She had barely disappeared inside the dark house when the little green door in the garden wall that led on to the lane, and was used only by people they knew, opened. An elderly lady in mourning appeared in the doorway, so stiff, so severe, and at the same time so comical that he would recall the sight of her for a long time.
She stood there for only a moment, and then, with a brisk, decisive step that belied her great age, she marched straight towards Maigret.
‘I say, gardener … There’s no point telling me that your master’s not at home … I know for a fact that he is here.’
She was tall and thin, with a crinkled face caked in a thick layer of powder streaked with sweat. The most striking thing about her was her extraordinarily lively eyes of an intense black.
‘Go at once and tell him that Bernadette Amorelle has come a hundred kilometres to talk to him.’
She certainly hadn’t had the patience to linger at the front door. She would not be kept waiting! As she said, she had asked the neighbours and had not been deterred by the closed shutters.
Had someone told her about the little garden door? It wouldn’t have mattered, she was capable of finding it for herself. And now she was walking towards the shady courtyard where Madame Maigret had just reappeared.
‘Kindly tell Detective Chief Inspector Maigret …’
Madame Maigret was baffled. Her husband followed with a lumbering tread, an amused twinkle in his eye. It was he who said:
‘If you would like to trouble yourself to come in.’
‘He’s having a nap, I’ll wager. Is he still as fat?’
‘Do you know him well?’
‘What business is it of yours? Go and tell him that Bernadette Amorelle is here and never mind anything else.’
She had second thoughts, rummaged in her bag, an outmoded kind, a black velvet reticule with a silver clasp, the sort that was fashionable around 1900.
‘Here,’ she said, proffering a small banknote.
‘Forgive me for not being able to accept, Madame Amorelle, but I am former Detective Chief Inspector Maigret.’
Then she said something hilarious, which was to go down in the annals of the Maigret household. Looking him up and down from his clogs to his dishevelled hair – for he had removed his huge straw hat – she proclaimed:
‘As you wish. …’
Poor Madame Maigret! She gesticulated to her husband, but he didn’t notice. She was trying to signal discreetly to him to take the visitor into the sitting room. One doesn’t entertain in a courtyard that serves as a kitchen and everything else.
But Madame Amorelle had sat herself down in a little rattan armchair where she was perfectly comfortable. It was she who, noticing Madame Maigret’s nervousness, said to her impatiently:
‘Let the inspector be!’
She all but asked Madame Maigret to leave them, which is exactly what the latter did, because she didn’t dare continue with her task in the presence of the visitor, and she didn’t know where to put herself.
‘You recognize my name, don’t you, inspector?’
‘Amorelle, of the sand quarries and tug-boats?’
‘Amorelle and Campois, yes.’
He had carried out an investigation in the Haute Seine in the past, and all day long he had watched convoys of boats going past bearing the green Amorelle and Campois triangle. When he was based at Quai des Orfèvres, he often used to glimpse the offices of Amorelle and Campois, quarry and ship owners, on the Île St Louis.
‘I have no time to waste and you must understand me. Earlier, I took advantage of the fact that my son-in-law and daughter were at the Maliks’ to tell François to get the old Renault going … They don’t suspect anything … They probably won’t be home before this evening … Do you understand?’
‘No … Yes …’
What he did understand was that the elderly lady had sneaked out, unbeknown to her family.
‘I assure you that if they were to find out I was here—’
‘Excuse me, Where were you?’
‘At Orsenne, of course,’ she answered, the way a queen of France might have said: ‘At Versailles!’
Didn’t everyone know, shouldn’t everyone know, that Bernadette Amorelle, of Amorelle and Campois, lived at Orsenne, a little hamlet on the banks of the Seine between Corbeil and the forest of Fontainebleau?
‘There’s no point looking at me as if you think I’m mad. They’ll probably try and have you believe I am. I assure you it’s not true.’
‘Forgive me, madame, but may I ask your age?’
‘You may, young man. I’ll be eighty-two on the seventh of September … but my teeth are all my own, if that’s what you’re looking at … And I’ll probably outlive the lot of them … I’d be very happy to see my son-in-law go to his grave.’
‘Would you like something to drink?’
‘A glass of cold water, if you have some.’
He poured it himself.
‘What time did you leave Orsenne?’
‘At eleven thirty … As soon as they’d gone … I had already asked François … François is the gardener’s boy, he’s a good boy … I helped his mother bring him into the world … None of the family knows that he can drive an automobile … One night when I couldn’t sleep – I should tell you, inspector, that I never sleep – I found him trying his hand at driving the old Renault by moonlight. Does this interest you?’
‘It does indeed.’
‘It doesn’t take much … The old Renault, which wasn’t even in the garage but in the stables, is a limousine that belonged to my late husband … Since he died twenty years ago, it must be … Well, the boy somehow managed to get it going and would take it for a spin on the road at night.’
‘Did he drive you here?’
‘He’s waiting for me outside.’
‘You haven’t had lunch?’
‘I eat when I have time … I hate people who feel the need to eat all the time.’
And she couldn’t help darting a disapproving look at Maigret’s paunch.
‘Look how you’re sweating. It’s none of my business … My husband, he also insisted on having his own way and he’s been gone for a long time … You’ve been retired for two years now, isn’t that so?’
‘Nearly two years, yes.’
‘So you’re getting bored … You will agree to my proposal, then. There’s a train at five o’clock from Orléans. I could drop you off at the station on my way back. Of course, it would be easier to drive you all the way to Orsenne, but you would not go unnoticed and the whole thing would go wrong.’
‘Forgive me, madame, but—’
‘I know you’re going to protest. But I absolutely need you to come and spend a few days at Orsenne. Fifty thousand if you’re successful. And, if you find nothing, let’s say ten thousand plus your expenses.’
She opened her bag and took out a wad of notes.
‘There’s an inn. There’s no chance of mistaking it as it’s the only one. It’s called L’Ange. You’ll be extremely uncomfortable there, since poor Jeanne is half-crazy. Another one I knew as a baby. She might not want to put you up, but you’ll find a way of winning her over, I’m sure. Just start talking to her about illnesses, and she’ll be happy. She’s convinced she’s got them all.’
Madame Maigret brought in a tray with some coffee, and the elderly lady, indifferent to this gesture, rebuffed her:
‘What’s this? Who told you to bring us coffee? Take it away!’
She took her for the maid, as she had mistaken Maigret for the gardener
.
‘I could tell you lots of stories, but I know your reputation and I know that you are clever enough to find things out for yourself. Don’t be taken in by my son-in-law, that’s my only piece of advice. He has hoodwinked everyone. He is polite, more so than anyone you’ve ever met. He’s sickeningly polite. But one day his head will roll—’
‘I’m sorry, madame—’
‘Stop saying sorry, inspector. I had a granddaughter, just one, the daughter of this wretched Malik. My son-inlaw is called Malik, that too you should know. Charles Malik … My granddaughter, Monita, would have turned eighteen next week—’
‘You mean she’s dead?’
‘Exactly seven days ago. We buried her the day before yesterday. She was found drowned, on the weir downstream … And, when Bernadette Amorelle tells you that it was no accident, you can believe it. Monita could swim like a fish. People will try and have you believe that she was reckless, that she used to go swimming alone at six o’clock in the morning and sometimes at night. That wouldn’t have caused her to drown. And if they insinuate that perhaps she wanted to commit suicide, you can tell them that they’re lying.’
The conversation had switched abruptly from comedy to tragedy, but the curious thing was that the old lady’s tone remained that of comedy. She did not cry. There wasn’t the hint of a tear in her startlingly black eyes. Her entire sharp, twitchy being continued to be animated with the same vitality, which, in spite of everything, had something comical about it.
She forged on, pursuing her train of thought with no regard for customary niceties. She looked at Maigret without doubting for a moment that he was all hers, simply because that was what she wanted.
She had stolen away in secret, in a dubious automobile, with a kid who could barely drive, crossing the entire Beauce region in the heat of the day, foregoing lunch. Now, she was looking at the time on an old-fashioned necklace watch that she was wearing.
‘If you have any questions, be quick,’ she commanded, already poised to get up.
‘You don’t like your son-in-law, if I understand correctly.’
‘I hate him.’
‘Does your daughter hate him too? Is she unhappy with him?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’
‘Don’t you get on with your daughter?’
‘I prefer to ignore her. She has no spine, no blood in her veins.’
‘You say that seven days ago, in other words last Tuesday, your granddaughter drowned in the Seine.’
‘I most certainly did not. You’d better listen more carefully to what I tell you. Monita was found dead in the Seine, above the weir downstream.’
‘But she had no injuries and the doctor gave permission for the body to be buried?’
She merely looked at him with the utmost contempt, with perhaps a touch of pity.
‘You are the only person, I gather, who suspects that this death was not natural.’
This time, she rose.
‘Listen, inspector. You are reputed to be the cleverest policeman in the whole of France. At least the one who has had the most successes. Get dressed. Pack your bag. In half an hour I’m dropping you off at Les Aubrais station. By seven o’clock this evening, you’ll be at the Auberge de l’Ange. It would be best if we appeared not to know one another. Every day, at around midday, François will go and have a drink at L’Ange. He doesn’t usually drink, but I’ll order him to. So that we can communicate without arousing their suspicions.’
She took a few steps in the direction of the garden, determined no doubt to go for a stroll while waiting for him, despite the heat.
‘Hurry up.’
Then, turning around:
‘Perhaps you would be so kind as to have a drink brought out to François. He must be in the car. Wine mixed with water. Not pure wine, as he has to drive me home, and he’s not used to it.’
Madame Maigret, who must have overheard everything, was standing in the hall behind the door.
‘What are you doing, Maigret?’ she asked on seeing him head for the staircase with its copper banister knob.
It was cool inside the house, where there was a pleasant smell of wax polish, cut hay, ripening fruit and food simmering on the stove. It had taken Maigret fifty years to rediscover that smell, the smell of his childhood, of his parents’ house.
‘You’re not going to go with that mad old woman, are you?’
He had left his clogs by the door. He walked barefoot on the cool tiles, then up the polished oak stairs.
‘Give the driver a drink, then come upstairs and help me pack.’
There was a little twinkle in his eyes, a little twinkle he recognized as he shaved in cold water and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror.
‘I really don’t understand you,’ sighed his wife. ‘Only a couple of hours ago you couldn’t relax because of a few Colorado beetles.’
The train. He was hot. He sat in his corner puffing on his pipe. The grass on the embankments was yellow, the little stations with their tubs of flowers flashed past. In the haze of the heat a man waved his small red flag and blew a whistle, as children do, looking ridiculous.
Maigret was greying at the temples. He was a little calmer, a little heavier than he had been, but he did not feel that he had aged since retiring from the Police Judiciaire.
It was out of vanity, or rather a sort of modesty, that for the past two years he had systematically refused to take on any of the jobs he had been offered, especially by banks, insurance companies and jewellers, who brought him tricky cases.
At Quai des Orfèvres they would have said:
‘Poor old Maigret is going back to his old ways, he’s already bored with gardening and fishing.’
And here he was, having allowed an old woman who had appeared through the little green door to twist him round her little finger.
He pictured her sitting upright and dignified in the old-fashioned limousine driven with perilous negligence by a François still wearing his gardener’s clothes who hadn’t had time to swap his clogs for a pair of shoes.
He heard her saying, after she had seen Madame Maigret waving from the doorstep as they left:
‘That’s your wife, isn’t it? She must have been offended when I took her for the housekeeper … And I thought you were the gardener.’
And the car set off on its daredevil journey, having dropped Maigret off at Les Aubrais station in Orléans, where François, in the wrong gear, had nearly reversed into a whole cluster of bicycles.
It was the holiday season. Parisians swarmed all over the countryside and the woods, driving fast cars on the roads and paddling canoes on the rivers, and there were fishermen in straw boaters at the foot of every willow tree.
Orsenne wasn’t a station, but a halt where the occasional train condescended to stop. Through the trees in the vast gardens the roofs of large houses could be glimpsed, and beyond them the Seine, broad and majestic at this spot.
Maigret would have found it hard to say why he had obeyed Bernadette Amorelle’s orders. Perhaps because of the Colorado beetles?
Suddenly, he too felt as if he were on holiday, just like the people he had sat among on the train, those he met walking down the steep path, those he saw everywhere since he had left Meung.
A different atmosphere from that of his garden enveloped him. He walked with a light step amid his new surroundings. At the bottom of the sloping path, he came to the Seine bordered by a path wide enough for vehicle traffic.
From the station, Maigret had followed the signs with arrows indicating the Auberge de l’Ang
e. He entered a garden with neglected arbours, and finally pushed open the glass door of a veranda where the air was suffocating because of the sunshine streaming in through the glazed sides.
‘Hello!’ he called.
There was only a cat on a cushion on the floor and some fishing rods in a corner.
‘Hello!’
He descended a step and found himself in a room where the copper pendulum of an ancient clock swung lazily to and fro, clicking with each movement.
‘There’s no one in this dump,’ he muttered.
Just then someone stirred, close to where he stood. He shuddered and in the gloom could just make out a person moving. It was a woman wrapped in blankets, no doubt this Jeanne whom Madame Amorelle had mentioned. Her dark, greasy hair hung down on either side of her face and there was a thick white compress around her neck.
‘We’re closed!’ she croaked.
‘I know, madame. I heard you were unwell.’
Ouch! The word ‘unwell’, ridiculously inadequate, was an insult.
‘I’m at death’s door, you mean! Nobody will believe it … People are horrible.’
Nevertheless, she finished shrugging off the blanket covering her legs and got to her feet, her thick ankles swollen over the tops of her felt slippers.
‘Who sent you here?’
‘It so happens I came here once before, more than twenty years ago, and this is a sort of pilgrimage that—’
‘So you knew Marius?’
‘Of course I did!’
‘Poor Marius … You know he died?’
‘So I heard. I found it hard to believe.’
‘Why? … He wasn’t in good health either … It’s three years since he died, and here I am, dragging on … Were you expecting to sleep here?’
She had spotted the suitcase that he had left in the doorway.
‘I was planning to spend a few days here, yes. As long as I’m not putting you to any trouble. In your condition—’
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