Félicie (12 page)

What emerges from these increasingly rushed
comings and goings? That
they
're in a hurry. That
they
need to find
something as soon as they can. Ergo
they
haven't found it yet.

Which is why Maigret also feels a feverish need
for haste.
True, he has the same feeling every time he puts any distance
between himself and Cape Horn, as if he were expecting some catastrophe to happen in his
absence.

He removes the rubber band around his notebook
and tears out a sheet.

Big round-up tonight, ninth and eighteenth
arrondissements

‘Give this to Inspector Piaulet.
He'll understand.'

Back out on the street, his eye again lingers
over the terrace of the café, where all people have to do is enjoy life and breathe in the
spring air. What the hell! Another quick beer. His close-cut moustache still flecked with froth,
he sinks into the back seat of a taxi.

‘Poissy first … and I'll tell
you from there …'

He struggles to stay awake. With his eyes
half-closed, he vows that when the case is solved, he will sleep for twenty-four hours. He
pictures his room, window wide open, the play of sunshine on the counterpane, the familiar
household noises, Madame Maigret moving about on tiptoe and saying sh! to noisy delivery
men.

But that, as the song goes, is what never happens
for you. You go on dreaming, you promise yourself you'll live that dream, you swear it,
and then, when the moment comes, the damned phone rings, even though Madame Maigret would like
to strangle it, like some evil monster.

‘Hello? … Speaking …'

And Maigret is off again!

‘Where to now, sir?'

‘Go up the slope, on
the left. I'll tell you where to stop.'

His impatience returns despite his drowsiness.
It's all he has thought about since his visit to Gastinne-Renette. Why didn't he
think of it sooner? But he was getting very warm, as they say in children's guessing
games. At first, the business with the three bedrooms had struck him. Then he had been diverted.
He had been deflected by his theory about jealousy.

‘On the right … Yes. The third house
along … Listen, I'd like you to stay here all night. Have you eaten? … No?
… Wait a minute … Lucas! Come here, would you? … Anything happened? Is
Félicie there? … What was that? … She asked you in for a coffee and a glass of
brandy? … Of course not! You're wrong. It's not because she's afraid.
It's because this morning I told off a silly nurse who was sniggering at her. Her
gratitude to me has rebounded on you, that's all. Make the most of the car. Go to the
Anneau d'Or. Have dinner. And see to it the driver gets his. Stay in contact with the
woman in the post office. Say she can expect to be disturbed tonight by the phone … Is the
bike here?'

‘I saw it in the garden leaning against the
wall of the wine store.'

Félicie is watching from the doorway. When
the taxi drives off and Maigret walks towards her, she asks, with her mistrust renewed:

‘So you went to Paris
after
all
?'

He knows what she is thinking. She is wondering
if he went back to the restaurant where they'd had lunch, if he succeeded in tracing the
man with grey hair, the
overcoat and the muffler, and if the man has talked
despite her sorry little note.

‘Come with me, Félicie. This is not
the time for playing games.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘Upstairs. Come on.'

He opens the door to old Lapie's
bedroom.

‘Think before you answer … When
Jacques had this room for several months, what items of furniture, what things were in
it?'

She wasn't expecting this question and she
has to think. She looks round the room.

‘First there was the brass bedstead which
is now in the lumber room. What I mean when I say lumber room is the room next to mine, the one
I was in for those few months. Since then we've used it as a dump for everything
that's cluttering up the house and in the autumn we even store apples there.'

‘The bed … And a … What else?
… The washstand?'

‘No. It was the same one.'

‘The chairs?'

‘Wait. There were chairs with leather
seats, which we took down to the dining room.'

‘The wardrobe?'

He has kept the wardrobe until last and he is so
tense that his teeth bite hard the stem of his pipe, cracking the vulcanite stem.

‘It was the same one.'

He is suddenly deflated. He feels that since his
visit to Gastinne-Renette he has been in a furious hurry only
to be brought
up short by a blank wall, or even worse, a vacuum.

‘When I say it was the same, it was the
same, though not really. There are two identical wardrobes in the house. They were bought at an
auction three, maybe four years ago, I can't remember which. I wasn't best pleased
because I would rather have had wardrobes with mirrors. In the whole house there isn't a
mirror where you can get a full view of yourself.'

Phew! If only she knew what a load she has just
taken off his mind! He loses interest in her. He rushes into her room, through which he passes
like a whirlwind, enters the room beyond, the one turned into a lumber room, opens the window
and savagely flings open the slatted shutters, which were fully closed.

Why hadn't it occurred to him before? There
is everything in this room: a roll of linoleum, old mats, chairs stacked on top of each other
the way they are in a brasserie after hours. There are racks of deal shelves which are probably
used for storing apples in winter, a chest containing an old Japy hand-pump, two tables and
lastly, behind all this jumble of junk, a wardrobe like the one in the old man's room.
Maigret is in such a hurry that he knocks over the disassembled sections of the brass bed which
lean against a wall. He moves one of the tables, clambers on to it and runs his hand through the
thick layer of dust on the other side of the frieze running round the top of the wardrobe.

‘You don't have some sort of tool I
could use?'

‘What sort of tool?'

‘Screwdriver, chisel,
pincers, anything …'

Dust settles on his hair. Félicie has gone
downstairs. He hears her walk across the garden and go into the wine store. She finally
reappears holding a cold chisel and a hammer.

‘What are you trying to do?'

Remove the slats from the back! Actually,
it's not too difficult. One of them is almost loose. Underneath, he feels paper. Maigret
takes hold of it and soon works free a packet wrapped in an old newspaper.

He looks down at Félicie and sees that she
has gone quite pale and stiff as she raises her eyes to him.

‘What's in the packet?'

‘Not the faintest idea!'

She has rediscovered her sharp voice and that
disdainful look.

He climbs down off the table.

‘We'll soon find out, won't we?
You're sure you don't know?'

Does he believe her? Or doesn't he? It is
as if he's playing a game of cat and mouse. He takes his time, examines the paper before
unwrapping it

‘It's a newspaper and it's over
a year old … Aha! … Did you know, Félicie, there were such riches in the
house?'

Because what he is holding is a wad of
one-thousand-franc notes.

‘Hands off! No touching!'

He climbs back on to the table, removes all the
slats from the top of the wardrobe and makes sure that nothing else is hidden there.

‘We'll be more
comfortable downstairs. Come on.'

He is jubilant. He sits down at the kitchen
table. Maigret has always had a weakness for kitchens which are always full of wholesome smells
and the sight of appetizing eatables: fresh vegetables, fresh meat oozing blood, chickens being
plucked. The decanter from which Félicie offered a glass to Lucas is still there, and he
helps himself before he starts counting the notes like some conscientious cashier.

‘Two hundred and ten … eleven …
twelve … ah, here are two stuck together … thirteen. … fourteen …
Two hundred and twenty three, four … seven … eight …'

He looks at her. Her eyes are glued to the notes;
all the colour has drained from her face, where the traces of where she was hit in the night now
show up more clearly.

‘Two hundred and twenty-nine thousand
francs, Félicie … Well, what do you make of that? Two hundred and twenty-nine
thousand francs in notes hidden in the bedroom of your boyfriend, Pétillon …

‘Because you do realize that it was in his
room that the money was hidden, don't you? The man who now has such an urgent need of the
money knew exactly where it was. There was just one thing he never suspected: that there were
two wardrobes. How could he know that, when Lapie went back to occupying his room, he carried
his obsessions to the point of taking his own wardrobe with him and consigning the other one to
the lumber room?'

‘Does that leave you any further
forwards?' she asks archly.

‘At least it explains why you were hit so
hard last night that you might have been knocked out and why, only a
few
hours later, your friend Jacques' room in Rue Lepic was ransacked.'

He stands up. He needs to stretch his legs. His
triumph is not complete. But one success leads to another. Now that he has found what he was
looking for and that his theory has been borne out by the facts – he is mentally
transported back to Gastinne-Renette's shooting range where the notion had suddenly come
to him! – now that he has moved forwards one square, other questions arise. He walks up
and down in the garden, straightens the stem of a rose-bush, absently gathers up the dibble
which Lapie, alias Pegleg, had put down shortly before going indoors to die so mindlessly in his
bedroom.

Through the open kitchen window, he can see
Félicie looking as if she has been turned to stone. A faint smile crosses the
inspector's lips. Why not? It is as if he is saying to himself, with a shrug of his
shoulders:

‘Why not give it a try?'

Toying with the dibble, which still has soil
clinging to it, he starts talking to her through the window.

‘You know, Félicie, I'm becoming
more and more convinced, surprising as it might seem, that Jacques Pétillon did not kill
his uncle and even that he had nothing whatsoever to do with this entire murderous business
…'

She stares at him without reacting in any way.
Her face, tired and drawn, registers no sign of relief.

‘Well, what do you say? You must be
pleased.'

She does her best to oblige, but what flickers on
her thin lips is a sorry, meagre smile.

‘Yes, pleased. I'm grateful
…'

And he has to make an effort
not to show how pleased he is too.

‘Yes, I can see that you're happy,
very happy … And I think that now you're going to help me prove the innocence of the
young man you love. Because you do love him, don't you?'

She looks away, probably so that he won't
see her mouth, which betrays how close she is to tears.

‘Of course you love him. There's no
shame in that. I'm sure he'll mend, that you'll fall into each other's
arms and that, to thank you for everything you did for him …'

‘I've done nothing for him
…'

‘Come now! … But no matter. I tell
you I'm quite sure that you'll marry him and raise a large family …'

She explodes, just as he was expecting.
Isn't this exactly what he was angling for?

‘You're a brute! A brute! You are the
cruellest, the most … the most …'

‘Because I tell you that Jacques is
innocent?'

These simple words puncture her rage. She
realizes she has made a mistake, but it's too late now, and she is at a loss for what to
say, she is miserable and floundering helplessly.

‘You know that it isn't what you
really think. You're trying to make me talk. From the moment you first set foot in this
house …'

‘When did you last see
Pétillon?'

But she still has enough presence of mind to
say:

‘This morning.'

‘Before that?'

She does not answer, and
Maigret makes a great show of turning round to look at the garden and the arbour with the
green-painted table on which, one fine morning, there was a decanter of brandy with two liqueur
glasses. Her eyes follow the direction of his. She knows what he is thinking.

‘I won't say anything.'

‘I know. You've told me that a dozen
times at least. It's starting to sound like some old refrain. Fortunately we've
recovered the banknotes …'

‘Why fortunately?'

‘You see, you're beginning to take an
interest … When Pétillon left Cape Horn
a year ago, he had fallen out with
his uncle, correct?'

‘They didn't get on, but
…'

‘Which is why he hasn't been back
since …'

She tries to work out where he intends to lead
her this time. Her mental effort is almost palpable.

‘And in all that time you never saw him
once!' Maigret muses casually. ‘Or more exactly, you didn't speak to him.
Otherwise you'd surely have told him that the furniture had been moved around.'

She senses danger: it is there, hidden beneath
these insidious questions. God, how hard it is to defend yourself against this unflappable man
who smokes his pipe and smothers you with that fatherly eye! She hates him! Yes, loathes him! No
one has ever caused her as much pain as this inspector who will not let her alone for a moment
and says the most unexpected things in that same, even voice while he pulls gently on his
pipe.