The Flemish House

by Georges Simenon

  ‘Maria?’

  ‘Maybe that’s her name … Thin, with blonde hair … Well! It wasn’t natural for her to be out of doors, given that the wind was rattling the moorings of the boats …’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘When I came back to go to bed … Perhaps about eight … Perhaps a bit later …’

  ‘Did she see you?’

  ‘No! Rather than going on my way, I pressed myself against the customs shed, because I thought she was waiting for a lover, and I was hoping to have a laugh …’

  ‘Really! You’ve been sentenced twice for indecent assault …’

  Cassin smiled, showing a row of rotten teeth. He was a man of indeterminate age, his hair still brown, low over his forehead, but his face was very wrinkled.

  He was very concerned with the effect he produced, and every time he uttered a phrase he looked first at Maigret, then at Inspector Machère, and then at a customer sitting behind him, listening to the conversation.

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘She wasn’t waiting for a lover.’

  None the less he hesitated. He gulped down the contents of his glass in one, and called out to the waiter:

  ‘Same again!’

  And in the next breath:

  ‘She checked that no one was coming … During that time people came out of the grocery, not through the shop but by the back door … They were carrying something long and they threw it into the Meuse, just between my boat and Les Deux Frères, which is moored behind it …’

  ‘How much is that?’ Maigret asked the waiter, getting to his feet.

  He didn’t look surprised. Machère was completely discomfited. As for the sailor, he didn’t know what to think.

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Come!’

  ‘I’m waiting for the drink I just ordered …’

  Maigret waited patiently. He told the landlord that he would come for lunch a few minutes later, and led the drunk towards the quay.

  It was the time of day when the place was deserted, because everyone was eating. Big drops of rain started falling.

  ‘Where exactly were you?’ Maigret asked.

  He knew the customs building. He saw Cassin pressing himself into a corner.

  ‘You didn’t move from there?’

  ‘Definitely not! I didn’t want to get involved!’

  ‘Let me take your place!’

  He stayed there only for a few seconds and then said, looking straight at the man:

  ‘You’ll have to find something else, my friend!’

  ‘What do you mean, something else?’

  ‘I’m saying that your story doesn’t hold water. From here you can’t see the grocery, or the stretch of river bounded by the two boats.’

  ‘When I say it was here, what I mean is …’

  ‘No! That’s enough! I’m telling you again, find something else! Come and see me when you’ve found it. And if it isn’t good enough, well, it might be necessary to bang you up again …’

  Machère couldn’t believe his ears. Embarrassed by his failure, he in turn had pressed himself against the wall, and was checking Maigret’s claims.

  ‘Obviously! …’ he grunted.

  The sailor didn’t even try to reply. He had lowered his head. An ironic, mean glance was fixed on Maigret’s feet.

  ‘Don’t forget what I just told you: a different, more plausible story … Otherwise, prison! … Come, Machère …’

  And Maigret turned on his heels and headed towards the bridge, filling his pipe.

  ‘Do you think that that sailor …’

  ‘I think that this evening or tomorrow he’ll come and bring us more evidence of the Peeters’ guilt.’

  Inspector Machère was unsettled.

  ‘I don’t understand … If he has evidence …’

  ‘He will …’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘What do I know? … He’ll find something …’

  ‘To shift the guilt from himself?’

  But Maigret dropped the conversation, murmuring:

  ‘Do you have a light? … That’s twenty matches that …’

  ‘I don’t smoke!’

  And Machère wasn’t exactly sure that he heard him say:

  ‘I should have suspected as much …’

  5. Maigret’s Evening

  The rain had started falling at about midday. At dusk, it was hammering loudly on the cobbles. By eight o’clock it was a deluge.

  The streets of Givet were deserted. The barges gleamed along the quay. Maigret, the collar of his overcoat turned up, hurried towards the Flemish house, pushed the door open, set off the bell that was becoming familiar to him, and breathed in the warm smell of the grocery.

  It was at this time of day that Germaine Piedboeuf had come into the shop, on 3 January, and no one had seen her again since then.

  The inspector noticed for the first time that the kitchen was separated from the shop only by a glass door. It was decorated with a tulle curtain, so that one could vaguely make out the outlines of the figures.

  Someone got up.

  ‘Don’t let me disturb you!’ Maigret exclaimed.

  And he went into the kitchen, walking in on the normal daily routine. It was Madame Peeters who had got up to go to the shop. Her husband was in his wicker armchair, still so close to the stove that one might have worried that he was going to catch fire. In his hand he held a meerschaum pipe with a long cherry-wood stem. But he wasn’t smoking any more. His eyes were closed. Regular breaths issued from his half-open lips.

  As to Anna, she was sitting at the sanded white wooden table, which had been polished by the years. She was doing some calculations in a little notebook.

  ‘Bring the inspector to the dining room, Anna …’

  ‘No!’ he protested. ‘I’m just passing through …’

  ‘Give me your coat …’

  And Maigret noticed the Madame Peeters had a beautiful, serious voice, deep and warm, a faint Flemish accent making it all the more delightful.

  ‘You will have a cup of coffee!’

  He wanted to know what she had been doing before he got there. At her place he saw steel-rimmed glasses and the day’s newspaper.

  The old man’s breath seemed to provide a rhythm to the life of the house. Anna closed her notebook, put a cap on the pencil, got up and went to fetch a cup from a shelf.

  ‘You will forgive me …’ she murmured.

  ‘I hoped to meet your sister, Maria.’

  Madame Peeters nodded sadly. Anna explained:

  ‘You won’t see her for a few days, unless you pay her a visit in Namur. One of her colleagues, who also lives in Givet, came just now … Marie was getting off the train, this morning, when she sprained her ankle …’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘At the school … They have a room for her there …’

  Madame Peeters sighed, still nodding:

  ‘I don’t know what we’ve done to offend the Lord!’

  ‘And Joseph?’

  ‘He won’t be back before Saturday. Although that’s only tomorrow …’

  ‘Your cousin Marguerite hasn’t paid you a visit?’

  ‘No! I saw her at vespers …’

  Boiling coffee was poured into the cup. Madame Peeters went out and came back in with a little glass, a bottle of genever.

  ‘It’s old Schiedam.’

  He sat down. He didn’t expect to find anything out. Perhaps even his presence was barely relevant to the case.

  The house reminded him of an investigation he had conducted in Holland, but with differences that he was unable to define. There was the same calm, the same heaviness in the air, the same sensation that the atmosphere was not fluid, but formed a solid body that one would break by moving.

  From time to time the wicker of the armchair creaked even though the old man hadn’t moved. And his breathing still provided a rhythm for life, for the conversation.

&
nbsp; Anna said something in Flemish, and Maigret, who had learned some words in Delfzijl, more or less understood:

  ‘You should have given him a bigger glass …’

  Every so often a man in clogs passed along the quay. The rain could be heard hammering on the front window.

  ‘You told me it was raining, didn’t you? As hard as it is today? …’

  ‘Yes … I think so …’

  And the two women, sitting down again, watched him pick up his glass and bring it to his lips.

  Anna didn’t have her mother’s fine features, nor her benevolent, indulgent smile. As usual, she didn’t take her eyes off Maigret.

  Had she noticed that the portrait was missing from her room? Probably not! If she had, she would have been upset.

  ‘We’ve been here for thirty years, inspector …’ said Madame Peeters. ‘My husband set up as a basket-maker, in this very house; we added a second storey later on …’

  Maigret was thinking about something else, about Anna, five years younger, going with Gérard Piedboeuf to the Rochefort caves.

  What had driven her into her companion’s arms? Why had she given herself? What had she thought afterwards? …’

  He had a sense that it was the only affair in her life, that she would never have any others …

  The rhythm of life in this house was like a magic spell. The genever put a dull heat in Maigret’s skull. He noticed the slightest little noises, the creaks of the armchair, the old man’s snores, the drops of rain on a window-sill …

  ‘You should play me that piece you played to me this morning again …’ he said to Anna.

  And as she hesitated, her mother pressed her:

  ‘Yes indeed! … She plays well, doesn’t she? … She had lessons for six years, three times a week, with the best teacher in Givet …’

  The girl left the kitchen. The two doors remained open between her and the rest of the family. The piano lid banged open.

  A few lazy notes with the right hand.

  ‘She should sing …’ murmured Madame Peeters. ‘Marguerite sings better … There was even talk of her taking lessons at the Conservatoire …’

  The notes filled the empty, echoing house. The old man didn’t wake up, and his wife, worried that he might drop his pipe, delicately took it from his hands and hung it on a nail in the wall.

  What was Maigret still doing there? He had nothing to find out. Madame Peeters listened, looking at her newspaper without daring to pick it up. Anna gradually accompanied herself with her left hand. Maigret guessed that it was at this table that Maria usually corrected her pupils’ homework.

  And that was all!

  Except that the whole town was accusing the Peeters of killing Germaine Piedboeuf, on an evening just like this one!

  Maigret gave a start at the sound of the shop bell. For a moment he felt as though he were three weeks younger, that Joseph’s mistress was going to come in and claim the money for her keep, the hundred francs that she was paid each month to look after the child.

  It was a sailor in an oilskin, who held out a small bottle to Madame Peeters, and she filled it with genever.

  ‘Eight francs!’

  ‘Belgian?’

  ‘French! Ten Belgian francs …’

  Maigret got up and walked across the shop.

  ‘Are you leaving already?’

  ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’

  Outside, he saw the sailor returning to his boat. He turned towards the house. With its big, illuminated window it looked like a stage set, particularly because of the music it exhaled, sweet and sentimental.

  Wasn’t Anna’s voice mingled with it?

  … But you will return to me,

  O my handsome betrothed …

  Maigret waded about in the mud, and the rain fell so heavily that his pipe went out.

  Now the whole of Givet seemed like a stage set. Now that the sailor was back on his boat, there wasn’t a soul outside.

  Nothing but the filtered lights at a few windows. And the noise of the Meuse in spate that gradually drowned out the song of the piano.

  When he had walked 200 metres, he was able to see, at the end of the stage, both the Flemish house and, in the foreground, the other house, the one where the Piedboeufs lived.

  There was no light upstairs. But the corridor was lit. The midwife must have been alone with the child.

  Maigret was in a bad mood. He didn’t often feel the pointlessness of his efforts to such an extent.

  What had he come to do here, in the end? He wasn’t on duty! People were accusing the Flemings of killing a young woman. But they couldn’t even be sure that she was dead!

  Might she not, weary of her wretched life in Givet, be in Brussels, Reims, Nancy or Paris, drinking in some brasserie or other with some friends she had met?

  And even if she was dead, had she been killed? Discouraged, might she not have been drawn by the muddy river as she left the grocery?

  No proof! No clue! Machère would go as far as he could, but he wouldn’t find anything, so that one day the public prosecutor’s office would decide to close the case.

  So why was Maigret getting drenched on this foreign stage?

  Just in front of him, on the other side of the Meuse, he saw the factory, whose courtyard was lit only by an electric light. Very near the gate, a guardroom with a light.

  Old Piedboeuf had gone to work. What did he do there all night?

  And then, without knowing quite why, Maigret, hands deep in his pockets, made his way towards the bridge. In the café where he had had a hot rum in the morning a dozen sailors and tugboat-owners were talking so loudly that they could be heard from the quay. But he didn’t stop.

  The wind vibrated the steel girders of the bridge which replaced the stone bridge that had been destroyed during the war.

  And, on the opposite shore, the quay hadn’t even been paved. You had to wade through mud. A roaming dog pressed itself against the whitewashed wall.

  A small door was built into the closed gate. And immediately Maigret saw Piedboeuf pressing his face to the glass of the guardroom.

  ‘Good evening!’

  The man was wearing an old army jacket that he had had dyed black. He too was smoking a pipe. And, in the middle of the room, he had a little stove whose chimney, after two bends, went into the wall.

  ‘You know you’re not allowed …’

  ‘To come here at night! That’s fine!’

  A wooden bench. A chair with a rush seat. Maigret’s overcoat was already starting to steam.

  ‘Do you stay in this room all night?’

  ‘Excuse me! I have to do three rounds of the courtyards and the workshops.’

  From a distance, his big grey moustache might have misled. Close up, he was a timid man, ready to collapse at any moment, with the keenest sense of his humble condition.

  Maigret intimidated him. He didn’t know what to say to him.

  ‘So, you always live on your own … Here at night … In your bed in the morning … And in the afternoon …?’

  ‘I do the garden!’

  ‘The midwife’s garden?’

  ‘Yes … we share the vegetables …’

  Maigret noticed some rounded shapes in the ashes. He prodded them with the tip of the poker and discovered some potatoes in their skins. He understood. He imagined the man, all on his own, in the middle of the night, eating potatoes and gazing into the void.

  ‘Does your son never come and see you at the factory?’

  ‘Never!’

  Here too the drops of rain were falling one by one outside the door, giving an irregular rhythm to life.

  ‘Do you really think your daughter was murdered?’

  The man didn’t reply straight away. He didn’t know where to look.

  ‘Since the moment that Gérard …’

  And suddenly, with a sob in the depths of his throat:

  ‘She wouldn’t have killed herself … She wouldn’t have left …’

 
It was unexpectedly tragic. The man mechanically filled his pipe.

  ‘If I didn’t think that those people …’

  ‘Do you know Joseph Peeters well?’

  And Piedboeuf looked away.

  ‘I knew he wouldn’t marry her … They are rich people … And we …’

  There was a fine electric clock on the wall, the only luxury in this cabin. Opposite, a blackboard on which someone had written in chalk: Not hiring.

  Lastly, near the door, a complicated apparatus with a big wheel for recording the time at which the workforce arrived and left.

  ‘Time for my round …’

  Maigret almost suggested going with him, to reach further into this man’s life. Piedboef put on a shapeless oilskin that flapped against his heels and picked up from a corner a hurricane lamp that was already lit, so that all he had to do was lengthen its wick.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re against us … Perhaps it’s natural, after all! … Gérard says that …’

  But the rain interrupted them, because they had reached the courtyard. Piedboeuf guided his guest to the gate that he was going to close before he did his round.

  One more source of astonishment for the inspector. From there he could see a landscape cut into equal slices by the iron bars: the barges moored on the other side of the river, the Flemish house and the illuminated front window, the quay where electric lights drew circles of light every fifty metres.

  From here you had a very clear view of the customs building and the Café des Mariniers …

  Most importantly, you could see the corner of the alleyway with the Piedboeufs’ house second on the left.

  The third of January …

  ‘Has your wife been dead for a long time?’

  ‘Twelve years next month … She suffered with her chest …’

  ‘What does Gérard do at this time of day?’

  The lamp dangled at the end of the night watchman’s arm. He had already put a big key in the lock. A train whistled in the distance.

  ‘He must be in town …’

  ‘You don’t know which side?’

  ‘The young people tend to meet at the Café de la Mairie!’

  And Maigret hurried off again through the rain, into the darkness. It wasn’t an investigation. It had no starting point, no foundation.

  There were only a handful of humans each getting on with their own lives in the little windswept town.