‘As we left the restaurant I did the same thing again, and since then I’ve done it all the time.’
In other words Jenny too had the same habit. It meant that she and her brother-in-law often walked along the street together.
Didn’t that suggest that they weren’t hiding, and Gisèle Marton knew all about it, contrary to what her husband said?
He leaned towards the ticket kiosk, then made for the entrance with two pink tickets in his hand.
It was a thriller, with gunshots and fights, and a hardboiled hero jumping out of a window only to land in a convertible and then, in the middle of the city, knocking out the driver, taking the steering wheel and driving at a crazy speed, escaping the police cars with their wailing sirens.
He smiled in spite of himself. Basically he was having fun. He forgot the Martons and the sister-in-law, Harris whose name was Schwob and the somewhat complicated relationships of the two couples.
At the interval he bought some sweets for his wife, a tradition that went back almost as long as her taking him by the arm. Another tradition was that while she ate her sweets he smoked half a pipe in the foyer, looking vaguely at the posters of the coming attractions.
The snow was still falling when they came out, and the flakes were thicker now, trembling on the ground for a moment before dissolving.
People walked with their heads bowed so that the flakes didn’t get in their eyes. Tomorrow, in all probability, the snow would whiten the roofs and the parked cars.
‘Taxi!’
He was worried that his wife might catch a chill. He thought that she had already lost weight, and even though he knew that this was on the instructions of Pardon it still worried him. He was concerned that she would become frailer and perhaps lose her optimism and her good humour.
As the car stopped opposite their flat on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, he murmured:
‘Would it bother you a lot if I came back in an hour?’
In any other case he wouldn’t have asked her the question. He would just have announced what he had to do. This evening it was an initiative that wasn’t necessary, for which there was in fact no reason, and he felt the need to apologize for it.
‘Shall I wait up for you?’
‘No. Go to bed. I may be late.’
He saw her crossing the pavement, looking in her bag for the key to the flat.
‘The church of Saint-Pierre de Montrouge,’ he said to the driver.
The streets were almost empty, the cobbles slippery, with huge marks left by cars that had zigzagged.
‘Not too fast …’
He thought:
‘What if something really does happen …’
Why did he feel it would happen very soon? Xavier Marton had come to see him the previous day. Not a week sooner, while the situation was the same, but only the previous day. Did that not suggest that the drama was reaching its conclusion?
Gisèle had come to police headquarters the previous day as well.
And her husband had returned today.
He tried to remember what they had said about this in the psychiatry book that he had skimmed through. Perhaps, after all, he had been wrong not to take a greater interest? There had been several pages on the evolution of acute crises, but he had skipped those.
And yet, there was something that could hasten the drama, if indeed there was a drama. Xavier Marton had agreed to take a test, the next day, at eleven o’clock in the morning, at the special police infirmary.
Would he tell his sister-in-law about it? His wife? Would his wife pass on the news to her lover on Rue Saint-Honoré?
Once he had taken the test, whatever the results, it seemed that it would be too late for any new developments.
The taxi stopped in front of the church. Maigret paid his fare. Opposite, a bar was still open, with only two or three customers inside. Maigret pushed the door open, ordered a hot rum, not so much to warm himself up as because someone had mentioned hot rum a short time before. As he was heading for the telephone cabin, the waiter called to him:
‘Do you want a token?’
‘I just want to take a look at the directory.’
For no precise reason, in fact. Thinking of Monsieur Harris, he had wondered whether the Martons had a telephone and he was going to check.
They didn’t. Lots of Mortons, Martins, but not a single Marton.
‘How much do I owe you?’
He stepped outside into Avenue de Châtillon, which was deserted, and where no more than two or three windows were lit. He could see neither Lucas nor Lapointe, and he was starting to get worried when, towards the middle of the avenue, just past Rue Antoine-Chantin, he heard a nearby voice saying:
‘Here, chief …’
It was young Lapointe, huddled in a corner with a scarf pulled up to the middle of his face, his hands plunged deep in his coat pockets.
‘I recognized your footsteps as soon as you turned the corner of the avenue.’
‘Is that it?’ Maigret asked, nodding towards a yellow brick building with all its windows in darkness.
‘Yes. You see that dark hole to the right of the door?’
It was a kind of blind alley, a passage of the sort one still sees often in Paris, even in the heart of the city. It was in just such a passage on Boulevard Saint-Martin that a murdered man had once been found, at five o’clock in the afternoon, a few metres from the crowd passing along the pavement.
‘Does it lead to the courtyard?’
‘Yes. They can go in and out without calling the concierge.’
‘Did you go and see?’
‘I go there every ten minutes. If you go, be careful. There’s a huge ginger cat that comes over silently and rubs itself against your legs. The first time it miaowed, and I was worried that it was going to sound the alarm.’
‘Have they gone to bed?’
‘They hadn’t just now.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘I don’t know. There must be someone on the first floor, but you can’t see anything because of the blinds. I waited in vain to see a silhouette, like a shadow puppet; it looks as if the person or people who are in the room aren’t moving, or else they’re staying on the far side. The ground floor is lit as well. You only realize that after a while, because the mechanical shutters only let out thin chinks of light.’
Maigret crossed the street, and Lapointe followed him. They were both careful not to make any noise. The passageway, which was arched for about three or four metres, was as cold and damp as a cellar. They found the courtyard in total darkness and, while they stood motionless, a cat did in fact come and rub itself not against Maigret, but Lapointe, whom it seemed already to have adopted.
‘They’ve gone to bed,’ Lapointe whispered. ‘The window with the light on was just in front of you.’
On tiptoes, he approached the shutters on the ground floor, bent down and came back towards Maigret. Just as the two men were preparing to turn around and leave, a light came on, not in the small house, but on the third floor of the block.
They both froze in the shadow, fearing that they might be heard by a tenant, and expected to see a face pressed against the window.
It didn’t happen. A shadow passed behind the curtain. They heard the sound of water flushing.
‘Somebody having a wee …’ Lapointe sighed, reassured.
A moment later they were back on the opposite pavement. Curiously, they both felt disappointed. It was Lapointe who murmured:
‘They’ve gone to bed.’
Didn’t that mean that nothing was going to happen, that Maigret had been worried about nothing?
‘I wonder …’ Maigret began.
Two policemen on bicycles appeared, cycling straight towards them. They had spotted them in the distance, and from the kerb one of them called in a loud voice.
‘What are you up to, you two?’
Maigret stepped forwards. The beam from a torch sought his face. The policeman frowned.
‘You’re not …? Oh! Forgive me, detective chief inspector … I didn’t recognize you straight away …’
He added, after glancing at the house opposite:
‘Do you need a hand?’
‘Not for now.’
‘Anyway, we pass by every hour.’
The two caped men cycled off, sprinkled with snow, and Maigret joined Lapointe, who hadn’t moved.
‘What was I saying?’
‘You were wondering …’
‘Oh yes …! I was wondering if the husband and wife still sleep in the same bed.’
‘I don’t know. From what Janvier told me this afternoon, there’s a sofa on the ground floor, which doesn’t mean that anyone sleeps there. Logically, if someone does, it should be the sister-in-law, shouldn’t it?’
‘Goodnight, my friend. Perhaps you can …’
He wondered whether to send Lapointe off to bed. What was the point of keeping watch outside a house where nothing was happening?
‘If you’re hesitating on my account …’
Basically, Lapointe would have been annoyed not to be able to do his stakeout to the end.
‘Stay if you like. Goodnight. You don’t want to come for a drink?’
‘I admit that I went for one a few minutes before you arrived. I was able to keep an eye on the street from the bar on the corner.’
By the time Maigret reached Saint-Pierre de Montrouge, the grilles of the Métro were closed, and there was no taxi in sight. He hesitated between making for the Lion de Belfort and taking Avenue du Maine towards Gare Montparnasse. He chose Avenue du Maine because of the station, and in fact soon hailed a taxi that was coming back empty.
‘Boulevard Richard-Lenoir.’
He didn’t have a key to the flat, but he knew there was one under the doormat. As head of the Crime Squad, he had never thought of telling his wife that the hiding place was illusory at best.
She was asleep, and he was starting to get undressed in the semi-darkness, leaving only the lamp in the corridor lit. A few moments later a voice from the bed asked him:
‘Is it late?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe one thirty …’
‘You haven’t caught a chill?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t want me to make you a herbal tea?’
‘Thank you. I had a hot rum just now.’
‘And then you went out again?’
They were banal little phrases that he had heard hundreds of times, but they struck him tonight because he wondered if Gisèle had ever uttered them.
Wasn’t it in fact, for want of having heard them, that her husband …
‘You can turn the light on.’
He merely switched on the bedside light on his side of the bed and went and turned out the one in the corridor.
‘Have you closed the front door?’
He wouldn’t have been surprised, in a few minutes, to hear his wife getting up to go and check.
That was also part of a whole, a whole that Xavier Marton had probably sought, which he hadn’t found, which …
He slipped between the warm covers, turned the light out and found in the darkness, without having to look very hard, his wife’s lips.
He thought he would have trouble getting to sleep but a few moments later he was slumbering. It is true that, if someone had turned on the light abruptly, they would have seen that his face was set in a frown, a concentrated expression, as if he were still in pursuit of a truth that escaped him.
Usually Madame Maigret got up silently at half past six and went to the kitchen without his noticing. He only became aware of the new day when he caught the smell of coffee.
It was the time of day when other windows on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, and in all the districts of Paris, were lighting up; it was also the time when one heard the footsteps on the pavement of people who got up early.
That day he wasn’t pulled from sleep by the familiar smell of coffee, or by the hushed footsteps of his wife. It was the sudden ringing of the telephone that dragged him from the world of the night, and, when he opened his eyes, Madame Maigret, already sitting in the bed, was shaking his shoulder.
‘What time is it?’ he stammered.
She groped around to find the switch of the bedside light, then the light fell on the alarm-clock, and the hands showed 6.10.
‘Hello!’ Maigret said in a thick voice. ‘Is that you, Lapointe?’
‘Inspector Maigret?’
He didn’t recognize the voice and frowned.
‘Who’s speaking?’
‘The Police Emergency Service. Inspector Joffre.’
Sometimes, in certain particular cases, he would ask the Police Emergency Service to tell him straight away if something particular occurred. But he had done nothing like that the previous day. He hadn’t strung his thoughts together yet. And yet he was hardly surprised.
‘What is it, Joffre? Is it Lapointe?’
‘What do you mean, Lapointe?’
‘Was it Lapointe who asked you to call me?’
‘I’ve heard nothing from Lapointe, just a phone call a moment ago, asking us to pass on a message to you.’
‘What message?’
‘To go to Avenue de Châtillon straight away … Wait! I’ve jotted down the number …’
‘I know it. Who was that on the phone?’
‘I don’t know. They didn’t give their name.’
‘A man? A woman?’
‘A woman. She says you know about it and that you’ll know what it means. Apparently she looked for your number in the directory but …’
Maigret was ex-directory.
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’
Maigret hesitated. He nearly asked Joffre to phone the station in the fourteenth arrondissement so that they could send someone to Avenue de Châtillon. Then, on reflection, he did nothing. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he reached with his toes for his slippers. His wife was already in the kitchen, and he heard the little explosion as she lit the gas to heat the water.
‘Nothing, thank you …’
What surprised him was that it wasn’t Lapointe who called him, when he was the man on the spot.
Which woman would it be? Gisèle Marton? The sister-in-law?
If it was one of the two, she couldn’t have left the building, because Lapointe would have noticed and called Maigret in person.
And yet the Martons weren’t on the phone.
He called to his wife.
‘While I’m getting dressed, could you take a look in the phone book, the section classified by street, and tell me who is listed for 17, Avenue de Châtillon?’
He thought about shaving but decided not to, even though he was repelled by the idea of going out like that, to gain some time.
‘Seventeen … Here it is … Building …’
‘Fine. That means there’s a telephone in the concierge’s lodge.’
‘I also see one Madame Boussard, a midwife. That’s all. You’ll have your coffee in two minutes.’
He should have told Joffre to send him one of the cars from Quai des Orfèvres, but now that would take longer than calling a taxi.
Madame Maigret took charge of that. Five minutes later, after burning his mouth on some coffee that was still too hot, he came downstairs.
‘Will you phone me?’ his wife asked, leaning against the banisters.
It was something she asked very rarely. She must have sensed that he was more worried than usual.
He promised:
‘I’ll try.’
The taxi arrived. He got in and barely noticed that it had stopped snowing, that there were now traces of white in the street, and on the roofs, but that an icy rain was blackening the cobblestones.
‘Avenue de Châtillon.’
He sniffed, because the taxi still smelled of perfume. Perhaps it had just driven home a couple who had spent the night dancing in a cabaret. A little later he bent down to pick up a small pink cotton ball of the kind that grown-ups
throw after midnight when drinking champagne.
7. The Spiral Staircase
Maigret had asked to be dropped off on the corner of Avenue de Châtillon and, as in his own part of town, the pavements were empty under the rain; as on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir there were some lights on in the windows, three or four per house. Walking a hundred metres, he saw two coming on and heard the sound of an alarm-clock in a still-darkened ground-floor apartment.
He looked around for Lapointe in his corner, didn’t find him and muttered a couple of syllables under his breath, sullen, uneasy, drowsy.
In the corridor of the yellow brick building, at last, he saw a very small woman, with hips as wide as her shoulders, who must have been the concierge, a Métro worker holding an iron box containing his lunch and another woman, an old one, with white hair in curlers, wearing a sky-blue woollen dressing gown and a bright purple shawl.
All three looked at him in silence, and it was only later that he found out what had happened, and knew why Lapointe wasn’t on the pavement. For a few moments at the very least, he had felt a great emptiness in his chest, because he had thought that as the result of circumstances that he couldn’t guess his inspector might be the victim.
It was, as always, simpler than that. When Gisèle Marton had come to make her call in the concierge’s lodge, the concierge had got up to make some coffee but she hadn’t yet put out the bins. She had heard a call to the Police Emergency Service, then the message of her tenant, who had come out of the lodge without giving her any information at all.
The concierge, as she did every morning, had gone to open one of the double doors to drag the bins to the pavement. Lapointe was just crossing the street, with the intention of glancing into the courtyard as he had done several times during the night. Because of the phone call that she had just overheard, the concierge had looked at him with suspicion.
‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t suppose anything unusual has happened in the house?’
He showed his badge.
‘Are you from the police? There is someone, at the end of the courtyard, who has just called the police. What is the meaning of all this to-do?’
So Lapointe had been led across the courtyard, this time without hiding, and knocked at the door beneath which he saw a chink of light. The three windows on the first floor were also lit.
Maigret's Doubts Page 10