‘If you would be so kind as to wait for a moment, the public prosecutor will see you presently …’
It was almost as impressive as being allowed into the headmaster’s office at school.
‘Come in, Maigret. You asked to see me? But nothing new has happened …?’
‘I would like to submit a case that is almost a case of conscience …’
He gave a very bad account of the story, even worse than the one he had given to the commissioner of the Police Judiciaire.
‘If I understand you correctly, you have a sense that an incident is about to happen, perhaps a crime?’
‘That’s more or less it.’
‘But this impression is not based on anything precise, only the vague confidences of a man and the explanations that his wife then spontaneously gave you? Tell me, Maigret, how many lunatics, cranks, maniacs and plain eccentrics do you welcome into your office every year?’
‘Hundreds …’
‘And in here I receive thousands of letters from the same people.’
The prosecutor looked at him in silence, as if he had said all there was to say.
‘I would still have liked to make an investigation,’ Maigret murmured shyly.
‘What kind of investigation? Let’s be precise. Questioning the neighbours, the employers, the sister-in-law, the suppliers, and so forth? First of all, I don’t see where that will get you. Then, if the Martons are awkward customers, they would be perfectly within their rights to complain …’
‘I know …’
‘As to obliging them both to undergo psychiatric examination, that is not possible while no formal request has been submitted to us by either party. And in any case …!’
‘And if a crime is committed …?’
A brief silence. A slight shrug.
‘That would be regrettable, certainly, but there would be nothing we could do about it. And at the very least, in that case, we wouldn’t have far to look to find the guilty party.’
‘But will you allow me to keep them under surveillance?’
‘On condition, first of all, that it is done discreetly enough not to cause us any difficulties. And secondly, that it does not mean using inspectors who would be more useful elsewhere …’
‘We are in a period of dead calm …’
‘Those periods never last long. If you want to know what I really think, you are being over-scrupulous. If I were you, Maigret, I would drop the case. Once again, as things stand, we have no right to intervene, and no way of doing so. These husbands and wives suspecting one another – I’m sure there are thousands of them all around us …’
‘But neither the husband nor the wife has come to me for help.’
‘They really asked for your help?’
He had to agree that they hadn’t. Marton definitely hadn’t asked for anything. Neither had Madame Marton. And the sister, Jenny, certainly hadn’t.
‘I’m sorry you can’t stay. Five or six people are waiting for me, and I have a meeting at the Ministry at eleven o’clock.’
‘I’m sorry for disturbing you.’
Maigret wasn’t happy with himself. He had a sense that he had argued his case badly. Perhaps he shouldn’t have immersed himself in that psychiatric textbook the previous evening.
He walked towards the door. The public prosecutor called him back at the last minute, and his tone was no longer the same: his voice was suddenly as cold as if he had been delivering one of his famous summings-up.
‘It is understood, of course, that I will not cover for you and that I have forbidden you to pursue this case until a new development occurs.’
‘Understood, sir.’
And in the corridor he grumbled, with his head lowered:
‘… new development … new development …’
Who would be the new development, meaning the victim? Him or her?
He slammed the door so abruptly that he nearly shattered the glass.
4. The Restaurant on Rue Coquillière
It wasn’t the first time, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, that Maigret flew into a rage as he left the public prosecutor’s office, and his disputes with certain judges, with Examining Magistrate Coméliau in particular, who had been something like his friendly enemy for over twenty years, were legendary at Quai des Orfèvres.
When he had a clear head, he wasn’t too troubled by the antagonism that existed between the two worlds. On either side of the glass door, each of them, more or less, got on conscientiously with their job. The same people, low-lifes, criminals, suspects and witnesses, passed through their hands one by one.
The main difference, the one which created tacit conflicts, was the perspective one assumed. Did that perspective not flow directly from the way that both sides were recruited? The people in the public prosecutor’s office – prosecutors, deputy prosecutors, examining magistrates – almost all of them belonged to the middle, if not the upper strata of the bourgeoisie. Their lifestyle, after purely theoretical studies, barely brought them into contact, except in their practice, with the people they were meant to pursue in the name of society.
Hence their almost congenital lack of understanding of certain problems, an irritating attitude in the face of certain cases which the men of the Police Judiciaire, who lived, so to speak, in permanent and almost physical intimacy with the criminal world, assessed instinctively.
There was also a tendency on the part of the Palais de Justice to be a little hypocritical. In spite of an apparent much-discussed independence, they were more susceptible than most to a ministerial frown, and if a case that had stirred public opinion dragged a little, they hounded the police, who could never move quickly enough. It was up to the police to come up with a strategy and use the appropriate methods.
But if the newspapers criticized those methods, the magistrates of the public prosecutor’s office would hurry to take them to task.
Not without reason had the inspector gone to see the public prosecutor. As regularly happens, they were in a difficult situation at the moment. An incident had occurred, luckily not the fault of the Police Judiciaire, but of the Sûreté Générale in Rue des Saussaies, which had degenerated, leading to questions in parliament.
In a nightclub, the son of a parliamentary deputy had violently struck an inspector who, he claimed, had been tailing him for several days. A general punch-up had ensued. It had been impossible to hush up the case, and the Sûreté had been obliged to admit that they were investigating the young suspect not only for heroin use, but for procuring new clients for the dealers.
All kinds of revolting things had come to light as a result. According to the deputy whose son had been struck, one of the dealers was a police informer, and his father claimed that the order to turn his son into a drug addict had been deliberately issued by the Ministry of the Interior in order to compromise him as a politician.
So for a while the police had a bad press, and that morning Maigret had preferred to take his precautions.
Back in his office, he was still determined to bypass the instructions he had been given, not least because those instructions are never meant to be taken literally. The prosecutor had been covering his own back, quite simply, and if a corpse was found on Avenue de Châtillon tomorrow, he would be the first to rebuke the inspector for his inaction.
Since he had to cheat, he cheated, but without enthusiasm. He could no longer use Janvier, whom, curiously enough, Marton had spotted straight away at the Magasins du Louvre, and who had already paid a visit to the Marton household.
Of all the others, it was Lucas who would have shown the greatest flair and deftness, but Lucas had one flaw: it was easy to guess his profession.
He chose young Lapointe, who was less well trained, less experienced, but who could often pass for a student or a young clerk.
‘Listen, son …’
/> He gave him a long, slow briefing, so detailed that his instructions actually became quite unclear. First he was to go and buy some kind of toy, without hanging about, without making a fuss, at the Magasins du Louvre, with a view to spotting Marton and recognizing him again in future.
Then, at lunchtime, he was to stay near the staff door and follow the train-set specialist.
He was to start again in the evening, if necessary. Meanwhile, that afternoon, he was to take a look at the lingerie boutique on Rue Saint-Honoré.
‘There’s no reason to suspect that you’re not engaged …’
Lapointe blushed, because it was almost the case. Only almost, because the engagement was not yet official.
‘You could, for example, buy a nightdress for your fiancée. Ideally not something too expensive …’
And Lapointe replied shyly:
‘Do you think you give your fiancée a nightie as a present? Isn’t that a bit intimate?’
Afterwards they would see how they might find out more, without revealing themselves, about the Martons and their young sister-in-law.
Once Lapointe had left, Maigret went back to work, signing documents and mail, listening to the reports of his inspectors about unimportant matters. Marton and his wife were always there, like a backdrop, behind the concerns of the moment.
There was a faint hope that he didn’t really believe in: that they would come and tell him that Xavier Marton was asking to see him.
Why not? When he had left the previous day while Maigret was with his boss, was it not because the time he had allocated himself had passed, because he had to get back to the shop before a certain time? In such establishments, discipline is very strict. Maigret was well aware of this, not least because when he started out he had spent almost two years policing the big department stores. He knew the atmosphere, the intricacies, the rules and intrigues.
At midday, he came back to Boulevard Richard-Lenoir for lunch and noticed at last that it was grilled meat for the third day in a row. He remembered in time his wife’s visit to Pardon. She must have expected him to be surprised by the new menus and she had probably prepared a more or less plausible explanation.
He avoided putting her in that situation and was gentle with her, perhaps slightly too much so, because she was looking at him with a hint of anxiety.
Of course, he wasn’t thinking about the trio on Avenue de Châtillon all the time. The subject only came to mind every now and again, in little bursts, almost unconsciously.
It was a little like a puzzle, and it irritated him, like a jigsaw that you keep coming back to in spite of yourself, to put a piece in place. The difference being that in this instance the pieces were human beings.
Had he been hard on Gisèle Marton, whose lip had been trembling when she left him, as if she was about to cry?
It was possible. He hadn’t done it on purpose. His job was to try and find things out. Basically he found her quite sympathetic, like her husband. He was sympathetic with couples, and disappointed every time a misunderstanding appeared between a man and a woman who had once loved each other.
They must have loved each other, when they worked together at the Magasins du Louvre, when they only had two uncomfortable rooms above the workshop.
Little by little they had improved their apartment. Once the carpenter had left, they had expanded by renting the ground floor, which, according to Janvier, had become a nice room, and had had an interior staircase built so that they didn’t have to go outside to move from one floor to the other.
Now they were both what one would call well-to-do, and they had bought a car.
There was a flaw, that much was obvious. But what was it?
An idea ran through his head, and it would return to him several times. He was troubled by Marton’s visit to Doctor Steiner, because throughout his career he couldn’t remember a man going to a neurologist or a psychiatrist to ask him: ‘Do you think I’m mad?’
His idea was that perhaps Marton had read, whether by chance or otherwise, a psychiatric textbook of the kind that the inspector had flicked through the previous evening.
While he was mulling over the people on Avenue de Châtillon, Maigret went on answering phone calls. He spoke to a shopkeeper reporting a theft from her window display, whom he sent to her local inspector, and paced about in the inspectors’ office, which was still dead calm.
Lapointe gave no sign of life, and at about five o’clock Maigret found himself back in his office, lining up words in a column on the yellow jacket of a file.
First of all he had written: frustration.
Then, below it: inferiority complex.
Those were terms that he didn’t normally use, and which he mistrusted. A few years previously he had had an inspector who was just out of university and who had been with the Police Judiciaire for only a few months. He probably worked for a legal firm now. He had read Freud, Adler and a few others and had been so influenced by them that he claimed to be able to explain any case that came in with reference to psychoanalysis.
During his brief stay at the Police Judiciaire he had made one mistake after the other, and his colleagues had nicknamed him Inspector Complex.
The case of Xavier Marton was no less curious, in that he seemed to have sprung fully formed from the pages of the book that Maigret had read the previous evening, and which he had ended up slamming impatiently shut.
Whole pages of the book dealt with frustration and its consequences on the behaviour of the individual. It included examples that might have been a portrait of Marton.
A child who had grown up in care, he had spent his childhood on a poor farm in the Sologne, with harsh and brutal farmers who tore the books out of his hands when they caught him reading.
Still, he had devoured all the printed pages that he had been able to lay his hands on at random: popular novels, scientific works, mechanics manuals, poems, gulping down the good and the bad indifferently.
He had taken his first step in joining a department store, where, at first, he had been entrusted with only the humblest of tasks.
One fact was typical. As soon as Marton had the chance, he stopped living in more or less moth-eaten furnished rooms, like most people starting out in Paris, and had instead had his own flat. It was only two rooms at the end of a courtyard; the furnishing was basic, comfort non-existent, but it was his.
He rose through the ranks. He already had the illusion of a regular, bourgeois existence, and his first concern was to improve the interior with the scant means at his disposal.
That was what Maigret put under the heading: inferiority complex. More precisely, it was Marton’s reaction to that complex.
The man needed to reassure himself. He also needed to show other people that he was not an inferior being, and he worked hard to become an uncontested expert in his specialization.
In his mind, did he not consider himself as something like the Train-Set King?
He was becoming someone. He had become someone. And, when he married, it was to a girl of a middle-class background, the daughter of a schoolteacher, who had passed her school-leaving exam, whose manners were different from those of the little salesgirls that surrounded her.
Maigret tentatively wrote down a third word: humiliation.
Marton’s wife had overtaken him. She was now almost independent, working in a luxury business where every day she met notable women, high society, le Tout-Paris. She earned more than he did.
Certain phrases stayed with Maigret from what he had read the previous day. He couldn’t remember them literally, but in spite of himself he tried to apply them to his problem.
One, for example, saying essentially that ‘psychopaths close themselves away in a world of their own, a world of dreams which is more important to them than reality’. It wasn’t that exactly, but he wasn’t going to make himself look ridiculous by goi
ng to his chief’s office and consulting the book again.
And besides, he didn’t believe it. It was all airy speculation.
Did the train sets not only on Rue de Rivoli, but in the workshop on Avenue de Châtillon not correspond reasonably well to that ‘dream world’, that ‘closed world’.
Another passage reminded him of the calm of Xavier Marton, the conversation at Quai des Orfèvres, the apparently clear way in which he had argued his case.
Maigret could no longer remember whether it fell under the heading of neuroses, psychoses or paranoia, because the boundaries between those different domains didn’t strike him as very clear.
… starting from false premises …
No. It wasn’t quite that.
… on false or imaginary premises, the patient constructs a rigorous reasoning that is sometimes subtle and brilliant …
There was something similar about persecution, but here ‘the persecuted individual starts off from real facts and draws conclusions which have the appearance of logic’.
The zinc phosphide was real. And in the partnership of Harris/Gisèle Marton, or rather Maurice Schwob/Gisèle Marton, was there not a certain ambiguity that might affect the husband?
The most worrying thing in this case was that, looking at it in close up, the young woman’s behaviour, studied in the light of the same texts, led to an almost identical diagnosis.
She too was intelligent. She too described their case with evident clarity. She too …
To hell with it all!
Maigret looked for an eraser to rub out the words he had written on the yellow file, filled a pipe and went and stood by the window, outside of which, in the darkness, he could see nothing but the dots of the streetlights.
By the time young Lapointe knocked at his door half an hour later, he was dutifully filling in the blanks of an administrative questionnaire.
Lapointe had the advantage of coming from outside, from real life, and there was still a bit of chilly air in the folds of his overcoat, his nose was pink with cold, and he was rubbing his hands together to warm them up.
Maigret's Doubts (Inspector Maigret) Page 6