He was in the café. Men holding grubby cards and totting up red and yellow counters were seated at the brown, polished tables.
He was in Geneviève’s bedroom. He was suffering with her, feeling for her pride as a woman. Doubtless, she had just lived through the most painful day of her life and was perhaps anxiously awaiting Maigret’s return so that she could slip into his room once more.
Madame Naud was wide awake. She had gone to bed, but could not get to sleep and in the darkness of her room, she lay listening for the slightest sound in the house. She wondered why Maigret had not come back, pictured her husband cooling his heels in the drawing-room, torn between hope after his telephone call to Bréjon and anxiety at the superintendent’s absence.
Maigret felt the warmth of the cattle in the stables, heard the mare kicking, visualized the old cook in her camisole…And in Groult-Cotelle’s house…Look now! A door was opening. Alban was leading his visitor out. How he hated him. What had he and Cavre said to each other in the dusty, stale-smelling sitting room after the telephone call to Naud?
The door closed again. Cavre walked quickly along, his briefcase under his arm. He was pleased, yet displeased. After all, he had almost won the game. He had beaten Maigret. Tomorrow the superintendent would be summoned back to Paris. But none the less, he felt a little humiliated that he had not brought this about single-handed. Furthermore, he felt thoroughly ruffled by the superintendent’s menacing tone with regard to the whereabouts of Albert Retailleau’s cap…
Cavre’s employee would be waiting for him at the Lion d’Or, drinking brandy to while away the time.
“Are you going back straightaway?” asked Louis.
“Yes, lad…What else can I do?”
“You’re not going to give up?”
“Give up what?”
Maigret knew them all so well! He had come across so many lads like Louis in his life, youngsters who were just as enthusiastic, just as naive and crafty, who plunged straight into every difficulty in their desire to solve the case come what may!
“You’ll get over it, my lad,” he thought. “In a few years’ time you will bow respectfully to a Naud or a Groult-Cotelle because you’ll have understood that it’s the wisest course of action when you’re Fillou’s son…”
And what about Madame Retailleau, all alone in her house? She was sure to have carefully removed all the notes from the soup tureen. She had understood long ago. She had doubtless been as good a wife and as good a mother as anyone else. It was probably not that she lacked feelings, but that she had realized that feelings are of no use. She had resigned herself to this truth.
But she was determined to defend herself with other arms! She was determined to turn all life’s misfortunes into banknotes. Her husband’s death had secured her her house and an income which allowed her to bring up and educate her son.
The death of Albert…
“I bet,” he muttered to himself in a low voice, “she wants a little house in Niort, not in Saint-Aubin…A brand-new little house, spotlessly clean, with pictures of her husband and son on the wall…somewhere she can live comfortably and securely in her old age.”
As for Groult-Cotelle and his Sexual Perversions…
“You’re walking awfully quickly, superintendent…”
“Are you coming back with me?”
“Do you mind?”
“Won’t your mother be worried?”
“Oh! She doesn’t take any notice of me…”
He said these words with a mixture of pride and regret in his voice.
Off they went, past the station, along the water-logged path bordering the canal. Old Désiré would be sleeping off his wine on his dirty straw mattress. Josaphat the postman was proud of himself and was no doubt reckoning what he had gained from his cleverness and cunning…
Ahead of them, at the end of the path, there was a circle of light like the moon seen through the veil of a cloud. A large, warm and peaceful-looking house pierced the mist, one of those houses that passers-by look at enviously and think how nice it must be to live there.
“Off you go, son…We’re here now…”
“When will I see you again? Promise me you won’t leave without…”
“I promise…”
“You’re sure you’re not giving up?”
“Sure…”
Alas! For Maigret was not exactly thrilled at the thought of what remained to be done and walked up to the steps of the house with his shoulders down. The front door was ajar. They had left it like this so that he could get in. There was a light on in the drawing-room.
He sighed as he took off his heavy overcoat which the fog had made even heavier, then stood for a moment on the doormat to light his pipe.
“In we go!”
Poor Etienne had sat up waiting for him, torn between hope and a deadly anxiety. That very afternoon, Madame Naud had tormented herself in similar fashion, in the same armchair as her husband was sitting in now.
A bottle of armagnac on a small round table looked as if it had served its purpose well.
8
MAIGRET PLAYS MAIGRET
There was nothing affected about Maigret’s stance. If his shoulders were hunched and his head slightly to one side, as if he were frozen to the marrow and bent on warming himself by the stove, it was because he was cold. He had been out in the fog for some time and had paid no attention to the temperature outside. He shivered now as he took off his overcoat and suddenly seemed aware of the icy dampness that chilled his bones.
He felt irritable, as one does when one is about to go down with flu. He also felt uneasy, since he disliked the task which faced him. And he was hesitant. As he was about to go into the drawing room, he suddenly thought of two diametrically opposed methods of tackling the situation, just when he had to make up his mind one way or the other.
It was this, rather than an attempt to live up to his reputation, that made him walk into the room, swerving to and fro like a bear, with a churlish expression on his face and large eyes that did not appear to be focusing on anything.
He looked at nothing, yet saw everything: the glass and the bottle of armagnac, the smooth hair of Etienne Naud who said with a false cheerfulness:
“Did you have a good evening, superintendent?”
He had obviously just run a comb through his hair. He always kept one in his pocket for he liked to be admired. But before, while he was gloomily waiting for Maigret to come back, he had probably run his shaking fingers through his hair.
Instead of replying, Maigret went over to the wall on the left and adjusted a picture which was not hanging straight. Nor was this affectation. He could not abide seeing a picture hang crooked on a wall. It quite simply irritated him and he had no wish to be irritated for such a stupid reason just when he was all set to play the detective.
It was stuffy. The smell of food still lingered in the room and mingled with the bouquet from the armagnac, to which the superintendent finally helped himself.
“There!” he sighed.
Naud jumped in surprise and anxiety at that resounding “There!” for it was as if Maigret, having debated the situation in his mind, had reached a conclusion.
If the superintendent had been at Police Headquarters or had even been officially investigating the case, he would have felt obliged, in order to make the odds in his favor, to use traditional methods. Now, traditional methods in this case tended to break down Naud’s resistance, to scare him and shatter his nerves by making him oscillate between hope and fear.
It was easy. Just let him get entangled in his own lies first. Then vaguely bring up the subject of the two telephone calls. And then (why not, after all?) say point-blank:
“Your friend Alban will be arrested tomorrow morning…”
Not a bit of it, however! Maigret quite simply stood with his elbows resting on the mantelpiece. The flames in the fireplace scorched his legs. Naud was sitting near him presumably going on hoping…
“I shall leave t
omorrow at three o’clock as you wish,” sighed the superintendent at last, having puffed at his pipe two or three times in quick succession.
He pitied Naud. He felt uncomfortable before this man who was about the same age as himself and who up until now had lived a comfortable, peaceful, upright life. Now, threatened as he was by the thought of being shut behind prison walls for the rest of his days, he was playing his last cards.
Was he going to carry on the struggle and go on lying? Maigret hoped not, just as, out of compassion, one hopes that a wounded animal, clumsily shot, will die quickly. He avoided looking at him and fixed his eyes on the carpet.
“Why do you say that, superintendent? You know you are welcome here and that my family not only likes but respects you, as I do…”
“I overheard your telephone conversation with your brother-in-law, Monsieur Naud.”
He put himself in the other man’s shoes. Afterwards, he preferred to forget such moments as these. He therefore hurried on:
“Furthermore, you are mistaken about me. Your brother-in-law Bréjon asked me as a favor to come and help you with a delicate matter. I realized straightaway, believe me, that he had wrongly interpreted your wishes and that it was not help of this kind that you wanted from him. You wrote to him in a moment of panic to ask his advice. You told him about the rumors circulating but you did not admit, of course, that they were true. And he, poor man, being an honest, conscientious magistrate who works by the book, sent you a detective to sort out the mess.”
Naud struggled slowly to his feet, walked over to the small, round table and poured himself a generous glass of armagnac. His hand was shaking. There were probably beads of sweat on his forehead, although Maigret could not see. No doubt out of consideration for Naud’s feelings, the superintendent had looked the other way at this crucial moment, for he pitied the man.
“If you had not called in Justin Cavre, I would have left the district immediately after our initial meeting, but his presence somehow goaded me into staying.”
Naud said not a word in protest, but fiddled with his watch chain and stared at the portrait of his mother-in-law.
“Of course, since I am not here on official business, I am not accountable to anyone. So you have nothing to fear from me, Monsieur Naud, and I am in a position to talk to you all the more freely. You have just been through a hellish few weeks, haven’t you? And so has your wife, for I am sure she knows all about it…”
The other man still did not respond. It had got to the point where a nod of the head, a whisper or a flutter of the eyelids was all that was required to put an end to the suspense. After that, peace would come. He could relax. He would have nothing more to hide, no game to play.
Upstairs, his wife was probably awake, listening carefully and fretting because there was no sign of the two men coming up to bed. And what of his daughter? Had she managed to get to sleep?
“Now, Monsieur Naud, I am going to tell you what I really think, and you will understand why I have not left without saying anything, which strange though it may seem, I was on the point of doing. Listen carefully, and don’t be too ready to misconstrue what I say. I have the distinct impression, the near certitude, that however guilty you may be of the death of Albert Retailleau, you are also a victim of his death. I will go further. If you have been the instrument of death, you are not primarily responsible for it.”
And Maigret helped himself to a drink, in turn, in order to give the other man time to weigh up his words. As Naud remained silent, he finally looked him in the eye and forced him to look back. He asked:
“Don’t you trust me?”
The result was as distressing as it was unexpected, for Naud, a man in the prime of his life, capitulated by bursting into tears. His swollen eyelids brimmed with tears and he pouted his lips like a child. He fought back the tears for a moment, standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, and then rushed over and leaned against the wall. Burying his face in his arms, he started to sob violently, his shoulders moving jerkily up and down.
There was nothing else to do but wait. Twice, he tried to speak, but it was too soon, for he had not regained sufficient composure. As if out of discretion, Maigret had sat down in front of the fire and, not being able to poke the fire as he was accustomed to doing in his own home, he arranged the logs with a pair of tongs.
“You can tell me in your own words what happened in a little while, if you like, although it won’t serve much purpose as it is a simple matter to reconstruct the events of the night in question. But what followed is another matter altogether…”
“What do you mean?”
Naud looked just as tall and strong, but he seemed to have lost his grip. He had the air of a child who has shot up too quickly and who at the age of twelve is as tall and well-filled out as a fully grown man.
“Did you not suspect there was something going on between your daughter and that young man?”
“But I didn’t even know him, superintendent! I mean I knew of his existence because I know more or less everyone in the village, but I could not have put a name to his face. I still wonder how on earth Geneviève managed to meet him as she virtually never left the house…”
“On the night in question, you and your wife were in bed, were you not?”
“Yes…And another thing…It’s ridiculous, but we’d had goose for dinner…”
He clung to facts of this kind, as though investing the truth with such intimate details somehow made it less tragic.
“I love goose, but I find it difficult to digest…At about one in the morning, I got up to take some bicarbonate of soda…You know the layout of the rooms upstairs, more or less…Our bathroom is next to our bedroom, then there’s a spare room and next to that a room we never go into because…”
“I know…In memory of a child…”
“My daughter’s room is at the far end of the corridor and so it is rather isolated from the rest of the house. The two maids sleep on the floor above…So I was in our bathroom groping about in the dark, as I didn’t want to wake up my wife, as she’d have scolded me for being greedy…I heard the sound of voices…There was an argument going on…It did not cross my mind that the noise could be coming from my daughter’s room…
“However, when I went into the corridor to see for myself, I realized this was so. There was a light beneath her door, too…I heard a man’s voice…
“I don’t know what you would have done in my place, superintendent…I don’t know if you have a daughter…We’re still rather behind the times here in Saint-Aubin…Perhaps I am particularly naive…Geneviève is twenty…But it had never occurred to me she might hide something like this from her mother and me…To think that a man…No! You know, even now…”
He wiped his eyes and mechanically took his packet of cigarettes out of his pocket.
“I almost rushed into the room in my nightshirt…I’m rather old-fashioned in that respect, too, as I still wear nightshirts and not pajamas…But at the last moment I realized how ridiculous I looked and went back into the bathroom. I got dressed in the dark and just as I was putting on my socks, I heard another noise, this time from outside…As the bathroom shutters had not been closed I drew back the curtain…There was a moon and I could see a man climbing down a ladder into the courtyard…
“I got my shoes on somehow…I rushed downstairs…I am not sure, but I think I heard my wife calling:
“‘Etienne…’
“Have you already thought of looking at the key to the door which opens on to the courtyard?…It’s an old key, a huge one, a real hammer…I would not be prepared to swear I took it off its hook without thinking, but it wasn’t a premeditated action either for it had not occurred to me to kill and if anyone had said then…”
He spoke softly but in a shaky voice. To calm himself down he lit his cigarette and puffed slowly at it several times, like condemned men must do.
“The man went around the house and jumped over the low wall by the road. I jumped over
it behind him, not thinking to stifle the sound of my footsteps. He must have heard me but he went on walking at the same pace. When I had almost caught up with him he turned around, and although I could not see his face, for some reason or other I got the impression he was jeering at me.
“‘What do you want of me?’ he asked in an aggressive, scornful tone of voice.
“I swear to you, superintendent, there are moments I wish with all my heart I had never lived through. I recognized him. He was just a youngster to me, but he had just left my daughter’s bedroom and now he was sneering at me. I didn’t know what to do. This kind of thing doesn’t happen the way you imagine. I shook him by the shoulders but couldn’t find the words to express what I wanted to say.
“‘So you’re annoyed I am jilting your daughter, are you! The slut!…You were hand in glove, weren’t you?’ he flung at me.”
Naud passed his hand over his face.
“I am not sure of anything, any more, superintendent. With the best will in the world, I could not give you an exact account of what happened. He was every bit as angry as I was but more in control of himself. He was insulting me, insulting my daughter…Instead of falling on his knees at my feet, as I had stupidly half-imagined he would do, he was making fun of me, my wife, my whole family. He said things like:
“‘A fine family, indeed!’
“He used the most obscene language when referring to my daughter, words I cannot bring myself to repeat, and then I began to hit him. I don’t know how it happened. I had the key in my hand. The youth suddenly punched me hard in the stomach and the pain was such that I hit him more violently than ever…
“He fell…
“And then I ran away. All I wanted to do was to get back to the house…
“I swear to you this is the truth…My idea was to telephone the gendarmerie in Benet…When I got closer to the house I saw a light on in my daughter’s room…I suddenly thought that if I told the truth…But you must understand…I went back to where I had left him…He was dead…”
Inspector Cadaver Page 12