‘Monsieur was quite proud of being the lover of a Forlacroix girl, the daughter of a judge, someone who played the piano …’
‘Listen, inspector …’
‘Shut up! You won’t speak until there’s a lawyer present. You told me that. Monsieur is in love. Monsieur is raring to go. And when old Forlacroix, who’s been watching him from behind his door, lets him in, Monsieur is reduced to a stammering little boy …’
‘“What! You love my daughter? That’s no problem! She’s yours! Take her. Marry her.”
‘That’s it, isn’t it? And this big lump who’s strong enough to kill an ox can’t see further than the end of his nose.
‘“Yes, sir, I’ll marry her! Yes, sir, I’m an honest man and my intentions are honourable …”
‘He’s so moved, so filled with happiness and pride that he can’t hold it in and goes to see his enemy, young Forlacroix, who’s vowed a hundred times to smash his face in.
‘“You have the wrong idea about me. I want to marry your sister. Let’s make it up between us.”
On the other side of the glass, Forlacroix was craning his neck, trying to hear, and old Didine had moved to the very end of the bench.
‘Well, my boy, there’s something I can tell you for sure, which is that they both tricked you. You still don’t understand, do you? You told yourself they’d recognized your merits and were opening their arms to you.
‘Only your good old mother suspected something. And I’m sure you were angry with her when she advised you to be cautious, not to get carried away.
‘“I assure you, Mother, Lise isn’t as mad as people think. When she’s happy and well looked after …”
‘The same old story! You poor fool!’
Marcel was breathing heavily now. Maigret looked him up and down and winked at Méjat, who wasn’t quite sure what that meant.
‘I’m sure it was your mother who had the one little spark of common sense. What could the poor woman do to persuade a boy as stubborn and excitable as you?
‘“At least have her examined by a doctor. What if she’s completely mad?”
‘That’s when you think of your old shipmate Janin. You convince Albert that you only want what’s best. If, after examining Lise, Janin decides that …
‘What? That’s not the way it happened? Don’t answer! You’re not saying anything without a lawyer present, isn’t that right?
‘Of course, Albert knows that his sister’s pregnant …’
It was so sudden that Maigret didn’t have time to move back. Or maybe this was the reaction he was after. Marcel had grabbed him by his lapel and was about to shake him.
‘What did you say? … What did you say? …’
‘Do you want the doctor at the clinic to confirm it to you? Later. You just have to talk to him on the phone.’
‘Lise is …’
‘Pregnant. Oh, yes! It does happen! That’s why the judge is suddenly so happy to let his daughter marry a big brute like you.
‘And that’s why Albert goes with you to Nantes. He doesn’t trust you. He doesn’t want his sister and himself to become the laughing stock of L’Aiguillon.
‘There was one thing that bothered me. I wondered if Janin had really agreed to climb along the wall to go and see a patient.
‘Of course not! There was no need! You can’t have him come to your house because then your mother would know, and you prefer to keep her out of this.
‘The three of you have dinner at Albert’s house. I can even tell you that you ate sole.
‘Then, when the guests have arrived at the judge’s house, when the game of bridge has started and the way is clear, it’s Albert who takes the doctor there. He has the key. It isn’t difficult to get up to the first floor without making any noise … I became suspicious when he saw fit, in front of me, to knock the door in with his shoulder. If he had a key to the front door, it was more than likely … But that’s no concern of yours … He lets Doctor Janin into his sister’s room. He waits …
‘And you’re left pacing up and down outside, near the wall you’re so used to climbing …’
Maigret turned to the door and saw Albert Forlacroix standing beyond it, looking menacing.
‘You had a strange time waiting there, didn’t you? Thérèse interfering and threatening you … You wonder why the two men haven’t come down again … Well, I’m going to tell you. After examining the girl, Dr Janin joined Albert in the fruitery. What he told him isn’t hard to guess. The first thing he must have said was: “Your sister is expecting a baby.”
‘Then … Look at him … No, not the inspector … Turn to the door … Look at his face …’
Albert Forlacroix stood there, pale-faced, and you could see a strange dampness on his lips and a pinching of his nostrils.
‘Come in, Forlacroix. You’ll be able to hear better. I’m going to tell you what the doctor told you. He told you that your sister was incurable, that it would be dishonest to throw her into the arms of an honest man, that her place was in a clinic, and that his duty as a doctor was to …’
‘It isn’t true!’ Albert uttered in a toneless voice.
‘What isn’t true?’
‘I didn’t kill him. It was my sister …’
He bent his head forward as if about to charge.
‘That’s the story you told Marcel when you came back down on your own. Unfortunately, if Lise had killed the doctor with a hammer from the fruitery, it would never have occurred to her to then wipe the handle. Has she ever even heard of fingerprints? No, my friend! The one who struck him was you, in a fit of anger, and you’re going to have another one if you’re not careful …
‘The doctor told you that he wanted to tell his friend Airaud the truth.
‘You insisted. You wanted the marriage to go ahead, come what may.
‘Then you had one of your usual tempers.
‘And do you know … Yes, I’d swear to it … Do you know what must have gone through Dr Janin’s mind when he saw you coming at him like a maniac?
‘He must have thought your sister wasn’t the only mad one in the family and that …’
Albert Forlacroix charged, his features twisted, his eyes shining, his breathing hoarse. But before he could reach Maigret, Marcel had grabbed him by the shoulders, and both of them were rolling on the floor.
Unconcerned by what was happening, Maigret went to the table, poured himself a drink, relit his pipe and wiped his forehead.
‘Put the handcuffs on him if you can, Méjat. It’s safer.’
It wasn’t an easy task, because the two fighters were of more or less equal strength. Forlacroix had managed to seize his opponent’s thumb between his teeth and was biting savagely. Marcel was unable to hold back a scream. A handcuff clicked. Méjat couldn’t get hold of the other hand and so, in a panic, he started clumsily hitting out like a deaf man, pounding his fists on Albert’s face.
Didine’s face was pressed to the glass, her nose spread, a gleam in her eyes, the beginnings of a smile of contentment on her thin lips.
‘Well?’
‘There, chief … That’s it …’
The other wrist had at last been imprisoned in the steel ring.
Marcel Airaud got unsteadily to his feet, squeezing his bloodstained left thumb with his right hand. He, too, seized the bottle of alcohol from the table. But it wasn’t to drink from it. It was to pour some on his wound. The bone was exposed.
The gendarme knocked at the door and half opened it.
‘Do you need me?’
At that moment Maigret looked at all of them, one after the other, with a vacant eye. He looked at Didine, who was nodding smugly, Méjat with blood on his hands and an expression of disgust on his face, the startled gendarme, Airaud wrapping a check handkerchief around his thumb …
Albert Forlacroix got up painfully, or rather sat up on the floor, and remained there, dazed, his body still shaken with spasms.
The silence was such that you could hear distinctly
the ticking of the watch on the table. Maigret put it back on the end of its chain. It showed ten minutes past two.
‘He made me believe it was her,’ Airaud murmured, looking stupidly at his thumb. ‘To divert suspicion …’
‘Will you take care of them, Méjat?’
He went out, lit his pipe and walked slowly to the harbour. He could hear scurrying footsteps behind him. The sea was becoming swollen. The beams of the lighthouses joined in the sky. The moon had just risen, and the judge’s house emerged from the darkness, all white, a crude, livid, unreal white.
The footsteps had stopped. Two figures had come together on the corner of the street. Didine had rejoined her one-eyed customs officer, who had been waiting for her, and was talking to him in a low voice.
‘I wonder if they’ll cut his head off!’ she said, pulling her shawl tight about her shoulders to keep warm.
Soon afterwards, a door creaked. They had returned home. They were going to climb up into the high bed with its feather eiderdown and would probably whisper in the darkness for quite some time to come.
Left alone, Maigret caught himself murmuring dreamily:
‘And that’s it!’
It was over. He might never return to L’Aiguillon. From now on, it would be like one of those distant landscapes, tiny but meticulously accurate, that you see in glass globes: a little world … People from far and wide … The judge sitting by the fire … Lise in her bed, her full lips, her gold-speckled pupils, her swollen breast … Constantinesco in the apartment in Versailles, and his daughter on her way to the Conservatoire … Old Horace Van Usschen in his excessively light trousers and white woollen cap … Thérèse who would get someone to marry her, come what may … The widow Airaud, who had been thinking she would be alone for ever in her house, and who would suddenly be reunited with her giant of a son …
A regular sound, coming from out of the darkness, made him jump. He remembered that it was old Bariteau, off to lay his eel nets.
Come to think of it, how high was the tide tonight?
1. Did Picpus Lie?
Three minutes to five. A white light flashes in the huge map of Paris which fills the whole of one wall. An operator puts down his sandwich, plugs a line jack into one of the myriad holes that is a telephone switchboard.
‘Hello? Is that the fourteenth arrondissement? … Has your bus left yet?’
Maigret, trying hard to look unconcerned, with the sun full on him, wipes his forehead. The operator mutters a few monosyllables, unplugs the jack, reaches for his sandwich and murmurs for the benefit of the detective chief inspector from the Police Judiciaire:
‘A Bercy!’
In the jargon, a ‘Bercy’ is a drunk. It is August. Paris reeks of tarmac. The noise from the Cité in the heart of Paris drifts in through the large, open windows into this room which is the nerve centre of the Police Emergency Service. Below, in the courtyard of the Préfecture de Police, two vans full of policemen are visible, ready to leave whenever the word is given.
Another light winks on, this time in the eighteenth arrondissement. Sausage sandwich down. Plug in.
‘Hello? … Ah, Gérard! … On duty? … What’s happening your end? … Right! … Fine! …’
Defenestration. It’s the method of choice of poor people who commit suicide, especially the old men and, oddly enough, especially in the eighteenth arrondissement. Maigret knocks out his pipe on the window-sill, refills it and glances up at the clock. Yes or no: has someone killed the clairvoyant?
The door opens. Sergeant Lucas, short, podgy, flustered. He wipes his brow too.
‘Still nothing, chief?’
Like Maigret, he has just walked across the boulevard which separates the headquarters of the Police Judiciaire from the Préfecture. A neighbourly call.
‘So, our man’s there …’
‘Mascouvin?’
‘He’s as pale as papier mâché. He’s insisting on talking to you. He’s saying suicide is the only way out left to him …’
Another light comes on. Maybe this is it? No … Just a brawl out at Saint-Ouen.
The phone rings. The commissioner of the Police Judiciaire, for the inspector.
‘Maigret? … Got something? … Anything? …’
The irony in his voice is audible. Maigret is getting angry. He is hot. He’d give anything for a freshly drawn beer. And for the first time in his life he is almost on the point of wanting a crime, the crime he is expecting, to happen. Absolutely! If the clairvoyant is not killed at exactly five o’clock or rather, as was written on the blotting-pad, ‘at five in the afternoon’, then he’ll have to put up with months of sarcastic smiles and jokes, some funnier than others.
‘Go and bring me Mascouvin.’
God knows but the man looks like a joker! He turned up the previous evening at the Police Judiciaire with gloom written all over him, and wouldn’t take no for an answer, his face twitching with a nervous tic, insisting loudly on speaking to Detective Chief Inspector Maigret in person.
‘It’s a matter of life and death!’ he said.
A small, thin man, rather dull to look at, neither young nor old, exuding the stale smell of a bachelor who does not look after himself. He pulls his fingers and cracks his knuckles while telling his tale, the way a schoolboy recites his lesson.
‘Fifteen years I’ve worked for Proud and Drouin, property dealers on Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. I live alone in a two-roomed flat, 21, Place des Vosges … Every evening I go for a game of bridge in a club in Rue des Pyramides … For the last two months, I’ve been having a run of bad luck. I’ve lost all my savings … I owe the countess 800 francs …’
Maigret only half-listens, thinking that one half of the population of Paris is on holiday and that at that moment the other half is downing cold drinks under the awnings of pavement cafés. Who was this countess? Well, the sad little man explains. An upper-class lady who has been through hard times and set up a bridge club in Rue des Pyramides. A good-looking woman. It’s obvious: this small dull man is in love.
‘Today, at four o’clock, inspector, I took a thousand-franc note from my employers’ till.’
He could not have cut a more tragic figure if he’d wiped out an entire family. He continues with his confession, still cracking his fingers. After the offices of Proud and Drouin closed for the day, he wandered around the boulevards with the thousand-franc note in his pocket. He was racked by guilt. He walked into the Café des Sports at the corner of Place de la République and Boulevard Voltaire, where he usually has a lonely drink before his evening meal.
‘Can I have pen and paper, Nestor?’
For he called the waiter by his Christian name. Yes, he will write to his employers. He will confess everything and send the thousand-franc note back! His luck has deserted him for too long! He has been losing steadily for two months. The countess he silently adores only has eyes for a retired army captain and is always strict in making Mascouvin pay up what he owes her.
Surrounded by the bustling crowd, he stared at the blotting-pad which lay open in front of him. Mechanically, he had put his pince-nez down on the blotter and looked at it there with his large, short-sighted eyes. It was at that moment that the strange thing happened. One of the lenses, acting as a mirror, reflected the criss-cross, hatched ink marks which had dried on the blotter. Mascouvin made out the words: will kill … He looked more closely … The lens restored the original image:
Tomorrow, at five in the afternoon, I will kill …
Tomorrow, at five in the afternoon, I will kill the clairvoyant. Signed, Picpus.
Five past five. The operator has had time to finish eating his sausage, which smells of garlic, for the white lights on the map of Paris have remained dormant. A sound of footsteps on the stairs. It is Lucas bringing sad little Mascouvin.
The previous evening, Maigret told him to go home, turn up for work as usual and put the thousand francs back where they belonged. As a precaution, Lucas had followed him. At about nine o’cloc
k, Mascouvin was hanging around in Rue des Pyramides but did not go into the countess’s building. He spent the night at home in Place des Vosges. Next morning he went to his office and at midday ate his lunch in a cheap café on Boulevard Saint-Martin.
Then, at four thirty, when it was all getting too much for him, he suddenly left the sombre offices of Proud and Drouin and headed off towards Quai des Orfèvres.
‘I can’t stand it any more, inspector … I daren’t look my employers in the face … It seems like …’
‘Sit down … Don’t say anything …’
Eight minutes past five! A glorious sun lights up the teeming streets of Paris; the men are in shirt-sleeves and the women are almost naked under their light dresses. Meanwhile, the police are keeping watch on eighty-two clairvoyants, some more far-sighted than others.
‘You don’t think, Maigret, it could be a hoax?’
Lucas is worried about his chief, who stands to make himself a laughing-stock. A light goes in the third arrondissement.
‘Hello? … Right … Fine …’
The operator turns to Maigret and sighs:
‘Another Bercy … But it’s not Saturday …’
Mascouvin, unable to stop fidgeting and pulling his fingers, opens his mouth:
‘Excuse me, sir … I’d just like to say …’
‘Well don’t!’ snarls Maigret, shutting him up.
Come on, yes or no, is this Picpus going to make up his mind and kill himself a clairvoyant?
The light of the eighteenth arrondissement again.
‘Hello? … Detective Chief Inspector Maigret? … I’ll put him on …’
Maigret’s heart misses a beat as he grabs the receiver.
‘Hello … Yes … The station in Rue Damrémont? … Say again? … 67A, Rue Coulaincourt … Mademoiselle Jeanne? … A clairvoyant?’
His voice is loud and urgent. His face lights up.
‘Come on, look lively! … Lucas, take him back … You never know …’
Joseph Mascouvin, like a sleepwalker, the lugubrious kind of sleepwalker, follows the two men down the dusty stairs. A police car is waiting in the courtyard.
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