Maigret in Vichy, page 14
‘On Monday night, you appeared when she was about to go inside the house?’
‘No … I saw the lodgers go out … I knew she’d be in the park, listening to the music … She’s always loved music … I had no difficulty opening the door … My hotel room key worked …’
‘You searched through the drawers.’
‘First of all, I saw there was only one bed …’
‘The photos?’
‘Of her … Only her … I’d have given everything to come across a photo of a child …’
‘And to discover letters?’
‘Yes … I found myself facing an inexplicable void … Even if Philippe was at boarding school, he must …’
‘She caught you in her house when she returned home?’
‘Yes … I begged her to tell me where our son was … I remember asking her if he’d died, if he’d had an accident …’
‘She refused to answer?’
‘She was calmer than I was … She reminded me of our pact …’
‘The promise to give you back your son when he was twenty-one?’
‘Yes … For my part, I’d sworn not to try and contact him …’
‘Did she use to tell you about him?’
‘In great detail … His first teeth … His childhood illnesses … The nanny she’d hired at a time when she was unwell … Then school … She gave me an almost day-by-day account …’
‘Without mentioning the place?’
‘Yes … Recently, he’d been saying he wanted to become a doctor, apparently …’
He looked at Lecoeur without false modesty.
‘There never was any son?’
‘There was … but he wasn’t yours …’
‘Another man?’
Lecoeur shook his head.
‘It was Francine Lange who gave birth to a son, in Mesnil-le-Mont … Until you told me, I didn’t know, I confess, that the child had been registered as being the son of Hélène Lange … The idea must have occurred to the two sisters when Francine found herself pregnant … If I know her, her first thought must have been to get rid of the baby … But her sister had a better idea …’
‘That flashed through my mind … I told you … That night, after begging her, I threatened … For fifteen years I’ve dreamed about this son whom I’d get to meet one day … My wife and I don’t have any children … When I learned I was a father … But what’s the use?’
‘You put your hands round her neck?’
‘To frighten her, to make her talk … I shouted at her to tell the truth … I didn’t think of the sister, but I was afraid the child was dead, or disabled …’
He let his hands dangle as if there wasn’t an ounce of energy left in his body.
‘I squeezed hard … I didn’t realize … If only her face had shown some kind of emotion! But no! She wasn’t even afraid …’
‘When you read in the newspaper that her sister was in Vichy, it gave you fresh hope?’
‘If the child was alive, and if Hélène was the only person who knew where he was, there was no longer anyone to take care of him … I was expecting to be arrested from one day to the next … You must have found my fingerprints …’
‘Without being able to compare them to yours … Even so, we’d have tracked you down eventually …’
‘I had to know, to make arrangements …’
‘You telephoned different hotels, in alphabetical order …’
‘How do you know?’
It was child’s play, but Lecoeur needed satisfaction.
‘You called from different public phone booths …’
‘So you’d identified me?’
‘Almost …’
‘What about Philippe?’
‘Francine Lange’s son was fostered shortly after his birth, by a family called Berteaux, farmers in Saint-André-du-Lavion, in the Vosges … With your money, the two sisters bought a hair salon in La Rochelle … Neither of them took care of the child, who continued to live in the country until, at two and a half, he fell into a pond …’
‘He’s dead?’
‘Yes … But for you, he had to be kept alive, and Hélène invented his childhood, his first years at school, his games and, recently, his interest in medicine …’
‘It’s unspeakable …’
‘Yes …’
‘That a woman could …’
He shook his head.
‘I am not doubting what you say … But something inside me refuses to accept this truth …’
‘This is not the time occurrence of a case of this kind in the annals of crime … I could cite precedents …’
‘No …’ he begged.
He withdrew into himself, his resilience gone, with nothing left to cling to.
‘You were right, earlier, when you said you didn’t need a lawyer … All you need to do is tell your story to the jury …’
He remained completely still, his head in his hands.
‘Your wife must be worried … In my opinion, the truth will hurt her less than what she might imagine …’
He appeared not to have thought about her and he finally showed his flushed face.
‘What am I going to tell her?’
‘I’m afraid you can’t tell her anything at present … I’m not authorized to release you, even for a short time … I have to take you to Clermont-Ferrand … Unless the examining magistrate objects, which would surprise me, your wife will be allowed to visit you.’
This thought upset Pélardeau, who eventually looked at Maigret in desperation.
‘Couldn’t you talk to her?’
Maigret shot a questioning glance at Lecoeur, who shrugged as if to say that it wasn’t up to him.
‘I’ll do my best …’
‘You should tread softly, because for the past few years she’s been suffering from a weak heart … Neither of us is young any more …’
Nor was Maigret. He felt old, this evening. He was impatient to get back to his wife, the humdrum daily walks through Vichy and the little yellow chairs in the park.
They went downstairs together.
‘Shall I drop you off, chief?’
‘I’d rather walk …’
The pavements were glistening. The black car drove off, taking Lecoeur and Pélardeau to Clermont-Ferrand.
Maigret lit his pipe and mechanically thrust his hands in his pockets. The night wasn’t cold, but because of the storm the thermometer had still dropped by several degrees.
Water was dripping from the two shrubs flanking the entrance to the Hôtel de la Bérézina.
‘It’s you, at last!’ sighed Madame Maigret, getting out of bed to greet him. ‘I dreamed you were at Quai des Orfèvres, carrying out an interrogation that went on for ever and having endless glasses of beer brought up …’
After watching him for a moment, she murmured:
‘Is it over?’
‘Yes …’
‘Who is it?’
‘A very respectable man, who employs thousands of office staff and workers, but who remained very unworldly …’
‘I hope you’ll be able to sleep tomorrow?’
‘I’m afraid not … I have to go and explain to his wife …’
‘She doesn’t know?’
‘No.’
‘Is she here?’
‘At the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs …’
‘What about him?’
‘In half an hour, he’ll be inside Clermont-Ferrand prison …’
While he got undressed, she carried on watching him, finding there was something strange about him.
‘How many years do you think he’ll …?’
And Maigret, filling his last pipe of the day, from which he only took a few puffs before getting into bed, said:
‘I hope he’ll be acquitted …’
1.
For the first time since they had been going for dinner with the Pardons once a month, Maigret had a memory of the evening at Boulevard Voltaire that was almost painful’. It had started on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. His wife had phoned for a taxi, because for three days it had, according to the radio, been raining harder than at any time in the past thirty-five years. The rain was coming down in sheets, frozen, lashing people’s hands and faces, making their wet clothes stick to their bodies.
On the stairs, in lifts and offices, feet left dark prints, and everyone was in a terrible mood.
They had gone downstairs and spent almost half an hour on the doorstep, increasingly numb with cold, waiting for the taxi to arrive. Then, on top of everything. they had had to haggle for the driver to agree to take them such a short distance.
‘I’m sorry. We’re late.’
‘Everybody’s late these days. Would you mind if we sat down at the table straight away.’
The apartment was warm and intimate, and they felt all the better for the sound of the storm rattling the shutters. Madame Pardon had made her unparalleled boeuf bourguignon, and the dish, filling yet refined, had been the focus of their conversation.
Then they had talked about provincial cookery, about cassoulet and potée Lorraine, about tripes à la mode de Caën and bouillabaisse.
‘Basically most of these recipes were born of necessity. If they had had refrigerators in the Middle Ages.’
What else had they talked about? The two women, as usual, had ended up going to sit in a corner of the sitting room, where they chatted in a low voice. Pardon had taken Maigret into his surgery to show him a rare edition given to him by one of his patients. They had sat down in their usual places, and Madame Pardon had come to bring them coffee and calvados.
Pardon was tired. For quite a long time his features had been drawn, and sometimes a kind of resignation appeared in his eyes. He still worked fifteen hours a day, without a word of complaint or recrimination, in his surgery in the morning, and spent part of the afternoon lugging his heavy medical bag from street to street, then back home, where the waiting room was always full.
‘If I had a son and he’d told me he intended to become a doctor, I think I would try to dissuade him.’
Maigret nearly looked away out of modesty. Coming from Pardon, these words were most unexpected, because he was passionate about his profession, and it was impossible to imagine him practising another one.
This time, though, he was discouraged and pessimistic, and most importantly he was going so far as to express that pessimism.
‘They’re turning us into civil servants, and transforming medicine into a big machine for producing basic treatment.’
Maigret studied him, lighting his pipe.
‘Not only civil servants,’ the doctor continued, ‘but bad civil servants, because we can no longer devote the necessary time to each patient. Sometimes I’m ashamed as I guide them to the door, nearly pushing them. I see their worried, even imploring faces. I feel that they expected something from me, questions, words, minutes, in short, during which I would attend to their case.’
He raised his glass.
‘Your good health.’
He tried to smile, a mechanical smile that didn’t suit him.
‘Do you know how many patients I’ve seen today.? Eighty-two. And that’s not exceptional. After which they make us fill in various forms that take up our evenings. I’m sorry for boring you with that. You must have worries of your own at Quai des Orfèvres.’
What had they talked about after that? The sort of mundane matters that you don’t remember the next day. Pardon was sitting at his desk, smoking his cigarette, Maigret in the stiff armchair reserved for the patients. The air was filled with a particular smell with which he was very familiar, because he encountered it every time he visited. A smell that in a way reminded him of the offices at the station. A smell of poverty.
Pardon’s patients were local, almost all of them from a very modest background.
The door opened. Eugénie, the maid, who had worked at Boulevard Voltaire for so long that she was more or less part of the family, announced:
‘It’s the Italian, sir.’
‘Which Italian? Pagliati.’
‘Yes, sir. He’s in a terrible state. Apparently it’s very urgent.’
It was 10.30. Pardon got to his feet and opened the door of the sad waiting room, in which magazines were scattered over a pedestal table.
‘What’s wrong, Gino?’
‘It’s not me, doctor. Nor my wife. There’s a wounded man on the pavement who seems to be dying.’
‘Where?’
‘Rue Popincourt, less than a hundred metres from here.’
‘Was it you who found him?’
Pardon was already in the doorway, putting on his black overcoat, looking for his doctor’s bag, and Maigret, quite naturally, put on his coat as well. The doctor opened the door to the sitting room.
‘We’ll be back right away. An injured man on Rue Popincourt.’
‘Take your umbrella.’
He didn’t take it. It would have seemed ridiculous, holding an umbrella as he leaned over a man dying in the middle of the pavement in the pelting rain.
Gino was a Neapolitan. He kept a grocer’s shop on the corner of Rue du Chemin-Vert and Rue Popincourt. More precisely, it was his wife, Lucia, who kept the shop while he made fresh pasta in the back room, ravioli and tortellini. The couple were popular in the area. Pardon had treated Gino for high blood pressure in the past.
The pasta-maker was a short man with a heavy, thick body and a flushed face.
‘We were coming back from my brother-in-law’s on Rue de Charonnne. My sister-in-law is going to have a baby, and we’re expecting to drive her to the maternity hospital at any moment. We were walking in the rain when I saw …’
Half of his words were lost in the storm. The gutters were real torrents that you had to jump over, and the few cars sent dirty water spraying several metres.
The spectacle that awaited him on Rue Popincourt was unexpected. There were no pedestrians from one end of the street to the other, and only a few windows, apart from that of a small café, were still lit.
About fifty metres from that café, a stout woman stood motionlessly beneath an umbrella shaken by the wind, and the light from a street lamp revealed the shape of a body lying at her feet.
It brought back old memories for Maigret. Even before he had been at the head of the Crime Squad, while he had only been an inspector, he had sometimes been first on the scene of a brawl, a settling of scores, a knife attack.
The man was young. He looked barely twenty, he was wearing a suede jacket, and his hair was quite long at the back. He had fallen forwards, and the back of his jacket was stained with blood.
‘Have you called the police?’
Pardon, crouching beside the injured man, interrupted:
‘Tell them to send an ambulance.’
That meant that the stranger was alive, and Maigret moved towards the light that he could see fifty metres away. Inscribed on the faintly lit display window were the words: ‘Chez Jules’. He pushed the glass door, hung with a cream-coloured curtain, and stepped into an atmosphere so calm that it was almost unreal. It was like a genre painting.
It was a bar in the old style, with sawdust on the floor and a strong smell of wine and spirits. Four middle-aged men, three of them fat and red-faced, were playing cards.
‘Can I make a phone call?’
They watched with surprise as he walked towards the telephone on the wall, beside the zinc bar and the rows of bottles.
‘Hello … Is that the station of the eleventh arrondissement?’
It was a stone’s throw away, at Place Léon-Blum, formerly Place Voltaire.
‘Hello. This is Maigret. There’s an injured man on Rue Popincourt. Towards Rue du Chemin-Vert. We need an ambulance.’
The four men grew animated, like figures in a painting coming to life. They kept the cards in their hands.
‘What is it?’ asked someone in shirt-sleeves, who must have been the owner. ‘Who’s injured?’
‘A young man.’
Maigret set some change down on the counter and headed towards the door.
‘A tall, thin guy in a suede jacket?’
‘Yes.’
‘He was here a quarter of an hour ago.’
‘On his own?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he look nervous?’
The owner, probably Jules, glanced quizzically at the others.
‘No. Not especially.’
‘Did he stay for long?’
‘About twenty minutes.’
When Maigret was outside, he saw two officers on bicycles, capes dripping, standing near the injured man. Pardon had got back to his feet.
‘There’s nothing I can do. He’s been stabbed several times. They missed his heart. And none of his arteries has been cut either, at first glance, or there would have been more blood.’
‘Will he regain consciousness?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t dare to move him. Until we get him to a hospital they won’t be able to.’
The two vehicles, the police car and the ambulance, arrived almost simultaneously. The card-players, rather than getting wet, stood in the doorway of the little café and watched from a distance. Only the owner came over, with a sack over his head and shoulders. He recognized the man’s jacket straight away.
‘That’s him.’
‘He didn’t say anything to you?’
‘No. Except to order a cognac.’
Pardon gave instructions to the orderlies who were bringing their stretcher.
‘What’s that?’ asked one of the police officers, pointing to a black object that looked like a camera.
The injured man wore it across his body. It wasn’t a camera, but a tape recorder. It was drenched in rain, and when the man was being slipped on to the stretcher, Maigret took advantage of the fact to release the strap.
‘To Saint-Antoine.’
Pardon got into the ambulance with one of the orderlies while the other one took the wheel.
‘Who are you?’ he asked Maigret.
‘Police.’
‘If you want to get in beside me …’
The area was deserted, and, less than five minutes later, the ambulance, followed by one of the police vans, reached Saint-Antoine Hospital.
Here too, Maigret found old memories: the globe-shaped light above reception, the long, badly lit corridors where two or three people were waiting on benches in silent resignation, giving a start every time a door opened and closed, or when a man or a woman in white moved from one place to another.
