Maigret shuddered. So that was what they would have him believe? That this was a punishment?
‘That was hopeless, Ernest.’
And, leaning over the hole, he said in a calm, gentle voice:
‘You can come now, Georges-Henry. You have nothing more to fear. Not from your father or from anyone else.’
Mimile held out his hand and helped the young man to hoist himself up through the trap door. Georges-Henry stood hunched, avoiding looking at his father, waiting for the chance to run away.
And that, Maigret had foreseen. For he had anticipated everything, even – and especially – Malik’s bursting in on them. And Mimile had been given precise instructions, so now all he had to do was act on them.
The four of them could not stand there in the old kennel indefinitely, and Maigret was the first to walk towards the door, ignoring Malik, who stood barring his path.
‘We’ll be more comfortable talking inside the house,’ he murmured.
‘You insist on talking?’
Maigret shrugged. As he passed Mimile, he shot him a look that meant: ‘Act with caution’.
For this was a delicate operation and one slip could ruin everything. They exited one by one and Georges-Henry emerged last, careful to keep a distance from his father. The four of them walked down the path and now it was Malik’s turn to display a certain anxiety. The night was pitch black. The moon hadn’t risen yet. Maigret had switched off his torch.
There was barely another hundred metres to go. What was the boy waiting for? Had Maigret got it wrong?
Now it was as if no one dared speak, no one wanted to take responsibility for what was about to happen.
Another sixty metres. In one minute, it would be too late and Maigret felt like giving Georges-Henry a nudge to bring him back down to earth.
Twenty metres … ten metres … Maigret would have to resign himself. What were the four of them going to do inside the house whose white façade loomed in front of them?
Five metres. Too late! Or rather it wasn’t. Georges-Henry proved himself cannier than Maigret himself, for he had banked on one thing: once they reached the house, his father would have to go ahead to open the door.
At that exact moment he darted off and, a second later, the rustle of grasses and branches could be heard in the thicket. Mimile had been quick to spot the boy’s move and set off in pursuit.
Malik barely lost a second, but it was a second too long. His reflex was to aim his gun at the circus-man’s silhouette. He would have fired. But before he had time to squeeze the trigger, Maigret brought his fist down on his forearm and the gun clattered to the ground.
‘And so we have it!’ said Maigret with satisfaction.
He did not deign to pick up the weapon, which he kicked into the middle of the path. For his part, a sort of human pride prevented Ernest Malik from going to retrieve it. What would be the point?
The game being played now between the two of them could not in any way be affected by a gun.
For Maigret, it was quite an emotional moment. Precisely because he had anticipated it. The night was so still that they could hear, already some distance away, the footsteps of the two men running. Malik and he listened out. They could clearly hear that Mimile was close on the boy’s heels.
They must have entered the neighbouring estate, still running, and from there they would probably head down to the towpath.
‘And so we have it,’ repeated Maigret as the sound faded until it was barely audible. ‘Shall we go inside?’
Malik turned the key which he had inserted in the lock earlier and stood aside. Then he switched on the light and they saw his wife standing in a white bathrobe on the bend in the stairs.
She stared at the two of them, round-eyed in amazement and at a loss for words, until her husband snapped irritably:
‘Go to bed!’
The two of them were in Malik’s study and Maigret, standing, began to fill his pipe, darting smug little glances at his adversary. Meanwhile Malik paced up and down, his hands behind his back.
‘Aren’t you planning to lodge a complaint?’ Maigret asked quietly. ‘It’s the perfect opportunity. Your two dogs poisoned. Climbing over the wall and trespassing. You could even claim there was a kidnap attempt … After sunset to boot … That would carry a sentence of hard labour. Go on, Ernest … The telephone is there, within reach. A call to the Corbeil gendarmerie and they’ll have to arrest me.
‘What’s wrong? … What’s stopping you?’
Using a familiar tone no longer bothered him now, quite the opposite, but it was not the chumminess Malik had used on their first meeting. It was the contemptuous familiarity that the former inspector used to employ with his ‘customers’.
‘Don’t you want the whole world to know that you were keeping your son locked up in a cellar? … First of all, it’s your right as a father. The right to punish. How many times, when I was little, was I threatened with being locked in the cellar!’
‘Shut up, will you?’
Malik had planted himself in front of Maigret and was staring at him intently, trying to fathom what lay behind his words.
‘What exactly do you know?’
‘Finally! The question I’ve been waiting for.’
‘What do you know?’ asked Malik again, becoming impatient.
‘And you, what are you afraid of me knowing?’
‘I have already asked you not to poke your nose in my business.’
‘And I refused.’
‘For the second and last time, I’m telling you—’
But Maigret was already shaking his head.
‘No … You see, that’s impossible now.’
‘You don’t know anything.’
‘In that case, what are you afraid of?’
‘You won’t find out anything.’
‘So I’m not a bother to you, then.’
‘As for the boy, he won’t talk. I know you’re relying on him.’
‘Is that all you have to say to me, Ernest?’
‘I’m asking you to think. I could have killed you earlier, and I’m beginning to wish I had.’
‘You may well have been wrong not to. In a few moments, when I leave here, you’ll still have a chance to shoot me in the back. It’s true that now the boy is far away, and that there’s someone with him. Come on! I’m ready for bed. So, no telephone? No complaint? No gendarmerie? Understood? Agreed?’
He headed for the door.
‘Good night, Ernest.’
As he was about to disappear into the hall, he changed his mind and went back into the room, to say, with a solemn expression and a heavy gaze:
‘You see, what I am going to discover is I suspect so ugly, so vile, that I’m loath to continue.’
He left without looking round, slamming the door hard behind him, and made his way to the gate, which was locked. The situation was absurd: here he was in the grounds of the house with no one to let him out.
The light was still on in the study, but Malik was not thinking about seeing his enemy off the premises.
Scale the back wall? Maigret did not think he was agile enough to do so alone. Find the path that would take him to the Amorelles’ garden, where the gate might not be locked?
He shrugged and headed over to the gardeners’ cottage, and tapped on the door.
‘What is it?’ came a sleepy voice from inside.
‘A friend of Monsieur Malik’s who needs someone to unlock the gate for him.’
He heard the old gardener moving around as he pu
t on his trousers and hunted around for his clogs. The door opened a fraction.
‘How come you are in the gardens? Where are the dogs?’
‘I think they’re asleep,’ muttered Maigret. ‘Unless they’re dead.’
‘What about Monsieur Malik?’
‘He’s in his study.’
‘But he has the key to the gate.’
‘Maybe. But he’s so preoccupied that it didn’t even occur to him.’
The gardener walked ahead of him, grumbling, turning round from time to time to dart an inquisitive look at this nocturnal visitor. When Maigret hastened his step, the man shuddered, as if he were expecting to be hit from behind.
‘Thank you, my good man.’
He returned serenely to L’Ange. He had to throw pebbles at Raymonde’s window to wake her and ask her to open the door.
‘What time is it? I wasn’t expecting you back tonight. Earlier I heard people running along the little path. Wasn’t that you?’
He poured himself a drink and went to bed. At eight o’clock the next morning, freshly shaven and carrying his suitcase, he boarded the train for Paris. At half past nine, having drunk a coffee and eaten croissants in a little café, he walked into Quai des Orfèvres.
Lucas was conferring in his superior’s office. Maigret sat down at his old desk, next to the open window, and an Amorelle and Campois tug happened to be passing on the Seine, giving two loud siren blasts before disappearing under the Pont de la Cité.
At ten o’clock, Lucas came in, holding a sheaf of papers, which he set down on a corner of the desk.
‘You’re in town, chief? I thought you were back in Orsenne.’
‘Has there been a telephone call for me this morning?’
‘Not yet. Are you expecting one?’
‘You need to inform the switchboard. Tell them to put the call directly through to me, or, if I’m not here, to take a message.’
He didn’t want to appear anxious, but he smoked one pipe after another.
‘Carry on with your work as if I weren’t here.’
‘Nothing exciting this morning. A stabbing in Rue Delambre.’
The daily routine. He knew it so well. He had removed his jacket, as in the old days when he was at home here. He wandered in and out of the various offices, shook hands, caught snatches of an interrogation or a telephone conversation.
‘Don’t mind me, boys.’
At half past eleven, he went down for a beer with Torrence.
‘By the way, there’s something I’d like you to find out for me. Still on the subject of Ernest Malik. I want to know if he’s a gambler. Or if he was in the past, when he was young. It must be possible to find someone who knew him twenty or twenty-five years ago.’
‘I will, chief.’
At a quarter to twelve, there was still nothing, and Maigret’s shoulders grew more stooped, his gait more hesitant.
‘I think I’ve been a complete idiot!’ he even said to Lucas, who was dealing with routine business.
Each time the telephone rang in the office, he picked it up himself. At last, a few seconds before midday, someone was asking for Maigret.
‘Maigret speaking … Where are you? … Where is he?’
‘In Ivry, boss. I’ll be quick, because I’m worried he’ll take advantage. I don’t know the name of the street. I didn’t get a chance to see it. A little hotel. It’s a three-storey building and the ground floor is painted brown. It’s called A Ma Bourgogne. There’s a gas works right opposite.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘I have no idea. I think he’s sleeping. I’d better go.’
Maigret went and stood in front of a map of Paris and the suburbs.
‘Do you know a gas works in Ivry, Lucas?’
‘I think I get where it is, it’s just past the station.’
A few minutes later, Maigret, sitting in an open-topped taxi, was heading towards the smoke of Ivry. He had to comb the streets for a while until he found a gas works and eventually spotted a seedy hotel whose ground floor was painted dark brown.
‘Shall I wait for you?’ asked the driver.
‘I think that would be a good idea.’
Maigret walked into the restaurant area where workers, nearly all foreigners, were eating at the marble tables. A powerful smell of stew and cheap red wine assailed his throat. A sturdy girl in black and white wove among the tables, carrying an impossible number of small, grey ceramic dishes.
‘Are you looking for the fellow who came down to telephone earlier? He said to tell you to go up to the third floor. You can go through here.’
A narrow corridor, with graffiti on the walls. The staircase was dark, lit only by a small window on the second floor. Once past it, Maigret caught sight of two feet and a pair of legs.
It was Mimile, sitting on the top stair, an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
‘Give me a light first, boss. I didn’t even stop to ask for matches when I went downstairs to telephone. I haven’t been able to have a smoke since last night.’
There was a mixture of joy and mockery in his light-coloured eyes.
‘Do you want me to shove over so you can sit down too?’
‘Where is he?’
On the landing Maigret was able to make out four doors painted the same dreary brown as the façade. They bore the clumsily painted numbers 11, 12, 13 and 14.
‘He’s in number 12! I’ve got 13. It’s funny, anyone would think they’d done it on purpose … Thirteen, unlucky for some!’
He inhaled the smoke avidly, stood up and stretched.
‘If you’d like to come into my pad … but I warn you it stinks and the ceiling’s low. While I was here on my own, I thought it best to be out here and bar the way, you understand?’
‘How did you manage to telephone?’
‘Exactly … I’d been waiting for an opportunity all morning. ’Cause we’ve been here a while. Since six o’clock this morning.’
He opened the door of number 13, and Maigret glimpsed an iron bedstead painted black and an ugly reddish blanket, a straw-bottomed chair and a basin with no jug on a pedestal table. The third-floor rooms were under the eaves and, from the centre of the room, you had to stoop.
‘Let’s not stay here because he’s as slippery as an eel. He’s already tried to run off twice this morning. At one point I thought he might try and escape over the rooftops, but I realized that it’s impossible.’
The gas works opposite, with its coal-blackened yards. Mimile had the tousled look of someone who hadn’t slept and hadn’t washed.
‘We’re actually better off on the stairs and it doesn’t smell so bad. Here it stinks of sick flesh, don’t you find? Like the smell of an old dressing.’
Georges-Henry was asleep, or was pretending to be, because when they pressed their ears to the door, they could not hear a sound from his room. The two men stayed on the staircase and Mimile explained, chain-smoking to catch up:
‘First of all, how I managed to telephone you. I didn’t want to leave my stakeout, as you police call it. But on the other hand, I had to contact you, as we’d agreed. At one point, at around nine o’clock, a woman came down, the one from number 14. I thought of asking her to give you a call, or to get a message to Quai des Orfèvres. Except that here, it might not be a very good idea to mention the police and I might have got myself thrown out.
‘“Better wait for another opportunity, Mimile,” I said to myself. “This is no time to get into a fight.”
‘When I saw the fellow fr
om number 11 coming out of his room, I knew at once that he was a Pole. When it comes to Polish, I’m your man, I speak a bit of their language.
‘I started to chat to him and he was very happy to hear his lingo. I told him some story about a chick. That she was in the room. That she wanted to ditch me. In short, he agreed to stand guard for the few minutes I needed to go downstairs and telephone.’
‘Are you sure the kid is still in there?’
Mimile gave him a cheeky wink and took from his pocket a pair of pliers with which he gripped the tip of the key that was on the inside of the door but was protruding slightly from the keyhole.
He beckoned to Maigret to come over quietly and, with an extraordinarily gentle movement, he turned the key and opened the door a crack.
Maigret peered in and, in a room just like the one next door, whose window was open, he saw the young man stretched out fully clothed across the bed.
He was asleep, there was no doubt about it. He slept as boys of that age sleep, his features relaxed, his mouth half-open in a childlike pout. He had not taken his shoes off and one of his feet hung over the end of the bed.
Mimile shut the door again just as gently.
‘Now let me tell you what happened. That was a brilliant idea of yours to have me take my bicycle. And an even more brilliant idea of mine to hide it near the level crossing.
‘You remember how he raced off. A real rabbit. He zigzagged through the gardens and dived into the undergrowth hoping to shake me off.
‘At one point, we went through a hedge, one after the other, and I still didn’t manage to catch sight of him. It was the sound that told me that he was making for a house. Not exactly towards the house, but towards a sort of shed from which I saw him take out a bicycle.’
‘His grandmother’s house,’ added Maigret. ‘The bike must have been a woman’s bike, the one belonging to his cousin Monita.’
‘A woman’s bike, yes. He jumped on to it, but he couldn’t go fast along the garden paths, and I was still on his tail. I didn’t dare talk to him yet, because I didn’t know what was happening your end.’
‘Malik wanted to shoot you.’
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