‘Yes … I’m listening, Madame Kruger … Yes …’
The woman at the other end of the line didn’t need any encouragement to talk. Her words tumbled over each other and, for those who didn’t have the receiver next to their ear, formed an incomprehensible but nonetheless pathetic litany.
And there was a drama playing itself out on Pardon’s face, mute but expressive. The local doctor, who just a few moments earlier had been smiling, relaxed, joining in the fun of the rice pudding, now seemed a long way from the tranquil bourgeois dining room.
‘I understand, Madame Kruger … I know, yes … If it would be of help, I could come round and …’
Madame Pardon looked at the Maigrets as if to say:
‘Here we go again! Another dinner we’ll have to finish without him …’
She was wrong. The voice was still booming out. The doctor was becoming more and more uneasy.
‘Yes … Of course … Try to put them to bed …’
They could tell he was feeling despondent, powerless.
‘I know … I know … But I can’t do any more than you have …’
No one was eating. No one said a word.
‘You realize that, if this goes on, it will be you …’
He sighed, wiped his brow with his hand. He was forty-five and almost totally bald.
His voice weary, he finally gave another sigh, as if buckling under irresistible pressure:
‘Give him one of the pink pills … No … Just one! … Give it half an hour, and if it has had no effect …’
Everyone could sense the feeling of relief at the other end of the phone.
‘I’ll be at home all evening … Goodbye, Madame Kruger …’
He hung up and came back to the table. They avoided asking him any questions. It took them several minutes to get the conversation flowing again. Pardon remained distracted. The evening followed its usual course. They left the table to have their coffee in the living room, where the table was covered with magazines, as this was the room where his patients waited during surgery hours.
The two windows were open. It was May. The evening was warm, and in spite of the buses and cars there was a hint of spring in the Parisian air. Families from the neighbourhood strolled along Boulevard Voltaire, and there were two men in shirt-sleeves sitting on the café terrace across the road.
When the coffee had been poured, the women picked up their knitting and sat in their usual corner. Pardon and Maigret were seated next to one of the windows, while Alice’s young husband, unsure about which group to join, ended up sitting next to his wife.
They had already decided that Madame Maigret would be the godmother, and she was knitting a little jacket for the baby.
Pardon lit a cigar. Maigret filled his pipe. They felt no great compulsion to speak, so they sat there in silence for quite a long time, while listening to the murmur of their wives’ conversation.
Finally the doctor muttered, as if to himself:
‘Another one of those evenings when I wished I did a different job!’
Maigret didn’t press the point or push him into breaking confidences. He liked Pardon a lot. He considered him to be a man, in the fullest sense of the word.
Pardon glanced furtively at his watch.
‘It could go on for three or four hours, but she could ring at any moment …’
He continued, without providing any details, leaving Maigret to read between the lines:
‘A small-time tailor, a Polish Jew, who set up above a herbalist’s shop in Rue Popincourt … Five children, the eldest nine, and his wife is expecting a sixth …’
He gave his daughter’s belly an involuntary look when he said this.
‘Medical science can do nothing more for him, but five weeks on he is still not dead … I’ve done everything I can to convince him to go into hospital … But no sooner do I say the word than he falls into a sort of trance, summons his family to his bedside, cries, groans and begs them not to let anyone take him away against his will …’
Pardon was smoking his only cigar of the day without enjoyment.
‘They live in two rooms … The kids crying all the time … His wife’s at the end of her tether … She’s the one I should be tending to, but as long as this goes on I can do nothing … I went over there before dinner … I gave him an injection and his wife a sedative … It isn’t having an effect any more … While we were eating, he started groaning again, then howling in pain, and his wife, her strength all used up …’
Maigret drew on his pipe and muttered:
‘I think I understand.’
‘Legally, medically, I don’t have the right to prescribe him another dose … That wasn’t the first such telephone call I’ve received … Until now, I’ve managed to convince her …’
He looked at the inspector as if seeking his indulgence.
‘Put yourself in my place …’
He glanced at his watch again. How much longer would the sick man last out?
The evening was mild, with a certain languor in the air. The murmur of the women’s conversation and the rhythmic clack of their needles carried on in the corner of the living room.
Maigret said in a hesitant voice:
‘It’s not the same, of course … but I too have often wished I’d chosen a different profession …’
It wasn’t a proper, joined-up conversation. It was full of gaps, silences and slow puffs of smoke rising from the inspector’s pipe.
‘For a while now the police haven’t had the powers we enjoyed before, and, by extension, the same responsibilities …’
He was thinking out loud. He felt Pardon was a close friend; the feeling was mutual.
‘Over the course of my career I have seen our powers gradually diminished in favour of the magistrates. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. In any case, it’s never been our role to pass judgement. It’s up to the courts and the juries to decide if a man is guilty or not and to what extent he should be held responsible …’
He took it upon himself to do the talking because he sensed that his friend was tense, that his mind was elsewhere, in Rue Popincourt, in the two-room apartment where the Polish tailor was dying.
‘Even with the law as it is now, with us as instruments of the prosecutor’s office, of the examining magistrate, there still comes a moment when we have to make a decision which will have serious consequences … Because, at the end of the day, it is our investigations, the evidence we have gathered, that the magistrates, then the juries, will rely on to form their opinion …
‘The simple fact of considering a man a suspect, of bringing him into Quai des Orfèvres, of questioning his family, friends, concierge and neighbours about him, can potentially affect the rest of his life …’
It was Pardon’s turn to murmur:
‘I understand.’
‘Is such-and-such a person capable of committing a crime? Whatever happens, it is almost always we who ask ourselves the question first. Material evidence is often inexistent, or unconvincing …’
The phone rang. Pardon seemed almost afraid to answer, and it was his daughter who picked up the receiver …
‘Yes, monsieur … No, monsieur … You have a wrong number …’
She explained with a smile:
‘Bal des Vertus again …’
A dance hall on Rue du Chemin-Vert, whose phone number was very similar to the Pardons’.
Maigret continued, speaking quietly:
‘So this apparently normal individual you have before you, was he capable of killing someone or not? Do you see what I’m getting at, Pardon? I’m saying it’s not about deciding if he is guilty or not. That’s not the business of the Police Judiciaire. But we do have to ask ourselves if it is possible that … Isn’t that a form of judging? I hate that. And if I’d thought about that when I first joined the police, I’m not sure I would have …’
A longer silence. He emptied his pipe and took another one from his pocket, which he
slowly filled, seeming to caress the briar.
‘I remember one case, not so long ago … Did you follow the Josset affair?’
‘The name rings a bell.’
‘There was a lot in the papers about it, but the true story, insofar as there is a true story, was never told.’
It was very unusual for him to talk about a case he had been involved in. Occasionally, at Quai des Orfèvres, among colleagues, some famous case or some difficult investigation might be mentioned, but it was always a passing allusion.
‘I recall Josset at the end of his first interrogation, because that’s when I had to ask the question … I could show you the transcript, so that you can form your own opinion. Only, you would not have had the man himself in front of you for two hours. You wouldn’t have heard his voice, seen his facial expressions …’
It was at Quai des Orfèvres, in Maigret’s office, a Tuesday – he remembered the day – around three o’clock in the afternoon. And it was spring then too – the end of April or the beginning of May.
When he came into work that morning Maigret knew nothing of the affair, and he wasn’t alerted to it until around ten o’clock, firstly by the chief inspector at Auteuil and subsequently by Examining Magistrate Coméliau.
There was some confusion that day. The inspector from Auteuil claimed that he had informed the Police Judiciaire in the early hours of the morning, but for some reason the message did not seem to have reached its destination.
So it was nearly eleven o’clock before Maigret took a car to Rue Lopert, two or three hundred metres from the church at Auteuil, and found that he was the last to arrive. The reporters and photographers were already there, along with a hundred or so curious onlookers, being held back by uniformed policemen. The men from the prosecutor’s office were already on the scene, and five minutes later Criminal Records showed up.
At 12.10 Maigret showed into his office one Adrien Josset, a handsome, still quite lean forty-year-old, who cut an elegant figure despite his unshaven, crumpled appearance.
‘Come in, please … Take a seat.’
He opened the door of the inspectors’ room and summoned young Lapointe.
‘Bring a pad and pencil …’
The office was bathed in sunlight, and the noises of Paris could be heard through the open window. Lapointe understood that he was required to take a shorthand record of the interrogation and sat down at the corner of the table. Maigret filled his pipe and watched a convoy of boats going up the Seine and a man in a barge allowing his vessel to drift.
‘Forgive me, Monsieur Josset, but I am obliged to record the answers you will be so kind as to give to my questions … I hope you aren’t too tired.’
The man shook his head with a vaguely bitter smile. He hadn’t slept a wink all night, and the police at Auteuil had already subjected him to a long interrogation.
Maigret hadn’t wanted to read it, preferring instead to form his own impression.
‘To begin with the boring formalities … Could you tell me your surname, first names, age, profession …?’
‘Adrien Josset, forty, born Sète, Hérault …’
It was only when he said that that Maigret picked up the slight hint of a southern accent.
‘Your father?’
‘Schoolteacher. He died ten years ago.’
‘Is your mother still alive?’
‘Yes. She still lives in the same little house in Sète.’
‘Did you study in Paris?’
‘Montpellier.’
‘You are a pharmacist, I believe.’
‘I trained in pharmacy, then did one year of medicine. I didn’t follow through on that.’
‘Why not?’
He hesitated, and Maigret could see it was out of a kind of honesty. It was clear that he was trying hard to give accurate, truthful replies, so far at least.
‘For different reasons, probably. But the main one was that I had a girlfriend who went with her parents to Paris.’
‘Did she become your wife?’
‘No. As a matter of fact, our relationship broke down a few months later … But I think my heart wasn’t in being a doctor … My parents weren’t well off … they had to make sacrifices to pay for my studies … Even if I’d qualified as a doctor, I’d have found it hard to set up in practice …’
He was so tired he was struggling to string his thoughts together, and he cast the occasional glance at Maigret as if to check that he was making a favourable impression on the inspector.
‘Is this important?’
‘Anything might be important.’
‘I understand … I wondered whether I had any particular vocation … I’d heard about career opportunities in laboratories … Most pharmaceutical companies have their own research laboratories … When I got to Paris with my pharmacy diploma in my pocket I tried to find one of these jobs …’
‘Without success?’
‘All I could find was a job as a temporary stand-in at a chemist’s, then another …’
He was feeling hot. So was Maigret, who was now pacing up and down in the room, pausing occasionally by the window.
‘Did they ask you all these questions at Auteuil?’
‘No. Not the same questions. I can see that you are attempting to understand who I am. As you see, I’m trying hard to give you honest answers. Deep down, I see myself as no better or no worse than anyone else …’
He had to wipe his brow.
‘Are you thirsty?’
‘A bit …’
Maigret opened the door to the inspectors’ room.
‘Janvier? Could you get us something to drink?’
Then, to Josset:
‘Beer?’
‘If you like.’
‘Are you hungry?’
Without waiting for a reply he turned again to Janvier:
‘Beer and sandwiches.’
Josset gave a sad smile.
‘I read about that …’ he murmured.
‘You read what?’
‘Beer, sandwiches. The chief and his inspectors taking it in turns to ask questions. It’s common knowledge, isn’t it? I never thought that one day …’
He had fine hands and he sometimes wrung them nervously.
‘You know when you get here, but …’
‘Don’t be alarmed, Monsieur Josset. I can promise you that I have no preconceived ideas about you …’
‘The inspector at Auteuil certainly did.’
‘Was he rough with you?’
‘He didn’t treat me well. He used some words which … Anyway, who knows? If I were him …’
‘Let’s get back to those early days in Paris. How long was it before you met the woman who would become your wife?’
‘About a year … I was twenty-five and working in an English chemist’s on Faubourg Saint-Honoré when I met her …’
‘Was she a customer?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was her maiden name?’
‘Fontane, Christine Fontane. But she was still using the name of her first husband, who had died a few months earlier – Lowell – from the English brewing family. You’ll have seen the name on beer bottles.’
‘So she had been a widow for a few months and she was … what age?’
‘Twenty-nine.’
‘Any children?’
‘No.’
‘Rich?’
‘Indeed. She was a regular customer of all the luxury shops on Faubourg Saint-Honoré …’
‘Did you become her lover?’
‘She had a free and easy lifestyle.’
‘Even when her husband was alive?’
‘I believe that was the case.’
‘What was her background?’
‘Bourgeois … Not wealthy, but comfortably well off … She grew up in the sixteenth arrondissement, and her father was chair on a number of company boards …’
‘Did you fall in love with her?’
‘Head over heels.’
‘
Had you already split up with your girlfriend from Montpellier?’
‘Several months earlier.’
‘Did you and Christine Lowell discuss the prospect of marriage from the very start?’
The briefest of hesitations.
‘No.’
There was a knock at the door. It was the waiter from the Brasserie Dauphine, bringing some beer and sandwiches. This gave them an excuse to take a break. Josset didn’t eat but merely drank half of his beer, while Maigret continued to pace up and down, nibbling on a sandwich.
‘Can you tell me how it happened?’
‘I will try. It’s not easy. Fifteen years have passed. I was young, I can see that now. With hindsight, life was different then. Certain things didn’t seem as important as they do now.
‘I wasn’t earning a lot of money. I was living in furnished lodgings, near Place des Ternes, and I had all my meals in cheap restaurants, except when I would make do with some croissants. I spent more money on clothes than I did on feeding myself …’
He still had a taste for fashion: the suit he was wearing was by one of the finest tailors in Paris; his monogrammed shirt had been made to measure, as had his shoes.
‘Christine lived in a different world, which I knew nothing about and which dazzled me. I was still the son of a small-town schoolteacher, and the students I frequented with at Montpellier weren’t much better off than me.’
‘Did she introduce you to her friends?’
‘Much later. That was an aspect to our relationship that took me a long time to figure out.’
‘Can you give me an example?’
‘We often hear about businessmen, industrialists or bankers having a fling with a shopgirl or a model. It was much the same for her, in reverse. She was dating an inexperienced, penniless pharmacist’s assistant. She insisted on knowing where I lived, a cheap furnished hotel with earthenware tiles on the walls of the stairwell, and walls so thin you could hear every noise. It delighted her. On Sundays she would take me out in the car to some country inn.’
His voice had become muted, tinged with both sadness and resentment.
‘In the beginning I too thought it was just a fling that wouldn’t last.’
‘Were you in love?’
‘I grew to love her.’
‘Were you jealous?’
‘That’s how it all began. She would speak to me about her friends and even her lovers. She enjoyed telling me all the details. At first I didn’t say anything. Then, in a fit of jealousy, I called her every name under the sun and ended up giving her a slap. I was convinced she was making fun of me and that once she left my iron bed she gossiped to everyone about how awkward and naive I was. We had lots of arguments along those lines. I once stopped seeing her for a month.’
Maigret 53 Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses Page 14