Maigret in Vichy, page 3
When he let out an exclamation, Madame Maigret appeared from the bathroom in a blue floral dressing gown, toothbrush in hand.
‘What is it?’
‘Look …’
On the first page devoted to Vichy was a photograph, that of the lady in lilac. She must have been a few years younger and she’d made the effort to give a wan smile for the photographer.
‘What’s happened to her?’
‘She’s been murdered …’
‘Last night?’
‘If it happened last night, it wouldn’t be in today’s papers … The night before …’
‘We saw her at the bandstand …’
‘At around nine o’clock, yes … She went home, two streets from here, Rue du Bourbonnais … I had no idea we were almost neighbours. She took off her stole and her hat, and went into the sitting room, on the left of the hallway—’
‘How was she killed?’
‘She was strangled … Yesterday morning, her lodgers were surprised not to hear any noise coming from the ground floor—’
‘She’s not here to take the waters?’
‘She lives in Vichy all year round … She owns the house and rents out furnished rooms on the first floor.’
Maigret remained seated and his wife knew what an effort that was for him.
‘Do you think it’s a financially motivated murder?’
‘The killer searched the place thoroughly, but doesn’t appear to have taken anything … A few pieces of jewellery and a sum of money were even found in a drawer that had been opened …’
‘She wasn’t—’
‘Raped? No …’
He gazed at the window in silence.
‘Do you know who’s in charge of the investigation?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Lecoeur, who was one of my inspectors and is now head of the Clermont-Ferrand Police Judiciaire … He’s here … He doesn’t have any idea that I am too …’
‘Do you plan to go and see him?’
Maigret didn’t answer straight away.
2.
It was five to nine and Maigret still hadn’t answered his wife’s question. It was as if it was a matter of honour for him to behave exactly as on the other mornings and keep to their Vichy routine without departing from it in the least.
He had read the newspaper to the end as he finished his coffee, then shaved, listening to the news on the radio as usual. At five to nine he was ready and the two of them descended the red-carpeted staircase with brass rods.
The owner, in a white jacket, a chef’s hat on his head, was waiting for him in the hallway.
‘Well, Monsieur Maigret, we’re taking good care of you here in Vichy! Even going so far as to offer you a juicy murder …’
Maigret managed a vague smile.
‘You’ll be handling it, I hope?’
‘What happens outside Paris isn’t under my authority …’
Madame Maigret was watching him. She thought he wouldn’t notice, but he was aware of it. Instead of going down Rue d’Auvergne, towards the river and the children’s playground, he turned right, looking all innocent.
True, they sometimes varied their itinerary, but always on the way back from town. She was in awe of her husband’s sense of direction. He hadn’t consulted any maps. He gave the impression of wandering aimlessly, diving down little backstreets that seemed to be taking him away from his destination, and she’d be taken by surprise when she suddenly recognized the façade of their hotel, the two shrubs in their green containers.
This time he turned right again, then again, and they spotted a dozen or so onlookers on a pavement gazing upwards.
A little glint came into Madame Maigret’s eyes. Maigret appeared to hesitate. He crossed to the other side of the street, stopped to empty his pipe, banging it against his heel, and slowly filled another. It made him look like a big child, and at times like these she felt a rush of affection.
A struggle was taking place inside Maigret. Finally, as if he didn’t know where he was, he mingled with the group of curious spectators, and he too stared up at the house opposite, outside which a car was parked, and nearby a police officer was standing guard.
The house was elegant, like most of the others in the street. The façade had been repainted white tinged with pink quite recently, and the shutters and balcony were almond green.
On a marble plaque was the name, in fancy English lettering: Les Iris.
Madame Maigret guessed at the conflict going on inside him. He hadn’t wanted to go to the police headquarters, just as right now he hadn’t wanted to cross the street and tell the police officer who he was and gain admission to the house.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The street was clean, the air clear, light, joyful. A few houses further down, a woman was beating her carpets at the window, watching the spectators with a pitying look. But the previous day, when the murder had been discovered and the police had arrived in large numbers, hadn’t she herself mingled with the neighbours to stare at a façade which she’d been familiar with for years?
Some exchanged opinions.
‘Apparently it was a crime of passion …’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! She was nearly fifty …’
On the first floor, a face with dark hair and a pointed nose could be made out behind the windows, and sometimes in the background the shape of a man who was still young.
The door was white. A milk float went past, and bottles were deposited on most doorsteps. The milkman walked towards the white door holding a bottle of milk. The police officer said something to him, probably that there was no point, but the milkman shrugged and left the bottle anyway.
Was anyone going to notice that Maigret …? He couldn’t stay there indefinitely …
Just when he was about to set off again, a tall young man with a mop of hair appeared in the doorway, crossed the street and walked straight up to him.
‘The chief superintendent would like you to come and see him …’
His wife managed to suppress a smile.
‘Where should I wait for you?’ she asked.
‘In our usual spot, at the spring …’
Had he been recognized through the window? He crossed the road in a dignified manner, trying to put on a grumpy expression. The hallway was cool, and on the right was a bamboo coat rack where two hats hung. He added his, a straw boater which his wife had made him buy at the same time as the mohair jacket he was a little ashamed of.
‘Come in, chief …’
A familiar, jovial voice, a face and a shape that Maigret recognized at once.
‘Lecoeur!’
They hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years, when Désiré Lecoeur, an inspector at the time, had still been part of Maigret’s team at Quai des Orfèvres.
‘Yes, chief, we gain experience, a paunch and stripes. Here I am, chief superintendent in Clermont-Ferrand, which is why I’m landed with this exasperating case … Come in …’
He showed him into a small sitting room blue with smoke and sat down at the table serving as a temporary desk, which was strewn with papers.
Maigret lowered himself gingerly on to a delicate Louis XVI chair and there must have been a questioning look in his eyes, because Lecoeur hastily said:
‘You’re probably wondering how I knew you were here? First of all, Moinet, whom you haven’t met and who is head of the Vichy police, saw your name among the hotel index cards … Naturally, he didn’t dare disturb you, but his men see you walk past every day … Apparently even the coastguards are wondering when you’ll decide to play boules … Each morning, you seem to be more and more interested in the game, to the point—’
‘Did you get here yesterday?’
‘From Clermont-Ferrand, of course, with two of my men, including young Dicelle who brought you in from the street. I was loath to send him to fetch you. I said to myself that you’re here to take the waters, not to give us a hand. I also knew that if you were intrigued by the case, you’d end up—’
Now Maigret really looked grumpy.
‘A financially motivated murder?’ he growled.
‘Definitely not.’
‘A crime of passion?’
‘Unlikely. I say that, but, after twenty-four hours, I’m barely any the wiser than when I arrived yesterday morning …’
He rummaged among his papers.
‘The victim’s name is Hélène Lange. She was forty-eight and was born in Marsilly, about ten kilometres from La Rochelle. I telephoned Marsilly town hall and found out that for many years her mother, widowed young, ran a small haberdashery on Place de l’Église.
‘She had two daughters, and Hélène, the eldest, took a shorthand-typing course in La Rochelle … Then for a time she worked in the offices of a ship-owner before leaving for Paris, after which there’s no trace of her …
‘She never applied for a copy of her birth certificate, which suggests she never married. Besides, her identity card states single …
‘She had a sister six or seven years her junior who was a manicurist in La Rochelle. Like her elder sibling, she went to Paris, but she returned after ten or so years.
‘She must have built up a tidy sum which allowed her to buy a hair salon, on Place d’Armes, which she still runs … I tried to telephone her … but I only spoke to an assistant who’s looking after the salon while she’s on holiday in the Balearic Islands … I sent a cable to her hotel to ask her to fly home immediately and I’m expecting her later today …
‘This sister, Francine, isn’t married either … The mother died eight years ago … We’re not aware of any other family …’
Maigret, despite himself, had his professional countenance. Anyone would have thought that he was in charge of the investigation and that one of his colleagues was giving him a report in his office.
He missed having his pipes in front of him, which he was in the habit of fiddling with in such circumstances, the view over the Seine through the window, his sturdy armchair with a back he could lean against.
While Lecoeur was speaking he noticed two or three details, in particular that in this lounge that served as a living room there were photographs only of Hélène Lange. On a sideboard were pictures of her aged five or six, in a dress that was too long for her, a thin braid either side of her face.
On the wall, a larger portrait by a skilled photographer showed her aged around twenty, in a romantic pose, her gaze ethereal.
In a third, she was standing at the edge of the sea. She was wearing not a bathing-costume but a white dress fluttering towards the left in the breeze, like a flag, and she was holding a light-coloured, broad-brimmed hat in both hands.
‘Do you know when and how the murder was committed?’
‘It’s hard to piece together the events … We’ve been working on it since yesterday morning, but we’ve barely made any progress …
‘The day before yesterday, that is Monday evening, Hélène Lange had dinner alone in her kitchen. She washed the dishes, because we didn’t find any dirty crockery, got dressed up and went out after switching off all the lights. If you want to know, she ate two soft-boiled eggs. She was wearing a mauve dress and a white woollen stole, as well as a hat that was also white …’
Maigret hesitated but finally couldn’t resist the urge to announce:
‘I know …’
‘Have you already investigated?’
‘No, but on Monday evening, I glimpsed her sitting in front of the bandstand where there was a concert playing …’
‘You don’t know when she left the park?’
‘My wife and I moved on from there before nine thirty on our usual stroll …’
‘Was she on her own?’
‘She was always on her own.’
Lecoeur didn’t try to hide his astonishment.
‘Had you noticed her on other occasions?’
A smiling Maigret nodded.
‘Why?’
‘Here, we spend our time walking and, automatically, people look at one another. They also meet at the same times in the same places …’
‘Do you have an idea?’
‘About what?’
‘About the kind of woman she was?’
‘She certainly wasn’t ordinary, that’s all I know …’
‘Right … I’ll go on … two of the three first-floor bedrooms are rented out … The first is occupied by an engineer from Grenoble, a certain Maleski, and his wife … They left the house a few minutes after Mademoiselle Lange to go to the cinema and they only got back at half past eleven … All the shutters were closed, as usual, but light could be seen between the slats of those on the ground floor … Once in the hallway, they noticed that there was light coming from under the door of the lounge and from Mademoiselle Lange’s bedroom, which is on the right—’
‘Did they not hear anything?’
‘Maleski didn’t hear anything … His wife, although very uncertain, spoke of a murmur of voices … They went to bed almost immediately and nothing woke them until the next morning …
‘The other lodger is called Madame Vireveau, a widow who lives in Rue Lamarck, in Paris … She’s an imposing person in her early sixties, who comes to Vichy every year to shed a few kilos … It’s the first time she’s rented a room from Mademoiselle Lange … In previous years she stayed at a hotel …
‘People say she used to lead a different lifestyle, that her husband was a wealthy man but was too generous, which has left her in difficult circumstances … In short, she’s dripping with fake jewellery and talks like a character in a bad play … She went out at nine p.m … She saw no one and left the house in total darkness …’
‘Does each lodger have their own key?’
‘Yes … The Vireveau widow went to the Carlton bridge club, which she left just before midnight … She walked back, as usual … She doesn’t have a car. The Maleskis have a little motor car but rarely use it during their stay in Vichy and most of the time it’s kept in a local garage …’
‘Were the lights still on?’
‘Hold on, chief … Of course, I wasn’t able to question the Vireveau woman until after the murder had been discovered and the whole street was in turmoil … I don’t know if her imagination is as colourful as her taste in costume jewellery … She claims that on reaching the corner of the street, in other words the intersection of Boulevard de La Salle and Rue du Bourbonnais, she almost bumped into a man … He hadn’t been able to see her coming and she swears he was startled, and raised his hand to his face as if to avoid being recognized—’
‘But she recognized him anyway!’
‘No. She states that she’d be able to identify him all the same if she were to meet him face to face … He was very tall and very strong … A broad gorilla’s chest, she says … He was walking fast, leaning forwards … She was frightened, but she still turned around to look at him as he hurried on his way into town …’
‘A man of what age?’
‘Not young … Not old either … Very strong … Terrifying … She almost ran and only felt safe once the key was in the lock …’
‘Were lights still visible on the ground floor?’
‘That’s the point, they were off, insofar as we can trust her testimony. She didn’t hear anything. She went to bed, so upset that she took a spoonful of peppermint spirit on a sugar lump …’
‘Who discovered the murder?’
‘I’ll get to that, chief. Mademoiselle Lange wanted to rent out her rooms to respectable people, but she wasn’t prepared to provide meals … Nor did she allow them to cook, or even permit them to use a little spirit stove to make coffee in the morning …
‘At around eight o’clock yesterday morning, Madame Maleski came downstairs with her Thermos to fill it with coffee at a nearby café and buy croissants, as she did every day … She didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary … Nor when she returned … What surprised her was not hearing any noise, especially the second time, because Mademoiselle Lange usually rose early and could be heard moving from one room to the next …
‘“I wonder whether she’s ill,” she said to her husband while they ate.
‘Because the landlady was always complaining about her health. At nine o’clock, the couple went downstairs, whereas Madame Vireveau was still in her room and, in the hallway, they found Charlotte dumbstruck—’
‘Charlotte?’
‘A little servant girl whom Mademoiselle Lange employed every morning from nine to twelve to clean the rooms … She cycles over from a village around ten kilometres away and she’s a bit simple …
‘“All the doors are locked,” she said to the Maleskis.
‘On the other mornings, by the time she arrived, the ground-floor doors and windows were open because Mademoiselle Lange always said she needed some fresh air.
‘“Don’t you have the key?”
‘“No … If she’s not there, I may as well go home …”
‘Maleski tried to open the door with the key to his room but wasn’t able to, and in the end he called the police, from the same bar where his wife had just gone to get the coffee.
‘That’s about all. The Vichy police lieutenant soon arrived with a locksmith. The key to the lounge door was missing. The other doors, that of the kitchen and the bedroom, were locked …’
‘In this lounge, here to be precise, on the edge of the rug, Hélène Lange was lying, or rather she was curled up, and she wasn’t a pretty sight because she’d been strangled …
‘She was still wearing her mauve dress, but she’d taken off her stole and hat, which we found on the coat-stand in the hall … The various drawers were open and papers and cardboard boxes were scattered over the floor—’
‘No rape?’
‘Not even attempted … Nothing stolen either, as far as we can tell … The report in this morning’s La Tribune is quite accurate … In a drawer we found five one-hundred-franc notes … The victim’s handbag had been searched, its contents strewn on the floor like the rest, including four hundred francs in ten- and twenty-franc notes as well as some small change and a season ticket for the Grand Casino theatre.’
‘How long ago did she buy this house?’
