Maigret's Failure

by Georges Simenon

  Victor’s was a peasant’s hatred, after all, and a peasant rarely forgets his self-interest, even if he is in the grip of passion.

  Maigret didn’t say anything. Everyone looked at him. He felt humiliated because he had failed. He had spent too long circling the truth and now had little confidence in the manhunt that was being organized.

  ‘Gentlemen, I won’t keep you. If you want to get the formalities over with …’

  The examining magistrate, who hadn’t been in the job very long, didn’t dare question his decision. It was all he could do to mutter:

  ‘Do you think it’s him?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘And he took the millions?’

  Most probably. Either Victor had them on him or he had hidden them somewhere and was going to fetch them.

  Lapointe’s monotonous voice was repeating the description into the telephone as Maigret trudged down to the courtyard. He looked at Félix, who was still washing the car, for a moment.

  Then he walked past him without a word, climbed the stairs and pushed open the door to Louise Bourges’ bedroom.

  There was a glint of mischief and profound satisfaction in her eyes.

  ‘Did you know?’ he simply said.

  She didn’t try to deny it, retorting instead:

  ‘Admit it, you suspected me, didn’t you?’

  Without denying that either, he sat down on the edge of the bed and slowly filled his pipe.

  ‘How did you find out?’ he went on. ‘Did you see him do it?’

  He pointed to the window.

  ‘No. I was telling you the truth. I always tell the truth. I can’t lie, not because I can’t abide lying, but because I blush when I do.’

  ‘Did you really close the shutters?’

  ‘I always do. The thing is, I sometimes used to find Victor in parts of the house where he shouldn’t have been. He had a knack of moving around in complete silence, as if the air didn’t even stir. It made me jump a few times, suddenly finding him next to me.’

  Of course, he moved like a poacher! The same thing had suddenly occurred to Maigret when he was looking from the safe to the door and back again, but too late …

  The secretary pointed out a bell in the corner of her bedroom.

  ‘You see that. It was put in so Monsieur Fumal could call me at any time. Sometimes that was in the evening, sometimes pretty late at that. I had to get dressed and go over to see him because he’d have some urgent piece of work to give me, especially after business dinners. That was when I’d sometimes come upon Victor on the stairs.’

  ‘Would he give you any explanation for being there?’

  ‘No. He’d just give me a look.’

  ‘What sort of look?’

  ‘You know …’

  It was true, Maigret probably did know, but he wanted to hear it from her all the same.

  ‘There was a tacit complicity between everyone in the house. None of us liked our boss. We each had secrets, to a greater or lesser degree.’

  ‘You have one to do with Félix.’

  Confirming how easily she blushed, she went red up to her ears.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The evening Fumal made you strip …’

  She walked to the window and shut it.

  ‘Have you talked to Félix about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you going to?’

  ‘What for? I’m just wondering why you put up with it.’

  ‘Because I want us to get married.’

  ‘And go and live in Giens!’

  ‘What’s the harm in that?’

  What did she care about or want more: marrying Félix or being the landlady of an inn in the Loire?

  ‘How were you getting the money?’

  Émile Lentin was taking it out of petty cash. She must have had a ruse of her own.

  ‘I can tell you, because there’s nothing illegal about it.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘The director of Northern Butchers was interested in certain figures I had access to, because he could make a big profit on the side with them. It would take a long time to explain exactly how. As soon as I had the figures, I’d telegraph them to him, and every month he’d pay me quite a sizeable sum.’

  ‘What about the other managers?’

  ‘I’m sure everyone was stealing, but they didn’t need any help from me.’

  So, Fumal, the most mistrustful of men, the most ruthless of businessmen, was surrounded exclusively by people cheating him in one way or another. He spied on them, spent his life watching them, threatening them, making them feel the weight of his authority.

  And yet a man stayed several nights a week in his own house without him knowing, came and went as he pleased, ate at his expense and didn’t think twice about tiptoeing past the bedroom where he was asleep and taking money from petty cash.

  His secretary was hand in glove with one of his managers.

  And Monsieur Joseph must have made a bundle too, mustn’t he? Not that they’d necessarily ever know; there was every chance that even the experts of the finance department wouldn’t find anything.

  To guarantee the services of a bodyguard, a loyal guard dog, he had saved a local poacher from prison. No doubt he called him up to his office too, of an evening, to give him confidential little assignments.

  And yet of them all it was Victor who hated him the most. With a peasant’s hatred, patient, tenacious, the same hatred that the poacher had nursed for years for the gamekeeper whom he had ended up killing when the right moment came along.

  Victor had waited for the right moment with Fumal too. Not just an opportunity to kill him, because he had any number of those every day. Or to kill him without being caught, but an opportunity to do so and set himself up for life into the bargain.

  Wasn’t it partly the sight of the empty safe, the missing fifteen million that had suddenly put Maigret on the right track?

  He would analyse it all later. The elements were still all jumbled up in his mind.

  The Luger played its part too.

  ‘Was Victor in the war?’

  ‘At an ammunition depot, near Moulins.’

  ‘Where was he during the occupation?’

  ‘In his village.’

  The village had been occupied by the Germans. That was the sort of thing Victor would do too, get hold of one of their weapons during their retreat. Maybe he’d even hidden a stash in the woods.

  ‘Why did you warn him?’ Maigret asked reproachfully.

  ‘Warn him about what?’

  She blushed again, then caught herself doing so, which disarmed her.

  ‘I talked to him when I went downstairs. He was standing at the bottom, looking worried.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe because the safe was being opened. Or because he heard you, or one of your men, say something that made him think you were on his trail.’

  ‘What did you say to him exactly?’

  ‘I said: You’d better make yourself scarce.’

  ‘Why?

  ‘Because he did everyone a favour by killing Fumal.’

  She seemed to be defying him to contradict her.

  ‘Besides, I sensed you’d discover the truth. Afterwards it might be too late.’

  ‘Admit that you were starting to feel nervous.’

  ‘You suspected Félix and me. Well, Félix had a Luger too. He was part of the occupying forces in Germany. When he showed me the gun, which he’d kept as a souvenir, I said he had to get rid of it.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘A year.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s jealous. He has violent rages, and I was afraid he’d shoot me in one of them.’

  She said this without blushing; in other words, she was telling the truth.

  Every police station in Paris had been alerted. Squad cars would be criss-crossing the neighbourhood, passers-by would be being scrutinized
on the pavements, bar and restaurant owners would be seeing officers lean in to have a quiet word in their ear.

  ‘Can Victor drive?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  The roads were being watched nonetheless. In a radius stretching far from Paris gendarmes would be setting up checkpoints and inspecting the occupants of every car.

  Maigret felt useless. He had done everything in his power. It wasn’t up to him now. To tell the truth, it was going to be more a matter of luck than police expertise now.

  They were looking for one man out of millions, and he was determined not to be caught.

  Maigret had botched it. He had figured it out too late. As he was heading to the door, Louise Bourges asked him:

  ‘Do we have to stay here?’

  ‘Until you’re told otherwise. There’ll be formalities to observe, maybe you’ll need to answer some questions.’

  In the courtyard Félix watched him suspiciously, then immediately went upstairs to find the young woman. Was he going to make a jealous scene because she had been ensconced in her room with Maigret?

  Maigret left the building and made for the nearest bistro, the first one on Boulevard des Batignolles, where he had already taken refuge once.

  The owner, who had a good memory, asked:

  ‘Glass of beer?’

  He shook his head. He didn’t feel like beer today. The bar smelled of marc de Bourgogne and, despite the time, he ordered:

  ‘A marc.’

  He asked for a second and later, his mind elsewhere, a third.

  It was strange that this drama had started at Saint-Fiacre, a tiny little village in the Allier, where he and Ferdinand Fumal had been born.

  Maigret had been born in the chateau, or more precisely in one of its cottages, where his father was the estate manager.

  Fumal was born in a butcher’s shop, and his mother didn’t wear underwear so as not to keep men waiting.

  Victor was born in a hut in the woods, and his father ate crows and vermin.

  Was that why Maigret felt he understood them?

  Did he really want the manhunt to succeed and the former poacher to be sent to the gallows?

  His thoughts were hazy. They were more like a series of images that filed through his mind as he stared at the cloudy mirror behind the bar’s bottle-lined shelves.

  Fumal had behaved aggressively towards Maigret because when they had been at school together, Maigret was the son of the estate manager, an educated man who represented the count in his dealings with the peasants.

  Victor must have considered anyone who didn’t roam the woods like him, anyone who lived in a proper house and wasn’t in open conflict with the gendarmes and gamekeepers, an enemy.

  Fumal had made the mistake of bringing him to Paris and shutting him away in that big stone box on Boulevard de Courcelles.

  Hadn’t Victor felt a prisoner there? Living alone in his lodge like an animal in its burrow, hadn’t he dreamed of the morning dew and game caught in traps?

  He didn’t have a rifle here, like in the woods, but he had brought his Luger with him, which he must have sometimes stroked nostalgically.

  ‘Same again, landlord.’

  But he immediately shook his head.

  ‘No!’

  He didn’t feel like drinking any more. No need. He had to finish the job he’d started, even if his heart wasn’t in it, go back to his office at Quai des Orfèvres and oversee the search.

  Quite apart from the fact that there was still an Englishwoman to be found!

  9. The Search for the Missing Persons

  The newspaper headline that best summed up the situation ran:

  Double failure for the Police Judiciaire

  The implication being:

  Double failure for Maigret

  A tourist had left a hotel in Saint-Lazare for no apparent reason, gone into a bar, come out of it, walked straight past a policeman, and then vanished into thin air.

  A distinctive-looking man, who had not only murdered the king of the meat trade but also a gamekeeper, had walked out of a townhouse on Boulevard de Courcelles in broad daylight, at eleven in the morning, while the police and an examining magistrate were inspecting the premises. He may have been armed; he was definitely carrying fifteen million francs.

  He had no known friends in Paris, no relatives, male or female.

  And yet, just like Mrs Britt, he had disappeared in the city without leaving a trace.

  Over the subsequent weeks, hundreds, if not thousands, of policemen and gendarmes all over the country spent an incalculable number of hours searching for both these people.

  In time, public feeling died down, but the men responsible for the nation’s safety kept a pair of names and descriptions among all the other persons of interest in their notebooks.

  For two years, nothing more was heard of the woman or the man.

  Mrs Britt, the landlady from Kilburn Lane, was the first to be found, in perfect health, married and running a boarding house in a mining town in Australia.

  Neither the French nor the British police could claim credit for finding her. By pure chance, that honour fell to someone who had been part of the same herd of tourists on the trip to Paris and then happened to take a trip to the Antipodes.

  Mrs Britt didn’t see fit to explain herself. No one could force her to either. She hadn’t committed any crime or misdemeanour. All the obvious questions – how and where had she finally met the man of her life? Why had she left the hotel, then France, without a word to anyone? – all that was her business, and when journalists came to question her, she promptly showed them the door.

  Things played out differently with Victor, and he also disappeared for longer. His name was a permanent fixture in policemen’s and gendarmes’ notebooks for five years.

  One morning in November, however, as a crowd streamed off a mixed passenger and cargo ship from Panama, the Cherbourg harbour police noticed someone travelling third class who seemed unwell and had a crudely forged passport.

  ‘Will you come this way?’ one of the inspectors asked politely after a wink at his colleague.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just a formality.’

  The man left the queue of passengers, went into an office and was shown to a chair.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘It’s there in front of you. Henri Sauer.’

  ‘Were you born in Strasbourg?’

  ‘It says so in my passport.’

  ‘Where did you go to school?’

  ‘Well … in Strasbourg …’

  ‘At Quai Saint-Nicolas school?’

  The inspector reeled off a string of names of streets, squares, hotels, restaurants.

  ‘It’s so long ago …’ sighed the man, his face bathed in sweat.

  He must have caught a fever in the tropics, because his body suddenly started trembling convulsively.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘Your real name …’

  Despite being so sickly, the man didn’t give in, simply repeating the same story over and over.

  ‘I know where you bought this passport in Panama. The trouble is, you see, you got ripped off. You obviously didn’t go to school for long. As forgeries go, this couldn’t be worse, and you’re at least the tenth person to be caught.’

  The policeman fetched other similar passports from a filing cabinet.

  ‘Look. Your dealer in Panama is called Schwarz and he’s an ex-convict. He really was born in Strasbourg … Not saying anything? Up to you! Give me your thumb …’

  The policeman calmly took the suspect’s fingerprints.

  ‘What are you going to do with them?’

  ‘Send them to Paris, where they’ll know straight away who you are.’

  ‘And in the meantime?’

  ‘We’ll keep you here, of course.’

  The man looked at the glazed door, behind which some other policemen were chatting.

  ‘In that
case …’ he sighed, defeated.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Victor Ricou.’

  Even after five years, that was enough to ring a bell. The inspector stood up, headed over to the filing cabinets again and eventually dug out a file.

  ‘The Victor from Boulevard de Courcelles?’

  Ten minutes later Maigret, who had just got to the office and was going through his post, was informed by telephone.

  The following day, in the same office, Maigret found himself studying a wreck of a man, a broken creature who seemed to have given up all thought of defending himself.

  ‘How did you get out of Paris?’

  ‘I didn’t. I stayed here for three months.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In a little hotel on Place d’Italie.’

  Fascinated, Maigret asked how, with just a few minutes’ head start, Victor had made it out of the neighbourhood when the police had been alerted immediately.

  ‘I grabbed a delivery tricycle that was parked by the road, then no one paid any attention to me.’

  After three months, he had made his way to Le Havre and secretly boarded a ship bound for Panama with the help of one of the crew.

  ‘At first he told me it would cost me 500,000 francs. When we were on board, he demanded another 500,000. Then, before disembarking …’

  ‘How much did he take in total?’

  ‘Two million. Out there …’

  Victor had planned to live in the countryside, but there wasn’t any real countryside. It was virgin forest almost the moment you left the city. Disorientated, he had hung around seedy bars, got robbed again. His fifteen million hadn’t lasted more than two years, and he had had to start working.

  ‘I couldn’t stand it any more. I had to come back …’

  The newspapers, which had made such a fuss about him at the time, devoted three lines to his arrest, because everyone had forgotten about the Fumal case.

  Victor didn’t even have to go to court. As the preliminaries dragged on because the witnesses couldn’t be found, he had time to die in the prison hospital at Fresnes, where Maigret was the only person to visit him, two or three times.

  1. The Inspector at the Window

  The little old man with the wisp of a goatee beard was emerging from the shade of the warehouse again, walking backwards, looking left and right and gesturing with both hands as if he were actually drawing the heavy lorry he was directing towards him. His hands were indicating: