‘So you came here. Did your husband receive you?’
‘In the passage.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That he didn’t know me and so there was no reason to get a divorce.’
Maigret would gladly have clapped, so typical of Forlacroix was that answer. He wrote a few words in pencil on a piece of paper, which he passed to the magistrate, because from now on he had to step aside in favour of the latter.
‘What did you do after that?’
‘I went back to Nice.’
‘Just a moment! Didn’t you see anyone else in L’Aiguillon?’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘Your son, for example.’
A hate-filled look at Maigret.
‘I see the man just can’t keep his mouth shut … I did meet my son, as it happens.’
‘How did you meet him?’
‘I went to his house.’
‘Did he recognize you after so many years?’
She shrugged.
‘What does it matter? I told him he wasn’t Forlacroix’s son.’
‘Are you sure of that?’
‘Can you ever be sure? I told him I wanted to get a divorce, that my husband was refusing, that he was a cruel man, that he had a lot on his conscience and that if he, Albert, could get him to agree to a divorce …’
‘In other words, you got your son on your side. Did you offer him money?’
‘He didn’t want any.’
‘Did he promise to help you?’
She nodded.
‘Did you tell him about the old crime?’
‘No. I just told him that, if I wanted, Forlacroix would go to prison for a long time.’
‘Did you write to him after that?’
‘To ask him if he’d got anywhere.’
‘Have you ever heard of a Dr Janin?’
‘No, never!’
The magistrate looked inquisitively at Maigret, who murmured:
‘If Madame is tired, maybe we could let her go and have lunch? I have the impression that Monsieur Van Usschen is getting bored in the car.’
‘Am I under arrest?’
‘Not yet,’ the magistrate declared. ‘I simply ask you to remain at the disposal of the authorities. If you’d like to give me an address in La Roche-sur-Yon, for example.’
‘Very well! Hôtel des Deux Cerfs. I think it’s the best one there.’
They all stood up. As she went out, she smiled at both the magistrate and the lawyer but had to restrain herself from sticking her tongue out or making a face at Maigret, who joyfully relit his pipe.
8. The Potato Eaters
‘Tierce … That’s trumps …’
‘Not worth anything, my friend … Fifty …’
‘Let me see! In case your fifty’s full of holes …’
What time was it? The cheap clock on the wall had stopped. The lights had been on for some time now … It was hot. The little glasses had been filled three or four times and a smell of marc mingled with the smell of the pipes.
‘Too bad! I’m playing trumps!’ Maigret said, laying down a card.
‘That’s the best thing you can do, Inspector. Even if you have a nine after it …’
It was their fourth or fifth game. Maigret was smoking, tipped back slightly on his chair. His partner was the hotelier, and the other two were fishermen, including old Bariteau, the eel fisher.
Inspector Méjat sat astride a chair, following the game.
‘I knew perfectly well you had a nine …’
‘Tell me, Méjat. Do you remember the name of the pathologist?’
‘I wrote it down.’
‘I want you to phone him. Ask him if he can determine roughly how long before his death the man ate for the last time. And if it was a full meal. Do you understand?’
‘Who was it who had a fifty? … And thirty-six …’
The owner was counting. Maigret seemed buried up to his neck in a kind of warm, mundane state of bliss, and if anyone had suddenly asked him what he was thinking about, he would have been surprised himself.
An old memory! From the time of the Bonnot case, when he was thin and wore a long pointed moustache and a little beard, false stiff collars ten centimetres high and top hats.
‘You know, my dear Maigret,’ his chief at the time – Detective Chief Inspector Xavier Guichard, later to become commissioner of the Police Judiciaire – had said to him, ‘all these stories about intuition’ (the newspapers had been talking about his infallible intuition) ‘are fine for entertaining the public. In a criminal case, what matters before anything else is to store away the fact, or the two or three facts, you’re absolutely certain about, because, whatever happens, they’ll stay solid, and you can use them as a foundation.
‘After that, all you have to do is push ahead, slowly and surely, the way you’d push a wheelbarrow. It’s a question of expertise, and what people call intuition is nothing but chance …’
As strange as it might seem, it was because of that memory that he had agreed to play cards, much to Méjat’s astonishment.
After Valentine Forlacroix and the Dutchman had driven off in their car, the other two cars had left, those of the examining magistrate and the lawyer. Maigret had stood alone for a moment, seemingly helpless, in the middle of the street. Forlacroix was in prison. His daughter Lise was in a clinic. Before leaving, the examining magistrate had placed seals on the house.
He had left satisfied, as if carrying off his booty. All this belonged to him now! It was he, in his office at the Palais de Justice in La Roche-sur-Yon, who was going to proceed with the interviews, with bringing the witnesses face to face …
‘Let’s go!’ Maigret had muttered as he walked back into the hotel.
Why was he so queasy? Wasn’t it always like this? And wasn’t this feeling, a feeling that resembled jealousy, quite ridiculous?
‘What do we do now, chief?’
‘Where’s the list I dictated to you?’
… Didine and her husband … Marcel Airaud … Thérèse … Albert Forlacroix …
‘Who shall we start with?’
He had started with a game of cards.
‘Can I play a lower card here?’
‘Only in trumps … What about in Paris?’
‘It depends … Anyway, here’s my eight …’
After a while, leaving his partner to count the points, he had taken a pencil and a notebook from his pocket, even though he never took notes, and had written, pressing down so hard that he had broken the lead:
Doctor Janin arrived in L’Aiguillon on Tuesday at between four fifteen and four thirty.
That was the first sure-fire element, as Xavier Guichard would have said. And after that? He almost added that the very same Janin had been killed in the judge’s house that night. But that was no longer certain. After three days, the pathologist had only been able to pinpoint the time of death to within a few hours. And nothing proved …
On Wednesday morning, Janin’s body is lying on the floor in the fruitery of the judge’s house.
‘Hearts are trumps … Are you playing?’ someone asked him, surprised to see him staring into space.
‘Hearts are fine! … Whose turn is it?’
The hotelier respectfully refrained from saying the traditional: ‘The idiot who’s asking …’
Since then, Maigret had glanced from time to time at those two little sentences that constituted the only sure-fire elements of the case.
Méjat could be heard telephoning under the stairs, and, whenever he spoke on the telephone, he assumed a horrible head voice.
‘Well?’
‘The doctor had to reread his report. According to the contents of the stomach, a normal meal. There were quite strong traces of alcohol …’
Méjat couldn’t understand why Maigret looked so pleased. The inspector sat so far back in his chair that he almost lost his balance and had to hold on to the table.
‘Well, well,’ he said after examining
his cards, ‘so the rascal had something to eat!’
It might not be much. And yet … Janin hadn’t had dinner at the Hôtel du Port, nor at the inn opposite, and there was nowhere else to eat in L’Aiguillon.
‘Tierce …’
‘How high?’
‘Kings … By the way, doesn’t young Forlacroix have a lorry?’
‘Yes, he does, but it’s been under repair for the last two weeks.’
No motorist had reported driving Janin anywhere by car. So if he had eaten …
‘Méjat … Run to the butcher.’ He turned to the hotelier. ‘Tell me … There is only one butcher here, isn’t there?’
‘And he only slaughters once a week.’
‘Ask him if that Tuesday, between four and seven, anyone came in for a good cut of meat.’
‘Who?’
‘Anyone.’
Méjat put on his overcoat and left with a sigh. As the door opened and closed again, it let in cold air, which you could feel gliding between your legs. Thérèse was sitting by the stove, knitting. No sooner had the door closed than it opened again. It was Méjat, making signals at the inspector.
‘What do you want?’
‘Can I have a word, chief?’
‘One moment … Trumps! … Clubs! … And you won’t take this ace of diamonds away from me … You’ve lost, gentlemen!’
Then, to Méjat:
‘What is it?’
‘Didine’s outside. She’s asking for you to come straight away. Apparently it’s urgent.’
‘Give me my hat and coat, Thérèse … You, take my place for a moment …’
He lit his pipe before going out. The night was pitch black. It was freezing cold. Only a few lights could be seen in the street, and in the window of the grocery, covered in transparent advertisements. Didine’s little figure somehow hitched itself to Maigret.
‘Come with me. Let’s not walk together. You just have to follow me, so that they don’t know I’m leading you.’
She was carrying a half-filled sack and in her other hand she held a pruning knife, like those old ladies who go out to cut grass for their rabbits. After a while, they passed Albert Forlacroix’s house, and a figure moved in the shadows; the gendarme on guard gave a military salute.
Every now and again, Didine turned to make sure that Maigret was following her. Suddenly, she disappeared, as if sucked into the black void that formed a gap between two houses. He turned into this gap. An icy hand touched his.
‘Careful! There’s barbed wire.’
By day, the place was probably ordinary enough. In the darkness, led on by this strange little witch with her sack and her sickle, Maigret was finding it hard to perceive the layout of the place. He caught his feet on oyster shells, then a strong smell of dustbins struck his nostrils.
‘Step over. There’s a little fence.’
Frozen cabbages. They were in a vegetable garden behind the houses. There were other, similar gardens, separated by old trellises. Something living stirred: rabbits in a hutch.
‘I’d come to get some grass for my rabbits,’ she said, still walking.
The village, in fact, had only one row of houses all along the street. Behind these houses were the vegetable gardens, then there was a ditch, filled with seawater at high tide, and finally the marshes, stretching to infinity.
‘Don’t make any noise. Don’t say a word. Careful where you put your feet.’
She didn’t let go of his hand. A few moments later, she was walking alongside a whitewashed wall.
He made out a figure near a dimly lit window. He recognized Justin Hulot, who placed a finger over his lips.
He would have been hard put to say what he was expecting. In any case, not the spectacle he had before his eyes a moment later, as peaceful and calm as a scene in one of those chromos that stay on the walls of rustic houses for generations.
Hulot had withdrawn to make room for him at the window. The latter being a little low for him, he had to bend down. Through the glass, he could see a stable lantern standing on a barrel, giving out a yellowish light.
Maigret had already calculated that they must be just behind Albert Forlacroix’s house. What they discovered was the interior of a shed at the end of the backyard, which served as a storehouse, the kind you find in all country areas: empty barrels, saucepans, rusty old tools, sacks, crates, bottles …
In the fireplace, where the food for the animals was probably cooked, and a pig roasted at Christmas, a few logs were burning.
Two men were sitting by the fire, one on a crate, the other on an upended basket. They both wore high rubber boots pulled down at the knee, which always reminded Maigret of the Three Musketeers.
They were both tall, strong and young. Two strangely dressed giants. Of course they were merely wearing the traditional costume of the mussel farmer, but in this light, the two men were rather reminiscent of figures out of some painting in a museum.
One of them took a cigarette from his pocket and held it out to his companion, who grabbed a brand from the fire.
They were speaking. You could see their lips moving, but unfortunately it was impossible to hear a sound.
One of the two men, the one who had taken out the cigarette and who now took another for himself, was Albert Forlacroix. The second, sitting right up against the fire, was Marcel Airaud, barely recognizable because of a growth of blond beard already several centimetres thick.
Didine’s thin body brushed against Maigret and she whispered:
‘They were already there an hour ago when I looked in for the first time. It was just starting to get dark. Young Forlacroix left for a moment to go and look for potatoes …’
He didn’t understand what potatoes had to do with anything, and the remark struck him as ridiculous.
‘I didn’t want to go into the hotel. I knocked lightly at the window, but you were playing cards and didn’t even notice.’
What a strange little mouse! So she had trotted home and sent her husband to keep guard!
Was it only chance that had led her to take a look inside Albert Forlacroix’s property while out cutting grass for her rabbits? If not, what other train of thought could have brought her to this place? That wasn’t the least troubling aspect of the matter. Her husband had moved two or three metres away and was waiting.
‘I suspected he would come back …’ she resumed.
‘And that he’d see Albert Forlacroix?’
‘Shhh …’
Maigret wasn’t good at keeping his voice low, so it was best for him not to say anything.
‘Are you going to arrest the two of them?’ Didine whispered.
He didn’t reply. He didn’t move. Behind them, the Baleines lighthouse turned in the sky at a regular pace, and occasionally a cow mooed out on the marshes. The game must still be going on at the Hôtel du Port, and presumably Thérèse was getting worried by Maigret’s absence.
As for the two men … Maigret hadn’t noticed before how similar they were physically. In both cases, their line of work, the salt water, the spindrift, the sea air, had turned their skin deep pink and bleached their hair …
They were both heavy, with the heaviness of people who are constantly struggling with the patient forces of nature.
They were smoking. They were talking slowly. Their eyes were fixed on the fire, and after a while Marcel stirred something in the ashes with the end of a piece of iron, his face expressing a simple joy.
He said something to Albert, who rose and went to the low door, bending to walk through it. When he returned after a short time, he was holding two big glasses, which he went and filled straight from a barrel in the corner.
White wine! Never before in his life had Maigret had such a yearning for white wine, so delicious did this one seem. As for the potatoes … Because, sure enough, there were potatoes …
It brought back childhood memories, the kind of engravings you find in books by Fenimore Cooper or Jules Verne. They were in France, in the very heart
of a French village. And at the same time, they were a long way away. The two men could have been trappers, or castaways on a desert island. Their work clothes were of no particular period. Marcel’s thick, shapeless beard added to the illusion.
And it was large, hot, blackened potatoes he was removing from the ashes with his piece of iron, potatoes whose charred skin he cracked between his big fingers. The white steaming flesh appeared, and he bit into it greedily.
Then his companion stood up, almost touching the ceiling with his head. He took a knife from his pocket and cut two sausages from the string of them drying above the fireplace.
‘What are they doing?’ Didine whispered.
He didn’t reply. He would have given a lot to share that improvised meal, those potatoes cooked under ash, those sausages browned by time, that wine that appeared so refreshing!
The most troubling thing was the ease, the calm of those two strong men, who were far from suspecting that their gestures and lip movements were being spied upon.
What could they be saying to each other? There they were, confident in themselves, confident in one another. Almost crouching, they ate, each with a knife he had pulled from his pocket, in the style of peasants and sailors. They talked unhurriedly. From time to time, they would utter a few words, then let silence fall again.
‘Aren’t you arresting them?’
Maigret gave a start, because something had just brushed against his leg. It was only a dog, a little hunting dog, not much more than a puppy, which must belong to one of the neighbours and was silently rubbing up against him.
‘Justin!’ Didine called.
She pointed to the dog, which might bark at any moment. Hulot took the animal by the scruff of its neck and walked away with it.
There was no gaiety, though, on the other side of the window. No gaiety, but no anxiety either. A kind of ponderous tranquillity. Albert got up to get some more sausages, and for a moment, as he turned in his direction, Maigret thought that he had seen him through the glass. But he hadn’t.
Finally, they wiped their lips and lit more cigarettes. Airaud yawned. How long was it, hunted as he was by the police, since he had last slept in peace? He scraped his teeth with the point of his knife and rested his head against the wall.
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