Maigret's Failure

by Georges Simenon

  Question: No one told you?

  Answer: People don’t talk to me if they have a choice.

  This was true. It tallied with the maids’ accounts. Noémi summed up the general feeling about Monsieur Joseph when she said:

  Answer: He moved around the house like a mouse behind the wainscots. You never knew when he was coming or going. You didn’t even know exactly what he was doing.

  The statements tallied about the rest of the night too. Monsieur Joseph had rung the bell just after 9.30. The little door in the carriage gate had opened and closed behind him.

  Question: Why didn’t you come in by the back door when you had a key?

  Answer: I only used that door when it was late or when I was going straight up to my apartment.

  Question: Did you stop on the first floor?

  Answer: Yes. As I’ve said three times.

  Question: Was Monsieur Fumal alive?

  Answer: Same as you and me.

  Question: What did you talk about?

  Answer: Business.

  Question: Was there anyone else in the office?

  Answer: No.

  Question: Did Fumal tell you he was expecting a visit?

  Answer: Yes.

  Question: Why didn’t you say so earlier?

  Answer: Because you didn’t ask me. He was expecting Gaillardin and knew why he was coming. Gaillardin was still hoping for an extension. We decided not to give him one.

  Question: Didn’t you stay for the conversation?

  Answer: No.

  Question: Why?

  Answer: Because I don’t like firing squads.

  Amazingly, that seemed to be true. Looking at the fellow, you felt he was capable of every crooked scheme, every base act, but only, it seemed, so long as he didn’t have to look a person in the eye and tell him his fate.

  Question: Did you hear Gaillardin arrive from upstairs?

  Answer: You can’t hear anything in the house from up there. Have a try!

  Question: Weren’t you curious enough to go down afterwards to find out what had happened?

  Answer: I already knew.

  Immediately realizing the ambiguity of his answer, he corrected himself:

  Answer: I mean, I knew that Monsieur Fumal would say no, that Gaillardin would plead with him, talk about his wife, his children, as they all do, even when they’re living with their mistress, but that it wouldn’t get him anywhere.

  Question: Do you think that he killed Fumal?

  Answer: I’ve already said what I thought.

  Question: Had you and your boss argued recently?

  Answer: We never argued.

  Question: How much are you paid, Monsieur Goldman?

  Answer: Have a look at my tax returns.

  Question: That’s not an answer.

  Answer: You can’t get a better answer.

  No one, at all events, had seen him come back downstairs. Although it was true that no one had seen or heard Émile Lentin go downstairs either, on his own first and then with his sister, and then eventually leave by the little door on Rue de Prony.

  A few minutes before ten, a taxi had stopped on the boulevard. Gaillardin had got out, paid the driver and rung the bell.

  Exactly seventeen minutes later, Inspector Vacher had seen him come back out and walk off towards l’Étoile, occasionally looking over his shoulder to see if a taxi was coming.

  Vacher hadn’t been able to watch the little back door, because he didn’t know it existed.

  Wasn’t that Maigret’s fault, because he hadn’t believed the anonymous letters and only grudgingly had the house watched?

  The office was thick with pipe and cigarette smoke.

  Every now and then, the inspectors swapped pieces of paper marked up in red and blue pencil.

  ‘What would you say to a glass of beer, boys?’

  Hours of poring over every sentence in the transcripts still lay ahead of them. Later they’d have sandwiches sent up.

  The telephone rang. Someone picked up.

  ‘For you, chief.’

  It was Moers, who had finished with the fingerprints and confirmed that Lentin’s prints had only been found on the door handle and the drawer of the secretary’s desk.

  ‘Someone’s got to be lying!’ Maigret shouted angrily.

  Unless there wasn’t a murderer at all, which was impossible.

  7. A Simple Maths Problem and a Less Innocent Souvenir of the War

  Maigret felt a sense of relief as profound and luxuriant as, for instance, when you have a hot bath after spending three days and nights on a train.

  He knew that he was asleep, that he was in his own bed, that he only had to reach out a hand to touch his wife’s hip. He even knew that it was the middle of the night, around two o’clock at the latest.

  But he was dreaming. Don’t you sometimes have intuitions when you’re dreaming that you wouldn’t if you were awake? Can’t the mind sometimes grow more rather than less acute while you’re asleep?

  It had certainly happened to him once, when he was a student. He had sweated over a difficult problem all evening, and then suddenly the answer had come to him in a dream in the middle of the night. When he had woken up he hadn’t remembered it immediately, but he had got there in the end.

  The same thing was happening now. If his wife had turned on the light, no doubt she would have seen a mocking smile on his face.

  He was laughing at himself. He had made too much of a tragedy out of Fumal’s case. He had rushed in headlong and been completely in the dark.

  Was he still scared, at his age, of a minister who might be gone in a week or a month?

  He had got off on the wrong foot. He’d known that immediately, from the moment Boom-Boom had come to see him in his office. But instead of getting a grip, quietly smoking a pipe and having a glass of beer to calm his nerves, he had plunged ahead.

  Now he’d found the solution, as he had with his old problem.

  It had come to him a bit like an air bubble rising to the surface of water. At last he could relax.

  All over! Tomorrow morning, he would set the wheels in motion and that would be that for the Fumal case. Then all he’d have to do was take care of the irksome Mrs Britt and find her, dead or alive.

  The main thing was not to forget his discovery. He had to get it straight in his mind first, register it as something more than a faint glimmer. He knew what that meant: one or two sentences. Brevity is the mark of truth. Who had said that? Didn’t matter. One sentence. Then wake up and …

  He opened his eyes suddenly in the dark bedroom and frowned. His dream wasn’t entirely over, though; the truth still felt within his grasp.

  His wife was sleeping, all warm, and he lay on his back so he could think more easily.

  It was something very simple to which he hadn’t paid sufficient attention during the day. He had laughed when he realized it in his dream. Why?

  He tried to recover his train of thought. It was about someone he’d been in contact with several times, he was sure.

  An insignificant fact. Was it actually a fact? Was it a physical clue?

  An almost painful tension replaced his relaxed, dreamy state. He forced himself to concentrate, desperately trying to visualize the mansion on Boulevard de Courcelles from top to bottom, its occupants, everyone who had visited it.

  He and his inspectors had worked on the witness statements at Quai des Orfèvres until ten at night. By the end, they had known every slightest reply off by heart, like some old refrain.

  Was it something in those transcripts? Was it to do with Louise Bourges and Félix?

  He was tempted to think so, started searching along those lines. After all, there was nothing to prove it wasn’t the secretary who had written the anonymous notes.

  Maigret hadn’t asked her how much she earned at Fumal’s. Still, she can’t have been paid more than the going rate for a secretary.

  She was Félix’s mistress, she was very open about that, but she wa
s quick to add:

  ‘We’re engaged too.’

  The chauffeur said the same.

  ‘When do you plan on getting married?’

  ‘When we’ve put aside enough money to buy an inn in Gien.’

  No one says they’re engaged if they’re planning to get married in ten or fifteen years.

  Maigret did a few sums in bed. Supposing that Louise and Félix spent the bare minimum on clothes and incidental expenses, or even saved their entire wages, it would still take them at least ten years to buy a business, however small.

  This wasn’t what he’d hit on in his sleep just now, but it was worth bearing in mind.

  One of them must have had a faster way of making money, and since they were still at Boulevard de Courcelles, despite loathing it, Fumal must have been involved somehow.

  Fumal had humiliated his secretary, treated her in the most squalid way imaginable.

  She hadn’t said anything about it to Maigret or the inspectors.

  Had she confessed it to Félix? Had he stayed calm when he heard that his mistress had been made to undress, contemptuously felt up, and then, when she was stark naked, told to put her clothes on again?

  That wasn’t it either. It was along those lines, but more revealing.

  Maigret was tempted to go back to sleep to try to recapture his dream but he couldn’t sleep now, his brain was whirring like the cogs in a clock.

  There was something else, more recent …

  He almost gritted his teeth in an effort to remember, to concentrate. Suddenly he saw Émile Lentin in his office again and thought he could hear his voice. What had Lentin said that was connected to Louise Bourges? He hadn’t talked directly about her, but about something to do with her.

  He had confessed … That was it!

  Maigret was getting somewhere after all. Émile Lentin had said he sometimes used to creep down to the office in his socks to take money out of the petty cash – a few hundred-franc coins at a time, he had said.

  So, that money was in Louise’s drawer. It was her responsibility. She probably recorded her expenses in a notebook, in the normal way.

  According to Lentin, these thefts were frequent.

  And yet she had never mentioned them. Was it believable that she hadn’t spotted anything, hadn’t noticed her accounts were wrong?

  So there were two things about which she had, if not lied, then certainly kept quiet.

  Why hadn’t she been worried when she found money missing from her drawer?

  Was it because she took some herself, and her accounts were fiddled as it was?

  Or because she knew who was committing the thefts and had reasons not to say anything?

  He felt the urge to smoke a pipe and noiselessly got out of bed, taking almost two minutes to slip out from under the sheets and pad over to the chest of drawers.

  Madame Maigret stirred, sighed, but didn’t wake up. Cupping the match in his hand, he only let it flare up for a second.

  Sitting in the wing chair, he continued to rack his brains.

  He might not have found the answer in his dream, but he had still made progress. Where was he? The thefts from the drawer. If Louise Bourges knew who was breaking into the office at night …

  He cast his mind back to that office where he had spent part of the day. Two big windows looked on to the courtyard. Across the courtyard stood the former stables and above them, not just two or three servants’ rooms, as you find in certain townhouses, but two entire floors of servants’ quarters, forming a small townhouse in themselves.

  He had inspected the rooms there. The secretary’s bedroom, where Félix used to spend the night with her, was on the second floor on the right, directly opposite the office but slightly higher up.

  He tried to remember the wording of the initial reports, particularly Lapointe’s, who was first on the scene. Was there any talk of the curtains?

  The windows, which Maigret could picture clearly, had muslin drapes which softened the daylight but wouldn’t be enough at night to hide what was happening in the lighted room.

  There were also thick, Empire red curtains. Had they been open or closed when Lapointe had got there?

  Maigret almost rang him at home to ask him that question, which suddenly seemed vital. If those curtains weren’t closed, Louise and Félix would know everything that went on in the office.

  Did that get him anywhere?

  Should he conclude that they had witnessed the previous night’s drama from their room and knew who the murderer was?

  There was a safe over a metre tall in a corner of the office that he wouldn’t be able to examine until the following day. It could only be opened in the presence of an examining magistrate and lawyer.

  What did Fumal keep in that safe? They hadn’t found a will among his papers. They had rung the lawyer, Maitre Audoin, who had no knowledge of one either.

  Motionless in the dark, Maigret kept mining this seam, although he sensed he wasn’t quite on the right track yet. The revelation he’d had moments ago, in the dream, was more complete, blindingly obvious.

  Lentin had frequently gone down to the office, sometimes when Fumal was asleep in his bedroom …

  That could open up new avenues. Admittedly there was a room between the office and the bedroom that would muffle sound, but Fumal was someone who distrusted everybody, and with good reason.

  Lentin’s thefts had gone on for years. Wasn’t it conceivable that on one or more occasions the former butcher had heard a noise?

  He was a physical coward, Maigret knew. He’d been one when they were still at school, playing mean tricks on classmates and when they turned on him, moaning, ‘Don’t hit me!’

  Or, more often, he would go and place himself under the protection of the teacher.

  Supposing that, a fortnight or so before, Lentin had gone to commit one of his petty thefts …

  Supposing Fumal had heard some noise …

  Maigret imagined the king of the meat trade clenching his revolver in his hand, not daring to go and see what was happening.

  If he didn’t know his brother-in-law was in the house, which he might easily not have, he must have thought it could be anybody, including Monsieur Joseph and his secretary, maybe even his wife.

  Had he thought they were after the petty cash? You would almost need second sight to do that.

  Why would a stranger be going into his office? Wasn’t that person going to open his bedroom door? These sorts of questions must have been running through his mind.

  That made sense. It wasn’t the dream yet but it was another step forwards. In fact, it might explain why Fumal had started writing anonymous letters to give himself an excuse to go to the police.

  He could have gone to the police anyway. But that would have meant acknowledging the fear he was living in.

  Madame Maigret stirred, pushed back the blanket, suddenly exclaimed:

  ‘Where are you?’

  From the depths of his armchair, he said:

  ‘Here.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m smoking a pipe. I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Haven’t you gone to bed yet? What time is it?’

  He turned on the light. The alarm clock showed 3.10. He emptied his pipe, went back to bed feeling dissatisfied, hoping without much conviction to recover the thread of his dream, and when he woke up he was greeted by the smell of fresh coffee. He was startled to see the sun, a genuine swathe of sunshine falling into the bedroom for the first time in at least two weeks.

  ‘You weren’t sleepwalking last night, were you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you remember sitting in the dark, smoking your pipe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He remembered everything, all his reasoning, but not the dream, unfortunately. He got dressed, had breakfast, walked to Place de la République, bought the morning papers at a newspaper stand and caught the bus.

  The faces around him were cheerful, thanks to the sun. The ai
r had already lost its aftertaste of damp and dust. The sky was pale blue. The pavements and roofs were dry, and only the tree trunks were still wet.

  Fumal, King of Meat Trade …

  The morning papers repeated the previous evening’s stories with further details and new photographs, including one of Maigret coming out of the mansion on Boulevard de Courcelles with his hat pulled down over his eyes, looking morose.

  One of the sub-headings struck him:

  On day of death, Fumal ‘asks for police protection’

  There had been a leak somewhere. The ministry, where any number of people must have known about the butcher’s telephone call? Or Louise Bourges, who had been questioned by the journalists?

  Of course, one of his inspectors could always have inadvertently been indiscreet too.

  A few hours before his tragic death, Ferdinand Fumal went to Quai des Orfèvres, where he is alleged to have informed Detective Chief Inspector Maigret of serious threats against his life. We understand that at the very moment he was killed in his office, an inspector from the Police Judiciaire was on guard in Boulevard de Courcelles.

  There was no mention of the minister, but the implication was that Fumal had acquired tremendous political influence.

  He slowly climbed the main staircase and waved good morning to Joseph, fully expecting to hear him say the big boss wanted to see him, but Joseph didn’t bat an eyelid.

  Some reports were waiting for him on his desk, which he merely glanced at.

  The forensic doctor’s report confirmed what he already knew. Fumal had been shot at point-blank range. The firearm had been less than twenty centimetres from his body when it was fired. The bullet had been found in the ribcage.

  The weapons expert who examined the bullet had been equally categorical. It had been fired from a Luger automatic of the sort German officers carried in the last war.

  A telegram concerning Mrs Britt had arrived from Monte-Carlo: the woman spotted at the tables wasn’t her but a Dutch woman who looked very similar.

  The briefing bell rang in the corridor, and he headed, sighing, to the commissioner’s office where he distractedly shook hands with his assembled colleagues.