Maigret Gets Angry (8 page)

An hour later, it was plain that the
crossing-keeper would sleep well that night, and that was all that Maigret required of him.

As
for him, he had made a point of spilling most of the alcohol that they had been served and he
did not feel too sleepy as he ambled down to the river and a little later walked into the little
garden of L'Ange.

Raymonde looked surprised to see him again so
soon.

‘What about Madame Jeanne?' he
asked.

‘She's still in her room. By the way,
a letter arrived for you. It was delivered just after you left. Maybe the train hadn't
arrived yet. If I hadn't been all alone, I'd have brought it to the
station.'

With a black border, of course.

Monsieur,

I wish you to stop the investigation which I asked you to carry out in a moment of
understandable depression, given my age and the recent shock I have suffered.

This may have led me to interpret certain tragic events in a way that is incompatible with
the facts, and I now regret having disturbed you in your retirement.

Your presence at Orsenne only complicates an already painful situation and I am taking the
liberty of adding that the indiscretion with which you have set about the task I entrusted to
you and the clumsiness you have exhibited so far prompt me to demand your immediate
departure.

I hope you will understand and not insist on upsetting a family under a great deal of
strain.

During my thoughtless visit to Meung-sur-Loire, I left a bundle of ten thousand francs on
your table to cover your
initial expenses. You
will find enclosed a cheque for the same amount. Please consider this case over.

Yours sincerely,

Bernadette Amorelle

The note was indeed in her large, pointed
handwriting, but it wasn't her style. Maigret gave a wry grimace and put the letter and
the cheque in his pocket, convinced that the words he had just read were those of Ernest Malik
rather than the elderly lady.

‘I also have to tell you that Madame Jeanne
asked me earlier when you were planning to leave.'

‘Is she throwing me out?'

Plump Raymonde, whose curves were both sturdy and
soft, blushed a deep red.

‘That's not what I meant at all.
It's just that she claims she's going to be ill for a while. When she has one of her
attacks …'

He glanced covertly at the bottles that were the
main reason for those attacks.

‘And then?'

‘The house is going to be sold any day
now.'

‘Once again!' said Maigret
sardonically. ‘And then what, dear Raymonde?'

‘Don't you worry about me. I'd
rather she'd told you herself. She says that it's not proper for me to be alone in
the house with a man. She heard that the two of us ate together in the kitchen. She scolded
me.'

‘When does she want me to leave?'

‘Tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.'

‘And there are no other inns around here,
are there?'

‘There's one five kilometres
away.'

‘Well, Raymonde, we'll see about that
tomorrow morning.'

‘The thing is I've got no food this
evening and I've been forbidden—'

‘I'll eat up at the lock.'

Which he did. There was a little grocer's
shop for the bargemen where drinks were served, as there are beside most locks. A group of boats
was in the lock and the women, surrounded by their brood, were doing their shopping while the
men came in for a quick drink.

All these people worked for Amorelle and
Campois.

‘Give me a bottle of white wine, a piece of
sausage and half a pound of bread,' he ordered.

There was no restaurant. He sat down at the end
of a table, and watched the water cascading over the lock gates. In the past, the barges used to
make their way slowly along the banks, drawn by heavy horses which a little girl, often barefoot
on the towpath, drove with a stick.

Those were the barges on which the horses used to
sleep too that could still be seen on some canals but which, thanks to Amorelle and
Campois' smoke-belching tug-boats and motorized barges, had disappeared from the Haute
Seine.

The sausage was good, and the wine light, with a
slightly acidic taste. The grocery shop smelled of cinnamon and oil. The upstream lock gates now
open, the tug led its barges like chicks towards the top of the millrace and the lock-keeper
came to have a drink at Maigret's table.

‘I thought you had to leave tonight.'

‘Who told you that?'

The lock-keeper looked sheepish.

‘You know, if we listened to all the
rumours we heard …!'

Malik was fighting back. He wasn't wasting
any time. Had he come all the way to the lock himself?

From a distance, Maigret could see, amid the
foliage, the roofs of the Campois' and the Amorelles' stately houses – that of
the elderly Madame Amorelle and of her son-in-law, that of Ernest Malik, the most luxurious of
all, that of Campois, halfway up the hill, almost rustic, although solidly bourgeois with its
pink walls. On the other side of the water was the quaint, dilapidated little manor house of
Monsieur Groux, who preferred to mortgage his properties rather than see his woods turned into
quarries.

He wasn't far away, Monsieur Groux. You
could see him, bareheaded in the sun, dressed as always in khaki, sitting in a green canoe
moored between two poles and fishing with a rod and line.

There wasn't a breath of wind, no ripples
on the water.

‘You know about these things, don't
you. Tell me, will there be a moon tonight?'

‘That depends what time. It will rise just
before midnight behind the wood you see upstream. It's in its first quarter.'

Maigret was fairly pleased with himself and yet
he couldn't rid himself of a little knot of anxiety that had lodged in his chest and was
growing instead of abating as the time passed.

A
pang of nostalgia too. He had spent an hour at Quai des Orfèvres, with men he knew so well
that they still called him chief, but who …

What had they said to each other after he had
left? That he was missing the job, naturally! That life in his rural retreat wasn't as
rosy as he would have them believe! That he had seized on the first opportunity to experience
the thrills of the past again!

An amateur, in other words! He looked like an
amateur.

‘Another drop of white?'

The lock-keeper didn't say no. He had the
habit of wiping his mouth with his sleeve after every sip.

‘I am sure that young Malik –
Georges-Henry – must have gone fishing lots of times with your son?'

‘Oh yes, sir.'

‘I expect he loved that, didn't
he?'

‘He loved the water, he loved the woods, he
loved animals!'

‘A good boy!'

‘A good boy, yes. Not proud. If you could
have seen the pair of them with the little young lady … They'd often go out together
in the canoe. I'd offer to let them through the lock, even though we don't normally
allow small boats through. But they were the ones who said no. They preferred to carry the boat
to the other side of the lock. I'd see them going home at dusk.'

At dusk, or rather after dusk had fallen, Maigret
himself had an unsavoury job to do. Then, everyone would know. They'd know whether he had
got it wrong, if he was just
an old dog who had
deserved his retirement, or whether he was still good for something.

He paid and set off slowly along the riverbank,
puffing away at his pipe. The wait was long, as if that evening the sun refused to go down. The
shimmering water flowed slowly, silently, with only a barely perceptible murmur. The midges
hovered dangerously close to the surface of the water, taunting the fish and making them
jump.

He saw no one, neither the Malik brothers, nor
their household servants. That evening everything was at a standstill. Shortly before ten
o'clock, leaving behind him the light shining in Jeanne's room at L'Ange and
in the kitchen where Raymonde sat, he made his way to the station, as he had done the previous
night.

The little glasses of white wine had doubtless
had their effect, because the crossing-keeper was not at his post outside his house. Maigret was
able to walk past unseen and follow the track.

Behind the curtain of hazelnut trees, more or
less at the spot where he had hidden the previous night, he found Mimile in position, a calm
Mimile, legs apart, a cigarette that had gone out dangling from his lips, who seemed to be
taking a breath of fresh air.

‘No sign of him yet?'

‘No.'

They stood waiting in silence. From time to time,
they whispered a few words. As on the previous night, there was a window open in Bernadette
Amorelle's apartment and they occasionally glimpsed the old lady moving around in the
faint glow.

It
was not until half past ten that a figure appeared in the Maliks' garden and things
happened exactly as they had done the night before. The man was carrying a parcel and his dogs
ran up to him then followed him to the door of the top kennel. He went inside, stayed a lot
longer than the previous night and finally went back into the house, where a light went on at a
first-floor window, which opened for a moment while the shutters were being closed.

The dogs roamed the gardens before settling down
for the night, coming to sniff the air not far from the wall, doubtless sensing the presence of
the two men.

‘Shall I go, boss?' whispered
Mimile.

One of the Great Danes snarled, as if about to
growl, but the circusman had already thrown an object in its direction which landed on the
ground with a soft thud.

‘Unless they're better trained than I
think,' muttered Mimile. ‘But I'm not scared of that. These bourgeois folk
don't know how to train dogs and even if they're given a well-trained animal, they
soon spoil it.'

He was right. The two dogs prowled around the
object, sniffing. Maigret, anxious, had let his pipe go out. Eventually one of the dogs gingerly
picked up the meat in its mouth and shook it, while the other one, jealous, gave a menacing
growl.

‘There's enough for everyone!'
sniggered Mimile, throwing a second piece. ‘No need to fight, my beauties!'

The whole thing lasted barely five minutes. The
pale hounds lurched about for a moment, then turned in circles, sick, and finally lay down on
their sides. At that moment, Maigret was not proud of himself.

‘It's done, boss. Shall we go?'

It was better to wait a little until it was
completely dark and all the lights were out. Mimile was growing impatient.

‘The moon will be up shortly and
it'll be too late.'

Mimile had brought a rope which was already tied
to the trunk of a young ash tree beside the track, close up against the wall.

‘I'll go first.'

The wall was around three metres high, but it was
in good condition, with no bulges.

‘It will be harder to climb back over from
here. Unless we find a ladder in their wretched garden. Oh look! There's a wheelbarrow
down that little path. We can stand it up against the wall. That'll help.'

Mimile was excited, happy, like a man back in his
element.

‘If anyone had told me that I'd be
doing this thing with you …'

They neared the former kennel or stable, which
was a single-storey brick building with a concrete yard enclosed by a fence.

‘No need for a torch,' whispered
Mimile fiddling with the lock.

The door was open and they immediately caught a
strong whiff of mouldy straw.

‘Close the door! Well, it looks to me as if
there's no one in here!'

Maigret switched on his torch and they saw
nothing around them other than a broken old wooden stall, a mildewed harness hanging from a
hook, a whip on the floor, and straw mixed with hay and dust.

‘Down below,' said Maigret. ‘There must be a
hatch or an opening of some kind.'

They simply had to shift the straw to find a
robust trap door with heavy hinges. The door was secured only with a bolt, which Maigret drew
back slowly with a heavy heart.

‘What are you waiting for?' hissed
Mimile.

Nothing. And yet it had been years since he had
felt that particular emotion.

‘Do you want me to open it?'

No. He raised the trap door. Not a sound came
from the cellar, and yet they both instantly had the feeling that there was a living creature
down there.

The torch suddenly lit up the dark space below
them, and the pale rays lighted on a face, a shape that leaped up.

‘Stay calm,' said Maigret
quietly.

He tried to track the shape with his torch as it
darted from one wall to another like a hunted animal. He said mechanically:

‘I am a friend.'

Mimile suggested:

‘Shall I go down?'

And a voice from below said:

‘Don't touch me!'

‘Don't worry! No one's going to
touch you.'

Maigret talked, talked as in a dream or rather as
if trying to soothe a child who is having a nightmare. And the scene did indeed resemble a
nightmare.

‘Stay calm. Let's get you out of
here.'

‘What if I don't want to come
out?'

The shrill, febrile voice of a mad child.

‘Shall I go down?' Mimile offered
again, keen to be done with things.

‘Listen, Georges-Henry! I am a friend. I know
everything.'

And suddenly it was as if he had spoken the magic
words. The boy's agitation abruptly ceased. There was a few seconds' silence, then a
changed voice asked warily: