My Friend Maigret

by Georges Simenon

  “Have you got any ideas yet?”

  “Ideas about what?”

  “Well, about the murderer! Morin-Barbu, who was born on the island and hasn’t left it for seventy-seven years, has never heard of anything like it. There have been people drowned. A woman from the North, five or six years back, tried to do away with herself by swallowing sleeping tablets. An Italian sailor, in the course of an argument, stabbed Baptiste in the arm. But a crime, never, inspector! Here even the bad ones become as gentle as lambs.”

  Everybody there was laughing, trying to talk, for what counted was to talk, to say anything, chat over your drink with the famous inspector.

  “You’ll understand better when you’ve been here a few days. What you ought to do is to come and spend your holidays here with your wife. We’d teach you to play boules. Isn’t that right, Casimir? Casimir won the Petit Provençal championship last year, and you know what that means.”

  From the pink it had been a short while ago, the church at the far end of the square was becoming violet; the sky was gently turning a pale green and the men began to depart one after the other; now and again a shrill woman’s voice could be heard calling in the distance:

  “Hey, Jules!…The soup’s ready…”

  Or else a small boy would come boldly in to look for his father and pull him by the hand.

  “Well, aren’t we going to have a game?”

  “It’s too late.”

  It was explained to Maigret that after the game of boules it was cards, but that the latter hadn’t taken place because of him. The sailor from the Cormorant, a dumb colossus with immense bare feet, who smiled at the chief inspector with all his teeth, now and again raised his glass and made a strange gobbling noise which took the place of: “Here’s to you!”

  “Do you want to eat straightaway?”

  “Have you seen the inspector?”

  “He went out while you were upstairs. He didn’t say anything. That’s his way. He’s marvelous, you know. In the three days he’s been ferreting about the island, he knows almost as much as I do about all the families.”

  Leaning forward, Maigret could see that the de Greefs had left and the Englishman was alone in front of the chessboard.

  “We eat in half an hour,” he announced.

  Paul asked him in a low voice, indicating the Scotland Yard detective:

  “Do you think he likes our cooking?”

  A few minutes later Maigret and his colleague went out for a walk and, quite naturally, walked toward the harbor. They had fallen into the habit. The sun had disappeared, and there was a feeling, as it were, of an immense release in the air. The noises were no longer the same. One could hear the faint lapping of the water against the stone of the jetty, and the stone had become a harder gray, like the rocks. The greenery was dark, almost black, mysterious, and a torpedo boat with a huge number painted in white on the hull slid silently toward the open sea, at what appeared to be a giddy speed.

  “I just beat him,” Mr. Pyke had declared at the outset. “He’s very good, very much his own master.”

  “It was he that suggested the game?”

  “I had taken the chessmen, to practice” (he didn’t add: while you were upstairs with Ginette), “not expecting to find an opponent. He sat down at the next table with his girlfriend and I realized, from his way of looking at the pieces, that he wanted to pit his wits against mine.”

  After this there had been a long silence and now the two men were strolling along the jetty. Near the white yacht there was a little boat, the name of which could be seen on the stern: Fleur d’amour.

  It was de Greef’s boat, and the couple were on board. There was a light under the roof, in a cabin just wide enough for two, where it was impossible to stand up. A noise of spoons and crockery was coming from within. A meal was in progress.

  When the detectives had passed the yacht, Mr. Pyke spoke again, slowly, with his habitual precision.

  “He’s the sort of son good families hate to have. Actually you can’t have many specimens in France.”

  Maigret was quite taken aback, for it was the first time, since he had known him, that his colleague had expressed general ideas. Mr. Pyke seemed a little embarrassed himself, as though overcome with shame.

  “What makes you think we have hardly any in France?”

  “I mean not of that type, exactly.”

  He picked his words with great care, standing still at the end of the jetty, facing the mountains which could be seen on the mainland.

  “I rather think that in your country, a boy from a good family can commit some bêtises, as you say, so as to have a good time, to enjoy himself with women or cars, or to gamble in the casino. Do your bad boys play chess? I doubt it. Do they read Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard? It’s unlikely, isn’t it? They only want to live their life without waiting for their inheritance.”

  They leaned against the wall which ran along one side of the jetty, and the calm surface of the water was occasionally troubled by a fish jumping.

  “De Greef does not belong to that category of bad characters. I don’t think he even wants to have money. He’s almost a pure anarchist. He has revolted against everything he has known, against everything he’s been taught, against his magistrate of a father and his bourgeois mother, against his hometown, against the customs of his own country.”

  He broke off, half-blushing.

  “I beg your pardon…”

  “Go on, please.”

  “We only exchanged a few words, the two of us, but I think I have understood him, because there are a lot of young people like that in my country, in all countries, probably, where morals are very strict. That’s why I said just now that one probably doesn’t come across a vast number of that type in France. Here there isn’t any hypocrisy. Perhaps there isn’t enough.”

  Was he alluding to the surroundings, the world the two of them had been plunged in since their arrival, to the Monsieur Émiles, the Charlots, the Ginettes, who lived among the others without being singled out for opprobrium?

  Maigret felt a little anxious, a little piqued. Without being attacked, he was stung by an urge to defend himself.

  “By way of protest,” pursued Mr. Pyke, “these young people reject everything en bloc, the good and the bad. Look, he has taken a young girl away from her family. She’s sweet, very desirable. I don’t think, however, that it was from desire for her that he did it. It was because she belonged to a good family, because she was a girl who used to go to Mass every Sunday with her mother. It was because her father is probably an austere and high-minded gentleman. Also because he was taking a big risk in carrying her off. But, of course, I may be quite wrong.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “There are some people who, when in a clean and elegant setting, feel the need to defile. De Greef feels the need to defile life, to defile anything. And even to defile his girlfriend.”

  This time Maigret was astounded. He was bowled over, as they say, for he realized that Mr. Pyke had been thinking the same thing as he had. When de Greef had admitted having been several times on board the North Star, it had immediately occurred to him that it was not only to drink, but that more intimate and less admissible relations existed between the two couples.

  “They are very dangerous fellows,” Mr. Pyke concluded.

  He added:

  “Perhaps they are very unhappy too?”

  Then, probably finding the silence a little too solemn, he said in a lighter tone:

  “He speaks perfect English, you know. He hasn’t even got an accent. I shouldn’t be surprised if he went to one of our public schools.”

  It was time to go to dinner. It was long past the half hour. The darkness was almost complete, and the boats in the harbor were swaying to the rhythm of the sea’s breathing. Maigret emptied his pipe and knocked it against his heel, hesitated to fill another. Going past, he studied the Dutchman’s little boat closely.

  Had Mr. Pyke just spok
en for the sake of speaking? Had he, in his own way, wanted to convey some sort of message?

  It was difficult, if not impossible, to tell. His French was perfect, too perfect, and yet the two men did not speak the same language, their thoughts followed different channels in their passage through the brain.

  “They’re very dangerous, those fellows,” the Scotland Yard inspector had emphasized.

  There was no doubt that he would not have wished, for anything in the world, even to appear to be intervening in Maigret’s case. He hadn’t asked him any questions about what had happened in Ginette’s room. Was he under the impression that his colleague was hiding something from him, that Maigret was trying to cheat? Or worse still, after what he had just said about the customs of the French, did he imagine that Maigret and Ginette…?

  The chief inspector grunted:

  “She told me of her engagement to Monsieur Émile. It has to be kept secret, because of old Justine, who would attempt to stop the marriage, even after her death.”

  He noticed that by contrast with the telling phrases of Mr. Pyke his speech was vague, his ideas even vaguer.

  In a few words the Englishman had said what he had to say. From half an hour spent with de Greef, he had formulated definite ideas, not only about the latter, but on the world in general.

  As for Maigret he would have been hard put to it to express a single idea. It was quite different. He sensed something. He sensed a whole heap of things, as he always did at the start of a case, but he couldn’t have said in what form this mist of ideas would sooner or later resolve itself.

  It was rather humiliating. It was a loss of face. He felt himself heavy and dull-witted beside the clear silhouette of his colleague.

  “She’s a strange girl,” he mumbled, in spite of everything.

  That was all he could find to say of someone he had met before, whose whole life story he almost knew, and who had spoken to him openly.

  A strange girl! She attracted him in some ways, and in others she disappointed him, as she had herself sensed perfectly well.

  Perhaps, later on, he would have a definite opinion about her?

  After a single game of chess and a few remarks exchanged over the board, Mr. Pyke had made a definitive analysis of his opponent’s character.

  Was it not as though the Englishman had won the first rubber?

  5

  He had thought about the smell straightaway, when he still imagined he was going to go to sleep at once. In actual fact, there were several smells. The principal one, the smell of the house, which one sniffed immediately on crossing the threshold of the café, he had been trying to analyze since that morning, for it was a smell which was unfamiliar to him. It struck him every time as he went in, and, each time, he would dilate his nostrils. There was a basis of wine of course, with a touch of anis, then the kitchen odors. And, since it was a Mediterranean kitchen, with foundations of garlic, red peppers, oil, and saffron, this made it differ from the usual smells.

  But what was the point of worrying about all this? His eyes closed, he wanted to sleep. It was no use calling to mind all the Marseillais or Provençal restaurants where he happened to have eaten, in Paris or elsewhere. The smell wasn’t the same, let it rest at that. All he had to do was sleep. He had had enough to drink to plunge into a leaden sleep.

  Hadn’t he been to sleep, immediately after lying down? The window was open and a noise had intrigued him; he had finally realized it was the rustling of leaves in the trees on the square.

  Strictly speaking, the smell downstairs could be compared with that of a small bar, in Cannes, kept by a fat woman, where he had once been on a case and had idled away many hours.

  The one in the bedroom was unlike anything. What was there in the mattress? Was it, as in Brittany, seaweed, which gave off the iodized smell of the sea? Other people had been in the bed before him, and he thought at odd moments that he could detect the smell of the oil with which women smear themselves before sun-bathing.

  He turned over heavily. It was at least the tenth time, and there was still someone about, opening a door, walking down the passage, and going into one of the lavatories. There was nothing extraordinary about that, but it seemed to him that far more people were going there than there were in the house. Then he began counting the occupants of the Arche. Paul and his wife slept over his head, in an attic which one reached by a sort of ladder. As for Jojo, he didn’t know where she slept. At any rate there was no room for her on the first floor.

  She, too, had a special smell of her own. It came partly from her oiled hair, partly from her body and clothes, and it was at once vague and spicy, not at all disagreeable. This smell had distracted him while she was talking to him.

  Another case where Mr. Pyke might have thought Maigret was cheating. The chief inspector had gone up to his bedroom for a moment, after dinner, to wash his teeth and hands. He had left the door open, and without his hearing, her feet making no sound on the floor, Jojo had come in and stood framed in the doorway. How old could she be? Sixteen? Twenty? She had the look, at once admiring and timorous, of girls who go to the stage door of theaters to beg for autographs. Maigret impressed her, because he was famous.

  “Have you got something to say to me, my girl?”

  She had closed the door behind her, which he hadn’t liked, for you never know what people will think. He was not forgetting that there was an Englishman in the house.

  “It’s about Marcellin,” she went on to say, blushing. “He talked to me one afternoon when he was very drunk and took his siesta on the café bench.”

  Well! Not so long ago, too, when the Arche was empty, he had seen someone stretched out on that same bench, a newspaper over his face, taking a short nap. It was evidently a cool spot. An odd house, even so! As for the smell…

  “I thought it might be of some use to you. He told me that, if he wanted, he could have a pile as big as that.”

  “A pile of what?”

  “Of banknotes, of course.”

  “A long time ago?”

  “I think it was two days before what happened.”

  “There wasn’t anyone else in the café?”

  “I was alone, polishing the counter.”

  “Did you tell anyone about it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He didn’t say anything else?”

  “Only: ‘What would I do with it, my little Jojo? It’s so nice here.’”

  “He never made love to you, never made any proposals?”

  “No.”

  “And the others?”

  “Nearly all of them.”

  “When Ginette was here—she came almost every month, didn’t she?—did Marcellin ever happen to go up to see her in her bedroom?”

  “Certainly not. He was very respectful toward her.”

  “Can I speak to you like a grown-up, Jojo?”

  “I’m nineteen, you know.”

  “Good. Did Marcellin have relations with women, now and again?”

  “Certainly.”

  “On the island?”

  “With Nine, to start with. That’s my cousin. She does it with everybody. It seems she can’t help it.”

  “On board his boat?”

  “Anywhere. Then with the widow Lambert, who keeps the café on the other side of the square. He would sometimes spend the night with her. Whenever he caught some sea wolves, he would bring them to her. I suppose, now he’s dead, I can tell you: Marcellin fished with dynamite.”

  “There was never any question of his marrying the widow Lambert?”

  “I don’t think she wants to remarry.”

  And Jojo’s smile let it be understood that the widow Lambert was no ordinary person.

  “Is that all, Jojo?”

  “Yes. I’d better be going down again.”

  Ginette wasn’t asleep either. She lay in the next room, just behind the partition, so that Maigret had the impression that he could hear her breathing. It made him feel uncomfortable
because when he turned over, half-asleep, he sometimes banged the partition with his elbow and each time that must have made her jump.

  It had been a very long time before she went off to sleep. What could she have been doing? Seeing to her face or her toilet? The silence at times was so profound in her bedroom that Maigret wondered if she was in the middle of writing something. Especially as the attic window was too high for her to be able to lean out and breathe the fresh air.

  That famous smell again…It was, quite simply, the smell of Porquerolles. He had caught it at the end of the jetty, a short while ago, with Mr. Pyke. There were whiffs of smells from the water, overheated by the sun during the day, and others coming from the land with the breeze. Weren’t the trees in the square eucalyptus? There were probably other natural scents on the island.

  Who was it going down the passage again? Mr. Pyke? It was the third time. Paul’s cooking, for which he was so ill acclimatized, must have upset him.

  He had drunk a lot, had Mr. Pyke. Was it from choice, or because he had been unable to do otherwise? At all events he liked champagne and Maigret had never thought of offering him any. He had drunk it all evening with the major. They got on so well together from the start, that one might have thought they had always known one another. They had settled themselves in a corner. On instructions, Jojo had brought champagne.

  Bellam didn’t drink it in champagne glasses, but in large ones, like beer glasses. He was so perfect that he looked like a drawing in Punch, with his silvery gray hair, his rosy complexion, large clear eyes swimming in liquid, and the huge cigar which never left his lips.

  He was an old boy of seventy or seventy-two years, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. His voice, probably because of the champagne and the cigars, was husky. Even after several bottles, he maintained an affecting dignity.

  “May I introduce Major Bellam?” Mr. Pyke had said at a certain moment. “It turns out we were at the same school.”

  Not the same year, at all events, nor the same decade. One could feel that this gave them both pleasure. The major called the chief inspector “Monsieur Maigrette.”