A few minutes later, Maigret calmly alighted, like an old regular, and lingered to chat to the crossing-keeper, who doubled as stationmaster.
He began by commenting that it was hotter in the country than in Paris, and it was true, for the heat in the valley was suffocating that day.
‘Tell me, they must serve a reasonably decent white wine in that café, do they?’
The café was fifty metres from the station, and shortly the two men were sitting at a table with a bottle of white wine in front of them. Soon there was a series of little glasses in front of them too, that succeeded each other at an increasingly rapid rate.
An hour later, it was plain that the crossing-keeper would sleep well that night, and that was all that Maigret required of him.
As for him, he had made a point of spilling most of the alcohol that they had been served and he did not feel too sleepy as he ambled down to the river and a little later walked into the little garden of L’Ange.
Raymonde looked surprised to see him again so soon.
‘What about Madame Jeanne?’ he asked.
‘She’s still in her room. By the way, a letter arrived for you. It was delivered just after you left. Maybe the train hadn’t arrived yet. If I hadn’t been all alone, I’d have brought it to the station.’
With a black border, of course.
Monsieur,
I wish you to stop the investigation which I asked you to carry out in a moment of understandable depression, given my age and the recent shock I have suffered.
This may have led me to interpret certain tragic events in a way that is incompatible with the facts, and I now regret having disturbed you in your retirement.
Your presence at Orsenne only complicates an already painful situation and I am taking the liberty of adding that the indiscretion with which you have set about the task I entrusted to you and the clumsiness you have exhibited so far prompt me to demand your immediate departure.
I hope you will understand and not insist on upsetting a family under a great deal of strain.
During my thoughtless visit to Meung-sur-Loire, I left a bundle of ten thousand francs on your table to cover your initial expenses. You will find enclosed a cheque for the same amount. Please consider this case over.
Yours sincerely,
Bernadette Amorelle
The note was indeed in her large, pointed handwriting, but it wasn’t her style. Maigret gave a wry grimace and put the letter and the cheque in his pocket, convinced that the words he had just read were those of Ernest Malik rather than the elderly lady.
‘I also have to tell you that Madame Jeanne asked me earlier when you were planning to leave.’
‘Is she throwing me out?’
Plump Raymonde, whose curves were both sturdy and soft, blushed a deep red.
‘That’s not what I meant at all. It’s just that she claims she’s going to be ill for a while. When she has one of her attacks …’
He glanced covertly at the bottles that were the main reason for those attacks.
‘And then?’
‘The house is going to be sold any day now.’
‘Once again!’ said Maigret sardonically. ‘And then what, dear Raymonde?’
‘Don’t you worry about me. I’d rather she’d told you herself. She says that it’s not proper for me to be alone in the house with a man. She heard that the two of us ate together in the kitchen. She scolded me.’
‘When does she want me to leave?’
‘Tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.’
‘And there are no other inns around here, are there?’
‘There’s one five kilometres away.’
‘Well, Raymonde, we’ll see about that tomorrow morning.’
‘The thing is I’ve got no food this evening and I’ve been forbidden—’
‘I’ll eat up at the lock.’
Which he did. There was a little grocer’s shop for the bargemen where drinks were served, as there are beside most locks. A group of boats was in the lock and the women, surrounded by their brood, were doing their shopping while the men came in for a quick drink.
All these people worked for Amorelle and Campois.
‘Give me a bottle of white wine, a piece of sausage and half a pound of bread,’ he ordered.
There was no restaurant. He sat down at the end of a table, and watched the water cascading over the lock gates. In the past, the barges used to make their way slowly along the banks, drawn by heavy horses which a little girl, often barefoot on the towpath, drove with a stick.
Those were the barges on which the horses used to sleep too that could still be seen on some canals but which, thanks to Amorelle and Campois’ smoke-belching tug-boats and motorized barges, had disappeared from the Haute Seine.
The sausage was good, and the wine light, with a slightly acidic taste. The grocery shop smelled of cinnamon and oil. The upstream lock gates now open, the tug led its barges like chicks towards the top of the millrace and the lock-keeper came to have a drink at Maigret’s table.
‘I thought you had to leave tonight.’
‘Who told you that?’
The lock-keeper looked sheepish.
‘You know, if we listened to all the rumours we heard …!’
Malik was fighting back. He wasn’t wasting any time. Had he come all the way to the lock himself?
From a distance, Maigret could see, amid the foliage, the roofs of the Campois’ and the Amorelles’ stately houses – that of the elderly Madame Amorelle and of her son-in-law, that of Ernest Malik, the most luxurious of all, that of Campois, halfway up the hill, almost rustic, although solidly bourgeois with its pink walls. On the other side of the water was the quaint, dilapidated little manor house of Monsieur Groux, who preferred to mortgage his properties rather than see his woods turned into quarries.
He wasn’t far away, Monsieur Groux. You could see him, bareheaded in the sun, dressed as always in khaki, sitting in a green canoe moored between two poles and fishing with a rod and line.
There wasn’t a breath of wind, no ripples on the water.
‘You know about these things, don’t you. Tell me, will there be a moon tonight?’
‘That depends what time. It will rise just before midnight behind the wood you see upstream. It’s in its first quarter.’
Maigret was fairly pleased with himself and yet he couldn’t rid himself of a little knot of anxiety that had lodged in his chest and was growing instead of abating as the time passed.
A pang of nostalgia too. He had spent an hour at Quai des Orfèvres, with men he knew so well that they still called him chief, but who …
What had they said to each other after he had left? That he was missing the job, naturally! That life in his rural retreat wasn’t as rosy as he would have them believe! That he had seized on the first opportunity to experience the thrills of the past again!
An amateur, in other words! He looked like an amateur.
‘Another drop of white?’
The lock-keeper didn’t say no. He had the habit of wiping his mouth with his sleeve after every sip.
‘I am sure that young Malik – Georges-Henry – must have gone fishing lots of times with your son?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘I expect he loved that, didn’t he?’
‘He loved the water, he loved the woods, he loved animals!’
‘A good boy!’
‘A good boy, yes. Not proud. If you could have seen the pair of them with
the little young lady … They’d often go out together in the canoe. I’d offer to let them through the lock, even though we don’t normally allow small boats through. But they were the ones who said no. They preferred to carry the boat to the other side of the lock. I’d see them going home at dusk.’
At dusk, or rather after dusk had fallen, Maigret himself had an unsavoury job to do. Then, everyone would know. They’d know whether he had got it wrong, if he was just an old dog who had deserved his retirement, or whether he was still good for something.
He paid and set off slowly along the riverbank, puffing away at his pipe. The wait was long, as if that evening the sun refused to go down. The shimmering water flowed slowly, silently, with only a barely perceptible murmur. The midges hovered dangerously close to the surface of the water, taunting the fish and making them jump.
He saw no one, neither the Malik brothers, nor their household servants. That evening everything was at a standstill. Shortly before ten o’clock, leaving behind him the light shining in Jeanne’s room at L’Ange and in the kitchen where Raymonde sat, he made his way to the station, as he had done the previous night.
The little glasses of white wine had doubtless had their effect, because the crossing-keeper was not at his post outside his house. Maigret was able to walk past unseen and follow the track.
Behind the curtain of hazelnut trees, more or less at the spot where he had hidden the previous night, he found Mimile in position, a calm Mimile, legs apart, a cigarette that had gone out dangling from his lips, who seemed to be taking a breath of fresh air.
‘No sign of him yet?’
‘No.’
They stood waiting in silence. From time to time, they whispered a few words. As on the previous night, there was a window open in Bernadette Amorelle’s apartment and they occasionally glimpsed the old lady moving around in the faint glow.
It was not until half past ten that a figure appeared in the Maliks’ garden and things happened exactly as they had done the night before. The man was carrying a parcel and his dogs ran up to him then followed him to the door of the top kennel. He went inside, stayed a lot longer than the previous night and finally went back into the house, where a light went on at a first-floor window, which opened for a moment while the shutters were being closed.
The dogs roamed the gardens before settling down for the night, coming to sniff the air not far from the wall, doubtless sensing the presence of the two men.
‘Shall I go, boss?’ whispered Mimile.
One of the Great Danes snarled, as if about to growl, but the circusman had already thrown an object in its direction which landed on the ground with a soft thud.
‘Unless they’re better trained than I think,’ muttered Mimile. ‘But I’m not scared of that. These bourgeois folk don’t know how to train dogs and even if they’re given a well-trained animal, they soon spoil it.’
He was right. The two dogs prowled around the object, sniffing. Maigret, anxious, had let his pipe go out. Eventually one of the dogs gingerly picked up the meat in its mouth and shook it, while the other one, jealous, gave a menacing growl.
‘There’s enough for everyone!’ sniggered Mimile, throwing a second piece. ‘No need to fight, my beauties!’
The whole thing lasted barely five minutes. The pale hounds lurched about for a moment, then turned in circles, sick, and finally lay down on their sides. At that moment, Maigret was not proud of himself.
‘It’s done, boss. Shall we go?’
It was better to wait a little until it was completely dark and all the lights were out. Mimile was growing impatient.
‘The moon will be up shortly and it’ll be too late.’
Mimile had brought a rope which was already tied to the trunk of a young ash tree beside the track, close up against the wall.
‘I’ll go first.’
The wall was around three metres high, but it was in good condition, with no bulges.
‘It will be harder to climb back over from here. Unless we find a ladder in their wretched garden. Oh look! There’s a wheelbarrow down that little path. We can stand it up against the wall. That’ll help.’
Mimile was excited, happy, like a man back in his element.
‘If anyone had told me that I’d be doing this thing with you …’
They neared the former kennel or stable, which was a single-storey brick building with a concrete yard enclosed by a fence.
‘No need for a torch,’ whispered Mimile fiddling with the lock.
The door was open and they immediately caught a strong whiff of mouldy straw.
‘Close the door! Well, it looks to me as if there’s no one in here!’
Maigret switched on his torch and they saw nothing around them other than a broken old wooden stall, a mildewed harness hanging from a hook, a whip on the floor, and straw mixed with hay and dust.
‘Down below,’ said Maigret. ‘There must be a hatch or an opening of some kind.’
They simply had to shift the straw to find a robust trap door with heavy hinges. The door was secured only with a bolt, which Maigret drew back slowly with a heavy heart.
‘What are you waiting for?’ hissed Mimile.
Nothing. And yet it had been years since he had felt that particular emotion.
‘Do you want me to open it?’
No. He raised the trap door. Not a sound came from the cellar, and yet they both instantly had the feeling that there was a living creature down there.
The torch suddenly lit up the dark space below them, and the pale rays lighted on a face, a shape that leaped up.
‘Stay calm,’ said Maigret quietly.
He tried to track the shape with his torch as it darted from one wall to another like a hunted animal. He said mechanically:
‘I am a friend.’
Mimile suggested:
‘Shall I go down?’
And a voice from below said:
‘Don’t touch me!’
‘Don’t worry! No one’s going to touch you.’
Maigret talked, talked as in a dream or rather as if trying to soothe a child who is having a nightmare. And the scene did indeed resemble a nightmare.
‘Stay calm. Let’s get you out of here.’
‘What if I don’t want to come out?’
The shrill, febrile voice of a mad child.
‘Shall I go down?’ Mimile offered again, keen to be done with things.
‘Listen, Georges-Henry! I am a friend. I know everything.’
And suddenly it was as if he had spoken the magic words. The boy’s agitation abruptly ceased. There was a few seconds’ silence, then a changed voice asked warily:
‘What do you know?’
‘First of all we need to get out of here, young man. I promise you that you have nothing to fear.’
‘Where’s my father? What have you done with him?’
‘Your father is in his bedroom, in bed, probably.’
‘It’s not true!’
His voice was full of animosity. They were lying to him. He was almost certain they were lying to him, as people had done all his life. This was the obsessive fear that his voice revealed to Maigret, who was beginning to lose patience.
‘Your grandmother told me everything.’
‘It’s not true!’
‘It was she who came to fetch me and who—’
And the boy, almost shouting:
‘She doesn’t know anything! I’m the only one who—’
‘Hush! Trust me, Georges-Henry. Come. When you come out
of here, we’ll talk calmly.’
Would he let himself be cajoled? Otherwise Maigret would have to go down into the hole, use force, seize him bodily and overpower him, and he might fight back, scratch and bite like a panic-stricken young animal.
‘Shall I go down?’ repeated Mimile, who was growing restless and occasionally turned towards the door, afraid.
‘Listen, Georges-Henry. I’m from the police.’
‘This has nothing to do with the police! I hate the police! I hate the police!’
He broke off. An idea had just struck him and he continued in a different voice:
‘Anyway, if you were the police you’d have—’
He shrieked:
‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Go away! You’re lying! You know you’re lying! Go and tell my father—’
Just then, from over by the door which had opened noiselessly, a voice rang out:
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, gentlemen.’
Maigret’s torch lit up the shape of Ernest Malik, who was standing there, very calmly, a big gun in his hand.
‘I believe, my poor Jules, that I would be within my rights to shoot you, along with your friend.’
From down below, they could hear the boy’s teeth chattering.
6. Mimile and his Prisoner
Without betraying the least surprise, Maigret turned slowly towards the newcomer and appeared not to notice the gun pointing at him.
‘Get the boy out of there,’ he said in his most natural voice, like a man who, having tried to complete a task and failed, was asking another to try his hand.
‘Now listen, Maigret—’ Malik began.
‘Not now. Not here. Later, I’ll listen to anything you like.’
‘Do you admit that you have put yourself in the wrong?’
‘I’m telling you to take care of the child. You won’t? Mimile, go down into the hole.’
Only then did Ernest Malik say sharply:
‘You can come out, Georges-Henry.’
The boy did not move.
‘Do you hear me? Come out! Your punishment has gone on long enough.’
Maigret Gets Angry Page 8