‘Why didn’t you go and have lunch at the Maliks’, seeing as you’re invited? I hear their cook used to be chef to the king of Norway or Sweden, I don’t remember which.’
‘I’d rather stay here and have a bite to eat with you.’
‘In the kitchen! With no tablecloth!’
Yet it was true. And Raymonde, unwittingly, was providing him with invaluable help. He felt relaxed here. He had removed his jacket and rolled up his shirt-sleeves. From time to time, he got up to pour boiling water over the coffee.
‘I wonder what keeps her here,’ Raymonde had said, among other things, talking about old Jeanne. ‘She’s got more money than she’ll ever spend, no children and no heirs, since she booted her nephews out a long time ago.’
It was insights like that which, added to memories of the previous evening, to insignificant details, helped flesh out for Maigret a solid picture of the inn owner’s character.
She had once been beautiful, Raymonde also told him. And it was true. You could tell, even though she was over fifty, despite her ill-kempt look, her lank, greasy hair and her sallow complexion.
A woman who had been beautiful and was intelligent, but who had suddenly let herself go, who drank, who lived a fiercely reclusive existence, complaining and drinking to the point of taking to her bed for days on end.
‘She’ll never make up her mind to leave Orsenne.’
Well! By the time all the characters had taken on the same human roundness, when he could ‘feel’ them the way he could feel the owner of L’Ange, the mystery would be very close to being solved.
There was Bernadette Amorelle, whom he was close to understanding.
‘Old Monsieur Amorelle, who died, wasn’t at all like his sons-in-law. More like Monsieur Campois. I don’t know if you see what I mean. He was tough, but fair. He would go down to the lock to chat with his bargemen and he wasn’t too proud to sit and have a drink with them.’
In other words, they were the first generation who’d done well for themselves, with their big, unpretentious houses.
Then the next generation, the two daughters who had married the Malik brothers, the modern residence, the pontoon, the luxury cars.
‘Tell me, Raymonde, did you know Monita well?’
‘Of course I did. I knew her when she was a little girl, because I’ve been at L’Ange for seven years and, seven years ago, she’d just turned ten. A right tomboy … She was always giving her governess the slip and they’d go hunting all over the place for her. Sometimes all the servants would be sent along the towpath calling Monita. She had usually run off with her cousin Georges-Henry.’
Maigret had never set eyes on him either. He had heard people describe him.
‘He wasn’t all dressed up to the nines like his brother! Nearly always in shorts, and rather grubby shorts at that, with his bare legs and tousled hair. He was terrified of his father!’
‘Were Monita and Georges-Henry in love?’
‘I don’t know whether Monita was in love. A woman hides her feelings better. But he definitely was.’
It was peaceful in this kitchen where only a single slanting ray of sunshine filtered in. Maigret smoked his pipe, his elbows on the polished heavy timber table, and sipped his coffee.
‘Have you seen him since his cousin’s death?’
‘I saw him at the funeral. He was very pale, red-eyed. Right in the middle of the service, he started sobbing. At the cemetery, when people were filing past the open grave, he suddenly began grabbing the flowers by the handful and throwing them on to the coffin.’
‘And since?’
‘I think they’re keeping him locked up inside the house.’
She stared at Maigret inquisitively. She had heard that he was a famous policeman, that during his career he had arrested hundreds of criminals and solved the most complicated cases. And this man was here in her kitchen, dressed casually, smoking his pipe and talking to her informally, asking her mundane questions.
What could he be hoping for? She felt something akin to pity for him. He was probably getting old, because they’d retired him.
‘Now, I must wash my dishes, then I’ve got to mop the floor.’
He didn’t leave and his face was still as placid, as if devoid of thought.
‘In short,’ he muttered suddenly, ‘Monita is dead and Georges-Henry has gone.’
She looked up abruptly.
‘Are you sure he has gone?’
And he rose, his attitude now hardened, displaying a sudden determination.
‘Listen to me for a moment, Raymonde. Hold on. Give me a pencil and a piece of paper.’
She tore a page from a grease-stained notebook in which she kept her accounts. She did not understand what he was leading up to.
‘Yesterday … Let’s see … We were on the cheese. So it was around nine o’clock in the evening … Georges-Henry jumped out of his bedroom window and ran off.’
‘In which direction?’
‘Off to the right. If he had gone down to the Seine, I would have seen him running across the garden. If he had gone to the left, I would also have seen him because the dining room has windows on both sides. Hold on … His father ran after him. Ernest Malik stayed away for twelve minutes. It’s true that during those twelve minutes he took the time to change his trousers and run a comb through his hair. To do that, he must have gone up to his bedroom. At least three or four minutes. Now, you know the area well, think carefully before you reply. Which way could Georges-Henry have gone if he had intended to leave Orsenne?’
‘To the right is his grandmother and his uncle’s house,’ she said, looking at the rough sketch he was drawing as she spoke. ‘There’s no wall between the two gardens but a hedge that has a couple of gaps in it.’
‘And then?’
‘From the neighbouring garden he would have been able to reach the little path that goes to the station.’
‘You can’t turn off the path before the station?’
‘No … Or perhaps he took a boat across the river.’
‘Is there a way out from the bottom of the garden?’
‘Only with a ladder. Both the Amorelles and the Maliks have a wall that’s too high to climb over. The railway line runs past the end of both gardens.’
‘Another question. When I came back an hour later, there was a boat on the water. I heard someone casting a fishing net.’
‘That’s Alphonse, the lock-keeper’s son.’
‘Thank you, Raymonde. If you don’t mind, we’ll have dinner together.’
‘But there’s nothing to eat.’
‘There’s a grocer’s next to the lock. I’ll buy the necessaries.’
He was pleased with himself. He had the sense of having set foot on dry land again, and Raymonde watched him lumber off in the direction of the lock. The weir was around five hundred metres away. There were no boats in the lock, and the lock-keeper was sitting on his blue-stone doorstep whittling a piece of wood for one of his kids, while in the gloomy kitchen a woman came and went, a baby in her arms.
‘Tell me …’ ventured Maigret.
The man had jumped to his feet and touched his cap.
‘You’ve come about the young lady, haven’t you?’
The local people already knew who he was. Everyone was aware of his presence.
‘Well, yes and no … I don’t suppose you know anything about her?’
‘Except that I was the one who found her. Over there, on the third section of the weir. It was a terrible shock, because we knew her well.
She often used to come through the lock in her canoe on the way down to Corbeil.’
‘Was your son out on the water last night?’
The man looked uncomfortable.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not interested in poachers. I spotted him at around ten o’clock, but I’d like to know whether he was already out an hour earlier.’
‘He’ll tell you himself. You’ll find him in his workshop, a hundred metres further down. He’s the boat builder.’
A wooden shed where two men were busy finishing off a flat-bottomed fishing boat.
‘I was on the water with Albert, yes … He’s my apprentice. First of all we put out the creels, then when we came back—’
‘If someone had crossed the river by boat between the Maliks’ house and the lock at around nine o’clock, would you have seen them?’
‘Definitely. First of all, it wasn’t dark yet. Then, even if we hadn’t seen him, we’d have heard him. When you fish the way we do, you keep your ears pricked and …’
In the little grocer’s shop where the bargemen stocked up, Maigret bought some tinned food, eggs, cheese and sausage.
‘I can tell that you’re at L’Ange!’ commented the shopkeeper. ‘There’s never anything to eat there. They’d do better to close down for good.’
Maigret walked up to the station. It was merely a halt with a crossing-keeper’s cottage.
‘No, monsieur, nobody came by around that time last night, or up to ten thirty. I was sitting on a chair in front of the house with my wife. Monsieur Georges-Henry? Definitely not him. We know him well and besides, he would have stopped for a chat, because he knows us too and he’s not stuck-up.’
But Maigret persisted. He peered over the hedges, chatted to good people out gardening, nearly all of them retired.
‘Monsieur Georges-Henry? No, we haven’t seen him. Has something happened to him too?’
A big car drove past. It was Ernest Malik’s, but it wasn’t him at the wheel, it was his brother Charles, heading in the direction of Paris.
It was seven o’clock by the time Maigret got back to L’Ange. Raymonde burst out laughing as he emptied his pockets, which were bulging with provisions.
‘With all that, we’ll be able to have a bite to eat,’ she said.
‘Is Madame Jeanne still in bed? Has no one been to see her?’
Raymonde hesitated for a moment.
‘Monsieur Malik came earlier. When I told him that you’d gone to the lock, he went upstairs. The two of them were up there whispering for a quarter of an hour, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.’
‘Does he often come and see Jeanne?’
‘He drops in occasionally. You don’t have any news of Georges-Henry?’
Maigret went into the garden to smoke a pipe until dinner was ready. Bernadette Amorelle seemed to have been speaking the truth when she told him that she hadn’t seen her grandson. True, that proved nothing. Maigret was close to believing that they were all lying, every single one of them.
And yet he felt that she had been telling the truth.
There was something in Orsenne, something in the Malik family, that had to be hushed up at all costs. Was it in some way connected with Monita’s death? Possibly, but it wasn’t certain.
The fact was that two people had broken away. First of all, old Madame Amorelle had taken advantage of her daughter and son-in-law’s absence to be driven to Meung in the old-fashioned limousine to summon Maigret to the rescue.
Then, on the same day, when the former inspector happened to be in Ernest Malik’s house, there had been a second escape. This time, it was Georges-Henry.
Why had his father claimed that the young man was at his grandmother’s? Why, in that case, had he not taken him there? And why had he not seen him again the next day?
All that was still unclear, for sure. Ernest Malik had been right when he had looked at Maigret with a smile that was a mixture of sarcasm and contempt. This wasn’t a case for him. He was out of his depth. This world was unfamiliar to him, and he had difficulty piecing it all together. Even the decor shocked him for its artificiality. Those huge mansions with deserted gardens and closed blinds, those gardeners trundling up and down the paths, that pontoon, those tiny, heavily lacquered boats, those gleaming cars sitting in garages …
And these people who stuck together, these brothers and sisters-in-law who loathed each other perhaps, but who warned each other of danger and closed ranks against him.
What was more, they were in deep mourning. They had on their side the dignity of bereavement and grief. In what capacity, what right did he have to come sniffing around here and poking his nose into their business?
He had almost given up earlier, just as he was returning to L’Ange for lunch, to be exact. What had stopped him had been Raymonde, who had been so easy to win over, and the relaxed, messy atmosphere of the kitchen. It was the words she had inadvertently let slip, her elbows casually on the table, that had lodged in his mind.
She had spoken of Monita, who was a tomboy and who kept running away with her cousin. Of Georges-Henry with his grubby shorts and unkempt hair.
Now Monita was dead and Georges-Henry had disappeared.
He would seek and he would find. That, at least, was his profession. He had been all around Orsenne. He was now almost certain that the young man had not left. At least he was pretty sure that he had lain low somewhere until nightfall and that then he had been able to remain unseen.
Maigret ate voraciously, in the kitchen again, just him and Raymonde.
‘If Madame were to see us, she wouldn’t like it,’ said Raymonde. ‘She asked me earlier what you’d eaten. I told her that I served you two fried eggs in the dining room. She also asked me whether you’d mentioned leaving.’
‘Before or after Malik’s visit?’
‘After.’
‘In that case, I’ll wager that tomorrow she’ll refuse to come down from her room again.’
‘She came down earlier. I didn’t see her. I was at the bottom of the garden. But I noticed that she’d been down.’
He smiled. He had understood. He pictured Jeanne descending noiselessly, having watched her housemaid go out, to come and get a bottle from the shelf!
‘I may be back late,’ he announced.
‘Have they invited you again?’
‘No, but I feel like going out for a stroll.’
At first he stayed on the towpath waiting for nightfall. Then he headed for the level crossing, where he saw the keeper, in the shadows, sitting outside his cottage, smoking a long-stemmed pipe.
‘Do you mind if I take a walk beside the railway track?’
‘Dear me, it’s against the regulations, but seeing as you’re from the police … Keep a lookout for the train that comes by at seventeen minutes past ten.’
Three hundred metres further on he caught sight of the wall of the first property, that of Madame Amorelle and Charles Malik. It wasn’t completely dark yet, but inside the houses, the lamps had long been lit.
There was light on the ground floor. One of the first-floor windows, one of the old lady’s bedroom windows, was wide open, and it was rather strange to peep into a private world from a distance, through the blue-tinged air and the tranquillity of the garden, and discover an apartment whose furniture and objects seemed to be frozen in a yellowish light.
He paused for a few moments to watch. A shadow crossed his field of vision. It was not that of Bernadette, but of her daughter, Charles’ wife, who was pacing up and down anxiously and seemed to be speaking emphatic
ally.
The old lady must be in her armchair, or her bed, or in one of the corners of the bedroom that was hidden from his view.
He continued along the railway track and came to the second garden, that of Ernest Malik. It was less bushy and had more open space, with wide, well-maintained paths. Here too, lamps were on, but the light only filtered through the blinds and Maigret wasn’t able to see inside.
He stood looking down into the garden itself, where, camouflaged by the young hazelnut trees planted along the railway line, Maigret could make out two tall shapes, pale and silent, and he remembered the Great Danes that had bounded over to lick their master’s hand the day before.
They were probably let loose every night, and were likely to be ferocious.
To the right, at the end of the garden, stood a little cottage which Maigret had not yet seen and which was probably where the gardeners and the driver lived.
There was a light on there too, a single one, which went out half an hour later.
There was no sign of the moon yet, but the night was not as dark as the previous one. Maigret sat down quietly on the embankment, facing the hazelnut trees which concealed him, and which he could draw aside with his hand like a curtain.
The 10.17 train sped past less than three metres from him and he watched its red lamp disappear around the bend in the track.
The few lights from Orsenne went out one by one. Old Groux was probably not out hunting woodpigeon that night, since the peace and quiet wasn’t shattered by any gunshots.
At last, at nearly eleven o’clock, the two dogs, lying side by side at the edge of a lawn, rose as one and loped towards the house.
They vanished for a moment behind it, and, when Maigret saw them again, the two animals were prancing around the shape of a man who was walking hurriedly and seemed to be making straight for him.
It was Ernest Malik, without a doubt. The shape was too slim and too energetic to be that of one of the servants. He walked silently across the lawn. In his hand he had an object that it was impossible to identify, but which looked quite bulky.
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