Félicie (5 page)

Was he missing her already?

He understands, he senses, he is certain that
Pegleg needed his closest enemy as much as the glass of wine he would go into the store room and
pour himself, as much as the air he breathed, as the games of cards every evening and his
arguments with his partners over a three-card trick or a trump.

From a distance he spots Lucas, who is kicking
his heels at the end of the alley. He couldn't have been very warm during the night. Then,
through the open window of her
room, he makes out dark hair, now held in
place by a kind of turban, and a bustling figure giving the bedclothes a good shake.
Someone
has seen him,
someone
has recognized him,
someone
must
already be thinking the kind of welcome which that
someone
intends to give him.

He smiles. He can't help it. That's
Félicie for you!

‘Hello? Is that you, sir? …
It's Janvier …'

A sweaty sort of day. It's not just because
the weather is stormy that at times Maigret's face breaks out in a faint rash of
perspiration and his fingers tremble with impatience. It reminds him of when he was a boy and
feeling scared when he found himself in a place where he shouldn't have been, knowing full
well that he didn't belong there.

‘Where are you?'

‘I'm in Rue des Blancs-Manteaux
… In a watch-maker's shop … I'm phoning from there … Our guy is in
a nasty-looking bistro across the road … He looks as if he's waiting for somebody or
something … He's just finished another glass of spirits …'

Then a silence. Maigret knows exactly what the
young inspector will say next.

‘I'm wondering, chief, if it
wouldn't be better if you came back …'

It's been going on all morning, and all
morning Maigret has been saying no.

‘Just carry on as you are. Phone the minute
there's anything new.'

He wonders if he might be wrong, if this is
really the way he should be conducting the investigation, but he
can't
bring himself to leave, something is holding him back, though he'd been hard put to say
what exactly.

And a very strange case it's turning out to
be! Fortunately, the papers aren't interested in the death of Pegleg. He has murmured to
himself at least twenty times so far:

‘But the old man was murdered!'

As if the crime has taken a back seat, as if he
couldn't help being sidetracked by something else – and that something is
Félicie!

The landlord of the Anneau d'Or has loaned
him a bike. On it, Maigret looks like a performing bear. It allows him to come and go as he
pleases, from Orgeval to the village and from the village to Orgeval.

The weather continues fair and bright. It seems
impossible to imagine the landscape here other than lit by spring sunshine, with flowers
blooming all along low walls and round the edges of vegetable patches, and pensioners gardening
and looking up idly as the inspector or Sergeant Lucas, whom Maigret has kept with him, pass
by.

Though he doesn't say so, Lucas also thinks
that this is a strange kind of investigation. He finds walking up and down outside Cape Horn
extremely tedious. What is he actually supposed to be doing? Watching Félicie? All the
windows in the house are open. All her movements are visible. She's done her shopping as
usual. She knows the sergeant is following her. Is the chief afraid she will disappear
again?

Lucas wonders if this is the case but
doesn't dare say so to Maigret. Instead, he keeps it to himself and smokes one pipe after
another. Every now and then, for want of
something better to do, he kicks a
stone with the toe of his shoe.

Since that morning, however, the focus of their
inquiries seems to have shifted. The first phone call came from Rue Lepic. Maigret, who was
sitting outside on the terrace of the inn next to a laurel bush in a green-painted planter, was
expecting it.

Maigret has already settled into a routine. He
settles into a routine wherever he goes. He has arranged with the woman in the post office that
she should call him through the window the minute there is a phone call for him from Paris.

‘That you, sir? … It's Janvier
… I'm phoning from a bar on the corner of Rue Lepic …'

Maigret pictures the sloping street, women with
handcarts selling fruit and vegetables, housewives in slippers, the colourful bustle of Place
Blanche and, between two shop fronts, the entrance to the Hôtel Beauséjour, where he
had once made inquiries about another case.

‘Jacques Pétillon got back home at six
this morning, completely done in. He collapsed on to his bed fully dressed. I went to the
Pelican, the club where he works. He hadn't shown up there all night. What do I do
now?'

‘Hang on there … Follow him if he
goes out.'

Is the nephew really as innocent as he looks?
Would it be better if Maigret, instead of hanging around Félicie, concentrated his efforts
on him? He can guess that this is what Janvier thinks. And it is this view that Janvier slips
into his second phone call:

‘Hello … It's Janvier …
Our man has just gone into the
tobacconist's in Rue Fontaine …
He looks washed out … He seems nervy, anxious … He kept looking over his shoulder as
if he was afraid of being followed, but I don't think he spotted me …'

So, Pétillon has had only a few hours'
sleep and here he is, on the move again. The tobacconist's in Rue Fontaine is used mainly
by shady characters.

‘What's he doing now?'

‘He's not speaking to anyone …
He's keeping an eye on the door. … Looks like he's waiting for someone
…'

‘Carry on.'

Meanwhile, Maigret has received a little more
information about old Lapie's nephew. Why did he never manage to work up any interest in
the boy who wanted to become a serious performer and has ended up earning just enough to live by
playing the saxophone in a Montmartre nightclub?

Pétillon has seen hard times. He has been
reduced to working nights loading vegetables in Les Halles. He has not always had enough to eat.
Several times he was forced to leave his violin at the pawnshop.

‘Don't you think it's odd,
chief, that he should have stayed out all night without setting foot in the Pelican and that now
… You should see him … I think it would be good if you saw him for yourself …
I get the feeling that he's worried sick, that he's scared … Maybe if you were
here …'

But he always gets the same response:

‘Carry on as you are!'

In the meantime, Maigret, perched on his bike,
shuttles to and fro between the terrace of the Anneau d'Or, where
he
waits for phone calls, and the pink house, where he calls on Félicie.

He walks into the house, comes and goes and makes
himself at home. She pretends to pay no attention to him, gets on with the housework, makes her
meals. She has gone shopping every morning at Madame Chochoi's and bought provisions.
Sometimes she looks straight at the inspector, but he finds it impossible to read any sort of
feeling whatsoever in those eyes.

She's the one Maigret wants to scare. From
the start, she has been too sure of herself. It's impossible that this attitude is not
concealing something and he watches for the moment when she will eventually weaken.

But the old man was murdered!

It's her, she is the one who occupies all
his thoughts, it's her secret he wants to draw out. He has been prowling round the garden.
He has been in the wine store five or six times and each time has poured himself a glass of the
rosé which has become a habit with him too. He has made a discovery. Dragging a fork
through the layer of leaf-mould which has collected under the hedge, he trawled up a liqueur
glass, the twin of the one he found on that first day on the table in the arbour. He showed it
to Félicie.

‘All you need do now is look for
fingerprints on it,' she told him disdainfully without being the least disconcerted.

When he went up to the rooms on the first floor,
she did not follow. He searched every nook and corner of Lapie's room. He crossed the
landing, entered Félicie's room and began opening all the drawers. She must have
heard his comings and goings over her head. Had she been afraid?

And still the weather remains
ideal: the softness of the air, the scents wafting in on the breeze and the song of birds coming
through the open windows.

And then he manages to find the diary at the back
of Félicie's wardrobe, among the tangled knot of stockings and underwear. Pegleg had
been quite right to call his housekeeper a cockatoo. Even under her day clothes her taste is for
colours, aggressive pinks and acid-sharp greens, and for lace inserts as wide as a hand even
though they aren't hand made.

To get a reaction out of her, Maigret goes down
to the kitchen to run through the pages of her diary for the previous years. Félicie is
busy peelings potatoes, which she then drops into a blue enamel bucket:

From time to time Maigret glances up, while
Félicie pretends to ignore him.

He tries to be jocular, but his laughter rings as
false as that of the traveller who attempts to take liberties with a
hotel
chambermaid and keeps the tone light with suggestive banter.

‘What's his name?'

‘None of your business.'

‘Married, is he?'

An angry glare, like a cat defending her
kittens.

‘Was it love? The real thing?'

She does not reply, but he persists and hates
himself for persisting. He keeps telling himself he's wrong, he thinks of Rue Lepic, Rue
Fontaine, of the scared young man who has been going backwards and forwards since last night and
keeps crashing into walls like a panic-stricken bumble-bee.

‘So tell me, was it here that you met this
man?'

‘Why not?'

‘Did your employer know?'

No. He can't go on like this, interrogating
this girl who does not give a damn about him or his questions. Still, going round to see Madame
Chochoi, as he does next, is not much more clever. He leans his bike against the shop front and
waits until a woman who is buying a tin of peas has gone.

‘Incidentally, Madame Chochoi, did Monsieur
Lapie's housekeeper have many boyfriends?'

‘I expect she had some.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘At least she used to talk about one.
Always the same one. But that's her business. She was often down in the dumps, poor
thing.'

‘A married man?'

‘Could have been. That was probably why she
was always talking about setbacks. She never said much to
me. If she ever
told anyone about it, it would have been Léontine, the girl who cleans for Monsieur
Forrentin.'

A man has been murdered and here's Maigret,
a serious man, a man in the prime of life, worrying his head about the love-life of a girl with
a head full of romantic notions! Romantic to the point where there are whole pages in her diary
like:

Maigret moves on to Forrentin's house and
rings the bell. Léontine, the estate manager's housemaid, is a girl of about twenty,
with a large moon face. She immediately takes fright. She is afraid of getting her friend into
trouble.

‘Of course she used to tell me everything.
Or at least everything she wanted to tell me. She used to come round often, rush in she would
…'

He pictures the two of them so clearly, one
open-mouthed in admiration, and Félicie with her coat worn carelessly over her
shoulders.

‘Anyone else here? Oh Léontine, if you
only knew …'

She talks and talks the way young women talk
among themselves.

‘I saw him … Oh, I'm so
happy!'

Poor Léontine does not
know how to answer Maigret's questions.

‘I'll never say a bad word about her.
Félicie has been so unhappy!'

‘On account of a man?'

‘Several times she said she wished she was
dead.'

‘Didn't he love her?'

‘I don't know. Stop tormenting
me.'

‘Do you know his name?'

‘She never told me.'

‘Did you ever see him?'

‘No.'

‘Where did she used to meet him?'

‘I dunno.'

‘Was she his mistress?'

Léontine blushes and stammers:

‘Once, she told me that if she ever had a
baby …'

What has any of this to do with the murder of the
old man? But Maigret ploughs on and the further he goes the more he feels plagued by that uneasy
feeling he has whenever he is about to make a blunder.

It can't be helped! Here he is, back again
on the terrace of the Anneau d'Or. The woman who operates the post office switchboard is
waving.

‘There have already been two calls from
Paris. They'll be calling you back any minute now …'

Janvier again? No, it's not his voice, it
is a voice unfamiliar to the inspector.