Maigret 53: Maigret and the Reluctant Witness (1987) by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon
Format: epub
Published: 1987-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

Details would come later. By this time there must be at least a dozen reporters prowling around Ivry.

Maigret sat placidly in his office, where the smoke from his pipe was beginning to form a blue cloud on a level with his forehead, and sorted out his information.

At six o’clock, which corroborated what they already knew, Paulette Lachaume left the house on the quay, wearing a fur coat and a beige hat. She did not take her own car, but hurried off on foot to the Pont National, some two hundred yards away, where a man was waiting for her in a red sports car that seemed to have been a Panhard.

At about the same hour, her own car, the blue Pontiac, was parked outside the biscuit factory.

There was no precise information as to the time at which that car had been used.

All that was known was that toward seven o’clock it was no longer there, and that around nine o’clock Léonard Lachaume brought it back and ran it into the garage at the far end of the courtyard.

What time did the Lachaumes have dinner? In the ordinary way there should be six of them at the table, because young Jean Paul was not yet a boarder at his school.

Paulette was definitely out that evening. Léonard too, almost certainly.

So in the dining room there were only the two old people, Armand, and the boy.

At about ten o’clock the bargeman belonging to the Twee Gebroeders heard the sound of glass being smashed on the top of the wall, and caught sight of a face.

At half-past eleven Paulette came home, by some unknown means. Had she taken a taxi? Or had the red car brought her back?

While she was going down the second-floor corridor, her brother-in-law, in pajamas and dressing gown, half opened his door and wished her good night.

Was Armand already asleep then? Had he heard his wife come in?

Once undressed, Paulette had gone to the bathroom, at the far end of the corridor, and had noticed a streak of light under Leonard’s door.

Then, as was her custom, she would have taken a sleeping pill, and apparently slept until morning without hearing anything.

The rest was more in the nature of conjecture, except the time of Leonard’s death, which Dr. Paul put between two and three in the morning.

When and where had he drunk the fairly considerable quantity of alcohol revealed by the examination of the stomach and by the blood analysis?

Maigret turned to the experts’ first report. It included a meticulous inventory of everything in the dead man’s room, with a description of the furniture, hangings, and miscellaneous objects. There was no mention of a bottle or a glass.

“Get me Dr. Paul, please. He’s pretty sure to be home now.”

So he was, just returned from a lunch out, which had put him into an excellent humor.

“Maigret speaking. I wonder if you could clear up one point for me. It’s about the alcohol found in Léonard Lachaume’s body.”

“In the stomach, at any rate, it was brandy,” replied Paul.

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