Inspector Maigret Omnibus 2 by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141982328
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

13. The House Across the Street

Monsieur Grandmaison was dead. Lying across the carpet, his head near a table leg, his feet over by the window, he seemed enormous. Very little blood. The bullet had entered between two ribs and lodged in his heart.

As for the revolver, it lay next to his lifeless hand.

Madame Grandmaison was not weeping. She stood leaning against the monumental mantelpiece, staring at her husband as if she had not yet grasped what had happened.

‘It’s over,’ said Maigret simply, and got to his feet.

A large room, sad and severe. Dark curtains at windows that let in a bleak light.

‘Did he say anything to you?’

She shook her head, then made an effort to speak.

‘Ever since we got home,’ she stammered, ‘he’d been pacing up and down. Several times he turned to me, and I thought he was going to tell me something … Then suddenly, the shot came – and I hadn’t even seen the gun!’

She spoke as women do when they are profoundly shaken and struggling to make sense of their own thoughts, but her eyes were dry.

It was clear that she had never loved Grandmaison, at least not passionately. He was her husband. She was a dutiful wife. A kind of affection had sprung up as they’d grown used to living together.

But before his dead body, she displayed none of those wrenching emotions that betoken real love.

Instead, dazed and exhausted, she asked, ‘Was it him?’

‘It was.’

Then there was silence around the immense body bathed in harsh daylight. The inspector watched Madame Grandmaison. He saw her look out at the street, searching for something across the way, and a feeling of nostalgia seemed to soften her features.

‘Would you allow me to ask you two or three questions before the others arrive?’

She nodded.

‘Did you know Raymond before you met your husband?’

‘I lived across the street.’

A grey house much like the one they were in. Above the front door, the brass plate of a notary.

‘I loved Raymond. He loved me. His cousin was courting me as well, but in his own way.’

‘Two quite different men, weren’t they?’

‘Ernest was already as you knew him. A cold man, who seemed never to have been young. Raymond, well, he had a bad reputation because his life was too big and wild to fit into the small-town mould. That and his lack of fortune were why my father did not want me to marry him.’

It was eerie, listening to these personal confessions murmured next to a corpse. They were like the dismal summing-up of a whole life.

‘Were you Raymond’s mistress?’

She blinked in affirmation.

‘And he left?’

‘Without telling a soul. One night. I learned about it from his cousin. Left with some of the company money.’

‘And Ernest married you. Your son is not his, I take it?’

‘He is Raymond’s son. You see, when he left and I was on my own, I knew I was going to have a child. And Ernest was asking me to marry him. Look at these two houses, this street, this city where everyone knows everyone else.

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