‘Yes, but the connecting door is almost always closed.’
‘Locked?’
‘I think you’re overstepping the mark, detective chief inspector,’ the lawyer interjected.
The young woman gave a weary shrug.
‘No, not locked,’ she said scornfully.
‘So, you didn’t see your husband?’
‘No. I undressed and got straight into bed.’
‘Do you have your own bathroom?’
‘This is an old house. There’s only one bathroom upstairs, at the end of the corridor.’
‘Did you go to it?’
‘Of course. Should I go into more detail?’
‘Did you notice if there was a light still on in your brother-in-law’s room?’
‘I saw a light under the door.’
‘Did you hear anything?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘Did your brother-in-law ever confide in you?’
‘That depends what you mean by confide.’
‘Sometimes a man prefers to discuss certain things with a woman rather than his brother or parents, for example. A sister-in-law is both a relative and a stranger …’
She waited patiently.
‘Did Léonard Lachaume, who had been a widower for years, talk to you about his affairs with women?’
‘I don’t even know if he had any.’
‘Did he go out much?’
‘Very rarely.’
‘Do you know where he went?’
‘That was none of my business.’
‘His son is twelve, I’m told – is that right?’
‘He was twelve last month.’
‘Did Léonard look after him personally?’
‘As much as any working parent. Léonard worked a lot and he’d sometimes go back to the office after dinner.’
‘Your mother-in-law is virtually disabled, isn’t she?’
‘She can only walk with a stick and needs help getting upstairs.’
‘Your father-in-law isn’t very spry either, is he?’
‘He’s seventy-eight.’
‘And the maid, from what I’ve seen, is hardly any more agile. And yet, if I’ve understood correctly, the child was put on the second floor in the west wing with these three old people.’
‘Jean-Paul …’ she started, then changed her mind and fell silent.
‘You were saying that Jean-Paul, your nephew …’
‘I don’t know what I was saying.’
‘How long has his bedroom been on the second floor?’
‘Not long.’
‘Years? Months? Weeks?’
‘A week, roughly.’
Maigret was sure she had only disclosed this reluctantly. The lawyer realized it too, because he immediately created a diversion.
‘I wonder, detective chief inspector, if you mightn’t ask other members of the household these questions. Madame Lachaume has had a very hard morning and she hasn’t been given time to get dressed. I think her husband would be better placed to …’
‘At all events, Maître Radel, I have finished with her, at any rate for the moment. Unless the examining magistrate has any questions for her.’
The magistrate merely gave a faint shake of the head.
‘I apologize for having kept you, madame …’
‘Do you want me to send in my husband?’
‘Not just now. I’d rather ask the old maid a few quick questions … She’s called …?’
‘Catherine. She’s been with my parents-in-law for over forty years and is almost the same age as them. I’ll go and see if she’s in the kitchen.’
She went out. The lawyer was about to say something but then thought better of it and lit a cigarette after tapping it on his silver cigarette case.
He had offered one to the magistrate, who had refused saying:
‘No, thank you. I don’t smoke.’
Maigret was thirsty but didn’t dare ask for something to drink. He couldn’t wait to get out of that house.
It was an age before they heard scurrying feet, then what sounded like someone scratching at the door.
‘Come in!’
It was Catherine, the old maid, who gave each of them an even darker look than in the office earlier, then demanded:
‘What do you want from me? For a start, if you carry on smoking in the house like that, Monsieur Félix is going to have another asthma attack.’
What choice did he have? As the magistrate sardonically looked on, Maigret put his pipe on the pedestal table with a sigh.
3
More put out than ever by the magistrate’s attitude and the lawyer’s presence, Maigret began tentatively, as if testing the waters;
‘They tell me you’ve been in this house forty years …’
He thought he was mollifying her, pleasing her. Instead she snapped:
‘Who told you that?’
As he was wondering if the roles had been reversed, if he was going to have to answer the old woman’s questions, she went on:
‘I haven’t been here forty years, I’ve been here fifty. I started when poor madame had only just turned twenty and was expecting Monsieur Léonard.’
A quick calculation. That meant the older Madame Lachaume, who looked the same age as her husband, was only just over seventy. What was the house like when Catherine, a little housemaid probably leaving her village for the first time, had arrived to find her young mistress pregnant with her first child?
Absurd questions crowded Maigret’s mind. There must have already been an older generation of Lachaumes at that stage, another set of aged parents, because he’d read ‘Est. 1817’ on the brass plate. Not that long after Waterloo, in other words.
Wouldn’t some of the living-room furniture also have been where it was now – the Empire-style sofa, for instance, which would have been strikingly beautiful if it wasn’t covered in garish blue velvet?
Fires would have been blazing in all the marble fireplaces. A later generation had put in the central heating, which wasn’t used any more, either to save money or because the boiler was in poor repair.
The stove fascinated him, a battered little round cast-iron stove like the ones you used to find in small country railway stations and the occasional government office.
Everything was decrepit, the house’s contents as well as its occupants. The family and the house had turned in on themselves, taking on a hostile appearance.
Old Catherine mentioned something that dated the period more precisely than anything else. Talking about Léonard as a baby, she said proudly:
‘I nursed him!’
So she had come to Paris as a wet nurse rather than a maid. Maigret involuntarily looked at her flat chest, her baggy skirt, the dirty black fabric …
Because she was dirty. Everything in this house was dirty or dubious-looking, broken, worn out, repaired in makeshift ways.
Distracted by these images, Maigret asked a stupid question, which the young magistrate Angelot was bound to repeat around the office.
‘Did you nurse Monsieur Armand too?’
The answer came back as quick as a flash:
‘Where would I have got the milk?’
‘Do the Lachaumes have any other children?’
‘Mademoiselle Véronique.’
‘Isn’t she here?’
‘She hasn’t been for a while.’
‘I don’t suppose you heard anything last night, did you?’
‘No.’
‘What time does Monsieur Léonard usually get up?’
‘He gets up when he pleases.’
‘Do you know his friends, his acquaintances?’
‘I’ve never concerned myself with my employers’ private lives, and you shouldn’t either. You’re here to find the criminal who killed Monsieur Léonard, not to stick your nose in the family’s affairs.’
Turning her back on him, she headed towards the dining-room door. He was on the verge of calling her back, but what was the point? If he h
ad other questions for her, he’d ask them when he wasn’t being watched by a silently gloating examining magistrate or lawyer.
He was floundering, no two ways about that. But he would still have to have the last word.
What now: send for old Félix Lachaume and his half-paralysed wife? It made sense questioning them next but he was afraid of giving a repeat performance of Maigret failing to cope.
The maid had barely left before he lit his pipe and went out to the hall. He looked out of the window at the long ladder lying across the courtyard. As he’d expected, the magistrate and the lawyer came after him.
On at least one previous occasion in his career, he had had to work with someone scrutinizing everything he did, although that was an infinitely less unpleasant case. Someone called Inspector Pyke, from Scotland Yard, had been given permission to shadow one of his investigations to familiarize himself with his methods. Maigret had hardly ever felt as uncomfortable in his life.
It was all too common for people to think that these famous methods were a bit like a recipe, with a definitive version which you just had to follow to the letter.
‘I assume you’re intending to question Armand Lachaume?’
The lawyer was speaking. Maigret looked at him blankly, then shook his head.
‘No. I’m going to have a look downstairs.’
‘You won’t mind if I come with you. Seeing as my clients …’
He shrugged his shoulders and started off down the staircase of what had once been a handsome, elegant, patrician residence.
At the bottom, he randomly pushed open a set of double doors and discovered a vast ballroom, plunged in darkness because the shutters were closed. It smelled stuffy, mouldy. He looked for the light switch and two out of a possible twelve bulbs flickered into life in a crystal chandelier, several of whose garlands were hanging off, broken.
There was a piano over in one corner and an old harpsichord in another, and carpets were rolled up at the foot of the walls. In the middle of the floor, there was a stack of magazines, green folders and biscuit tins.
There may once have been music and dancing here, but no one had set foot in this room for years, and the crimson silk covering its walls was peeling off in places.
A half-open door led to a library with shelves that were virtually bare, apart from some red-bound school prizes and a few of those moth-eaten volumes you find in certain riverside bookstalls.
Had the rest been sold? Most likely. As had the furniture, no doubt, because there was none to be seen apart from a billiard table with mildewed baize in a third, even damper room.
Maigret’s voice echoed strangely, like in a crypt, when he said, more to himself than to the others who were still tagging along:
‘I suppose the offices are the other side of the entrance.’
They crossed the passage, hearing voices on the pavement outside, where the police were holding back a couple of dozen curious onlookers.
Opposite the ballroom they finally found a room that seemed relatively alive, an office that actually looked like an office, though still an old-fashioned one. The walls were wood-panelled and hung with two oil portraits from the previous century and a row of photographs, the last of which was presumably Félix Lachaume in his fifties or sixties. The Lachaume dynasty, without a likeness of Léonard as yet. The furniture was the mixture of Gothic and Renaissance you still find in the head offices of very old Parisian businesses. A display case contained an array of the firm’s various biscuits.
Maigret knocked on a door to his right.
‘Come in!’ said a voice.
The door led to another office, equally old-fashioned but messier, where a man in his fifties, with a shiny, bald head, was bent over a large book.
‘I imagine you’re the book-keeper?’
‘Justin Brême, the book-keeper, yes.’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret.’
‘I know.’
‘Monsieur Angelot, examining magistrate, and Maître Radel, the family’s lawyer.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘I presume you’re aware of what happened last night, Monsieur Brême?’
‘Have a seat, gentlemen …’
There was an empty office opposite his.
‘Is that Monsieur Armand Lachaume’s office?’
‘Yes, gentlemen. Lachaumes’ has been a family business for several generations, and in the not so very distant past Monsieur Félix was still working in the next-door office, where his father and his grandfather had worked before him.’
He was fat, slightly sallow. Through an open door a third office could be seen in which a man in grey overalls and a middle-aged typist were working.
‘I’d like to ask you a few questions.’
Maigret pointed to an old-fashioned safe, which despite its heft and bulk wouldn’t have troubled a first-time burglar.
‘Do you keep the ready cash in that safe?’
Monsieur Brême went to shut the door of the neighbouring office, then came back looking embarrassed. He glanced at the lawyer as if seeking advice.
‘What ready cash?’ he asked eventually, with a combination of artlessness and cunning.
‘You have a workforce. So you have to pay their wages …’
‘Worse luck. Payday comes around far too soon.’
‘You must have some working capital …’
‘I should have, detective chief inspector! Unfortunately we’ve been living hand to mouth for a long time. This morning, for instance, there’s at most ten thousand francs in that safe. I’ll be needing that in a moment as an advance on an invoice.’
‘Are the men and women who work here aware of this?’
‘Sometimes they have to wait days to be paid, sometimes they only get paid in part.’
‘So none of them would get it into their heads to rob the house?’
Monsieur Brême laughed silently at the notion.
‘Definitely not.’
‘Is this common knowledge locally?’
‘The grocer, the butcher, the woman from the dairy sometimes have to come back three or four times before they’re paid …’
It was unpleasant following this through to its logical conclusion. It was like a squalid striptease, but it had to be done.
‘Don’t the Lachaumes have any private means?’
‘No, none.’
‘How much money might there have been in Monsieur Léonard’s wallet, in your opinion?’
The book-keeper gestured vaguely.
‘Not a lot.’
‘And yet the business is still going,’ Maigret objected.
Monsieur Brême looked at the young lawyer again.
‘I get the impression,’ the lawyer interjected, ‘that my clients are increasingly the subject of this investigation rather than the murderer.’
Maigret retorted testily:
‘You sound like old Catherine, maître. How am I expected to find a murderer if I don’t discover his motives, what’s driving him? We’re told it was a burglar …’
‘The ladder proves as much …’
Maigret grunted sceptically:
‘Ah yes! And the missing wallet. And the fact that we haven’t yet found a weapon …’
He hadn’t sat down. Nor had the others, despite being invited to by the book-keeper, who was also standing, eying his padded chair.
‘Tell me, Monsieur Brême, despite all this you must end up paying the staff, they’re still working …’
‘It’s a miracle every time.’
‘And where does this miraculous money come from?’
The man was starting to get nervous.
‘Monsieur Léonard used to give it to me.’
‘In cash?’
‘You don’t have to answer, Monsieur Brême,’ Maître Radel cut in.
‘They’ll see anyway when they go through the accounts or when they talk to the bank … The money generally came as a cheque …’
‘You mean that Monsieur Léon
ard had another bank account besides the Lachaume business account, and that he drew cheques on this account when in urgent need?’
‘No. It was Madame Lachaume.’
‘The mother?’
‘Madame Paulette.’
At last they were getting somewhere. Maigret sat down, satisfied.
‘Take a seat at your desk, Monsieur Brême. Answer calmly. How long has Madame Paulette, as you call her – Armand Lachaume’s wife, that is – been the company’s lifesaver?’
‘Since she joined it, so to speak.’
‘When did she get married?’
‘Six years ago. Two years after Madame Marcelle died.’
‘I’m sorry? Who was Madame Marcelle?’
‘Monsieur Léonard’s wife.’
‘So, six years ago Armand Lachaume married Paulette … Paulette who?’
‘Paulette Zuber.’
‘Was she wealthy?’
‘Very.’
‘Does she still have any family?’
‘Her father died five months ago, and she was his only daughter. She didn’t know her mother.’
‘Who was Zuber?’
The name was familiar; he had a feeling he had heard it at work.
‘Frédéric Zuberski, known as Zuber, the leather merchant.’
‘He had some problems, didn’t he?’
‘The Inland Revenue was on his back for a while. He was also accused after the war …’
‘I remember!’
Zuberski, who called himself Zuber, had had his hour in the spotlight. He had started off going around farms with a cart, collecting skins and raw hides, then he had set up a warehouse – in Ivry actually, probably not far from the Lachaumes …
His business had grown substantially, even before the war, and Zuber owned a number of trucks and warehouses in the countryside.
Then the rumour had gone around two or three years after the Liberation that he had amassed a considerable fortune, and people said he was going to be arrested.
The newspapers had picked up the story, largely because he was such a colourful character: an ill-proportioned, badly dressed fellow who spoke French with a thick accent and could barely read or write. He turned over millions, some said billions, and it was claimed that, directly and through intermediaries, he had secured a monopoly of the raw hides market.
The financial section had dealt with the case, rather than Maigret. After a while it had all gone quiet, so he didn’t know what the upshot had been.
Maigret 53 Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses Page 4