient’s irregular breathing. From time to time she gave a long sigh, then babbled a jumble of syllables.
When Monsieur Martin came back, he found him in the same spot.
‘Have you got everything you need?’
‘Yes … This is terrible! … And I haven’t even let my office know!’
Maigret helped him break up the ice and put it in a red rubber pouch.
‘And yet you didn’t have any visitors this morning?’
‘Nobody …’
‘And you didn’t receive any letters?’
‘Nothing … Circulars.’
Madame Martin’s forehead was perspiring and her greying hair was plastered to her temples. Her lips were pale, but her eyes remained extraordinarily alert.
Did they recognize Maigret, who was holding the ice-filled pouch on her forehead?
It was impossible to say. But she seemed to have quietened down a little. She lay still with the red pouch on her forehead, staring at the ceiling.
The inspector led Monsieur Martin into the dining room.
‘I’ve got several pieces of news for you.’
‘Oh!’ he said with a shiver of anxiety.
‘Couchet’s will has been found. He has left a third of his fortune to your wife.’
‘What?’
And the civil servant floundered, panic-stricken, overwhelmed by this news.
‘You say he’s left us …?’
‘A third of his fortune! It’s likely that things won’t be straightforward. His second wife will probably contest the will. Because she only receives a third, too. The last third goes to another person, Couchet’s most recent mistress, a certain Nine—’
Why did Martin seem so crestfallen? Worse than crestfallen, devastated! As if his arms and legs had been severed! He stared fixedly at the floor, unable to regain his composure.
‘The second piece of news is not so good. It concerns your stepson—’
‘Roger?’
‘He committed suicide this morning, by jumping out of the window of his room in Rue Pigalle.’
Then he saw the petty official’s hackles rise, as he shot him a look of anger, of rage, and shouted, ‘What are you telling me? You’re trying to drive me mad, aren’t you? Admit that all this is a trick to get me to talk!’
‘Not so loud! Your wife—’
‘I don’t care! You’re lying! It isn’t possible.’
He was unrecognizable. In one fell swoop his shyness, the good manners that were of such importance to him had all deserted him.
It was strange to see his face distraught, his lips quivering and his hands waving around in mid-air.
‘I swear to you,’ said Maigret, ‘that both items of news are official.’
‘But why would he have done that? I tell you, it’s enough to drive a person insane! Actually, that’s what’s happening! My wife is going mad! You’ve seen her! And if this goes on, I’ll end up going mad, too. We’ll all go mad!’
His eyes were darting around wildly. He had lost all self-control.
‘Her son jumping out of the window! And the will—’
His features were tense and suddenly he burst into tears – it was tragic, comical, horrible.
‘Please! Do calm down—’
‘An entire lifetime … Thirty-two years … Every day … At nine o’clock … Never a foot wrong … All that for—’
‘Please … Remember your wife can hear you, and that she’s very unwell—’
‘What about me? Do you think I’m not unwell too? Do you think I could stand such a life for long?’
He didn’t look the sort to cry, and that made his tears all the more poignant.
‘It’s nothing to do with you, is it? He’s only your stepson. He’s not your responsibility.’
Martin looked at the chief inspector, suddenly calm, but not for long.
‘He’s not my responsibility—’
He flew off the handle.
‘Even so, I’m the one who has to deal with all the trouble! You dare to come here telling these stories! On the stairs, the residents give me strange looks. And I bet they suspect me of killing that Couchet! Absolutely! And, anyway, how do I know you don’t suspect me as well? What do you want with us? Huh! Huh! You don’t answer! You wouldn’t dare answer. People choose the weakest! A man who’s unable to defend himself … And my wife is sick … And—’
As he gesticulated, he banged the wireless with his elbow. It wobbled and crashed on to the floor amid a tinkle of broken bulbs.
Then the petty official resurfaced.
‘That wireless cost twelve hundred francs! … I saved up for three years to buy it.’
A groan came from the bedroom next door. He listened out, but didn’t move.
‘Does your wife need anything?’
It was Maigret who put his head inside the bedroom. Madame Martin was still in bed. The inspector met her gaze and would have been unable to say whether it was a look of acute intelligence or one clouded by fever.
She did not attempt to speak, but let him go.
In the dining room, Martin was resting both elbows on a dresser, holding his head in his hands and staring at the wallpaper, a few centimetres from his face.
‘Why would he kill himself?’
‘Suppose for example that it was he who—’
Silence. A crackling. A strong smell of burning. Martin hadn’t noticed.
‘Is there something on the stove?’ asked Maigret.
He went into the kitchen, blue with steam. On the gas ring he found a milk pan whose contents had boiled over and which was about to explode. He turned off the gas, opened the window and caught a glimpse of the courtyard, Doctor Rivière’s Serums laboratory, the director’s car parked in front of the porch. And he could hear the clatter of typewriters in the offices.
If Maigret was lingering, it was not without a reason. He wanted to give Martin the time to calm down, even to decide on an attitude to adopt. He slowly filled his pipe and lit it with an igniter hanging above the gas stove.
When he came back into the dining room, the man had not budged, but he was calmer. He straightened up with a sigh, fumbled for a handkerchief and blew his nose loudly.
‘All this is going to end badly, isn’t it?’ he began.
‘There are already two dead!’ replied Maigret.
‘Two dead.’
An effort. An effort that must have been extremely harrowing, but Martin, who was about to get all agitated again, managed to remain composed.
‘In that case, I think it would be best—’
‘That it would be best …?’
Maigret barely dared speak. He held his breath. He felt a pang in his chest, for he sensed he was close to the truth.
‘Yes,’ groaned Martin to himself. ‘Too bad! It’s essential … ess-en-tial—’
But then he walked automatically over to the door of the bedroom, and looked deep into the room.
Maigret was still waiting, motionless, not saying a word.
Martin said nothing. His wife remained silent. But something must have been happening.
T
he situation dragged on and on. The inspector was growing impatient.
‘Well?’
Martin turned slowly towards him, with a different face.
‘What?’
‘You were saying that—’
Monsieur Martin tried to smile.
‘That what?’
‘That it was best, to avert any further tragedies—’
‘That it was best to what?’
He wiped his hand across his forehead, like someone finding it difficult to remember.
‘Please forgive me! I’m so distraught—’
‘That you have forgotten what you wanted to say?’
‘Yes … I don’t remember … Look! … She’s asleep.’
He pointed to Madame Martin, who had closed her eyes and whose face had turned purple, probably from the ice being applied to her forehead.
‘What do you know?’ asked Maigret in the tone he used for smart-aleck prisoners.
‘Me?’
And from then on, all his answers were in that vein! What’s known as acting dumb. Repeating a word in astonishment.
‘You were on the point of telling me the truth—’
‘The truth?’
‘Come on! Don’t try and pretend you’re an idiot. You know who killed Couchet.’
‘Me? … I know?’
If he had never been given a clout, he was within a whisker of receiving an almighty one from Maigret’s hand!
Maigret, his jaws clenched, watched the unmoving woman who was asleep, or pretending to be, then the man whose eyelids were still puffy from the previous outburst, his features drawn, his moustache drooping.
‘Will you take responsibility for what might happen?’
‘What might happen?’
‘You’re wrong, Martin!’
‘Wrong how?’
What was going on? For a minute, perhaps, the man who had been about to speak had stood between the two rooms, his eyes riveted on his wife’s bed. Maigret had not heard a sound. Martin had not moved.
Now she was asleep, and he was feigning innocence!
‘Forgive me … I think there are moments when I don’t know what I’m saying … Admit that a person can go mad if—’
All the same, he remained sad, lugubrious even. He had the attitude of a condemned man. His gaze avoided Maigret’s face, fluttered over familiar objects and finally settled on the wireless set, which he proceeded to pick up, crouched on the floor, his back to the inspector.
‘What time will the doctor be coming?’
‘I don’t know. He said “this evening”.’
Maigret left, slamming the door behind him. He found himself nose-to-nose with old Mathilde, who got such a fright that she stood transfixed, her mouth open.
‘You haven’t anything to tell me either, have you? … Eh? … Perhaps you’re going to claim you don’t know anything either?’
She tried to compose herself. She had both hands beneath her apron in the classic pose of an elderly housewife.
‘Come and let’s go back to your room.’
Her felt slippers glided over the floorboards. She paused, reluctant to push her half-open door.
‘Go on, go inside.’
And Maigret followed her in, kicked the door shut, not even sparing a glance for the madwoman sitting by the window.
‘Now, talk! Understood?’
And he sank with his full weight on to a chair.
9. The Man with the Pension
‘First of all, they spend their whole time arguing!’
Maigret didn’t bat an eyelid. He was up to his ears in all this day-to-day unpleasantness, which was more repulsive than the murder itself.
The old woman before him had a malevolent expression of jubilation and menace. She was talking! She was going to talk some more! Out of hatred for the Martins, for the dead man, for all the residents of the building, out of hatred for the whole of humanity! And out of hatred for Maigret!
She remained standing, her hands clasped over her soft, fat belly, and it was as though she had been waiting for this moment all her life.
It was not a smile that hovered on her lips. It was bliss that melted her!
‘First of all, they spend their whole time arguing.’
She had time. She distilled her words. She allowed herself the leisure of expressing her contempt for people who argue.
‘Worse than ragamuffins! It’s always been like that! I sometimes wonder how he’s managed not to wring her neck yet.’
‘Ah! You were expecting …?’
‘When you live in a place like this, you have to expect anything …’
She placed careful emphasis on her words. Was she more loathsome than ridiculous or more ridiculous than loathsome?
The room was large. There was an unmade bed with grey sheets that can never have been hung out to dry in the open air. A table, an old wardrobe, a stove.
The madwoman sat in an armchair staring in front of her with a gentle half-smile.
‘Do you ever have visitors, may I ask?’ said Maigret.
‘Never!’
‘And your sister never leaves this room?’
‘Sometimes, she gets out on to the staircase.’
A depressing drabness. A smell of unsavoury poverty, of old age, of death even?
‘Mind you, it’s always the wife who goes for him!’
Maigret barely had the energy to question her. He vaguely looked at her. He was listening.
‘Over money matters, of course! Not over women … Although once she suspected, when she did the accounts, that he had visited a house of ill-repute, and she gave him a hard time.’
‘Does she hit him?’
Maigret spoke without irony. The idea was no more preposterous than any other. There were so many implausibilities that nothing would be surprising.
‘I don’t know if she hits him, but in any case she smashes plates … Then she cries, saying that she’ll never have a happy marriage.’
‘In other words, there are scenes almost every day?’
‘Not big scenes! But carping. Two or three big scenes a week.’
‘That must keep you busy!’
She wasn’t sure she had understood and began to look slightly anxious.
‘What does she complain about most often?’
‘“When you can’t afford to feed a wife, you don’t marry!
‘“You don’t deceive a woman telling her you’ll be getting a rise when it’s not true.
‘“You don’t steal a wife from a man like Couchet, who’s capable of earning millions.
‘“Civil servants are cowards. You should work for yourself, be prepared to take risks, be entrepreneurial, if you want to get anywhere.”’
Poor Martin, with his gloves, his putty-coloured overcoat and his waxed moustache! Maigret could imagine the hail of criticism she constantly rained on him.
But he had done his best! Couchet before him had been subjected to the same criticisms, and she must have said to him, ‘Look at Monsieur Martin! Now there’s a clever man! And he hopes to have a wife one day! She’ll get a pension if anything happens to him! Whereas you—’
All this sounded like a sinister accusation. Madame Martin had been wrong, had been wronged, had wronged everyone!
There was a terrible mistake at the root of all this!
The confectioner’s daughter from Meaux wanted money. That was an established fact. It was a necessity! She felt it. She was born to have money, and consequently, it was up to her husband to earn it!
But Couchet didn’t earn enough. And she wouldn’t even be entitled to a pension if he died.
So she had married Martin.
Except that it was Couchet who had become a millionaire, when it was too late! And there was no way of giving Martin wings, no way to convince him to leave the Registry Office and to sell serums too, or something that would bring in money.
She was unhappy. She had always been unhappy. Life seemed determined to cheat her cruelly!
Old Mathilde’s glaucous eyes stared at Maigret, making him think of jellyfish.
‘Did her son ever visit her?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Did she quarrel with him too?’
This was Mathilde’s big moment! She took her time. After all, she had all the time in the world!
‘She used to advise him: “Your father’s rich! He should be ashamed of himself, not getting you a better job! You don’t even have a car … and do you know why? Because of that woman who married him for his money! Because that’s the only reason she married him!
“‘And God knows what she’s got in store for you later … Will you even get a share of the fortune that should be yours?
‘“That’s why you should get money out of him now, put it away in a safe place. I’ll look after it for you if you like. Do you want me to look after it for you?”’
And Maigret, gazing at the filthy floor, thought hard, his forehead furrowed.
He concluded that among this hodgepodge of sentiments he could identify one overriding feeling which had perhaps led to all the others: anxiety! A morbid, pathological anxiety verging on madness.
Madame Martin always talked about what might happen: her husband’s death, poverty if he didn’t leave her a pension … She was afraid for her son!
It was a nightmare, an obsession.
‘What did Roger reply?’
‘Nothing! He never stayed long! He must have had better things to do elsewhere.’
‘Did he come the day of the murder?’
‘I don’t know.’
And the madwoman in her corner, as old as Mathilde, still gazed at the inspector, smiling her blissful smile.
‘Did the Martins have a conversation that was more interesting than usual?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did Madame Martin go downstairs at around eight o’clock in the evening?’
‘I don’t remember! I can’t be in the corridor all the time.’
Was it thoughtlessness, transcendent irony? In any case, she was holding something back. Maigret could tell. Not all the pus had come out.
‘That evening, they had an argument.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Weren’t you listening?’
She did not reply. Her expression signified: ‘That’s my business!’
‘What else do you know?’
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