Inspector Cadaver (20 page)

It was a quite extraordinary moment, in that
it probably lasted for no more than a second, but it was like those dreams which, people
say, seem to go on for a long, long time. Years later, Maigret could still have pointed
out the exact spot where it had happened, the part of the pavement on which his feet had
been standing, the very flagstone on which his shadow had fallen, he could not only have
reconstituted the smallest details of the scene, but also recalled the wafted smells and
the vibrations of the air which had the feel of a childhood memory.

It was the first time that year that
he'd gone out without an overcoat, the first time he'd been in the country
at ten in the morning. Even his large pipe tasted of springtime. It was still chilly.
Maigret walked heavily, hands in his trouser pickets. Félicie walked by his side,
just a little in front of him, having to take two quick steps to his one.

They were both walking past the front of a
new shop built of pink brick. In the window were a few vegetables, two or three kinds of
cheese and a selection of sausages in an earthenware dish.

Félicie put on a spurt, stretched out
one arm, pushed open a glazed door, and it was then, sparked off by the bell which was
set ringing, that it happened.

Now, this shop doorbell was no ordinary
doorbell. Metal
tubes dangled behind the door. When the door opened,
the tubes knocked against each other and began to chime, making light, ethereal music.

Long ago, when Maigret was a boy, there had
been a pork-butcher in his village who had had his shop completely refurbished. It had a
set of chimes just like this one.

That is why that moment seemed to hang
suspended. For a time whose length was impossible to determine, Maigret was transported
out of the living present and saw his surroundings as though he were not inside the skin
of the thick-set detective chief inspector who Félicie had in tow.

It was as if the boy he had once been was
hiding somewhere, invisible, looking on with a strong urge to burst out laughing.

Get a grip! What was this solemn, bulky
adult doing in a place which was as insubstantial as a child's toy, following
Félicie, who was wearing a ridiculous red hat that looked straight out of the pages
of a children's picture book?

An investigation? Was he looking into a
murder? Hunting down the perpetrator? And doing so while the little birds chirruped and
the grass was an innocent green and the bricks as pink as Turkish delight and there were
new flowers everywhere and even the leeks in the window looked like flowers?

Yes, he would remember this moment later and
not always fondly. For years and years, it was a tradition at Quai des Orfèvres, on
certain frisky spring mornings, to call out to Maigret with heavy sarcasm:

‘Oh, Maigret …'

‘What?'

‘Félicie's here!'

And in his mind's eye he would see
that slim figure in the striking clothes, those wide eyes the colour of forgetme-not,
the pert nose and especially the hat, that giddy, crimson bonnet perched on the top of
her head with a bronze-green feather shaped like a blade stuck in it.

‘
Félicie's
here!
'

A growl. Everyone knew that Maigret always
began growling like a bear whenever anyone reminded him of Félicie, who had given
him more trouble than all the ‘hard' men who had been put behind bars
courtesy of the inspector.

That May morning, standing in the doorway of
the shop, Félicie was all too real. Above the transparent advertising stickers for
starch and metal polish was written, in yellow letters,
Mélanie Chochoi,
Groceries
. Félicie waited until the inspector decided to emerge from his
daydream.

Finally he took one step forwards, found
himself in the real world once more and picked up the thread of his investigation into
the murder of Jules Lapie, also known as Pegleg.

Her features sharp and aggressively
sarcastic, Félicie waited for his questions as she had been doing all morning.
Behind the counter, a short, motherly woman, Mélanie Chochoi, hands crossed over
her ample stomach, gazed at the strange couple formed by the detective chief inspector
of the Police Judiciaire and Pegleg's housekeeper.

Maigret was drawing gently on his pipe,
looking around him at the brown racks full of tinned foods and then,
through the shop window, out at the unfinished road, where the recently planted
saplings were still no more than the frail offspring of trees. Taking his watch from his
pocket, he spoke at last:

‘You came in here at quarter past ten,
you said. That's correct, isn't it? How can you be sure that was the exact
time?'

A thin, scornful smile parted
Félicie's lips.

‘Come and see for yourself,' she
said.

When he was standing next to her, she
pointed to the back of the shop, which was Mélanie Chochoi's kitchen. In the
semi-darkness could be seen a rattan chair on which a marmalade had rolled itself into a
ball on a red cushion; just above it, on a shelf, an alarm clock registered 10.17.

Félicie was right. She was always
right. The grocer was wondering what these people had come to her shop for.

‘What did you buy?'

‘A pound of butter … Would you
get me a pound of butter, Madame Chochoi? The inspector here wants me to do exactly what
I did the day before yesterday. Slightly salted, wasn't it? … Wait …
You can also give me a packet of peppercorns, a tin of tomatoes and two loin chops
…'

Everything was strange in the world which
Maigret inhabited that morning, and it required an effort on his part to convince
himself that he was not some sort of giant floundering through a toy construction set.

A few kilometres out of Paris, he had turned
his back on the banks of the Seine. At Poissy he had climbed the slope and suddenly,
surrounded by the reality of fields
and orchards, he had discovered
this remote world whose existence was signalled by a signboard on the side of a new
road: Jeanneville Village.

A few years earlier there would have been
the same fields, the same meadows, the same groves of trees here as elsewhere. Then a
man of business had come this way, with a wife or mistress named Jeanne no doubt, hence
the name Jeanneville which had been given to this world in gestation.

Roads had been laid out and avenues planted
with still uncertain saplings, their thin trunks wrapped in straw to protect them from
the cold.

Villas and houses had been built
willy-nilly. It did not amount either to a village or a town, it was a universe apart,
incomplete, with gaps between the buildings, wooden fences, areas of waste-ground,
ridiculously useless gas-lamps on streets which were still only names on blue signs:

‘My Dream' … ‘The
Last Lap' … ‘Dunrentin' … each poky house had its name
inscribed in a decorated plaque, and lower down the hill were Poissy, the silver ribbon
of the Seine, where all too real barges plied, and railway tracks on which real trains
ran. Further along the plateau, farms could be seen, and the steeple at Orgeval.

But here the only manifestation of true
reality was the old woman who ran the grocery, Mélanie Chochoi, who had been
uprooted by the developers from a neighbouring town and given a fine, brand-new shop so
that buying and selling would not be entirely absent from this new universe.

‘Anything else, dear?'

‘Wait a minute … What else did I
buy on Monday?'

‘Hairpins.'

Mélanie's shop sold everything,
toothbrushes, face-powder, paraffin, picture postcards …

‘I think that's all, isn't
it?'

From the shop, as Maigret had already
checked, Pegleg's house could not be seen, nor the path that ran round the outside
of the garden.

‘The milk!' said Félicie,
remembering. ‘I was forgetting the milk!'

She explained to the inspector, still with
that air of sovereign disdain:

‘You've been asking so many
questions that I almost forgot my jug of milk … Anyway, I had it on Monday. I left
it in the kitchen. A blue jug with white dots, you'll see it next to the butagaz
stove. Isn't that so, Madame Chochoi?'

Every time she supplied any piece of
information, she did so in a loud voice, like Caesar's wife who must be above
suspicion.

She's the one who insists that nothing
should be overlooked.

‘And what did I tell you last Monday,
Madame Chochoi?'

‘I do believe you said my
Zouzon's got worms, seeing as how he's always swallowing his fur
…'

Zouzon was obviously the tomcat snoozing on
the red cushion on the chair.

‘Wait a sec … You took your
Ciné-Journal
and one of them twenty-five sou novels.'

At one end of the counter was a display of
the gaudy covers of popular magazines and books, but Félicie did
not even give them a second glance and just shrugged her shoulders.

‘How much do I owe you? Please hurry,
because the inspector insists that everything should happen the way it did on Monday,
and I didn't stay here this long then.'

Maigret broke in:

‘Tell me, Madame Chochoi, since
we're talking about Monday morning … When you were serving this young lady,
did you happen to hear the sound of a car?'

The grocer stares out at the sunlit
landscape through the window.

‘I couldn't rightly say …
Wait a bit … It isn't as if we get a great many cars round here. You just
hear them passing by on the main road … What day was it? … I can remember a
small red car which drove past behind the house where the Sébiles live. But as to
saying what day that was …'

Just in case, Maigret jotted down in his
notebook:
Red Car, Sébile
.

Then he was outside again with Félicie,
who swayed her hips as she walked and wore her coat over her shoulders like a cape,
leaving the sleeves trailing loosely behind her.

‘This way. When I go home, I always
take this short cut.'

A narrow path between kitchen gardens.

‘Did you meet anyone?'

‘Wait. You'll see.'

He saw. She was right. As they joined a new,
wider path, the postman, who had just come up the hill, passed them on his bike, turned
to them and cried:

‘Nothing for you, Mademoiselle
Félicie!'

She eyed Maigret:

‘He saw me here on Monday, at the same
time, just like almost every morning.'

They skirted an appallingly ugly house
covered with sky-blue stucco and set in a garden filled with lifeless earthenware
animals then walked along a hedge. Félicie pushed open the side-gate. Her trailing
coat brushed against a row of redcurrant bushes.

‘Here we are. This is the garden.
You'll see the arbour in a moment.'

They had left the house at a few minutes
before ten by the other door, which opened on to a wide avenue. To get to the shop and
come back they had described almost a full circle. They walked past a border of
carnations, which would soon flower, and beds of young salad plants of a delicate green
colour.

‘
He
should have been here
…' Félicie said sternly, pointing to a tightly drawn string and a
dibble pushed firmly into the earth. ‘
He
had started pricking out his
tomatoes. The row is half finished. When
he
failed to appear, I assumed
he
had gone off for a glass of rosé …'

‘Did he drink a lot of that?'

‘When he was thirsty. You'll
find his glass upside down on the barrel in the wine store.'

The garden of a careful man with a modest
private income, the kind of a house that thousands of hard-pressed citizens dream of
building, where they might spend their declining years. They moved out of the sunlight
and stepped into the bluish shade of the yard, which was a continuation of the garden.
There was an arbour
on the right. On the table in the arbour was a
small decanter containing some strong spirit and a glass with a thick bottom.

‘You saw the bottle and the glass. Now
this morning you told me your employer never drank spirits when he was by himself, and
especially not what's in that decanter.'

She gives him a defiant look. She seems to
be constantly presenting him, and not by accident, with a sight of the clear blue of her
pupils, so that he can see in them for himself a confirmation of her total innocence.

Even so, she retorts: ‘He was only my
employer.'

‘I know. You already told me.'

Good God! How irritating it is to have to
deal with someone like Félicie! What else has she said in that shrill voice which
grates of Maigret's nerves? Oh yes, she said:

‘It's not my business to reveal
secrets which are not mine to tell. To some people I may have been just his live-in
housekeeper. But that was not how he saw me, and one day people will discover that
…'

‘Discover what?'

‘Oh nothing!'

‘Are you implying that you were
sleeping with Pegleg?'

‘What do you take me for?'

Taking a risk, Maigret asks:

‘His daughter, then?'

‘It's no good questioning me.
One day, perhaps …'

That was Félicie for you! Stiff as an
ironing board, acid-tongued, capricious, a sharp face badly daubed with powder and
lipstick, a little housemaid who puts on airs at a Sunday dance, and then suddenly an
unnerving beadiness appears
in her eye, or maybe something resembling
a distant smile of contemptuous irony crosses her lips.

‘If he had a drink when he was by
himself, it was no business of mine.'

In fact, old Jules Lapie, usually known as
Pegleg, had not had a drink by himself. Of that Maigret is quite certain. A man who
works in his garden, with his straw hat on his head and clogs on his feet, does not
suddenly abandon his tomato seedlings, bring out the decanter of old brandy from the
sideboard and pour himself a glass in the arbour.