‘What did she say was wrong with her?’
‘For some time she’s been breathless when climbing the stairs, and particularly in the morning her legs feel heavy. Nothing to worry about, I should tell you again. Except that her circulation isn’t quite what it should be. I prescribed her some pills to be taken after each meal. I should also tell you, so that you aren’t surprised, that I’ve put her on a diet. I would like her to lose five or six kilos, which would take the strain off her heart.’
‘You’re sure that …’
‘I swear that there’s absolutely nothing to worry about, but I thought it was better to put you in the picture. If you want my advice, pretend not to notice a thing. What scares her most is the idea that you might worry on her account …’
Knowing his wife, she would have gone to buy her medication from the nearest chemist. The phone call was in the morning. At lunchtime he had watched Madame Maigret, who hadn’t taken any pills in front of him. Not in the evening either. He had looked for a little bottle, or a box, in the drawers in the sideboard and then, as if he wasn’t doing anything, in the kitchen.
Where had she hidden her medication? She had eaten less than usual; she hadn’t had any pudding, in spite of her sweet tooth.
‘I think I’m going to go on a bit of a diet,’ she had said, joking. ‘I’m starting to split my dresses …’
He trusted Pardon. He stayed calm. But it did weigh on his mind, or more exactly it made him melancholy.
The previous year he had been the first to have three weeks of complete rest. It was his wife’s turn now. That meant that they were very slowly reaching the age of minor ailments, of little repairs that needed carrying out, a little like cars which suddenly need to go to the garage almost every week.
Except that you can buy replacement parts for cars. You can even put in a new engine.
When the clerk knocked on his door and opened it as usual without waiting for an answer, Maigret was not aware of his ruminations. He lifted his head from his dossier and looked at old Joseph with big, sleepy-looking eyes.
‘What is it?’
‘Someone insists on seeing you in person.’
And Joseph, who didn’t make a sound when he walked, set down a form on the corner of the desk.
Maigret read a name written in pencil, but since the name meant nothing to him he paid it no attention. He would only remember that it was a two-syllable surname probably beginning with an M. Only the first name stayed in his memory, Xavier, because it was the name of his first boss at Quai des Orfèvres, old Xavier Guichard.
Beneath the printed words: ‘object of visit’, it said something like: ‘absolutely needs to talk to Detective Chief Inspector Maigret’.
Joseph waited impassively. It was grey enough in the office for the lamps to be lit, but Maigret hadn’t thought of lighting them.
‘Will you see him?’
He replied with a movement of his head and a slight shrug. Why not? A moment later, a man of about forty was brought in. He had an unremarkable face and might have been any one of the thousands of men one sees at six o’clock in the evening, hurrying towards the nearest Métro.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, detective chief inspector …’
‘Have a seat.’
His visitor was slightly nervous, but not excessively so, more emotional, like so many who came into this very office. He wore a dark overcoat, which he unbuttoned before sitting down, keeping his hat on his knees at first and then, a little later, placing it on the carpet by his feet.
Then he smiled mechanically, probably a sign of shyness. After giving a little cough, he said:
‘The most difficult thing, I’m sure you’ll agree, is where to start. Of course, like everyone, I have said heaven knows how many times in my head the things that I am about to tell you, but when the time comes it all turns into a blur …’
Another smile, seeking approval or encouragement from the inspector. But Maigret’s interest had not yet been aroused. The man had come at a bad time, when his mind was still drowsy.
‘You must receive many visits of the same kind, people coming to tell you about their small troubles, convinced that you will find them interesting.’
He had brown hair, he wasn’t bad-looking, although his nose was a little crooked and his lower lip was a bit too fleshy.
‘I can assure you that that isn’t the case with me and that I hesitated for a long time before disturbing a man as busy as you are.’
He must have expected a desk covered with files, with two or three telephones ringing at the same time, inspectors going in and out, witnesses or suspects slumped on the chairs. And that was more or less what he would have found on another day, but his disenchantment didn’t raise a smile from Maigret, whose mind seemed to be quite blank.
In fact, looking at the man’s suit, he was thinking that it was made of a good material and must have been cut by a local tailor. A grey suit, almost black. Black shoes. A neutral tie.
‘Let me assure you, inspector, that I’m not insane. I don’t know if you know Doctor Steiner, Place Denfert-Rochereau. He’s a neurologist, which is, I believe, more or less synonymous with psychiatrist, and he has acted several times as an expert witness in court trials.’
Maigret’s thick eyebrows rose slightly, but not exaggeratedly.
‘Have you been to see Steiner?’
‘I went to ask him for a consultation, yes, and I should mention in passing that his consultations last an hour and that he leaves nothing to chance. He found nothing. He considers me completely normal. As for my wife, who didn’t go and see him …’
He paused, because his monologue was not exactly the one he had prepared, and he was struggling to remember it word for word. With a mechanical gesture he had taken a pack of cigarettes from his pocket but didn’t dare to ask permission to smoke.
‘You may,’ Maigret said.
‘Thank you.’
His fingers were slightly clumsy. He was nervous.
‘Excuse me. I should control myself better than that. I can’t help being emotional. It’s the first time that I’ve seen you in the flesh, all of a sudden, in your office, with your pipes …’
‘May I ask you what your profession is?’
‘I should have started with that. It isn’t a very common one, and like many people you may smile. I work at the Grands Magasins du Louvre on Rue de Rivoli. Officially, my title is first salesman in the toy department. That is to say that I was kept on my toes during the holiday season. In fact, I have a specialism that takes up most of my activity: I look after the train sets.’
He seemed to be forgetting the purpose of his visit and where he was and instead was talking freely about his favourite subject.
‘Did you walk past the Magasins du Louvre in December?’
Maigret said neither yes nor no. He couldn’t remember. He vaguely remembered a giant decoration in lights on the façade, but he couldn’t have said what the moving and multi-coloured characters represented.
‘If you did, you saw, in the third window on the Rue de Rivoli, a precise reconstruction of Gare Saint-Lazare, with all its platforms, its suburban and express trains, its signals, its signal boxes. It took me three months of work, and I had to go to Switzerland and Germany to buy some of the material. That may seem childish to you, but if I told you our turnover on train sets alone … Most importantly, don’t imagine that our clientele consists only of children. Some grown-ups, including men in important positions, are passionate about train sets, and I am often called to people’s houses to …’
He broke off again.
‘Am I boring you?’
‘No.’
‘Are you listening to me?’
Maigret nodded. His visitor must have been between forty and forty-five, and wore a red-gold wedding ring, broad and flat, almost the same as the one the inspector was wearing. He also wore a tie-pin representing a railway signal.
‘I can’t remember where I got to. I didn’t come t
o see you to talk to you about train sets, of course, and I realize that I’m wasting your time. And yet you need to be able to place me, don’t you? You need me to tell you that I live on Avenue de Châtillon, near the church of Saint-Pierre de Montrouge, in the fourteenth arrondissement, and that I have lived in the same accommodation for eighteen years. No: nineteen … Well, it will be nineteen years in March … I’m married …’
He was sorry not to be clearer, and sorry that he had to give too many details. It seemed as if when the ideas came to him he weighed them up, wondered whether they were important or not, then expressed or rejected them.
He looked at his watch.
‘It’s precisely because I’m married …’
He smiled apologetically.
‘It would be easier if you asked the questions, but you can’t, because you don’t know what it’s about …’
Maigret almost blamed himself for being so static. It wasn’t his fault. It was physical. He was struggling to take an interest in what he was being told, and regretted allowing Joseph to show the visitor in.
‘I’m listening …’
He filled a pipe to keep himself busy and glanced at the window, beyond which there was only pale grey. It looked like a worn-out backcloth from a provincial theatre.
‘Above all I must stress that I am not accusing anyone, inspector. I love my wife. We’ve been married for twelve years, Gisèle and I, and we have hardly ever argued. I talked to Doctor Steiner about it, after he examined me, and he said to me solicitously, “I would be obliged if you would bring your wife to see me.” Except, on what pretext can I ask Gisèle to follow me to see a neurologist? I can’t even claim that she is mad, because she gets on with her work, and no one has any complaints.
‘You see, I’m not a very educated person. I grew up in care and had to educate myself, and I consider that knowledge is man’s most precious property.
‘Forgive me for talking to you like this. It is to explain to you at last that when Gisèle started behaving differently towards me, I went to libraries, including the Bibliothèque Nationale, to consult books that would have been too expensive for me to buy. Besides, my wife would have been worried if she had found them at home …’
To prove that he was more or less following this chatter, Maigret asked:
‘Books about psychiatry?’
‘Yes. I don’t claim to have understood everything. Most of them are written in a language that is too complicated for me. But I did find books on neuroses and psychoses that made me think. I imagine you know the difference between neuroses and psychoses? I’ve also studied schizophrenia, but I think in all conscience that her condition doesn’t go quite that far …’
Maigret thought of his wife, of Doctor Pardon, and observed a little brown mole in the corner of his visitor’s lip.
‘If I understand correctly, you suspect your wife of not being in her normal state of mind?’
The moment had come, and the man paled slightly and gulped back his saliva two or three times before declaring, as if searching for his words and weighing their meaning:
‘I am convinced that for several months, five or six at least, my wife has been planning to kill me. That, inspector, is why I came to see you in person. I have no formal proof, or else I would have started with that. I am prepared to give you all the clues I have, which fall into two categories. Psychological clues first of all, the most difficult to expose, as you must understand because most of them are trivial facts which have no significance in themselves, but which cumulatively assume a meaning.
‘As to material clues, there is one, which I have brought you, and which is the most troubling …’
He opened his overcoat, his waistcoat, pulled his wallet from his inside pocket and took out a folded paper of the kind in which some chemists still put headache powders.
The paper did contain powder, a powder of a dirty white colour.
‘I will leave you this specimen, which you can send for analysis. Before coming to you, I asked for it to be analysed by a salesman at the Louvre who is a passionate chemist and who has set up a real laboratory. He was categorical. It is white phosphide. Not phosphate, as you might think, but phosphide, I checked in the dictionary. And not just the Larousse. I also consulted textbooks on chemistry. White phosphide is an almost colourless powder, which is extremely toxic. It was used in the old days, in minute doses, as a remedy for certain illnesses and it was abandoned precisely because of its toxicity.’
He paused, slightly disoriented at having in front of him a Maigret who was still impassive and apparently miles away.
‘My wife doesn’t do chemistry. She isn’t following a course of treatment. She has none of the illnesses for which one might, in extremis, prescribe zinc phosphide. And yet I didn’t find just a few grams at home, but a bottle containing at least fifty grams. And I happened upon it by chance. On the ground floor of our house I have a kind of studio where I work on the models for my window displays and carry out minor mechanical tests. They are just toys, of course, but as I have said, toys represent …’
‘I know.’
‘One day when my wife was out, I knocked over a pot of glue on my workbench. I opened the cupboard where we keep the brooms and cleaning products. Looking for a detergent of some kind, I happened to lay my hand on a small unlabelled bottle that seemed to me to be a strange shape.
‘Now, if you connect this discovery with the fact that over the last few months I have had, for the first time in my life, a number of anxieties that I have told Doctor Steiner about …’
The phone on the desk rang, and Maigret picked it up, recognizing the voice of the commissioner of the Police Judiciaire.
‘Is that you, Maigret? Have you got a few minutes? I’d like to introduce you to an American criminologist who is in my office and very keen to shake your hand …’
Once he had hung up again, Maigret looked around. There was nothing confidential lying about on the desk. His visitor didn’t have the look of a dangerous man.
‘Will you excuse me? I’ll only be a few minutes.’
‘Be my guest …’
But at the door he had a sudden reflex and crossed the office once more to open, as he usually did, the door of the inspectors’ office. But he gave them no special instruction. It didn’t occur to him.
A few minutes later he pushed open the chief’s padded door. A big red-haired man got out of an armchair and shook his hand vigorously, saying in French with the merest hint of an accent:
‘It’s a great joy for me to see you in the flesh, Monsieur Maigret. When you came to my country I missed you, because I was in San Francisco, and you didn’t come all the way to us. My friend Fred Ward, who welcomed you in New York and went with you to Washington, has told me exciting things about you.’
The commissioner gestured to Maigret to sit down.
‘I hope I’m not disturbing you in the middle of one of those interrogations that seem so strange to us Americans?’
The inspector reassured him. The chief’s guest held out his cigarettes and then changed his mind.
‘I forgot that you are a fan of the pipe.’
It happened periodically, and it was always the same phrases, the same questions, the same exaggerated and embarrassing admiration. Maigret, who hated being examined as if he were a freak, put a brave face on things and at such moments he had a special smile that greatly amused his chief.
One question led to another. They discussed technique, then talked about some famous cases, on which he had to supply an opinion.
Inevitably the conversation turned to his methods, something that always strained his patience, because, as he repeated, without managing to destroy the legend, he had never had any methods.
To rescue him, the commissioner rose to his feet, saying:
‘Now, if you would like to go upstairs and visit our museum …’
It was part of every visit of this kind, and, with his hands crushed once more by a more vigorous grip than
his own, Maigret was able to return to his office.
He stopped, surprised, in the doorway, because there was no one sitting in the armchair that he had offered his train-set salesman. The office was empty, with only some cigarette smoke floating just below the ceiling.
He went into the inspectors’ office.
‘Has he left?’
‘Who?’
Janvier and Lucas were playing cards, which they did barely three times a year, except when they were on guard duty all night.
‘Nothing … It doesn’t matter …’
He went out into the corridor, where old Joseph was reading the paper.
‘Has my client left?’
‘Not long ago. He came out of your office and told me he couldn’t wait any longer, that he absolutely had to get back to the shop, where they were waiting for him. Should I have …?’
‘No. It doesn’t matter.’
The man was free to go, since no one had asked him to come.
It was at that moment that Maigret realized he had forgotten the man’s name.
‘I don’t suppose, Joseph, that you remember what his name is?’
‘I must confess, inspector, that I didn’t look at his form.’
Maigret went back to his office and immersed himself once again in his report, which contained nothing exciting. The boiler must have been racing, because the radiators had never been so scorching, and were making worrying noises. He nearly got up to turn the handle, but he couldn’t be bothered and instead reached for the telephone.
His plan was to call the Magasins du Louvre and find out about the head of the toy department. But if he did that wouldn’t they wonder why the police were suddenly interested in one of the members of staff? Didn’t Maigret risk damaging his visitor’s reputation?
He worked a little longer and picked up the receiver almost mechanically.
‘Could you try and find me a certain Doctor Steiner, who lives on Place Denfert-Rochereau?’
Less than ten minutes later the phone rang.
‘You’ve got Doctor Steiner on the line.’
‘Forgive me for disturbing you, doctor … This is Maigret … The detective chief inspector at the Police Judiciaire, yes … I think you recently had a patient whose first name is Xavier and whose surname escapes me …’
Maigret Travels Page 14