It was up to Maigret to make a move again, to take another plane …
Maigret hated over-simplification. His judgements of people didn’t depend on how much money they had, or didn’t have. He was determined to keep a cool head, but there were a hundred things he couldn’t help being irritated by.
He heard people who had come back from the famous gala dinner talking loudly outside, then in their suites, opening taps, flushing toilets.
He was the first person up, at six in the morning, and he shaved with the cheap razor he’d had a bellboy buy him along with a toothbrush. It took him nearly half an hour to get a cup of coffee. The lobby was being cleaned when he crossed it. When he asked the worn-looking receptionist for his bill, the man replied:
‘Monsieur Van Meulen left instructions—’
‘It’s not up to Monsieur Van Meulen to give instructions.’
He insisted on paying. Outside the door, the Belgian’s Rolls was waiting, the chauffeur holding the door open.
‘Monsieur Van Meulen has asked me to drive you to the airport.’
He decided to get in anyway, because he had never ridden in a Rolls-Royce. He was early. He bought some newspapers. On its front page, the Nice paper carried a photograph of him and Van Meulen coming out of the lift, with the caption: Detective Chief Inspector Maigret leaving a meeting with the billionaire Van Meulen.
A meeting!
The Paris newspapers carried the headline:
ENGLISH BILLIONAIRE FOUND DEAD IN HIS BATH
The word ‘billionaire’ was repeated a lot.
Murder or accident?
The reporters probably weren’t up yet, and he was left in peace to board his plane. He fastened his seat belt and looked absently through the window as the sea grew distant and little white houses with red roofs appeared, strewn over the dark green of the mountains.
‘Coffee or tea?’
He seemed to be brooding. When the stewardess insisted, he didn’t even grant her a smile. When, under a cloudless sky, he discovered the Alps beneath him, with great streaks of snow, he wouldn’t even admit that it was a magnificent sight.
Less than ten minutes later they entered a small area of mist that ran alongside the plane and soon metamorphosed into opaque steam, like the kind you see emerging from locomotives as they pull into stations with their whistles blowing.
In Geneva, it was raining. The rain hadn’t only just started. It was obvious that it had been raining for a long time: it was cold, and everyone was wearing coats.
No sooner had he put his foot on the gangway than the flashes went off. There may not have been any reporters when he left, but they were waiting for him when he arrived, seven or eight of them, with their notebooks and their questions.
‘I have nothing to say.’
‘Will you be going to Lausanne?’
‘I have no idea.’
He brushed them aside, helped, most considerately, by a Swissair representative who, sparing him the formalities and the queues, shepherded him through the non-public areas of the airport.
‘Do you have a car? Are you taking the train to Lausanne?’
‘I think I’ll take a taxi.’
‘I’ll call you one.’
Two cars followed his, filled with reporters and photographers. Still surly, he tried to doze in a corner, glancing vaguely from time to time at the wet vines and the patches of grey lake glimpsed between the trees.
What annoyed him the most was the impression he had that whatever he was doing had been decided for him. He wasn’t going to Lausanne because it was his idea to go there, but because a path had been marked out for him that led there, whether he liked it or not.
His taxi came to a halt by the columns outside the Lausanne Palace. The photographers mobbed him. He was asked questions. The doorman helped him to force his way through.
Inside, he encountered the same atmosphere as at the George-V or the Hôtel de Paris, as if people who travelled were determined not to change scenery. It was perhaps a little heavier, more solemn here, with a porter in a black frock coat discreetly embellished with gold. He spoke five or six languages, like the others, and the only difference was that in French he had a slight Germanic accent.
‘Is Countess Palmieri here?’
‘Yes, inspector. In suite 204 as usual.’
An Asian family sat in armchairs in the lobby, waiting for something or other. The wife wore a gold sari, and her three children looked at him with curiosity in their big brown eyes.
It was barely ten in the morning.
‘I don’t suppose she’s up yet?’
‘She rang for her breakfast half an hour ago. Would you like me to inform her that you’re here? I think she’s expecting you.’
‘Do you know if she’s made or received any telephone calls?’
‘You’d have to ask the operator. Hans, take the chief inspector to the switchboard.’
It was in a room at the end of a corridor behind reception, where three women sat side by side.
‘Could you tell me—’
‘One moment.’ Then, in English: ‘You’re through to Bangkok, monsieur.’
‘Could you tell me if Countess Palmieri has made or received any telephone calls since she arrived?’
They had lists in front of them.
‘Last night, at one o’clock, she received a call from Monte Carlo.’
Probably Van Meulen, Daddy, taking the trouble between dances at the Sporting Club, or more likely between two card games, to find out how she was.
‘This morning she called Paris.’
‘What number?’
It was the number of Marco’s bachelor apartment in Rue de l’Étoile.
‘Was there any answer?’
‘No. She left a message asking to be called back.’
‘Was that the only one?’
‘About ten minutes ago, she asked for Monte Carlo again.’
‘Did she get through?’
‘Yes, twice. Three minutes each time.’
‘Could you announce me?’
‘Gladly, Monsieur Maigret.’
It was stupid. Having heard so much about her, he was somewhat overawed, which he found humiliating. Going up in the lift, he felt almost like a young man going to see a famous actress in the flesh for the first time.
‘This way.’
The bellboy knocked at a door. A voice answered, ‘Come in.’ The door was opened for him, and Maigret found himself in a sitting room with a view of the lake through its two windows.
There was nobody here. A voice reached him from the bedroom, the door to which was ajar.
‘Take a seat, inspector. I’ll be right with you.’
On a tray, bacon and eggs that had hardly been touched, a few rolls and a crumbled croissant. He thought he caught the characteristic sound of a bottle being closed. At last, a swish of silk.
‘Please forgive me …’
Again like the man who surprises an actress in an intimate moment, he was disconcerted, disappointed. Before him stood a very nondescript little woman, barely made up, pale-faced, with tired eyes, holding out a moist, trembling hand.
‘Please sit down.’
Through the half-open door, he glimpsed an unmade bed, things left lying around, a bottle of pills on the night table.
She sat down facing him and folded over her legs the ends of a cream silk dressing gown transparent enough to let her nightdress show through.
‘I’m so sorry to have put you to all this trouble.’
She looked every one of her thirty-nine years. In fact, right now she looked even older. There were deep blue shadows under her eyes and thin lines at the corner of each nostril.
She wasn’t pretending to be tired. She was genuinely weary, at the end of her tether. He would have sworn that she was ready to burst into tears at any moment. She was looking at him, unsure what to say, when the telephone rang.
‘Do you mind?’
‘Please go ahead.’
&n
bsp; ‘Hello? … Yes, speaking … Put her through … Hello, Anne … It’s kind of you to call me … Thank you … Yes … Yes … I don’t know yet … I have someone with me at the moment … No, don’t ask me to come out … Yes … Tell His Highness … Thank you … Speak to you soon …’
There were tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip, and as she spoke, Maigret could smell alcohol on her breath.
‘Are you very angry with me?’
She wasn’t putting on an act. She seemed quite natural, too shaken to be capable of playing a role.
‘It’s so awful, so unexpected! And the very day when—’
‘When you were going to tell Colonel Ward that you’d made up your mind to leave him? Is that what you meant?’
She nodded.
‘I think Jef – I think Van Meulen has told you everything, hasn’t he? I’m wondering what else I could tell you. Are you going to take me back to Paris?’
‘Does that worry you?’
‘I don’t know. He advised me to go with you if that was what you decided. I’m doing everything he told me. He’s such an intelligent man, so good, so superior! It’s as if he knows everything, can predict everything.’
‘He didn’t predict the death of his friend Ward.’
‘But he did predict that I would get back together with Marco.’
‘Was that already arranged between Marco and you? I thought when you ran into him in the nightclub, your first husband was with a young Dutch woman, and you didn’t even speak to him.’
‘That’s true. All the same, I decided …’
Her nervous hands, older than her face, couldn’t keep still. Her fingers intertwined, leaving white marks on her knuckles.
‘How can I explain this to you, when I don’t know myself? Everything was going well. I thought I was over it. David and I were waiting for the last papers to be signed so that we could get married. David was a man like Van Meulen, not exactly the same, but almost.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘With Daddy, I have the impression he always tells me what he thinks. Not necessarily everything, because he doesn’t want to tire me with details, but I feel there’s a real connection, if you know what I mean … David, on the other hand, would watch me with those big eyes of his, always with an amused little gleam in them. Maybe it wasn’t me he was laughing at, but himself. He was like a big cat, very crafty, very philosophical …’
She repeated:
‘If you know what I mean.’
‘At the beginning of the evening, when you went to dinner with the colonel, were you already intending to break it off with him?’
She thought about this for a moment.
‘No.’
Then she corrected herself:
‘But I suspected it would happen one day.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it wasn’t the first time. Not that I wanted to get back with Marco, because I knew perfectly well …’
She bit her lip.
‘What did you know?’
‘That it would mean starting all over again. He doesn’t have any money, and neither do I.’
She was suddenly off on a new track, speaking in the rapid, staccato fashion of a drug addict.
‘I don’t have any money, you know. I don’t own a single thing. If Van Meulen hadn’t transferred money to my bank that morning, the cheque I signed at the airport would have bounced. He had to give me some more yesterday so that I could come here. I’m very poor.’
‘Your jewellery …’
‘Jewellery, yes. And my mink. That’s all!’
‘But the colonel …?’
She sighed, despairing of getting across what she meant.
‘It’s not the way you think. He paid for my apartment, my travels, he paid my bills. But I never had any money in my bag. As long as I was with him I didn’t need any.’
‘Whereas once you were married …’
‘It would have been the same.’
‘He made sure his other three wives had an income.’
‘Afterwards! Once he’d left them.’
He came straight out with it:
‘Was he doing this to stop you giving money to Marco?’
She stared at him.
‘I don’t think so. I never thought about it. David never had any money in his pockets either. It was Arnold who paid the bills at the end of the month. Now, I’m forty years old and …’
She looked around her as if to say that she was going to have to leave all this. The yellowish furrows at the sides of her nose grew deeper. Hesitantly, she got to her feet.
‘Will you excuse me for a moment?’
She hurried into the bedroom and closed the door behind her, and when she returned, Maigret again smelled alcohol on her breath.
‘What did you just drink?’
‘A slug of whisky, if you must know. I’m ready to drop. Sometimes I can go for weeks without drinking.’
‘Except champagne?’
‘A glass of champagne from time to time, yes. But when I’m in the state I’m in now, I need …’
He would have sworn that she had drunk straight from the bottle, greedily, in the way some drug addicts inject themselves through their clothes in order not to waste time.
Her eyes were shinier, her delivery more voluble.
‘I swear I hadn’t made up my mind. I saw Marco with that woman, and it gave me a shock.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘Yes. She’s a divorcee, and her husband, who’s in shipping, had business dealings with David.’
These men knew each other, met around board tables, on beaches, in nightclubs, and apparently the same women went quite naturally from one man’s bed to another’s.
‘I knew that Marco and she had had an affair in Deauville. I’d even been told that she’d decided to marry him, but I didn’t believe it. She’s very rich, and he has nothing.’
‘So you got it into your head to prevent the marriage?’
Her lips had grown thinner and harder.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think Marco would have let you?’
Her eyes were watering, but she refused to cry.
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking. I kept watching them. He deliberately passed straight by me as he danced, without so much as a glance at me.’
‘So, logically, it’s Marco who should have been killed?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Didn’t you ever think of killing him? Didn’t you threaten him at any time?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Didn’t he think you capable of it?’
‘Van Meulen told you, didn’t he?’
‘No.’
‘It isn’t as simple as that. We’d been drinking over dinner. At the Monseigneur, I had a whole bottle of champagne and I think I also had a few sips from David’s glass of whisky. I was considering making a scene, going and tearing Marco from the arms of that horrible fat woman with her pink baby skin. David insisted that we leave, so in the end I went with him. In the taxi, I didn’t say a word. I was planning to leave the hotel later and go back to the nightclub to … I don’t know why. Don’t ask me to explain. David must have sensed it. He was the one who suggested we have a last drink in my suite.’
‘Why in yours?’
The question took her aback and she echoed:
‘Why?’
It was as if she, too, were looking for the answer.
‘David always came to my suite. I don’t think he liked … He was quite protective of his privacy.’
‘Did you tell him you were planning to leave him?’
‘I told him everything I’d been thinking, that I was just a bitch, that I’d never be happy without Marco, that Marco simply had to put in an appearance and I …’
‘What was his response?’
‘He kept calmly drinking his whisky, looking at me with his big sad eyes. “What about the money?” he said in the end. “You know perfectly
well that Marco …” ’
‘Was he right about Marco?’
‘Marco has big needs.’
‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to him to get a job?’
She stared at him in amazement, as if the question revealed boundless naivety.
‘What would he do? … In the end, I got undressed.’
‘Did anything happen between David and you?’
Another surprised look.
‘Nothing ever happened. You don’t understand … David had also drunk a lot, as he did every night before going to bed.’
‘A third of a bottle?’
‘Not completely. I know why you’re asking me that. But I was the one who had a little whisky when he left, because I didn’t feel well. All I wanted was to collapse on the bed and not have to think any more. I tried to sleep. Then I told myself that it wouldn’t work with Marco, that it would never work, and that the best thing I could do was die.’
‘How many pills did you take?’
‘I don’t know. As many as I could hold in the palm of my hand. I felt better. I was crying softly, and starting to fall asleep. Then I imagined my funeral, the cemetery, the … I started to struggle. I was scared that it was too late, that I wouldn’t be able to call anyone. I was already too weak to cry out. The buttons you press to ring for people seemed a long way away. My arm was heavy. It was like one of those dreams when you try to run away and your legs refuse to carry you. But I must have reached the bell, because someone came …’
She broke off on seeing the suddenly cold, hard expression on Maigret’s face.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Why are you lying?’
He had almost let himself be taken in.
‘At what point did you go to the colonel’s room?’
‘That’s true. I’d forgotten …’
‘You’d forgotten that you went there?’
She shook her head and at last started crying.
‘Please don’t be hard on me. I swear I didn’t mean to lie to you. The proof of that is that I told Jef Van Meulen the truth. Only, when I found myself in the hospital and started to panic, my first thought was to claim that I didn’t know what had happened. I was sure they wouldn’t believe me, that they’d suspect me of killing David. So, just now, talking to you, I forgot that Van Meulen advised me not to hide anything.’
Maigret 51 Maigret Travels Page 8