She does not move, she dares not move, she feels a threat of danger hanging over her. Her stomach feels heavy … The lobster … She remembers. She ate too much lobster. She took some drug. The man forced her to take a drug …
She strains her ears. What’s that? There’s someone in the kitchen. She recognizes the familiar sound of the coffee grinder. Her thoughts wander. It’s not possible that anyone could be actually grinding coffee beans …
She stares at the ceiling, all her senses now fully alert. Boiling water is being poured. The aroma floats up the stairs and reaches her. The rattle of crockery. Another sound she knows so well: the sugar-tin being opened, the cupboard door …
Someone is coming upstairs. And last night she did not lock herself in, she remembers that clearly. Why didn’t she just turn the key? It was pride! Yes, so that she wouldn’t show the man that she was afraid. She had promised herself that she would get up quietly and do it, later, after he’d gone back down, but she had gone straight to sleep.
A knock at the door. She props herself up on one elbow. She stares at the door fearfully, her nerves are raw. The knock comes again.
‘What is it?’
‘Breakfast.’
Frowning hard, she looks around for her dressing gown, does not find it and quickly slips down under the bedclothes just as the door opens, and the first thing she sees is a tray covered with a serviette and a cup with blue spots …
‘Sleep well?’
It’s Maigret, more placid than ever. He doesn’t seem to realize that he is in a young woman’s bedroom and that she is still in bed.
‘What do you want with me?’
He puts the tray down on the small table. He is wide awake and in fine fettle. Where did he wash and shave? Downstairs, obviously. In the kitchen, or maybe the lip of the well. His hair is still damp.
‘I assume it’s café au lait that you like in the morning? Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to leave the house and go round to Madame Chochoi’s for fresh bread … Eat up, girl … Do you want me to turn round so you can put this dressing gown on?’
She obeys unwillingly and drinks a mouthful of very hot coffee, then becomes still, the action of her hands temporarily suspended.
‘Who’s downstairs?’
Someone moved, she is sure of it.
‘Who is downstairs? Answer me.’
‘The murderer.’
‘What did you say?’
She has flung off the bedclothes.
‘What scheming trickery are you up to now? You vowed you’d drive me mad. And I have no one to defend me, no one to …’
He sits on the edge of the bed. He watches while she rants on wildly, shakes his head and sighs:
‘Listen, I’m telling you that the man downstairs is the murderer. I knew he’d come back. Given the fix he was in, he had to risk everything. Besides which, he very likely thought I’d be in Paris, directing operations there. It didn’t occur to him that I was determined to keep a close watch on the house.’
‘You mean he came?’
She pulls herself together. She is all at sea. Seizing Maigret by the wrists, she cries:
‘Who … Who is he? How is it possible that …’
She is so eager to know the answer that she rushes out on to the stairs, intending go down and see for – and by – herself, slim and uneasy in her vivid blue dressing gown, but stops, overcome by fear.
‘Who is he?’
‘Do you still hate me?’
‘Yes … I don’t know …’
‘Why did you lie to me?’
‘Because!’
‘Listen to me, Félicie …’
‘I won’t listen to you any more … I’m going to open the window and scream for help.’
‘Why did you never tell me that when you got back here on Monday morning you saw Jacques Pétillon actually coming out of the garden? Because you did see him. He was walking away behind the hedge. It was for him that old Lapie fetched the decanter and two glasses from the sideboard. He thought his nephew had come to make peace, ask to be forgiven, something along those lines.’
She stares at him, stony-faced, without moving, unprotesting.
‘And you thought it was Jacques who killed his uncle. You found the gun in the bedroom and you kept it on you for three days before getting rid of it by slipping it into the pockets of a man on the Métro. You imagined you were a heroine risking all to save the man you loved – though the poor devil never suspected a thing. So it was because of you and your lies that he was almost arrested for a murder he did not commit …’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Because the actual murderer is downstairs.’
‘Who is he?’
‘You don’t know him.’
‘You’re still trying to make me say things. I’m not going to answer any more of your questions, do you hear? I won’t tell you anything else. For a start, you can get out of here and let me get dressed … No … Stay … Why did Jacques come back on Monday morning?’
‘Because Mr Music had asked him to.’
‘Mr Music?’
‘A friend of his. In Paris people make acquaintances of all sorts, you know, some good, some bad … Especially if you play the saxophone in a night club … You’d better drink your coffee while it is still lukewarm …’
He opens the shutters and looks out of the window.
‘Ah! There’s your friend Léontine, she’s going for the bread … She’s looking this way … What a lot of tales you’ll have to tell her now!’
‘I shan’t be telling her anything!’
‘Want to bet?’
‘I wouldn’t bet with you.’
‘Do you still hate me as much?’
‘Is Jacques innocent?’
‘If he is, you’ll stop hating me. If he isn’t, then it will be the opposite … Oh really, Félicie! … Actually Jacques is guilty because one evening, just over a year ago, when he was living here in this house, under his uncle’s roof, guilty, I say, of letting a certain person stay here for one or more nights, someone he’d met in Montmartre … A man named Albert Babeau, known as the Musician and also called Shorty, who ran girls …’
‘Ran girls?’
‘You wouldn’t understand. He was being hunted by the police for his part in the Chamois shooting. He remembered his pal Pétillon, who was then living with an elderly uncle in the country … A good place to hide up for a villain who was being sought by the police.’
‘I remember …’ she says suddenly.
‘Remember what?’
‘The only time Jacques … The only times he was ever rude to me … I’d gone into his room without knocking. I just had time to hear sounds, as if something was being hidden.’
‘Actually it was the sound of someone being hidden or maybe taking cover, someone who shouldn’t have been there. And before moving on, that someone thought it would be a good idea to hide his loot in the room and loosened a board for it on top of the wardrobe. Later he was caught. He served a year in prison … Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘No reason … Go on.’
She blushes, then looks away. Although she did not know it, she had been gazing at the inspector in admiration.
‘When he got out he was broke and he naturally thought about his money. His first idea was to cosy up to you, which would have been a very convenient way of getting inside the house …’
‘Me? You can’t think for one moment that I’d …’
‘But you slapped his face for him. So he went lo
oking for Pétillon, he told him some yarn or other, that he’d left something important here, that he needed his help to come and get it … While Jacques was talking to old man Lapie in the garden …’
‘I understand …’
‘And none too soon.’
‘Thanks a lot!’
‘Think nothing of it … Pegleg must have heard a noise. He must have had pretty good hearing.’
‘Too good!’
‘He went up to his room, and the Musician, disturbed just as he was climbing on to a chair, panicked and put a bullet in him … Alarmed by the noise of the gun, Pétillon fled in one direction, and the murderer made off in the other … You saw Jacques, your own, your very own Jacques but you didn’t see the Musician, who left by another way …
‘And that was it. Obviously Jacques didn’t say anything. When he felt that suspicion was falling on him he panicked, like the kid he is …’
‘That’s not true!’
‘You don’t want him to be a kid? All right, then, he’s a fool. Instead of coming to me and telling what he knew, he decided to go looking for the Musician to get what was owing to him. He looked in all the shady places where he knew he could usually be found. He even went to Rouen as a last resort, to ask his mistress …’
‘How did he know that woman?’ asks Félicie, green with jealousy.
‘That, Félicie, I do not know … In Paris, these things … Anyway, he starts feeling desperate … He can’t go on … Then that evening he can’t stand it any longer and is about to tell what he knows when the Musician, who has been warned, takes a pot shot at him to teach him to keep his trap shut.’
‘Don’t talk like that …’
‘That night, the Musician comes back here, hoping at last to get his hands on his money … You have no idea how difficult it is to keep one step ahead of the police when your pockets are empty … He finds nothing on top of the wardrobe. But he leaves you with something to remember him by … If the money isn’t here, maybe Pétillon found it, and that’s why Adèle was sent to search his room in Rue Lepic.
‘It’s not there either. That night, Montmartre is besieged. The Musician is cornered, like a stag at bay. Adèle is arrested …
‘Somehow, the Musician manages to get past the police checkpoints and, more determined than ever, just as men of that type can be, he finds a taxi to take him to Poissy. He is so broke that he pays the driver with a swift blow on the back of the neck with a cosh.’
Félicie shudders. She is looking at Maigret’s face as if it were a cinema screen and she was watching an exciting film.
‘Did he come?’
‘He came … Quietly, without making any noise … He came in through the garden without stepping on a single twig, then walked past the kitchen window, which was open …’
In her eyes, Maigret is already a hero. She is thrilled.
‘Did you fight?’
‘No. Just when he was least expecting it, he felt the unpleasant sensation of the barrel of a revolver against the side of his head.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He didn’t do anything. He just said: “Oh hell! … I give up!”’
She feels let down. Surely it couldn’t have happened that simply! Her suspicions return, and her face becomes sceptical once more.
‘You didn’t get hurt?’
‘I told you …’
Because he is afraid of scaring her! So she remains convinced that he’s been in a fight, that he’s a hero, that …
Her eye catches the tray on the table.
‘And then you ground fresh coffee! You had the … You thought you would make me coffee and bring me my breakfast …’
She knows she is going to cry … She cries with tenderness, with admiration …
‘And you did that for me! Why? Tell me why.’
‘Simple! I did it because I hate you! I hate you so much that when Lucas gets here with the taxi, I shall leave and take my turkey with me. Did I mention that the Musician is trussed up like a turkey? I had to borrow the rope from poor old Lapie.’
‘And what about me?’
He has great difficulty in not smiling at this ‘what-about-me?’ into which she has unconsciously put her entire soul.
What about me? Am I to be left here all alone? There won’t be anyone left to take me seriously? No one to ask me questions, tease me, no one to …
What about me? …
‘Go and sort yourself out with Jacques. They still sell grapes, oranges and champagne in the shop in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which I believe you know. I’ve forgotten what the visiting hours are at the hospital, but they’ll tell you.’
A taxi, a sight so familiar in Paris, looks rather incongruous out here on roads which wind through country fields.
‘Better get dressed.’
And while, without turning round, he leaves her and starts going down the stairs, he hears her murmur:
‘Why are you always so horrible to me?’
A moment later he is circling the Musician, who is tied up in old Lapie’s chair. There is a sound of footsteps coming and going above his head, of splashing water, clothes being taken off hangers in the wardrobe, a shoe which falls on the floor and is picked up, the voice of someone who, in the heat of the moment, cannot stop talking although there’s no one there.
Quite. That’s Félicie for you!
1. The Old Lady in the Garden
Madame Maigret sat shelling peas in the warm shade, the blue of her apron and the green of the pea pods making rich splashes of colour. Her hands were never still, even though it was two o’clock in the afternoon on the hottest day of a sweltering August. She was keeping an eye on her husband as if he were a babe-in-arms. Madame Maigret was anxious:
‘I bet you’re already getting up.’
And yet the deck chair in which Maigret lay hadn’t creaked, nor had the former detective chief inspector of the Police Judiciaire let out the faintest sigh.
Probably because she knew him so well, she had seen his face shiny with sweat quiver imperceptibly. She was right, he was about to get up. But he forced himself to remain horizontal out of a sort of human respect.
This was the second summer they were spending in their house in Meung-sur-Loire since he had retired. Maigret had ensconced himself contentedly in the comfortable canvas chair, puffing away gently at his pipe. He savoured the coolness of the air around him all the more since only two metres away, on the other side of the boundary between shade and sunshine, there was a furnace buzzing with flies.
The peas tumbled into the enamel basin at a regular rhythm. Sitting with her knees apart, Madame Maigret had an apronful, and there were two big basketfuls picked that morning for bottling.
What Maigret loved most about his house was this spot where they were sitting, a place that had no name, a sort of partially roofed courtyard between the kitchen and the garden which they had gradually furnished, even putting in an oven and a dresser, and where they ate most of their meals. Slightly reminiscent of a Spanish patio, it was paved with red floor tiles that gave the shadows a very special character.
Maigret held out for a good five minutes, maybe a little longer, gazing through his half-closed eyelids at the vegetable garden that seemed to be steaming under a blistering sun. Then, setting aside all human respect, he got up.
‘Now what are you going to do?’
Off-guard in this domestic intimacy, his expression was that of a sulking child caught misbehaving.
‘I’m sure the aubergines are covered in Colorado beetles again,’ he grumbled, ‘and
that’s because of your lettuces …’
This little battle over the lettuces had been going on for a month. Since Madame Maigret had put her lettuce seedlings in the gaps between the aubergine plants.
‘It’s a pity to waste the space,’ she had said.
At that point, he had not protested, because he hadn’t realized that Colorado beetles love aubergine leaves even more than potatoes. But he couldn’t spray them with an arsenic mixture because of the lettuces.
And ten times a day, Maigret, wearing his huge straw hat, would go and bend over the pale-green leaves, as he was doing now, turning them over gently to pick off the little striped insects. He kept them in his left hand until it was full, and then he tossed them into the bonfire, looking disgruntled and darting a defiant glance at his wife.
‘If you hadn’t planted those lettuces …’
The fact was that since he had retired she hadn’t seen him sit still for an hour in his famous deck chair, which he had triumphantly brought back from the Bazar de l’Hôtelde-Ville swearing that he would have memorable siestas in it.
There he was, in the heat of the sun, barefoot in his wooden clogs, his blue linen trousers riding down his hips, making them look like an elephant’s hindquarters, and a farmer’s shirt with an intricate pattern that was open at the neck, revealing his hairy chest.
He heard the sound of the door knocker echoing through the dark, empty rooms of the house like a bell in a convent. Someone was at the front door, and, as always when there was an unexpected visitor, Madame Maigret became flustered. She looked at him from a distance as if to seek his guidance.
She lifted up her apron, which formed a huge pouch, wondered what to do with her peas, then finally untied the strings, because she would never go and open the door looking unkempt.
The knocker clanged again, twice, three times, imperiously, angrily, from the sound of it. Maigret thought he could make out the gentle purr of a car engine through the quivering of the air. He continued to tend his aubergines while his wife tidied her grey hair in front of a fragment of mirror.
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