As they passed a hedge he pulled a twig from it. He seemed to be struggling not to let events get on top of him.
‘And to think I brought Marie Vassiliev with me!’
‘Marie Vassiliev?’
‘My girlfriend! I left her in her bed, in Moulins … She’s quite capable of hiring a car right now and running off. That’s all I need!’
They were only now turning out the lights in Marie Tatin’s, where some men were drinking rum. The Moulins bus was about to set off, half empty.
‘She didn’t deserve that!’ Maurice said dreamily.
‘Who?’
‘My mother!’
And at that moment there was something childlike about him, in spite of his height and his developing paunch. Perhaps he was finally on the brink of crying?
The two men were walking up and down near the church, forever pacing out the same path, now facing the pond, now turning their backs on it.
‘Look, inspector! It isn’t at all possible that someone might have killed her … or at least I can’t imagine …’
Maigret thought about it, so intensely that he forgot all about his companion. He was remembering the tiniest details of the first mass.
The countess in her pew … No one had gone near her … She had taken communion … She had knelt down with her face in her hands … Then she had opened her missal … A little later, she had her face in her hands again …
‘Would you excuse me for a moment?’
Maigret climbed the steps and entered the church, where the sacristan was already preparing the altar for high mass. The bell-ringer, a clumsy peasant in heavy hobnail boots, was straightening the chairs.
The inspector walked straight towards the pews, bent down and called the sexton, who turned round.
‘Who picked up the missal?’
‘Which missal?’
‘The countess’s … It was left here.’
‘Is that right?’
‘You, come here!’ Maigret said to the bell-ringer. ‘Have you seen the missal that was here earlier?’
‘What?’
Either he was stupid or he was pretending to be. Maigret was agitated. He noticed Maurice de Saint-Fiacre standing at the end of the nave.
‘Who has been near this pew?’
‘The doctor’s wife was sitting there at seven o’clock mass …’
‘I didn’t think the doctor was a religious man.’
‘Perhaps he isn’t – but his wife …’
‘Right! Tell the whole village that there’s a big reward for anyone who brings me the missal.’
‘To the chateau?’
‘No! To Marie Tatin’s.’
Outside, Maurice de Saint-Fiacre walked beside him again.
‘I don’t understand this matter about the missal.’
‘Heart attack, isn’t that right? … Maybe caused by some kind of shock … And it happened shortly after communion, in other words after the countess had opened her missal … Let’s imagine that in that missal …’
But the young man shook his head.
‘I can’t imagine any sort of message that might have given my mother such a shock … Besides, it would be so … so hateful …’
He was having difficulty breathing. He looked grimly at the chateau.
‘Let’s go and get a drink!’
He headed not towards the chateau, but towards the inn, where his entry caused some awkwardness. The four farmers drinking were suddenly ill at ease. They greeted him with a mixture of respect and fear.
Marie Tatin ran from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She stammered:
‘Monsieur Maurice … I’m so distraught at the news … Our poor countess …’
She was crying. She probably cried her heart out every time someone died in the village.
‘You were at mass too, weren’t you?’ she said, calling Maigret as her witness. ‘To think that nobody noticed anything. I was here when they came and told me …’
It is always embarrassing, in such cases, to show less grief than people who are uninvolved. Maurice tried to hide his impatience as he listened to these words of condolence and to grant himself some composure he fetched a bottle of rum from the shelf and filled two glasses.
A shiver ran down his back as he drained his glass in one, and he said to Maigret, ‘I think I caught a cold on my way here this morning.’
‘Everyone around here has a cold, Monsieur Maurice.’
And, to Maigret: ‘You should take care too. I heard you coughing last night …’
The villagers left. The fire was blazing.
‘A day like today!’ said Marie Tatin.
And it was impossible to tell whether she was looking at Maigret or at the count, because her eyes went in different directions.
‘Wouldn’t you like a bite to eat? But look at me! I was so flabbergasted when I was told … that it didn’t even occur to me to change my dress …’
She had just put an apron on over the black dress that she only ever wore to go to mass. Her hat was on the table.
Maurice de Saint-Fiacre drank a second glass of rum, and looked at Maigret as if asking him what to do.
‘Let’s go!’ said the inspector.
‘Will you have lunch here? I’ve killed a chicken and …’
But the two men were already outside. In front of the church there were four or five carts, their horses tethered to trees. Heads could be seen coming and going above the low wall of the cemetery. And, in the courtyard of the chateau, the only touch of vivid colour was the yellow car.
‘The cheque was crossed?’ Maigret asked.
‘Yes! But it will be deposited tomorrow.’
‘Do you do a lot of work?’
Silence. The sound of their footsteps on the paved road. The rustle of dead leaves carried by the wind. The horses snorting.
‘I am the very definition of a good-for-nothing! I’ve done a bit of everything. You see! The forty thousand … I was going to set up a film club. Before that I ran a wireless business …’
A faint sound of gunshot, on their right, beyond the Notre-Dame pond. They saw a huntsman striding towards the bird he had killed, towards which his dog was hurrying.
‘It’s Gautier, the estate manager,’ said Maurice. ‘He must have gone hunting …’
Then all of a sudden he had a fit of annoyance, stamped his heel on the ground, pulled a face and nearly sobbed.
‘Poor old thing!’ he muttered, his lips pursed. ‘It’s … it’s so wretched! … and that little swine Jean who …’
As if by magic, they saw Jean pacing the courtyard of the chateau, side by side with the doctor, who must have been engaged in a heated discussion with him, since he was waving his thin arms around.
They occasionally caught the smell of chrysanthemums in the wind.
3. The Altar Boy
There was no sun to distort the images, and no greyness either to blur the outlines of things. Everything stood out with sharp clarity: the trunks of the trees, the dead branches, the pebbles and especially the black clothes of the people who had come to the cemetery. The whites, on the other hand, gravestones or starched shirt-fronts, or the bonnets of the old women, looked unreal and perfidious: whites too shockingly white.
Had it not been for the crisp breeze cutting into people’s cheeks, it was almost as if they were under a slightly dusty bell-jar.
‘I’ll see you in a minute!’
Maigret left the Count of Saint-Fiacre outside the cemetery gate. An old woman, sitting on a little bench that she had brought with her, was trying to sell oranges and chocolate.
Oranges! Fat ones! Unripe! And candied … They put your teeth on edge, they rasped your throat but, when he was ten years old, Maigret had devoured them anyway, because they were oranges.
He had turned up the velvet collar of his overcoat. He didn’t look at anyone. He knew that he had to turn to the left, and that the grave he was looking for was the third one past the cypress tree.
&nb
sp; All around, the cemetery was covered with flowers. The previous day, some women had washed certain gravestones with a brush and soap. The gates had been repainted.
HERE LIES ÉVARISTE MAIGRET …
‘Excuse me! No smoking.’
The inspector barely noticed that anyone was talking to him. At last he stared at the bell-ringer, who was also the grave-digger, and put his pipe, still lit, in his pocket.
He couldn’t think about one thing at a time. Memories came flooding in, memories of his father, a friend who had drowned in the Notre-Dame pond, the child of the chateau in his beautiful pram …
People looked at him. He looked at them. He had seen these faces before. But back then, that man holding a little boy in his arms, for example, the one walking behind a pregnant woman, had been a little boy of four or five.
Maigret had no flowers. The tombstone was blackened. He came out grumpily and muttered to himself, making a whole group of people turn round: ‘We really need to find the missal!’
He didn’t want to go back to the chateau. There was something about it that disgusted, even infuriated him.
Certainly, he was under no illusion about the men. But he was furious with them for sullying his childhood memories! Especially the countess, whom he had always considered as noble and lovely as a character in a picture-book …
And there she was, a batty old lady who kept gigolos!
Not even that! There was nothing honest or open about it! The famous Jean was just playing at being a secretary! He wasn’t handsome, he wasn’t even all that young!
And the poor old woman, as her son had said, was tormented, torn between the chateau and the church.
And the latest Count of Saint-Fiacre risked arrest for presenting a dud cheque!
Someone was walking in front of Maigret with his gun over his shoulder, and the inspector suddenly noticed that he was heading towards the estate manager’s house. He thought he recognized the silhouette he had seen in the field from a distance.
A few metres separated the two men, who were about to enter the courtyard where a few hens were huddled against a wall, in the shelter of the wind, their feathers trembling.
‘Hey! …’
The man with the rifle turned round.
‘Are you the Saint-Fiacre estate manager?’
‘And you are?’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, Police Judiciaire.’
‘Maigret?’
The estate manager was struck by the name, but couldn’t remember exactly why.
‘Have you been told what’s going on?’
‘I’ve just been informed … I was hunting … But what do the police? …’
He was a small, squat man, grey-haired, his skin criss-crossed with fine, deep wrinkles, and pupils that looked as if they were lying in ambush behind thick eyebrows.
‘I was told her heart …’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m hardly going to go into the chateau with my boots covered in mud and my rifle …’
The head of a rabbit hung from his game-bag. Maigret looked at the house they were walking towards.
‘Wait a moment! They’ve changed the kitchen …’
He felt a suspicious glance upon him.
‘Fifteen years ago!’ murmured the estate manager.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Gautier … Is it true that the count arrived without …’
His whole attitude was hesitant, reticent. And Gautier didn’t even invite Maigret inside. He pushed open his door.
The inspector came in anyway and turned right, towards the dining room, which smelled of biscuits and brandy.
‘If you have a moment, Monsieur Gautier … You’re not needed at the house … But I have a few questions to ask you …’
‘Hurry up!’ said a woman’s voice in the kitchen. ‘Apparently it’s horrible …’
And Maigret ran his fingers along the oak table, its corners decorated with carved lions. It was the one from his childhood! It had been sold on to the new estate manager after his father’s death.
‘Can I offer you something?’
Gautier chose a bottle from the sideboard, perhaps as a way of gaining some time.
‘What do you think about Monsieur Jean? … And by the way, what’s his surname? …’
‘Métayer … A respectable family from Bourges …’
‘Did he cost the countess a lot of money?’
Gautier filled the glasses with brandy, but remained stubbornly silent.
‘What business did he have at the chateau? As estate manager I assume you look after everything …’
‘Everything!’
‘So?’
‘He didn’t do anything … A few private letters … At first he claimed to be making the countess some money, thanks to his knowledge of finance … He bought some shares that collapsed in a few months … But he insisted that he would make it all back and more thanks to a new photographic process that one of his friends had invented … It cost the countess about a hundred thousand francs, and the friend disappeared … And last of all there was some story about photographic printing … I don’t know a thing about it. Something like photoengraving or heliogravure, but cheaper …’
‘Jean Métayer was a busy man!’
‘A lot of effort for not much result … He wrote articles in the Journal de Moulins, and they had to take them because of the countess … That was where he did his printing experiments, and the editor didn’t dare throw him out … Cheers! …’
And, suddenly uneasy:
‘There were no rows between him and the count.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘I assume you’re just here by chance … Since it was a heart attack, there’s no reason to …’
What annoyed Maigret most was that he couldn’t catch the estate manager’s eye. He wiped his moustache and moved into the other room.
‘Do you mind if I get changed? … I was supposed to be going to high mass and now …’
‘I’ll see you later!’ said Maigret as he left.
And he was just closing the door when he heard the still invisible woman asking, ‘Who was that?’
They had put sandstone paving stones down in the courtyard, where he had once played marbles on the beaten earth.
The square was filled with groups of people in their Sunday best, and the sound of organ music filtered from the church. The children, in their new suits, didn’t dare to play. And handkerchiefs protruded from everyone’s pockets. They all had red noses, which they blew noisily.
Scraps of phrases reached Maigret’s ears:
‘He’s a policeman from Paris …’
‘… Apparently he’s come about the cow that died at Mathieu’s the other week …’
A cocky young man with a red flower in the buttonhole of his navy-blue serge waistcoat, his face well scrubbed and his hair shiny with brilliantine, dared to call out to the inspector:
‘They’re waiting for you at Tatin’s, it’s about that guy who stole …’
And he nudged his friends in the ribs, holding in a laugh that exploded in any case as soon as Maigret turned his head away.
He hadn’t been making it up. At Marie Tatin’s the atmosphere was hotter now, and thick with pipe smoke. At one table a family of villagers were eating food they had brought from the farm and drinking big bowls of coffee. The father was cutting a dried sausage with his penknife.
The young people were drinking lemonade, the old ones brandy. And Marie Tatin trotted ceaselessly about.
In one corner a woman got up as the inspector came in and took a step towards him, fearful and hesitant, her lips moist. Her hand rested on the shoulder of a little boy; Maigret recognized his red hair.
‘Are you the inspector, sir?’
Everyone looked in his direction.
‘First of all I want to tell you, sir, that we’ve always been honest people in our family! But we’re poor … You understand? … And when I saw tha
t Ernest …’
The boy, extremely pale, stared straight ahead without showing the slightest emotion.
‘Are you the one who took the missal?’ Maigret asked him, bending towards him.
No answer. A keen, shy glance.
‘Answer the inspector …’
But the little boy didn’t open his mouth. His mother swiftly gave him a slap that left a red mark on his left cheek. The boy’s head rocked for a moment. His eyes moistened slightly, his lips trembled, but he didn’t move.
‘Are you going to give him an answer, you little wretch?’
And to Maigret:
‘Children today! For months he’s been pleading with me to buy him a missal! A big one like the one the priest has! Can you imagine that? … So, when I was told about the countess’s missal, I immediately thought … And besides! I’d been surprised to see him coming back between second and third mass, because he usually eats at the presbytery … I went into his room and found it under the mattress …’
Again the mother’s hand struck the child’s cheek. He did nothing to defend himself.
‘I couldn’t even read at his age! But I was never bad enough to steal a book …’
There was a respectful silence in the inn. Maigret held the missal in his hands.
‘Thank you.’
He was in a hurry to examine it. He walked to the back of the room.
‘Inspector, sir …’
The woman was calling to him. She was puzzled.
‘I was told there was a reward … Not because Ernest …’
Maigret held out twenty francs, which she put carefully in her purse, before dragging her son towards the door, saying crossly, ‘As for you, you young delinquent, just you wait till I get you home …’
Maigret’s eye met the boy’s. The glance lasted a matter of seconds. But they both knew that they were friends.
Perhaps because Maigret himself had once wanted – without ever owning one! – a gilt-edged missal, containing not only the ordinary of the mass but all the liturgical texts in two columns, in Latin and French.
‘What time will you be back for lunch?’
‘I don’t know.’
Maigret was about to go to his room to examine the missal, but when he remembered the draughts from the roof he chose instead to take the main road.
The Saint-Fiacre Affair Page 3