Félicie (4 page)

‘I pulled over for a moment so she could
sit next to me in front, on the bench-seat, because she'd been squatting on an old box
which was none too clean …

‘“Later … later …”
she kept saying, “when I've done what I have to do maybe I'll tell you all
about it. But whatever happens I'll always be grateful to you for saving me.”

‘Then as soon as we got to the toll-point
she thanks me and gets out, very graceful, like a princess.'

Lucas and Maigret exchange
glances.

‘And now, if it's all right with you,
we'll have a last one for the road – no no, my round! – and then I'm
going to get something to eat … I hope I'll not get into any trouble on account of
all this, will I? Cheers …'

Ten in the evening. Lucas has gone off to keep
Cape Horn under surveillance, replacing Janvier, who has gone back to Paris. The bar of the
Anneau d'Or is blue with smoke. Maigret has eaten too much and is now on his third or
fourth glass of the local marc-brandy.

As he straddles a straw-bottomed chair, elbows
leaning on its back, there are moments when it seems he is nodding off. His eyes are
half-closed, and a faint tendril of smoke rises straight up from the bowl of his pipe, while
four men play cards on the table in front of him.

As they deal and flip the greasy cards on the
garnet-red cloth, they talk, answer questions and sometimes tell an anecdote. The landlord,
Monsieur Joseph, is sitting in for old Lapie, and the mechanic has come back after eating his
dinner.

‘In a word, then,' murmurs Maigret,
‘he was on to a good thing. A bit like some respectable country priest with his
housekeeper. He probably made sure he got his home comforts and …'

Lepape, who is deputy mayor of Orgeval, winks at
the others. His partner, Forrentin, is manager of the Jeanneville development and lives in the
best house, on the main road, just by the hoarding which informs all who pass by that there are
still plots for sale in Jeanneville.

‘A priest and his
housekeeper, eh?' grins the deputy mayor.

Forrentin just gives a sardonic smile.

‘Get on with you! It's obvious you
didn't know him,' explains the landlord, declaring belote with three cards of the
same suit. ‘Dead he may be, but you can't deny he was the sorest bear's head
you ever did see …'

‘What do you mean, sorest bear's
head?'

‘Well, he was always moaning about
something or nothing from morning to night. He was never satisfied. Take that business with the
glasses …'

He turns to the others to back him up.

‘First, he said the bottoms of my liqueur
glasses were too thick, and he managed to spot an odd glass on the top shelf that suited him
better. Then one day as he was decanting from one glass to another, he saw that both contained
exactly the same amount and he was hopping mad …

‘“But you chose that glass
yourself,” I told him.

‘Well! He went into town, bought a glass
and brought it back to me. It held a third as much as the ones I use.

‘“It doesn't make any
difference,” I told him. “You'll just have to pay five sous extra.”

‘After that, he didn't come in here
for a week. Then one night I spot him standing in the frame of the door.

‘“What about my glass?”

‘“Five sous extra,” I say.

‘Away he goes again. It lasted a month, and
in the end I was the one who blinked because we were short of a fourth for cards.

‘So can't a man
say, yes or no, that he was like a bear with a sore head? He was like that, as near as dammit,
with his housekeeper. They were at each other's throats morning to night. You could hear
them arguing from miles away. They'd stop talking to each other for weeks on end. I think
that actually she always had the last word because, no offence intended, she was even more
Norman than he was … Anyway, I'd be interested to know who killed the old boy. There
was no harm in him really. It's just the way he was. I never saw a game of cards when he
didn't reckon at some point that people were trying to cheat him.'

‘Did he often go to Paris?' Maigret
asks after a moment.

‘Next to never. Once a quarter, to collect
his pension. He'd go off in the morning and come back the same evening.'

‘How about Félicie?'

‘Hey, you boys, did Félicie used to go
to Paris?'

The others don't really know. On the other
hand she was often seen on a Sunday, dancing in a bar which had a band on the river, at
Poissy.

‘Do you know what old Lapie called her?
When he talked about her, he used to say “my cockatoo” on account of her fancy ways
of dressing. You see, inspector – our friend Forrentin here is going to be vexed again,
but I'm only saying what I think – the people who live in Jeanneville are all more
or less crazy. This is not a land where good Christian folk live. They are poor devils who have
slaved all their lives and dreamed of retiring to the country one day. Well, the great day
arrives! They get taken in by
Forrentin's pretty brochures …
Don't deny it, Forrentin, everybody knows you're good at putting sugar all over the
pill … Anyway, they settle into their paradise on earth and then they realize they are
bored rigid … and it's costing them a hundred francs an hour …

‘But it's too late. They've
invested their nest-egg in it and now they're going to have to enjoy it as best they can
or at least fool themselves into thinking they're enjoying it. Some go to law over the
branch of a tree that overhangs their garden or a dog that comes and piddles on their begonias.
Then there are others …'

Maigret is not asleep; if proof be needed, he
reaches out with his hand to raise his glass to his lips. But the heat makes him sluggish, and
it is very gradually that he slips back into the real world, which he reconstructs step by step,
and once more he sees the unfinished streets of Jeanneville, the infant trees, the houses which
look like sets of cubes, the over-tended gardens, the pottery animals and the glass globes.

‘Didn't anyone ever come to see
him?'

It's impossible! It is all too calm, too
tidy, too neat. If life here is really as it is portrayed to him, it is not possible that one
fine morning, no longer ago than last Monday, Félicie should go off to do her shopping in
Madame Chochoi's grocery store, that Pegleg should suddenly abandon his tomato seedlings
to fetch the decanter and one glass from the sideboard in the dining room, go to the arbour,
where, alone, he drinks brandy kept for special occasions, and then …

He was wearing his gardening hat when he went up
to
his room with the highly polished wooden floor. What was he going to do
in his bedroom?

No one had heard the shot and yet a gun has been
fired, at very close range, less than two metres from his chest, according to the experts.

If only the revolver had been recovered, it might
have been thought that Pegleg, having become neurasthenic …

The deputy mayor looks for a simpler explanation
and, while he tots up his score, murmurs as if it is an answer to every question:

‘What could you expect? He was an odd
character …'

Agreed – but he is dead! Someone killed
him! And Félicie, who looks as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, managed to give
the police the slip immediately after the funeral to go to Paris, where she window-shopped as if
nothing had happened, ate cream cakes, drank a glass of port and then rode around on the
Métro!

‘I wonder who'll move into the house
…'

The card-players talk nineteen to the dozen, and
Maigret, who is not listening, hears it only as a vague background hum. He doesn't say
that it will be Félicie. His mind wanders. Images surface and disappear. He scarcely has
any idea of time and place … Images of Félicie who by now must be in bed reading. She
isn't afraid of being alone in that house where someone killed her employer … Of the
brother, Ernest Lapie, who is angry because of the will. He doesn't need money, but
it's beyond his understanding that his brother …

‘… the most solidly built house in
the whole of the development …'

Whose voice is that? Most
probably Forrentin's.

‘You couldn't want for a pleasanter
house. Just big enough so you've got everything you want within easy reach and
…'

In his mind's eye, Maigret sees the waxed
staircase. Say what you like about Félicie, the way she keeps the house clean is exemplary.
As Maigret's mother used to say, you could eat off the floor …

A door on the right, the old man's bedroom.
A door on the left, Félicie's bedroom. Beyond Félicie's bedroom
there's another quite large room which is a jumble of furniture …

Maigret furrows his brow. You couldn't call
it a presentiment exactly, even less an idea. He has a vague feeling that perhaps there's
something not quite right there.

‘When that young fellow was there
…' Lepape is saying.

Maigret gives a start.

‘Do you mean the nephew?'

‘Yes. He lived with his uncle for six
months, maybe more, about a year since. He wasn't very strong. Seems he'd been
recommended to get some country air, but he couldn't, being always stuck in Paris
…'

‘What room was he in?'

‘There you have it. That's the
strangest part of it …'

Lepape gives a knowing wink. Forrentin is not
best pleased. It's clear the manager of the estate doesn't like stories being spread
about the development, which he considers to be his own personal domain.

‘It doesn't mean a thing,' he
protests.

‘Maybe it does, maybe it don't, but
the old man and
Félicie … Listen, inspector. You know the house.
To the right of the stairs there's only one room, Pegleg's. Opposite there are two,
but you have to go through one to get to the other … Well, when the young fellow arrived,
his uncle gave him his own room, and he moved across the way, that is, on Félicie's
side. He had the first room and the girl slept in the second, which meant she had to pass
through her employer's bedroom to get to her own or come out of it …'

Forrentin objects:

‘So it would have been better to put a
young man of eighteen next to a young woman?'

‘I'm not saying that, I'm not
saying that at all,' repeats Lepape with a sly look in his eye. ‘I'm not
suggesting anything. I'm just saying that the old man was on Félicie's side of
the landing while the nephew was shut away on the other. But as to saying that there was
anything going on …'

Maigret gives that possibility short shrift. Not
that he has any illusions about middle-aged or even old men. Anyway, Pegleg was only sixty and
still sprightly …

No, it simply doesn't correspond to the
picture he has formed of him. He feels he is beginning to understand the grouchy loner whose
straw hat he tried on just hours ago.

It's not his relationship with Félicie
that bothers him. So what exactly is it? This business of the rooms troubles him.

He repeats to himself over and over, like a
schoolboy trying to make his lessons stick in his head:

‘The nephew on the right … by himself
… The uncle on the left, then Félicie …'

Which means the old man has
put himself between the pair of them. Did he want to ensure that the two young people did not
get together behind his back? Was he trying to prevent Félicie wandering off the straight
and narrow? No, because once his nephew had gone he again left her by herself on the other side
of the staircase.

‘Your deal,
patron
!'

He stands up. He is going up to bed. He is
impatient for it to be tomorrow so he can go back up to the construction set village, see the
houses glowing pink in the sunshine and look at those three bedrooms … And first thing,
he'll phone through to Paris and tell Janvier to find out what he can about the young
nephew.

Maigret has paid scarcely any attention to him.
No one saw him in Jeanneville on the morning the crime was committed. He is tall, thin and shy
and hasn't amounted to much good but he doesn't seem cut out to be a murderer.

According to the reports Maigret has received,
his mother, Lapie's sister, married a violinist who played in the brasseries in their part
of town. He died young. To raise her son, she found a job as cashier in a shop selling fabrics
in Rue du Sentier. She also died, two years ago.

A few months after her death, Lapie took the
young man in. They did not get on. It was only to be expected. Jacques Pétillon was a
musician like his father, and Pegleg was not the sort who could put up with hearing a violin
being scraped or a saxophone being blown under his roof.

So now, to earn a crust, Jacques Pétillon
works as a saxophonist in a club in Rue Pigalle. He lives in a sixth-floor furnished room in Rue
Lepic.

Maigret falls asleep in a
feather bed, into which he sinks, and mice dance all night above his head. The place smells
pleasantly of the country, of straw, of mildew too, and cows wake him by lowing, the morning bus
stops outside the Anneau d'Or, and Maigret breathes in the aroma of coffee with a little
drop of something in it.

Now this business of the bedrooms … But
first phone Janvier …

‘Hello … Rue Lepic … Hôtel
Beauséjour … bye for now …'

He trudges up the hill towards Jeanneville, whose
roofs seem to grow directly out of vast fields of waving oats. As he plods on in this fashion, a
curious change comes over him. He quickens his step, he keeps watching out for the windows of
Cape Horn to appear, he … Yes, he is eager to catch up with Félicie, already he is
picturing her in her kitchen with those sharp features, turning that nanny-goat forehead in his
direction, giving him as frosty a reception as possible with an indefinable look from those
transparent pupils.