The Judge's House

by Georges Simenon

  ‘Take a piece of paper. Write this down … Thérèse, the maid from the hotel … The two Hulots, Didine and her customs officer … Albert Forlacroix … We have to find Marcel Airaud whatever happens …’

  ‘The others you’ve mentioned, shall I keep an eye on them?’

  Footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘You can go …’

  Méjat reluctantly withdrew. The judge appeared in his hat and overcoat, looking very proper, very much the meticulous bourgeois.

  ‘Do you mind if I phone Dr Brénéol about the convalescent home?’

  Lise Forlacroix was coming and going in the room above them, along with the two maids.

  ‘Is that you, Brénéol? … No, nothing serious … I’d just like you to tell me if there’s a good convalescent home in the vicinity of La Roche-sur-Yon … Yes … The Villa Albert-Premier? … Just before you get to the town? … Thank you … Goodbye for now …’

  Old Élisa came down first with two suitcases, which she carried out to the car. Then her daughter with some smaller items of luggage. Finally Lise, almost sunk inside a soft fur coat with the collar up.

  It was all very quick. Lise and her father got in the back. Maigret took his seat next to the driver. From the corner of the street, Didine watched the scene. People were stopping. They had to drive all the way down the main street, past the hotel, the post office, the town hall. Curtains stirred. Children started running after the car.

  In the rear-view mirror, Maigret could see Lise and her father, and he had the impression they held hands throughout the ride. Night was falling by the time they approached La Roche-sur-Yon. They had to ask several times for the address of the Villa Albert-Premier. Then to wait for the director, visit the rooms.

  Everything was white, too white, like the nurses’ uniforms, and the doctor’s coat.

  ‘Room 7 … Very well.’

  Five people had gone in: Lise, a nurse, Maigret, the judge and the director.

  Three of them came back out into the corridor. Lise had remained on the other side of the door with the nurse. She hadn’t wept. Father and daughter hadn’t kissed each other.

  ‘In an hour’s time, an inspector will come and stand guard in this corridor …’

  Three more kilometres: the town, the gates of the prison, the register, a few formalities. By chance, no doubt, the judge and Maigret didn’t have time to say goodbye to each other.

  A brasserie. A fat woman at the cash desk. The railway timetable. A nice cold glass of beer.

  ‘I’d like something to write with and a ham sandwich … And another glass of beer!’

  He wrote an unofficial report for the prosecutor, then a few more telegrams, and caught his train just in time. From midnight until two in the morning, he had to wait at the station in Saint-Pierre.

  Gare d’Orsay. At eight o’clock in the morning, freshly shaved, he left his apartment on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. The sun was rising over Paris.

  He changed buses not far from Police Headquarters and could even see the windows of his old office in the distance.

  At nine o’clock, still in the sour January sunlight, he got off in Versailles and slowly, his pipe between his teeth, walked down Avenue de Paris.

  From that moment, he really had the impression of being double, of living on two different planes. He was still Maigret, a detective chief inspector more or less in disgrace, exiled to Luçon. He had his hands in the pockets of Maigret’s coat and he was smoking Maigret’s pipe.

  The setting was still Versailles that morning, and not a number of years earlier.

  The avenue was calm, especially towards the end, where vast gates and high walls hide the most delightful little mansions in the world from the passer-by.

  But it was a little like the reality of a film. A documentary film, for example. Images unreel on the screen. At the same time, the voice of an off-screen narrator comments on them …

  The voice was the flat little voice of Judge Forlacroix, and it was impossible not to superimpose on the image of Versailles the image of the library in L’Aiguillon, the logs, the pipe ash on the tiled floor, the cigarette ends in the green porcelain bowl.

  ‘We’ve been in Versailles for three generations. My father was a lawyer and lived all his life in the mansion on Avenue de Paris that he had inherited from his father. A white wall. A carriage entrance flanked by stone bollards. The gilded sign. Our name on a brass plate …’

  Here it was. Maigret had located the house, but the sign was no longer there, nor the brass plate. The door was open. A manservant in a striped waistcoat had come out to beat rugs on the pavement.

  ‘Once you get through the gate, a not very large main courtyard, with those little round cobbles you find in the great courtyard at Versailles and which are called king’s stones. Grass between the cobbles. A glass canopy. High windows with small panes. Light everywhere. Across the hall, in the middle of which there’s a bronze fountain, you can see a garden in the Trianon style, with its lawns and its roses. I was born there, just as my father was. I spent years there without bothering about anything except art and literature, a bit of good living, good food. I had no ambitions, and was content to become a justice of the peace …’

  Wasn’t it easier to understand him here than in the solitude of L’Aiguillon?

  ‘A few good friends. Trips to Italy and Greece. A sufficient fortune. Some fine pieces of furniture and good books. When my father died, I was thirty-five and a bachelor …’

  Weren’t there others like Forlacroix in the surrounding houses, people who wanted nothing more than a pleasant life?

  The manservant was starting to look askance at this man in his thick overcoat looking with such interest at his masters’ house.

  But wasn’t it too early for the visit that Maigret had to pay?

  Slowly, he walked back up part of the avenue, turned right, then left, looking at the names of the streets and finally stopping in front of a larger building, four storeys high, probably divided into several apartments.

  ‘Does Mademoiselle Dochet still live here?’ he asked the concierge.

  ‘She’s just now going upstairs with her shopping …’

  He caught up with her on the first floor just as she was turning a brass door knob. She was as antiquated as the house.

  ‘Excuse me, mademoiselle. You are the owner of this building, aren’t you? I’m looking for someone who used to live here, about twenty-five years ago …’

  She was seventy.

  ‘Come in. Wait while I turn off the gas in the kitchen. I don’t want my milk to get burned …’

  Stained glass panes in the windows. Crimson rugs.

  ‘This person was a musician. A great virtuoso named Constantinesco.’

  ‘I remember him! He lived in the apartment just above mine …’

  So it was true. And now it was the judge’s voice again that superimposed itself on the scene:

  ‘A bohemian, who may have been almost a genius. He’d been quite successful at the beginning of his career. He’d given recitals in America and all over. He’d got married somewhere, had had a daughter, had taken her away without worrying about the mother. He’d ended up in Versailles, in an old-fashioned apartment where he gave violin lessons. Some friends brought him over one evening when we needed a viola for a chamber music session …’

  The judge had almost blushed, looking at his white hands and adding:

  ‘I play the piano a little.’

  The old woman now declared:

  ‘He was half mad. He’d fly into terrible tempers. You’d hear him running down the stairs yelling.’

  ‘And his daughter?’

  The woman stiffened. ‘Now she’s married. And well married from what I hear! To a judge, isn’t it? There are those who succeed and they aren’t always the most …’

  The most what? Maigret would never know, because she had fallen silent.

  There was nothing more to learn here. He knew. The judge’s voice did not lie.

>   Valentine Constantinesco. A girl of eighteen, with an already full figure and huge eyes, who set off for Paris every morning, carrying her scores, to attend classes at the Conservatoire. She was studying the piano. At the same time, her father was teaching her the violin …

  And here was a little judge, unmarried and Epicurean, who watched for her at the corner of the street, followed her at a distance, got on the electric train behind her.

  Avenue de Paris … Ah! The manservant had gone back inside and closed the door behind him, that door which Valentine had crossed a few months later, in her white wedding dress …

  Wonderful years. The birth of a boy, then a girl. Sometimes, in the summer, they would go and spend a few weeks in the old family house in L’Aiguillon …

  ‘I assure you, inspector, that I’m no innocent. I’m not the kind of person who’s so happy that he doesn’t see what’s in front of him. Many’s the time I looked at her anxiously. But when you see her eyes, which can’t have changed, you’ll understand. As pure and clear as you could imagine. A voice like music. With her sea-green or pale blue dresses, always very light in colour, very neutral, she seemed to be straight out of a pastel.

  ‘I didn’t dare be surprised to find I’d fathered a sturdy boy with lots of hair, as coarse as a peasant. My daughter looked like her mother.

  ‘I found out later that old Constantinesco, who was constantly hanging around the house, knew all about it.

  ‘Wait … At the time I’m going to tell you about, Albert was twelve, Lise eight.

  ‘I was supposed to go to a concert at four in the afternoon with a friend who’s written several books about the history of music. He was in bed with a bout of bronchitis. I returned home.

  ‘Maybe you’ll see the house? There’s a little door in the big carriage entrance. I had the key to it. Instead of coming in through the hall, I took the staircase on the right leading to the first floor where the bedrooms are. I wanted to suggest to my wife that she come with me.’

  Maigret pulled on the brass button, and a big bell rang, as low-pitched as in a convent. Footsteps. The manservant, looking surprised.

  ‘I’d like to speak to the occupants of this house, please.’

  ‘Which of the ladies in particular?’

  ‘Whichever you like.’

  At that moment, through a ground-floor window, he saw two women, both wearing dressing gowns in glaring colours. One was smoking a cigarette at the end of a long holder, the other a tiny pipe that made Maigret smile.

  ‘What is it, Jean?’

  A strong English accent. The women were both between forty and fifty. The room, which must once have been the Forlacroix family’s large drawing room and had now been turned into a studio, was filled with easels, highly modernistic canvases, glasses, bottles, Negro and Chinese objects, a very Montparnasse-style clutter.

  Maigret presented his card.

  ‘Come in, detective chief inspector. We haven’t done anything wrong, have we? My friend, Mrs Perkins. I’m Angelina Dodds. Which of us are you here to see?’

  A lot of confidence, a touch of humour.

  ‘Do you mind my asking how long you’ve lived here?’

  ‘Seven years. Before us, there was an old senator who died. And before him, there was a judge, so we’ve been told.’

  A pity that the old senator was dead! He couldn’t have changed very much in this house, where Forlacroix had left him the furniture and some of the knick-knacks. Now a red and gold Chinese divan strewn with dragons stood incongruously in front of the most delicate imaginable Louis XVI pier glass.

  Anyway! Two Englishwomen, eccentric obviously, crazy about painting, attracted by the prestigious setting of Versailles.

  ‘Do you have a gardener?’

  ‘Of course! Why?’

  ‘Can I ask you to take me or have me taken to the garden?’

  Intrigued, they both came with him. A period garden, too, trying hard to imitate the gardens of Trianon on a smaller scale.

  ‘I tended to my rose bushes myself,’ the judge had said. ‘That explains why I thought of the well.’

  Three wells, in the places indicated. The one in the middle, which was disused, must have contained geraniums or other flowers in summer.

  ‘Would you mind, ladies, if I had this well pickaxed? There’s bound to be some damage. I’m afraid I don’t have a warrant with me, so I can’t force you to agree …’

  ‘Is there a treasure?’ one of the two Englishwomen exclaimed with a laugh. ‘Urbain! Come here with a pickaxe …’

  In L’Aiguillon, the judge had spoken calmly, in an even voice, as if not talking about himself.

  ‘You know what it means to catch someone in flagrante, don’t you? You’ve seen it in hotel rooms, in more or less seedy apartments. There are cases … I think it all came from the fact that the man had a common face and was looking at me defiantly … And yet he was ridiculous, loathsome, half naked, his hair dishevelled, his left cheek streaked with lipstick … I killed him …’

  ‘Did you carry a revolver with you?’

  ‘No, but there was one in a chest of drawers in our bedroom. The drawer was within reach … I did it coldly, I admit. I was calmer than I am now. I was thinking of the children, who were due back from school … I found out later that he was a café singer. He wasn’t handsome. He had thick greasy hair that formed a roll on the back of his neck.’

  Maigret went straight up to the gardener.

  ‘Remove the compost first. I assume it’s only about twenty centimetres deep … And underneath …’

  ‘Stones and cement.’ Urbain declared.

  ‘It’s those stones and cement you need to pickaxe.’

  Here the calm voice had become hallucinatory:

  ‘I thought of the well … I carried the man there, his clothes, everything I found on him … The well wasn’t very wide and, even cramming him in, I was only able to put the body in a crouching position … I covered it with large stones. I poured in several sacks of cement. But that’s not what matters …’

  It was about then that the gendarme had stuck his face against the window and the judge had shrugged.

  ‘In the blink of an eye, my wife had turned into a kind of fury … In less than thirty minutes, inspector, I learned everything from her own mouth, the affairs she’d had before our marriage, the ruses she’d employed, her father’s complicity … Then her many lovers, the places where she saw them …

  ‘She was unrecognizable. She was literally foaming at the mouth.

  ‘“And I really loved this one, do you hear, I loved him!” she screamed, without any concern for the children, who’d just come home and might have heard her.

  ‘I should have called the police and told them the truth, shouldn’t I? I would have been acquitted. But my son, and above all my daughter, would have spent their whole lives knowing that their mother …

  ‘I did think about it, believe me, briefly. It’s incredible how clearly things appear to us at such moments …

  ‘I waited for night to fall. It was June. I had to wait until it was very late … I’m stronger than I look … Well, I was then …’

  Eleven o’clock. The earth, frozen in the course of the night, was turning warm and damp in the rays of the sun.

  ‘Well?’ Maigret asked.

  ‘See for yourself.’

  The inspector leaned over. Something whitish, which the pickaxe had broken. A skull …

  ‘I beg your pardon, ladies, for all this disturbance. Rest assured that you won’t be bothered about it. This was a crime that took place a long time ago. I’ll pay you myself until the official search has been done.’

  The judge hadn’t lied. He had killed a man. And for nearly fifteen years, nobody had known anything about it, except his wife, who lived on the Côte d’Azur, at the Villa des Roches-Grises in Nice, with Horace Van Usschen, a Dutch cocoa merchant.

  ‘You will have a whisky, won’t you, inspector?’

  He hated whisky! Even more th
an talking about this case!

  ‘I have to see the legal authorities in Versailles before midday.’

  ‘You will come back?’

  No, he wouldn’t! It wasn’t this crime he was dealing with, but the death, in a house in L’Aiguillon, of a certain Dr Janin. It was as if gold dust had been sprinkled over Avenue de Paris, so fine and penetrating was the sun. But now he had to be quick. A taxi was passing.

  ‘To the Palais de Justice.’

  ‘It’s not far …’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  To be announced. To see people looking at him with a mixture of scepticism and boredom. Such an old case! Was it really necessary to …

  He had lunch alone, a sauerkraut, at the Brasserie Suisse. He read the newspaper without reading it.

  ‘Waiter! Can you get me number 41 at La Roche-sur-Yon … Priority, police … One moment … Can you also get me the prison …’

  The beer was good, the choucroute acceptable, very acceptable, and he asked for a second pair of sausages. It wasn’t very Louis XIV, but too bad!

  ‘Hello? … Yes … She’s been quiet? … That’s excellent … What’s that? … She asked for a piano? … Then hire her one … But of course! … I’ll vouch for it … The father will pay anything that’s needed … Only, if you ever leave the corridor or if she gets out through the window …’

  At the prison, nothing to report. At eleven o’clock, Judge Forlacroix had had a visit from his lawyer, and they had conversed calmly for half an hour.

  7. ‘Ask the Inspector …’

  It was a joy, at eight in the morning, to walk down the overly narrow stairs, whose pitch-pine banisters shone in the sunlight, and find the main room of the hotel empty, then go and take your seat at your usual table, which was already laid with a heavy porcelain bowl, homemade sausage and shrimps caught that morning.

  ‘Thérèse!’ he called as he sat down. ‘My coffee …’

  It was the hotelier’s wife who brought it.

  ‘Thérèse has gone to the butcher’s.’

  ‘Tell me, madame. I don’t see anybody in the harbour, even though the tide is low. Are people here scared of the cold?’

  ‘It’s the neap tide,’ she replied.