“That’s a nice job!”

  They had nothing more to do here. No more to discover in the room of a poor girl whose sole treasure consisted of a box of letters. Probably she hadn’t understood them all. It didn’t matter.

  “Are you coming, Maigret?”

  And, to the doctor:

  “Will you take charge of moving the body?”

  “To the morgue?”

  “A post-mortem will be necessary. I don’t see how…”

  He turned to the two policemen.

  “Don’t let anyone enter.”

  He went down the stairs, the cardboard box under his arm, and had to squeeze his way through the crowd gathered below. He hadn’t considered the question of a car. They were on the far side of town. Of his own accord, the Bordeaux reporter hurried forward.

  “Where would you like me to drive you?”

  “To my home.”

  “On Rue Clemenceau?”

  For the most part, they made the journey in silence. Only when they were a hundred yards from his house did Chabot murmur:

  “I suppose that’s the end of the case.”

  He couldn’t have been too sure, because he examined Maigret out of the corner of his eye. And the latter gave no sign of concurrence, said neither yes nor no.

  “I can see no reason, if he wasn’t guilty, for…”

  He stopped short, because, hearing the car, his mother, who must have been consumed with impatience, was already opening the door.

  “I was wondering what had happened. I saw people running as though something was going on.”

  He thanked the reporter, felt he had to offer him something:

  “A brandy?”

  “No, thanks. I must telephone my paper quickly.”

  “The joint will be overcooked. I was expecting you at half past twelve. You look tired, Julien. Don’t you think, Jules, that he looks pale?”

  “You must leave us for a moment, Mama.”

  “Don’t you want to eat?”

  “Not right away.”

  She clutched hold of Maigret.

  “Is there anything wrong?”

  “Nothing to worry you.”

  He preferred to tell her the truth, or at least part of the truth.

  “Alain Vernoux has committed suicide.”

  She simply said:

  “Ah!”

  Then, shaking her head, she went off to the kitchen.

  “Let’s go into my study. Unless you are hungry?”

  “No.”

  “Help yourself to a drink.”

  He would have liked a glass of beer, but he knew there was none in the house. He looked in the liqueur cabinet, took out, at random, a bottle of Pernod.

  “Rose will bring you water and ice.”

  Chabot had collapsed into his armchair, where his father’s head, before his own, had worn a darker patch in the leather. The shoe box was on the desk, with the ribbon, which had been retied.

  The Magistrate urgently needed to be reassured. His nerves were on edge.

  “Why don’t you take a little brandy?”

  From the way Chabot glanced at the door, Maigret, realized that it was at his mother’s wish that he had given up drinking.

  “I prefer not to.”

  “As you please.”

  In spite of the mild temperature that day, a fire continued to blaze in the fireplace, and Maigret, who was too hot, had to move away from it.

  “What do you think of it?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of what he’s done. Why, if he were not guilty…”

  “You read some of his letters, didn’t you?”

  Chabot lowered his head.

  “Superintendent Féron invaded Louise’s rooms yesterday, questioned her, took her to the police station, kept her all night in a cell.”

  “He acted without my instructions.”

  “I know. He did it, all the same. This morning, Alain hurried to see her and learned everything.”

  “I don’t see what difference that made.”

  He could tell very well, but was refusing to admit it.

  “You think it’s because of that… ?”

  “I think that was enough. Tomorrow, the whole town would have known. Féron would probably have gone on badgering the girl; they would finally have condemned her on grounds of prostitution.”

  “He has been imprudent. But it’s not a reason for taking one’s own life.”

  “It depends on who you are.”

  “You’re convinced he is not guilty.”

  “And you?”

  “I think that everyone will believe him guilty and be satisfied.”

  Maigret looked at him in surprise.

  “You mean to say you’re going to close the case?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know any more.”

  “Do you remember what Alain told us?”

  “What about?”

  “That a lunatic has his own logic. A lunatic who’s lived all his life without anyone perceiving his madness does not set out all of a sudden to kill without reason. There must be provocation at least. There must be a cause, which may appear insufficient to a person in his senses, but which appears sufficient to him.

  “Robert de Courçon was the first victim, and, in my opinion, that’s the one that counts, because it’s the only one that might provide us with a clue.

  “Public opinion doesn’t just spring up out of nothing, either.”

  “You trust the ideas of the masses?”

  “It can be mistaken in its demonstrations. However, almost always, I’ve been able to recognize over the course of the years that there’s some serious foundation for it. I would say that the masses have an instinct…”

  “So that it really is Alain…”

  “I haven’t come to that yet. When Robert de Courçon was killed, the townspeople associated the two houses on Rue Rabelais, and, at that time, there was no question of madness. Courçon’s murder was not necessarily the deed of a madman or a maniac. It was possible there were precise reasons for someone deciding to kill him, or to do it in a moment of anger.”

  “Go on.”

  Chabot was giving up the struggle. Maigret could have told him anything, and he would have concurred. He felt that his career, his life, was in the process of being destroyed.

  “I know no more than you. There have been two more crimes, one after the other, both inexplicable, both carried out in the same manner, as if the murderer meant to emphasize there was only one and the self-same guilty party.”

  “I thought that criminals generally kept to one method, always the same.”

  “I’m wondering, myself, why he was in such a hurry.”

  “In such a hurry over what?”

  “To kill once more. Then to kill yet again. As though to establish fully, in the public mind, that a criminal lunatic was going about the streets.”

  At this, Chabot raised his head sharply.

  “You mean it’s not a lunatic?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s a question I’m sorry I didn’t discuss more thoroughly with Alain Vernoux. The little that he told us about it sticks in my mind. Even a lunatic does not necessarily act like a lunatic.”

  “That’s obvious. Otherwise, there would be none left at large.”

  “Nor is it, necessarily, because he’s a lunatic that he kills.”

  “I don’t follow you any more. What’s your conclusion?”

  “I’ve come to no conclusion.”

  They jumped when they heard the telephone. Chabot lifted the receiver, changed his attitude, his voice.

  “But of course, madame. He is here. I’ll pass him on to you.”

  And, to Maigret:

  “Your wife.”

  She was saying at the other end of the line:

  “Is that you? I’m not disturbing your lunch? Are you still at the table?”

  “No.”

  It served no purpose to tell her he had not yet eaten.

  “Your chief phoned me half an hour ago and asked me if you were definitely returning tomorrow morning. I didn’t know what to reply, because when you telephoned me you didn’t seem certain. He told me, if I was phoning you again, to inform you that the daughter of some senator or other disappeared two days ago. It’s not yet in the newspapers. It seems that it’s very important, that there’s some risk of a scandal. Do you know who it is?”

  “No.”

  “He gave a name, but I’ve forgotten it.”

  “In fact, he wants me to return without fail?”

  “He didn’t put it quite like that. But I gathered he’d be glad if you’d take charge of the case yourself.”

  “Is it raining?”

  “It’s wonderful weather. What are you going to decide?”

  “I shall do my utmost to be in Paris by tomorrow morning. There must surely be a night train. I haven’t yet looked in the timetable.”

  Chabot signed to him that there was a night train.

  “Is everything going well at Fontenay?”

  “Everything’s going well.”

  “Give my regards to the Magistrate.”

  “I shan’t forget.”

  When he had hung up, he couldn’t have told whether his friend was dejected or delighted to find that he was leaving.

  “You have to return?”

  “It would be best.”

  “Perhaps it’s time we went to luncheon?”

  Maigret left the white box, which affected him somewhat as a coffin might, with regret.

  “Don’t let’s mention any of this in front of my mother.”

  They had not yet reached the dessert when there was a ring at the door. Rose went to open it, came back to announce:

  “It’s the Superintendent of Police asking for…”

  “Show him into my study.”

  “I have done that. He’s waiting. He says it’s not urgent.”

  Madame Chabot was making an effort to talk of one thing or another as if nothing were going on. She dug up names from her memory, people who were dead or who had left town a long time ago, whose history she reeled off.

  At last they got up from the table.

  “Shall I have the coffee brought to your study?”

  It was served to all three men, and Rose placed glasses and the bottle of brandy on the tray with an almost ritual gesture. They had to wait for the door to be shut again.

  “Well?”

  “I went there.”

  “A cigar?”

  “No, thanks. I haven’t had lunch yet.”

  “Would you like me to order something for you?”

  “I called my wife to say I wouldn’t be long in coming home.”

  “How did it go?”

  “The butler opened the door to me and I asked him if I could see Hubert Vernoux. He left me in the vestibule while he went to inform him. It took a long time. A boy of seven or eight came to look at me from the top of the stairs, and I heard his mother’s voice calling him. Someone else observed me through the crack of a door, an old woman, but I don’t know if it was Madame Vernoux or her sister.”

  “What did Vernoux say?”

  “He appeared from the end of the hallway and, when he was three or four yards from me, he asked, still coming forward:

  “ ‘Have you found him?’

  “I told him I had bad news for him. He didn’t invite me into the living room, left me standing on the mat, looking at me from his full height, but I could see clearly that his lips and fingers were trembling.

  “ ‘Your son is dead,’ I eventually told him.

  “And he replied:

  “ ‘You’ve killed him?’

  “ ‘He committed suicide, this morning, in his mistress’s room.’ ”

  “Did he seem surprised?” asked the Examining Magistrate.

  “It seemed to me that it gave him a shock. He looked as though he was about to ask a question, but merely murmured:

  “ ‘So he did have a mistress!’

  “He didn’t ask me who the mistress was, or what had become of her. He went toward the door to open it, and the last words he spoke, on ushering me out, were:

  “ ‘Now, perhaps, these people will leave us in peace.’

  “He jerked his chin toward the onlookers gathered on the sidewalk, the groups standing on the other side of the street, the reporters who were taking advantage of the moment he stood on the doorstep to photograph him.”

  “He didn’t try to avoid them?”

  “On the contrary. When he saw them, he paused, facing them squarely, looking them in the eyes, then, slowly, he closed the door, and I heard him fasten the bolts.”

  “How’s the girl?”

  “I called in at the hospital. Chabiron is still at her bedside. They aren’t sure yet whether she will pull through, because of something wrong with her heart.”

  Without touching his coffee, he gulped down his glass of brandy, rose to his feet.

  “May I go and eat now?”

  Chabot nodded and rose in his turn to see him out.

  “What shall I do next?”

  “I don’t know yet. Call in at my office. The Public Prosecutor’s meeting me there at three o’clock.”

  “Just in case, I’ve left two men outside the house on Rue Rabelais. The crowd’s filing by, stopping, arguing in low voices.”

  “Is it quiet?”

  “Now that Alain Vernoux’s committed suicide, I don’t think there’s any more danger. You know how it is.”

  Chabot looked at Maigret as though to say:

  “You see!”

  He would have given anything for his friend to have replied:

  “Of course. It’s all over.”

  Only, Maigret made no reply.

  * * *

  8

  A little before the bridge, as he was coming down from the Chabots’ house, Maigret had turned to the right and, for the past ten minutes, he had been following a long road that was neither in the town nor in the country.

  To start with, the houses, white, red, gray, including the large residence and storehouses of a wine merchant, were still attached one to another, but it didn’t bear the stamp of Rue de la République, for instance, and some of them, whitewashed, without an upper floor, were almost cottages.

  Then there had been some gaps, alleyways that allowed glimpses of kitchen gardens descending the slight slope toward the river, once or twice a white goat attached to a stake.

  He encountered hardly a soul on the sidewalks, but through open doors he noticed, in the half-light, families seemingly motionless, listening to the radio or eating pastries, or else a man in his shirt sleeves reading the newspaper, somewhere else again a little old woman dozing beside a grandfather clock with a copper pendulum.

  Little by little, the gardens encroached more and more, the gaps between the walls grew wider, the Vendée curved in close to the road, bringing down with it the broken branches from the last squalls.

  Maigret, who had refused to let himself be driven by car, was starting to regret it, for he hadn’t thought it was such a long way, and the sun was already hot on the back of his neck. He took almost half an hour to reach the Gros-Noyer crossroads, beyond which there seemed to be only meadows.

  Three young men dressed in navy blue, their hair oiled, who were leaning against the door of an inn and probably did not know who he was, looked at him with the aggressive irony of peasants for the town-dweller who has strayed among them.

  “Madame Page’s house?” he asked them.

  “You mean Léontine’s?”

  “I don’t know her first name.”

  That was enough to set them laughing. They found it odd that anyone shouldn’t know Léontine’s first name.

  “If you mean her, try that door over there.”

  The house they pointed out to him consisted only of a ground floor, so low that Maigret could touch the roof with his hand. The door, painted green, was divided in two, like some stable doors, the upper part being open, the lower closed.

  At first, he saw no one in the kitchen, which was very clean, with a white earthenware stove, a round table covered with checked oilcloth, some lilac in a multicolored vase, doubtless won at a fair; the mantelpiece was crowded with knickknacks and photographs.

  He pulled a little bell hanging from a piece of string.

  “What is it?”

  Maigret saw her come out of the bedroom through a door on the left: these were the only rooms in the house. The woman could have been anything from fifty to sixty-five years old. As dry and hard as the chambermaid in the hotel had been, she looked him over with peasantlike mistrust, without coming to the door.

  “What do you want?”

  Then right away:

  “Isn’t there a photograph of you in the newspaper?”

  Maigret heard someone move in the room. A man’s voice inquired:

  “Who is it, Léontine?”

  “The Chief Inspector from Paris.”

  “Chief Inspector Maigret?”

  “I think that’s his name.”

  “Ask him to come in.”

  Without moving, she repeated:

  “Come in.”

  He himself lifted the latch to open the lower part of the door. Léontine did not invite him to sit down, said nothing to him.

  “You were Robert de Courçon’s housekeeper, weren’t you?”

  “For fifteen years. The police and reporters have already asked me all sorts of questions. I know nothing.”

  From where he was, the Chief Inspector could now see a white bedroom with the walls adorned with colored prints, the foot of a high walnut bed topped by a red eiderdown, and the smoke of a pipe, which reached his nostrils. The man was still moving about.

  “I want to see what he looks like…” he was muttering.

  And she, to Maigret, in an unfriendly voice:

  “Did you hear what my husband said? Go in. He can’t leave his bed.”

  Sitting there, was a man whose face was covered by a beard; newspapers and popular novels were strewn around him. He was smoking a clay pipe with a long stem and, on the bedside table, within reach of his arm, was a liter of white wine and a glass.

  “It’s his legs,” explained Léontine. “Ever since he was jammed between the buffers of two freight cars. He used to work on the railway. It affected his bones.”

  The lace curtains softened the light and two pots of geraniums brightened the window sill.

 

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