The Yellow Dog

by Georges Simenon

  That was the only comic moment. The plump journalist heaved a sigh, an elated sigh. Then he had the nerve to babble: ‘In that case, I presume I can be released on bail? I’m prepared to put up 50,000 francs.’

  ‘The public prosecutor will determine that, Monsieur Goyard.’

  Madame Michoux had collapsed in her chair, but her son was more resilient.

  ‘You have anything to add?’ Maigret asked him.

  ‘I will answer only in the presence of my lawyer. Meanwhile, I formally protest the legality of this proceeding.’

  And he stretched out his neck, a thin chicken neck with a prominent, sallow Adam’s apple. His nose looked more crooked than ever. He was gripping his notepad.

  ‘And those two?’ murmured the mayor as he rose.

  ‘I have absolutely no charge against them. Léon Le Glérec has stated that his goal was to provoke Michoux to shoot him. To that end, he did nothing but put himself in the man’s path. There’s no law against—’

  ‘Except vagrancy,’ put in the police lieutenant.

  But Maigret shrugged in a way that made the man blush at his own suggestion.

  Lunchtime was long past, but there was still a crowd outside. So the mayor agreed to lend his car, which had curtains that could be sealed tight shut.

  Emma climbed in first, then Léon Le Glérec and, last, Maigret, who sat on the rear seat with the young woman, leaving the sailor to arrange himself awkwardly on the jump seat.

  They cut quickly through the crowd. A few minutes later, they were on the road to Quimperlé. Uncomfortable and averting his gaze, Léon asked Maigret, ‘Why did you say that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you’re the one who put the poison in the bottle?’

  Emma was very pale. She didn’t dare lean back against the cushions; it was doubtless the first time in her life that she had ridden in a limousine.

  ‘It just came to me!’ muttered Maigret, clamping his pipe stem in his teeth.

  Then the girl cried out in distress:

  ‘I swear to you, inspector, I didn’t know what I was doing any more! Michoux made me write that letter. I’d finally recognized the dog. And on Sunday morning I saw Léon lurking around … Then I understood. I tried to talk to him, but he walked off without looking at me, and he spat on the ground … I wanted to get revenge for his sake … I wanted … oh, I don’t even know! I was nearly crazy. I knew they were trying to kill him … I still loved him … I spent the whole day turning over ideas in my head. At noon, before lunch, I ran over to Michoux’s house to get the poison. I didn’t know which one to pick … He showed them to me once, and said there was enough there to kill everyone in Concarneau …

  ‘But I swear I would never have let you drink … At least, I don’t think so.’

  She was sobbing. Léon awkwardly patted her knee to calm her.

  ‘I can never thank you, inspector,’ she said through her sobs. ‘What you’ve done is … is … I can’t think of the word … It’s so wonderful!’

  Maigret looked at each of them, at him with his split lip, his cropped hair and his face of a beast trying to become human; at her with her poor little face faded white from living in that aquarium, the Admiral café.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘We don’t know yet … Leave this place. Maybe head for Le Havre … I managed to earn a living on the New York docks …’

  ‘Did anyone give you your twelve francs back?’

  Léon flushed but did not answer.

  ‘What’s the train fare to Le Havre?’

  ‘No! Don’t do that, inspector. Because then … we couldn’t … You see what I mean?’

  They were passing a small railway station. Maigret tapped on the glass separating them from the driver. Drawing two hundred-franc notes from his pocket, he said: ‘Take this. I’ll put it on my expense account.’

  He practically pushed them out of the car and closed the door while they were still looking for words to thank him.

  ‘Back to Concarneau. Fast!’

  Alone in the car, he shrugged his shoulders three times, like a man with a strong urge to make fun of himself.

  The trial lasted a year. During that whole year, as often as five times a week, Dr Michoux went to see the examining magistrate, carrying a morocco briefcase crammed with documents.

  At each court session he argued over something else. Every item in the dossier set off new controversies, investigations and counter-investigations.

  Michoux grew steadily thinner, yellower, sicklier, but he never gave up.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll allow a man with only three months to live …’

  That was his favourite expression. He fought every inch of the way, with underhanded manoeuvres, unpredictable responses. And he had found a lawyer even nastier to back him up.

  Sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour by the Finistère Criminal Court, he spent six months trying to appeal his case to the higher court.

  But a month ago, a photograph printed in all the newspapers showed him, still skinny and yellow, with his crooked nose, a bag on his back and a forage cap on his head, embarking from the Ile de Ré on the Martinière, which was carrying 180 convicts to Devil’s Island.

  Madame Michoux served her three-month sentence in prison and is in Paris pulling strings in political circles. She hopes to get her son’s case reheard.

  Léon Le Glérec fishes for herring in the North Sea, aboard the Francette, and his wife is expecting a baby.

  1. The Black Monocle

  Detective Chief Inspector Maigret was sitting with his elbows on the desk, and when he pushed his chair back with a tired sigh, the interrogation of Carl Andersen had been going on for exactly seventeen hours.

  Through the bare windows he had observed at first the throng of salesgirls and office workers storming the little restaurants of Place Saint-Michel at noon, then the afternoon lull, the mad six o’clock rush to the Métro and train stations, the relaxed pace of the aperitif hour …

  The Seine was now shrouded in mist. One last tug had gone past with red and green lights, towing three barges. Last bus. Last Métro. At the cinema they’d taken in the film-poster sandwich boards and were closing the metal gates.

  And the stove in Maigret’s office seemed to growl all the louder. On the table, empty beer bottles and the remains of some sandwiches.

  A fire must have broken out somewhere: they heard the racket of fire engines speeding by. And there was a raid, too. The Black Maria emerged from the Préfecture at around two o’clock, returning later to drop off its catch at the central lock-up.

  The interrogation was still going on. Every hour – or every two hours, depending on how tired he was – Maigret would push a button. Sergeant Lucas would awaken from his nap in a nearby office and arrive to take over, glancing briefly at his boss’s notes. Maigret would then go and stretch out on a cot to recharge his batteries for a fresh attack.

  The Préfecture was deserted. A few comings and goings at the Vice Squad. Towards four in the morning, an inspector hauled in a drug pusher and immediately began grilling him.

  The Seine wreathed itself in a pale fog that turned white with the breaking day, lighting up the empty quays. Footsteps pattered in the corridors. Telephones rang. Voices called. Doors slammed. Charwomen’s brooms swished by.

  And Maigret, setting his overheated pipe on the table, rose and looked the prisoner up and down with an ill humour not unmixed with admiration. Seventeen hours of relentless questioning! Before tackling him, they had taken away his shoelaces, detachable collar, tie and everything in his pockets. For the first four hours they had left him standing in the centre of the office and bombarded him with questions.

  ‘Thirsty?’

  Maigret was on his fourth beer, and the prisoner had managed a faint smile. He had drunk avidly.

  ‘Hungry?’

  They’d asked him to sit down
– and stand up again. He’d gone seven hours without anything to eat and then they had harassed him while he devoured a sandwich.

  The two of them took turns questioning him. Between sessions, they could each doze, stretch, escape the grip of this monotonous interrogation.

  Yet they were the ones giving up! Maigret shrugged, rummaged in a drawer for a cold pipe and wiped his damp brow.

  Perhaps what impressed him the most was not the man’s physical and psychological resistance, but his disturbing elegance, the air of distinction he’d maintained throughout the interrogation.

  A gentleman who has been searched, stripped of his tie and obliged to spend an hour completely naked with a hundred malefactors in the Criminal Records Office, where he is photographed, weighed, measured, jostled and cruelly mocked by other detainees, will rarely retain the self-confidence that informs his personality in private life.

  And when he has endured a few hours of questioning, it’s a miracle if there’s anything left to distinguish him from any old tramp.

  Carl Andersen had not changed. Despite his wrinkled suit, he still possessed an elegance the Police Judiciaire rarely have occasion to appreciate, an aristocratic grace with that hint of reserve and discretion, that touch of arrogance so characteristic of diplomatic circles.

  He was taller than Maigret, broad-shouldered but slender, lithe and slim-hipped. His long face was pale, his lips rather colourless.

  He wore a black monocle in his left eye.

  Ordered to remove the monocle, he had obeyed with the faintest of smiles, uncovering a glass eye with a disconcerting stare.

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘A flying accident, yes.’

  ‘So you were in the war?’

  ‘I’m Danish. I did not have to fight. But I had a private aeroplane, back home.’

  The artificial eye was so disturbing in this young face with pleasant features that Maigret had muttered, ‘You can put your monocle back.’

  Andersen had not made a single complaint, either about them leaving him standing or their forgetting for so long to give him anything to eat or drink. He could see the street traffic out of the window, the trams and buses crossing the bridge, the reddish sunlight as evening had fallen and now the bustle of a bright April morning.

  And he held himself as straight as ever, as if it were only natural, and the sole sign of fatigue was the thin dark shadow underlining his right eye.

  ‘You stand by everything you’ve said?’ Maigret asked.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You realize how improbable this all sounds?’

  ‘Yes, but I cannot lie.’

  ‘You’re expecting to be released, for lack of conclusive evidence?’

  ‘I’m not expecting anything.’

  A trace of an accent, more noticeable now that he was tired.

  ‘Do you wish me to read you the official record of your interrogation before I have you sign it?’

  He gestured vaguely, like a gentleman declining a cup of tea.

  ‘I will summarize the main points. You arrived in France three years ago, accompanied by your sister, Else. You spent a month in Paris. Then you rented a country house on the main road from Paris to Étampes, three kilometres from Arpajon, at the place called Three Widows Crossroads.’

  Carl Andersen nodded slightly in agreement.

  ‘For the last three years, you have lived there in isolation so complete that the local people have seen your sister only a few times. No contact with your neighbours. You bought an old 5CV that you use to do your own shopping at the market in Arpajon. Every month, in this same car, you come to Paris.’

  ‘To deliver my work to the firm of Dumas and Son, Rue du Quatre-Septembre, that’s correct.’

  ‘You work designing patterns for upholstery fabrics. You are paid five hundred francs for each pattern. You produce on average four patterns a month, earning two thousand francs …’

  Another nod.

  ‘You have no male friends. Your sister has no female friends. On Saturday evening, you both went to bed as usual at around ten o’clock. And, as usual, you also locked your sister in her bedroom, which is near yours. You claim this is because she is nervous and easily frightened … We’ll let that pass for the moment! At seven o’clock on Sunday morning, Monsieur Émile Michonnet, an insurance agent who lives in a house almost a hundred metres from your place, enters his garage to find that his car, a new six-cylinder model of a well-known make, has vanished and been replaced by your rattletrap …’

  Showing no reaction, Andersen reached automatically for the empty pocket in which he must ordinarily have kept his cigarettes.

  ‘Monsieur Michonnet, who has talked of nothing but his new car ever since he bought it, believes he is the victim of an unpleasant prank. He goes to your house, finds the gate closed and rings the bell in vain. Half an hour later he describes his predicament to the local police, who go to your house, where they find neither you nor your sister. They do, however, discover Monsieur Michonnet’s car in your garage and in the front seat, draped over the steering wheel, a dead man, shot point-blank in the chest. His identity papers have not been stolen. His name is Isaac Goldberg, a diamond merchant from Antwerp.’

  Still talking, Maigret put more fuel in the stove.

  ‘The police promptly question the employees of the station at Arpajon, who saw you and your sister take the first train for Paris … You are both picked up when you arrive at Gare d’Orsay … You deny everything …’

  ‘I deny having killed anyone at all.’

  ‘You also deny knowing Isaac Goldberg …’

  ‘I saw him for the first time, dead, at the wheel of a car that does not belong to me, in my garage.’

  ‘And instead of phoning the police, you made a run for it with your sister.’

  ‘I was afraid …’

  ‘You have nothing to add?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘And you insist that you never heard anything that Saturday night?’

  ‘I’m a heavy sleeper.’

  It was the fiftieth time that he had given precisely the same answers and Maigret, exasperated, rang for Sergeant Lucas, who swiftly appeared.

  ‘I’ll be back in a moment!’

  The discussion between Maigret and Coméliau, the examining magistrate to whom the matter had been referred, lasted about fifteen minutes. The magistrate had essentially given up in advance.

  ‘You’ll see, this will be one of those cases we get only once in ten years, luckily, and which are never completely solved! And it lands in my lap! Nothing about it makes any sense … Why this switching of cars? And why didn’t Andersen use the one in his garage to flee instead of walking to Arpajon to take the train? What was that diamond merchant doing at Three Widows Crossroads? Believe me, Maigret – this is the beginning of a whole string of headaches, for you as well as me … Let him go if you want. Perhaps you’re right to feel that if he can withstand seventeen hours of interrogation, we’ll get nothing more out of him.’

  The inspector’s eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep.

  ‘Have you seen the sister?’

  ‘No. When they brought me Andersen, the young woman had already been taken back to her house by the local police, who wished to question her at the scene of the incident. She’s still there. Under surveillance.’

  They shook hands. Maigret returned to his office, where Lucas was idly watching the prisoner, who stood with his forehead pressed against the windowpane, waiting patiently.

  ‘You’re free to go!’ announced Maigret from the doorway.

  Calmly, Andersen gestured towards his bare neck and unlaced shoes.

  ‘Your personal effects will be returned to you at the clerk’s office. You remain, of course, at the disposition of the authorities. At the slightest attempt to flee, I’ll have you sent to La Santé Prison.’

  ‘My sister?’

  ‘You will find her at home.’

  The Dane must have felt some emotion after all as he
left the room, for he removed his monocle to pass his hand over what had once been his left eye.

  ‘Thank you, chief inspector.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘I give you my word of honour that I’m innocent …’

  ‘Don’t mention it!’

  Andersen bowed, then waited for Lucas to take him along to the clerk’s office.

  After witnessing this scene with astonished indignation, a man in the waiting room rushed over to Maigret.

  ‘What? So you’re letting him go? That’s not possible, chief inspector …’

  It was Monsieur Michonnet, the insurance agent, the owner of the new six-cylinder car. He walked into Maigret’s office as if he owned the place and set his hat down on a table.

  ‘I am here, above all, about the matter of my car.’

  A small fellow going grey, carefully but unprepossessingly dressed, constantly turning up the ends of his waxed moustache.

  He spoke with pursed lips, weighing his words and trying to appear imposing.

  He was the plaintiff! He was the one whom the forces of justice had to protect! Was he not in some way a hero? No one was going to intimidate him, oh no! The entire Préfecture was at his personal service.

  ‘I had a long talk last night with Madame Michonnet, whose acquaintance you will soon make, I trust … She agrees with me … Mind you, her father was a teacher at the Lycée de Montpellier and her mother gave piano lessons … I mention this so that … In short …’

  That was his favourite expression, which he pronounced in a manner both cutting and condescending.