All the same she was a good-looking woman, in a common, feral way. Sitting sideways on the stool, or rather huddling up in self-defence, she fired daggers from her eyes as she scowled at the inspector.
‘If you know all that already, why bother to ask me? …’
Her eyes flashed, and she added with an offensive laugh:
‘Unless you’re afraid of bringing her down too! … I’m right, aren’t I? … Ha! Ha! … I don’t matter … I’m just a foreigner … A ghetto girl living from hand to mouth … But she’s different! … Oh well …’
She was going to talk. Jealousy had done it. Maigret sensed that he might scare her off if he seemed too interested, so he put on a nonchalant air and looked away. But she screamed out:
‘Well … You get nothing! Did you hear me? Buzz off and leave me alone. I told you already, you get nothing! … Not a thing!’
She threw herself to the floor in a way that could not have been forestalled even by men well acquainted with this kind of woman. She was having a fit of hysterics! Her face was all distorted, her arms and legs were writhing on the floor, and her body juddered with muscular spasms.
What had been a beautiful woman was now a hideous hag tearing whole tufts of hair off her head with no thought for the pain.
Maigret wasn’t alarmed, he’d seen a hundred fits of this kind already. He picked the water jug off the floor. It was empty. He called a guard:
‘Fill this up, quickly.’
Within minutes he’d poured cold water over the woman’s face. She gasped, greedily opened her mouth, looked at Maigret without knowing who he was, then fell into a deep slumber. Now and again small spasms ran across the surface of her body.
Maigret let down the bed, which had been raised against the wall as required by regulations, smoothed out the wafer-thin mattress and with great effort picked up Anna Gorskin and laid her on the bed.
He did all that without the slightest resentment, with a gentleness you’d never think he was capable of. He pulled the unhappy woman’s dress down over her knees, took her pulse and watched over her for a long while.
In this light she had the look of a worn-out woman of thirty-five. Her forehead was full of tiny wrinkles you couldn’t usually see. Conversely her chubby hands, with cheap varnish clumsily painted on her nails, had a delicate shape.
Maigret filled his pipe slowly with his index finger, like a man not sure what to do next. For a while he paced up and down the cell, with its door still ajar.
Suddenly he turned around, for he could hardly believe his eyes.
Anna Gorskin had just pulled the blanket up over her face. She was just a shapeless lump underneath the ugly grey cotton cover. A lump that was heaving up and down in staccato. If you strained your ear you could hear her muffled sobs.
Maigret went out noiselessly, shut the door behind him, went past the guard then, when he had gone ten metres further on, came back on his tracks.
‘Have her meals sent over from Brasserie Dauphine!’ he blurted out, grumpily.
15. Two Telegrams
Maigret read them aloud to Monsieur Coméliau, the examining magistrate, who had a bored expression on his face.
The first was a wire from Mrs Mortimer-Levingston in response to the message informing her of her husband’s murder.
Berlin. Hotel Modern. Am sick with a high temperature, cannot travel. Stones will deal with it.
Maigret smiled sourly.
‘Do you see? Here’s the message from Wilhelmstrasse, for contrast. It’s in IPC, I’ll translate it for you:
Mrs Mortimer arrived air, staying Hotel Modern, Berlin. Found message Paris on return from theatre. Took to bed and called American medic Pelgrad. Doctor claims confidentiality privilege. Query bring in second opinion? Hotel staff not aware any symptoms.
‘As you can see, your honour, the lady is not keen to be questioned by French police. Mind you, I’m not claiming she’s an accomplice. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m sure Mortimer hid ninety-nine per cent of his activities from her. He wasn’t the kind of man to trust a women, especially not his wife. But the bottom line is that she passed on a message one evening at Pickwick’s Bar to a professional dancer who’s now on ice in the morgue … That might be the only time that Mortimer used her, out of sheer necessity …’
‘What about Stones?’ the magistrate inquired.
‘Mortimer’s principal secretary. He was in charge of communications between the boss and his various businesses. At the time of the murder he’d been in London for a week, staying at the Victoria Hotel. I was careful to keep him out of the picture. But I called Scotland Yard and asked them to check the man out. Please note that when the English police turned up at the Victoria, news of Mortimer’s death hadn’t been released in the country, though it may have reached the news desks. Nonetheless the bird had flown. Stones did a bunk a few minutes before the police got there …’
The magistrate surveyed the pile of letters and telegrams cluttering his desk with a gloomy look on his face.
‘Do you think we should foster the rumour that it was a love murder?’ Coméliau asked, without conviction.
‘I think that would be wise. Otherwise you’ll set off a stock market panic and ruin a number of honourable businesses – first and foremost, those French companies that Mortimer had just bailed out.’
‘Obviously, but …’
‘Hang on a moment! The US Embassy will want proof … And you haven’t got any! … And nor do I …’
The magistrate wiped his glasses.
‘And the consequence is …?’
‘None … I’m waiting for news from Dufour, who’s been in Fécamp since yesterday … Give Mortimer a fine funeral … Doesn’t matter. With speeches and official delegations.’
The magistrate had been looking at Maigret with curiosity for the last few minutes.
‘You look funny …’ he said suddenly.
The inspector smiled and put on a confidential air:
‘It’s morphine!’ he said.
‘Eh? …’
‘Don’t worry! I’m not hooked on it yet! Just a little injection in my chest … The medics want to remove two of my ribs, they say it’s absolutely necessary … But it’s a huge job! … I’ll have to go into a clinic and stay there for God knows how many weeks … I asked for sixty hours’ stay of execution … The worst outcome would be losing a third rib … Two more than Adam! … That’s all! Now you’re treating this like a tragedy as well … It’s obvious you haven’t gone over the pros and cons with Professor Cochet, who’s fiddled about with the innards of almost all the world’s kings and masters … He’d have told you as he told me that there are thousands of people missing all sorts of bits and pieces in their bodies … Take the Czech premier … Cochet removed one of his kidneys … I saw it … He showed me all sorts of things, lungs, stomachs … And the people who had them before are still around, all over the world, getting on with their lives …’
He checked the time on his wristwatch, muttering:
‘Come on, Dufour! …’
He was now looking serious again. The air in the magistrate’s office was blue with the smoke from Maigret’s pipe. The inspector perched on the edge of the desk; he had made himself quite at home. After a pause:
‘I think I’d better pop down to Fécamp myself!’ he sighed. ‘There’s a train in an hour …’
‘Nasty business!’ Coméliau said, as if to bring the case to an end, pushing the file away.
Maigret was lost in contemplation of the pall of smoke all around him. The only noise that broke the silence, or rather gave it a rhythm, was the gurgling of his pipe.
‘Look at this photograph,’ he said all of a sudden.
He held out the Pskov photograph showing the tailor’s white-gabled house, the hoist, the six steps and the seated mother, with the father posing and the two lads in their embroidered sailor collar shirts.
‘That’s in Russia! I had to look it up in an atlas. Not far from the Baltic
Sea. There are several small countries in those parts: Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia … With Poland and Russia surrounding them. The national borders don’t match ethnic boundaries. From one village to the next you change language. And on top of that you’ve got Jews spread all over, constituting a separate race. And besides that, there are the communists! There are border wars going on all the time! And the armies of the ultra-nationalists … People live on pine-cones in the woods. The poor over there are poorer than anywhere else. Some of them die of cold and hunger. There are intellectuals defending German culture, others defending Slavic culture, and still others defending local customs and ancient dialects … Some of the peasants have the look of Lapps or Kalmyks, others are tall and blond, and then you’ve got mixed-race Jews who eat garlic and slaughter livestock their own special way …’
Maigret took the photograph back from the magistrate, who hadn’t seemed very interested in it.
‘What odd little boys!’ was his only comment.
Maigret handed it back to the magistrate and asked:
‘Can you tell me which of the two I’m looking for?’
Three-quarters of an hour remained before the train left. Magistrate Coméliau studied in turn the boy who seemed to be challenging the photographer and his brother, who could be turning towards the other one to ask for his advice.
‘Photographs like that speak volumes!’ Maigret continued. ‘It makes you wonder why their parents and their teachers who saw them like that didn’t guess right off what lay in store for these characters. Look closely at the father … He was killed in a riot one evening when the nationalists were fighting communists in the streets … He wasn’t on either side … He’d just gone out to get a loaf of bread … I got the story by sheer chance from the landlord of the Roi de Sicile, who comes from Pskov … The mother’s still alive and lives in the same house. On Sundays she puts on national dress, with a tall hat that comes down on the sides … And the boys …’
Maigret stopped. His voice changed entirely.
‘Mortimer was born on a farm in Ohio and started out selling shoelaces in San Francisco. Anna Gorskin, who was born in Odessa, spent her early years in Vilna. Mrs Mortimer, lastly, is a Scot who emigrated to Florida when still a child. And the whole lot have ended up a stone’s throw from Notre-Dame-de-Paris. Whereas I’m the son of a gamekeeper on a Loire Valley estate that goes back centuries.’
He looked at his watch again and pointed to the boy in the photograph who was staring admiringly at his brother.
‘What I’ve got to do now is lay my hands on that boy there!’
He emptied his pipe into the coal bucket and almost began filling up the stove, out of habit.
A few minutes later Magistrate Coméliau was wiping his gold-rimmed spectacles and saying to his clerk:
‘Don’t you find Maigret changed? I though he was … how should I put it … rather excited … rather …’
He couldn’t find the right word, and then cut to the main point:
‘What the hell are all these foreigners doing here?’
Then he abruptly pulled over the Mortimer file and began to dictate:
‘Take this down: In the year nineteen …’
• • •
Inspector Dufour was in the very same nook in the wall where Maigret had kept watch on the man in the trenchcoat one stormy day, because it was the only niche to be found in the steep alleyway that led first to the handful of villas on the cliff and then turned into a track that petered out in a grazed meadow.
Dufour was wearing black spats, a short, belted cloak and a sailor’s cap, like everyone else in these parts. He must have acquired it on arrival at Fécamp.
‘So? …’ Maigret asked as he came upon him in the dark.
‘All going fine, chief.’
He found that rather worrying.
‘What’s going fine?’
‘The man hasn’t come in or gone out … If he got to Fécamp before me and went to the villa, then that’s where he is …’
‘Give me the whole story, in detail.’
‘Yesterday morning, nothing to report. The maid went to market. In the evening I had Detective Bornier relieve me. Nobody in or out all night long. Lights out at ten …’
‘Next?’
‘I returned to my post this morning, and Bornier went to bed … He’ll come back and relieve me … Around nine, same as yesterday, the maid went off to the market … About half an hour ago a young lady came out … She’ll be back shortly … I guess she’s gone to call on someone …’
Maigret kept quiet. He realized how far the surveillance fell short of the mark. But how many men would he need to make a job like this completely watertight?
To keep the villa under permanent observation he would need at least three men. Then he’d need a detective to tail the maid, and another one for the ‘young lady’, as Dufour called her!
‘She’s been gone thirty minutes?’
‘Yes … Look! Here comes Bornier … My turn for a meal break … I’ve only had a sandwich all day and my feet are freezing …’
‘Off you go …’
Detective Bornier was a young man just starting out with the Flying Squad.
‘I met Madame Swaan …’ he said.
‘Where? When?’
‘At the dockside … Just now … She was going towards the outer pier …’
‘On her own?’
‘Yes, alone. I thought of tailing her … But then I remembered Dufour was expecting me … The pier’s a dead end, so she can’t get very far …’
‘What was she wearing?’
‘A dark coat … I didn’t pay attention …’
‘Can I go now?’ Dufour asked.
‘I told you already …’
‘If anything comes up, you will let me know, won’t you? … All you have to do is ring on the hotel bell three times in a row …’
What an idiot! Maigret was barely listening. He told Bornier: ‘You stay here …’ and then took off quite abruptly for the Swaans’ villa, where he tugged at the bell-pull at the gate so hard that it nearly came off. He could see light on the ground floor, in the room he now knew to be the dining room.
Nobody came for five minutes, so he climbed over the low wall, got to the front door, and banged on it with his fist.
From inside a terrified voice wailed:
‘Who’s there?’
He could hear children crying as well.
‘Police! Open up!’
There was a pause and the sound of scuffling feet.
‘Open up! Get a move on!’
The hallway was unlit, but as he went in Maigret made out a white rectangle that could only be the maid’s apron.
‘Madame Swaan?’
At that point a door swung open and he saw the little girl he’d noticed on his first visit. The maid stood stock still with her back to the wall. You could tell she was rigid with fright.
‘Who did you see this morning?’
‘Officer, I swear I …’
She collapsed in tears.
‘I swear … I swear …’
‘Was it Captain Swaan?’
‘No! … I … It was … madame’s … brother-in-law … He gave me a letter to give to madame …’
‘Where was he?’
‘Opposite the butcher’s … He was waiting for me there …’
‘Was that the first time he’s asked you to do jobs of that kind?’
‘Yes, the first time … I never saw him before except in this house.’
‘… Do you know where he planned to join up with Madame Swaan?’
‘I don’t know anything! … Madame has been in a nervous state all day … She asked me questions as well. She wanted to know how he looked … I told her the truth, I said he looked like he was on the edge … He scared me when he came up close.’
Maigret rushed out without closing the door behind him.
16. On the Rocks
Detective Bornier, a newcomer to the Squad, w
as quite horrified to see the chief run straight past, brushing him as he went without a word of apology and leaving the front door of the villa wide open. Twice he called out:
‘Inspector Maigret! Inspector, sir!’
But Maigret did not turn back. He only slowed down a few minutes later, when he got to Rue d’Étretat, where there were some passers-by, then he turned to the right, sploshed through the mud at the dockside and started running again towards the outer pier.
He’d only gone 100 metres when he made out the figure of a woman. He switched to the other side so as to get nearer to her. There was a trawler with an acetylene lamp up in the rigging – that meant it was unloading its catch.
He stopped so as to allow the woman to reach the pool of light and he saw it was the face of Madame Swaan, in great distress. She was rolling her eyes and walking with a hurried and clumsy tread, as if she were hopping over deep ruts and by some miracle not falling into them.
The inspector was ready to tackle her and had already started to walk over. But the long black line of the deserted pier stretching out into the dark, with waves breaking over both sides, caught his eye. He rushed towards it. Beyond the trawler there wasn’t a soul to be seen. The green and red flare of the harbour passage light cut through the night. The light was set on the rocks and every fifteen seconds it flashed over a wide stretch of water then lit up the outer cliff, which blinked on and off like a ghost.
Maigret stumbled over capstans as he found his way onto the pontoon, in the noise of crashing waves.
He strained his eyes to see in the dark. A ship’s siren wailed a request to be let out of the lock.
In front of him was the blank and noisy sea. Behind him, the town with its shops and slippery pavements.
He strode on quickly, stopping at intervals to peer into the darkness, with increasing anxiety.
• • •
He didn’t know the terrain and took what he thought was a short cut. The walkway on stilts led him to the foot of a lighthouse where there were three black cannonballs, which he counted without thinking why. Further on, he leaned over the railing and looked down on great pools of white foam settling between outcrops of rock.
Pietr the Latvian Page 11