Maigret’s imagination was particularly fired by the letter-head with its drawing of a manor house flanked by two circular towers above the address:
La Ribaudière
near Villefranche-en-Dordogne
At midday, Madame Maigret telephoned from Alsace to say that her sister would probably give birth that night, adding, ‘You’d think it was summer … The fruit trees are in blossom!’
Chance … Pure chance … A little later, Maigret was in the chief’s office, chatting, when his superior said, ‘By the way … Did you ever go to Bordeaux to follow up that matter we talked about?’
It was a minor case of no urgency. At some point, Maigret had to go to Bordeaux to trawl through the municipal records.
One idea led to another: Bordeaux … the Dordogne.
At that exact moment, a ray of sunlight struck the crystal globe paperweight on the chief’s desk.
‘That’s a thought! I’m not working on anything at the moment.’
Later that afternoon, having purchased a first-class ticket to Villefranche, Maigret boarded the train at the Gare d’Orsay. The guard reminded him to change trains at Libourne.
‘Unless you’re in the sleeper compartment which gets hitched to the connecting train.’
Maigret thought no more about it, read a few newspapers and made his way to the dining car where he sat until ten o’clock.
When he returned to his compartment, he found the curtains drawn and the light dimmed. An elderly couple had commandeered both seats.
An attendant walked past.
‘Is there a free bunk by any chance?’
‘Not in first-class … but I think there’s one in second … If you don’t mind—’
‘Of course not!’
And Maigret lugged his carpetbag along the corridors. The attendant opened several doors and finally found the compartment in which only the upper bunk was taken.
Here too, the light was dimmed and the curtains drawn.
‘Would you like me to switch on the light?’
‘No thank you.’
The air was warm and stuffy. There was a faint hissing sound, as if there was a leak in the radiator pipes. Maigret could hear the person in the top bunk tossing and turning and breathing heavily.
The inspector silently removed his shoes, jacket and waistcoat. He stretched out on the lower bunk and felt a slight draught coming from somewhere. He picked up his bowler hat and put it over his face for protection.
Did he fall asleep? He dozed off, in any case. Perhaps for an hour, perhaps two. Perhaps longer. But he remained half conscious.
And, in that semi-conscious state, he was aware of a feeling of discomfort. Was it because of the heat battling with the draught?
Or was it because of the man in the top bunk, who couldn’t keep still for a second? He tossed and turned continually, just above Maigret’s head. Every movement made a rustling sound.
His breathing was irregular, as if he had a fever.
After a time, Maigret got up, exasperated, went into the corridor and paced up and down. But there it was too cold.
So it was back into the compartment, and another attempt to sleep, his thoughts and sensations befuddled by drowsiness.
Cut off from the rest of the world, the atmosphere was that of a nightmare.
Had the man above him just raised himself up on his elbows and leaned over to try and get a look at his companion?
Maigret, meanwhile, didn’t dare move. The half-bottle of Bordeaux and the two brandies he had drunk in the dining car lay heavy in his stomach.
The night was long. Whenever the train stopped at a station, there was a babble of voices, footsteps in the corridors, doors slamming. It felt as if the train would never get going again.
It sounded as if the man was crying. There were moments when he held his breath. Then suddenly, there’d be a snivel and he would turn over and blow his nose.
Maigret regretted leaving his first-class compartment occupied by the elderly couple.
He dozed off, woke up and drifted off again. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, he coughed to steady his voice and said, ‘Monsieur, would you kindly try to keep still!’
He felt embarrassed, because his voice sounded much sterner than he had intended. Supposing the man was ill?
There was no answer. The tossing and turning stopped. The man must have been making a huge effort to avoid making the slightest sound. And it suddenly occurred to Maigret that it might not be a man after all, but a woman! He hadn’t seen the person who was wedged between the bunk and the ceiling.
And the heat must be suffocating up there. Now Maigret tried to turn down the radiator, but the control knob was jammed.
It was three o’clock in the morning.
‘I really must get some sleep!’
Now he was wide awake. He had become almost as jumpy as his fellow passenger. He listened out.
‘Here we go! He’s at it again.’
And Maigret forced himself to breathe regularly and count sheep, in the hope of falling asleep.
The man was definitely crying! Probably someone who had been to Paris for a funeral. Or vice versa, a poor soul who worked in Paris and had received bad news from back home – his mother ill, or dead … Or maybe his wife … Maigret was sorry he’d been harsh with him. You never knew … Sometimes they hitched a special hearse wagon to the train.
His thoughts turned to his sister-in-law in Alsace who was about to give birth. Three children in four years!
Maigret slept.
The train halted, then moved off again. It clattered over an iron bridge, making a terrible racket, and Maigret was suddenly wide awake.
Then he froze at the sight of two legs dangling in front of his nose. The man was sitting on his bunk meticulously lacing up his shoes. It was the first thing that the inspector saw of him and, despite the dim light, he noticed that they were patent-leather shoes. His socks, meanwhile, were grey wool and looked hand-knitted.
The man paused and listened. Had he noticed the change in Maigret’s breathing pattern?
Maigret started counting sheep again. It was all the more difficult because he was intrigued by the hands tying the shoelaces. They were trembling so badly that it took the man four attempts to tie the bow.
The train shot through a small station without stopping. All that could be seen through the curtain fabric were the lights flashing past.
The man was coming down! This was slowly turning into a nightmare. Why couldn’t he descend in an ordinary fashion? Was he afraid of being rebuked again?
His foot groped for the ladder for ages. He almost tumbled from the bunk. Then, keeping his back to the inspector, the man left the compartment, without bothering to close the door, and headed for the end of the corridor.
Had it not been for the open door, Maigret would probably have turned over and tried to go back to sleep. But he had to get up to shut it. He looked up and down the corridor.
He just had the time to throw on his jacket, not bothering with the waistcoat.
For the stranger had opened the carriage door at the far end of the corridor. It was not by chance: he had opened it just as the train was slowing down.
They were passing a forest. There were a few clouds illuminated by an invisible moon.
The brakes squealed. The train had slowed down from eighty kilometres an hour to around thirty, perhaps even less.
The man jumped off and slipped down the embankment, then vanished in the darkness. Maigret barely stopped to think. He leaped. The train was going even slower now, so he wasn’t in any danger.
He landed on his side and rolled over three times, coming to rest by a barbed-wire fence.
The train’s red light moved off and the clatter of the wheels grew fainter.
Maigret stood up. He hadn’t broken any bones. His companion’s fall must have been much harder, for he could see him, fifty metres away, still struggling to get to his feet.
This situation was ridicul
ous. Maigret wondered what instinct had prompted him to jump off the train while his luggage continued on its way to Villefranche-en-Dordogne. He didn’t even know where he was!
He could see nothing but woodland – probably a vast forest. Further away the pale ribbon of a road plunged into the trees.
Why was the man not moving? All Maigret could see was a kneeling shadow. Had he realized he was being followed? Was he hurt?
‘Hey! You over there!’ shouted Maigret fumbling for the gun in his pocket.
He didn’t have time to grab it. He saw a flash of red. And he felt something hit his shoulder even before hearing the report.
The whole thing hadn’t lasted a tenth of a second and already the man had sprung up, sprinted through a copse, crossed the main road and vanished into the pitch darkness.
Maigret cursed. Tears sprang to his eyes, not from the pain, but from shock, rage and confusion. It had all happened so fast! And he was in such a sorry mess!
He dropped his gun, bent down to pick it up and winced because his shoulder hurt.
No, it was something else: the sensation that he was bleeding profusely, that with each heartbeat the warm blood was spurting from a severed artery.
He didn’t dare run. He didn’t dare move. He didn’t even pick up his weapon.
His temples were damp, his throat tight. And, as expected, when he touched his shoulder, his hand came into contact with a sticky liquid. He squeezed and felt for the artery with his fingertips to staunch the flow of blood.
In his semi-conscious state, Maigret had the impression that less than a kilometre away, the train had been stationary for a long, long time while he listened out, acutely anxious.
What could it matter to him if the train had stopped? His response was automatic. The absence of the wheels’ rumbling left a void which terrified him.
At last! The noise started up again in the distance. He glimpsed something red moving in the sky, behind the trees.
Then nothing.
Maigret stood utterly alone, clutching his shoulder with his right hand. It was his left shoulder that had been hit. He tried to move his left arm and managed to raise it slightly, but it flopped back again, too heavy.
The woods were completely silent, suggesting that the man had not fled but was hiding in the undergrowth. If Maigret tried to reach the main road, might he not shoot again to finish him off?
‘Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!’ muttered Maigret, who felt utterly wretched.
Why had he felt the urge to jump off the train? At dawn his friend Leduc would be waiting for him at Villefranche station and his housekeeper would have cooked a salmon.
Maigret walked listlessly. He was forced to stop after three metres. He set off again, stopped once more.
Only the pale road stood out in the blackness, white and dusty like at the height of summer. Maigret was still bleeding, but not so profusely. His hand was stemming the flow and was covered in blood.
You would never have guessed that he had been wounded three times before. He was as scared as if on an operating table. He would prefer acute pain to this slow ebbing of blood.
It would be stupid to die here, tonight, all alone. Without even knowing where he was! While his luggage continued on its way without him!
‘Too bad if the man shoots!’ He walked as fast as he could, lurching forwards, feeling giddy. There was a signpost. But only the right hand side was lit up by a halo of moonlight: 3.5 km.
What was at 3.5 km? Which town? Which village?
A cow mooed from that direction where the sky was a little paler. That was probably the east. Dawn was about to break!
The stranger must have moved on. Or he had decided against trying to finish off the wounded inspector. Maigret calculated that he still had the strength to keep going for three or four minutes, and tried to make the most of it. He walked like a soldier, with regular steps, counting to stop himself from thinking.
The mooing cow must belong to a farm. Farmers rise early … Therefore—
The blood was seeping down his left side, beneath his shirt, beneath his trouser belt.
Was that a light he could see? Was he delirious already?
‘If I lose more than a litre of blood—’ he thought.
It was a light. But there was a ploughed field to cross and that was more difficult. His feet sank into the mud. He brushed past an abandoned tractor.
‘Hello! … Someone! … Help! Quick!’
That desperate quick escaped him as he leaned against the tractor for support. He slid down and sat on the ground. He heard a door opening and made out a lantern swinging on the end of an arm.
‘Quick!’
Hopefully the man who was coming over, getting closer, would be sharpwitted enough to staunch the bleeding! Meanwhile Maigret’s hand lost its grip and fell limply to his side.
‘One … two … one … two …’
The blood spurted out with every count.
Confused images, with blanks in between. All of them tinged with that note of panic that is the stuff of dreams.
A rhythm … The clip-clop of hooves … Straw under his head and trees filing past on his right.
That much, Maigret understood. He was lying in a cart. It was light. They were plodding slowly along a road lined with plane trees.
He opened his eyes without moving. Eventually a man entered his field of vision. He was sauntering along the road swinging a whip.
A nightmare? Maigret hadn’t seen the face of the man from the train. All he knew of him was a vague form, patent-leather shoes and grey woollen socks.
So why did he think that the man leading the cart was the man from the train?
He saw a deeply lined face, with a bushy grey moustache and heavy eyebrows … and light-coloured eyes looking straight ahead, taking no notice of the wounded man.
Where were they? Where were they going?
Maigret’s hand moved and he felt a strange wad around his chest, like a thick dressing.
Then his thoughts became muddled just as a ray of sunshine bored through his eyes into his brain.
Later there were houses, white façades … A wide street, bathed in light. Noise behind the cart, the noise of a crowd on the move … and voices … but he couldn’t make out the words. The bumping made his wound hurt.
No more jolts … Just a swaying movement now, a rolling that he had never experienced before.
He was on a stretcher. In front of him was a man in a white coat. A big gate clanged shut behind them and on the other side was a milling crowd. There was a sound of running footsteps.
‘Take him to the operating theatre right away.’
He didn’t move his head. He didn’t think. But he looked.
They were crossing lawns dotted with small, pristine buildings. Men in grey uniforms sat on benches. Some had their heads or legs bandaged. Nurses were bustling about.
And in his sluggish mind, he tried, without success, to formulate the word ‘hospital’.
Where was the farmer who looked like the man on the train? Ouch! They were going up some stairs. That hurt.
Maigret came to again to see a man washing his hands and looking at him gravely.
His heart skipped a beat. The man had a goatee, and busy eyebrows!
Did he look like the farmer? In any case, he looked like the man from the train!
Maigret couldn’t speak. He opened his mouth. The man with the goatee said calmly, ‘Put him in number three. It’s best for him to be in isolation because of the police.’
Because of the police? What did he mean?
People in white transported him through the grounds again. The sunshine was brighter than any sunshine Maigret had ever seen – a sun so strong, so powerful, it seemed to reach the farthest recesses!
They were putting him in a bed. The walls were white. It was almost as hot as in the train. A voice was saying, ‘It’s the inspector who’s asking when he’ll be able to—’
The inspector – wasn’t he the inspector? He
hadn’t asked anything! This was ridiculous! Especially this business with the farmer who looked like the doctor and the man on the train!
But did the man on the train have a grey goatee? A moustache? Bushy eyebrows?
‘Unclench his teeth … Good … Enough.’
The doctor was pouring something into his mouth.
To finish him off by poisoning him, of course!
When Maigret came round, towards evening, the nurse who was watching over him went out into the corridor where five men were waiting: the investigating magistrate from Bergerac, the prosecutor, the police inspector, a court clerk and the forensic pathologist.
‘You may go in, but the doctor advises you not to tire him. He has such a strange look that I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s mad!’
And the five men exchanged knowing glances.
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The Flemish House Page 12