Liberty Bar (3 page)

Maigret was blissfully ensconced in
Brown's armchair. The more the interrogation proceeded, the wider his smile
grew.

‘Was he mean?'

‘Him? … He was the finest of
men …'

‘Just a moment. If you'll bear
with me, I'd like to reconstruct the timetable of a typical day. Who would get up
first?'

‘William … He would mostly
sleep on the divan in the hall. We'd hear him moving around at the crack of dawn
… I told him a hundred times …'

‘Excuse me, did he make the
coffee?'

‘Yes … When we came down,
around ten, there would be coffee on the stove … But it was cold
…'

‘And Brown?'

‘He would be pottering in the garden
or in the garage. Or else he would sit by the sea. Come market day, he would get the car
out … Another thing I could never get him to do: wash before going out shopping.
He would always have his nightshirt on under his jacket, his slippers, his hair in a
mess … We would go into Antibes. He would wait outside the shops
…'

‘Did he get dressed when he got
home?'

‘Sometimes yes! Sometimes no! He
could sometimes go four or five days without washing.'

‘Where did you eat?'

‘In the kitchen. When you don't
have a maid, you try not to get all the rooms dirty …'

‘And in the
afternoon?'

Good heavens! They had a siesta. Then, at
around five o'clock, he would mope around the house in his slippers again.

‘Lots of arguments?'

‘Almost none! Though when you said
anything to him, William had an insulting way of snubbing you.'

Maigret did not laugh. He was starting to
develop a strong fellow feeling with this confounded Brown.

‘So, he was killed … That could
have happened while he was crossing the garden … However, as you found some blood
in the car …'

‘Why would we lie about
it?'

‘Quite! So, he was killed somewhere
else. Or rather, wounded! And, instead of taking himself to a doctor, or to the police
station, he came here to expire … Did you carry the body indoors?'

‘We couldn't leave it
outside!'

‘Now, tell me why you did not inform
the authorities … I'm sure you must have had an excellent reason
…'

The old woman stood up straight and
insisted:

‘Yes, inspector! And I will explain
that reason to you! You would have found out the truth one day in any case. Brown had
married before, in Australia … He is an Australian … His wife is still
alive. She has always refused to divorce him, who knows why? If we don't live in
the finest villa on the Côte d'Azur, it's all because of her
…'

‘Have you ever seen her?'

‘She has never left Australia …
But she has arranged things so that her husband was placed under legal
guardianship … For ten years we have been living with him, taking care of him,
consoling him … Thanks to us he has a bit of money put aside … So, if
…'

‘If Madame Brown had learned about
her husband's death, she would have had all his assets here seized!'

‘Exactly! We would have made all
those sacrifices for nothing! And not just that. I am not entirely without resources of
my own. My husband was in the army, and I still draw a small pension … A lot of
the things here belong to me … But this woman has the law on her side and she
could simply have turned us out of our house …'

‘So you hesitated … You weighed
up the pros and cons for three days, with the dead body presumably lying on the divan in
the hall …'

‘Two days! We buried him on the
second day …'

‘The pair of you! Then you gathered
up the most valuable items in the house and … So tell me, where did you intend to
go?'

‘Anywhere! Brussels, London
…'

‘Had you driven the car
before?' Maigret asked Gina.

‘Never! Though I have started it up
in the garage.'

A heroic undertaking, then! It was almost
like a dream, this departure, with the dead body in the garden, the three heavy
suitcases and the car swerving all over the place …

Maigret was starting to feel sick of the
atmosphere in here, the smell of musk, the reddish light filtering through the
lampshade.

‘Do you mind if I have a look round
the house?'

They had regained their poise, their
dignity. Perhaps they even felt a bit baffled because the inspector was taking
everything in his stride and seemed, deep down, to find these events
perfectly normal.

‘Please excuse the mess.'

And what mess! Mess wasn't the word
for it. It was something far more sordid! A cross between a den, where animals live in
their own stench, among leftover food and excrement, and a bourgeois interior, with all
its preening pomposity.

On a coat-peg in the hall there was an old
overcoat that had belonged to William Brown. Maigret searched through its pockets, took
out a worn pair of gloves, a key, a tin of cachous.

‘He ate cachou lozenges?'

‘When he had been drinking, to
disguise the smell on his breath. We wouldn't let him touch whisky … The
bottle is still hidden away.'

Above the coat-peg there was a stag's
head with antlers. And further along, a rattan pedestal table with a silver platter for
visitors' cards.

‘Was he wearing this coat
here?'

‘No, his gabardine …'

The shutters were closed in the dining
room. The room was used as little more than a shed, and Brown must have done some
fishing, for there were lobster pots stacked on the floor. Then there was the kitchen,
where the big stove had never been lit. The alcohol stove was the one that was used.
Next to it stood fifty or sixty empty bottles, which had once contained mineral
water.

‘The water round here is too hard,
and …'

The stairs, covered with a threadbare
carpet, were held
in place by copper grips. You just had to follow the
scent of musk to find Gina's bedroom.

No bathroom, no toilet. Dresses thrown
higgledy-piggledy on the bed, which was unmade. It was here that they had sorted through
the clothes in order to take only the best ones.

Maigret preferred to avoid the old
woman's room.

‘We had to leave in such a hurry
… I am so ashamed to show you the house in such a state.'

‘I'll come back and see you
later.'

‘Are we free?'

‘Let's just say you won't
be going back to prison … At least not for the time being … But if you try
to leave Antibes …'

‘We wouldn't dream of
it!'

They saw him to the door. The old woman
remembered her good manners.

‘A cigar, inspector?'

Gina went even further. Always best to keep
such an influential man onside.

‘You can take the whole box. William
won't be smoking them …'

You couldn't make it up! Outside,
Maigret felt almost giddy. He wanted to laugh and grit his teeth at the same time. Once
outside the gate, he turned around and got quite a different view of the villa, stark
white against the greenery.

The moon was just at the angle of the roof.
To the right, the shiny sea, the quivering mimosas …

He had his gabardine under his arm. He
walked back to
the Hôtel Bacon without thinking, just vague images
running through his head, some of them painful, some comic.

‘Good old William!'

It was late. The dining room was empty
apart from a serving girl who was reading the paper. That was when he noticed that it
wasn't his gabardine he had brought with him, but Brown's – filthy and
stained with oil and grease.

In the left pocket there was a monkey
wrench, in the right a handful of change and a few small square coins made of copper and
marked with a figure. They were tokens for fruit machines to be found on the counters of
small bars.

There were about ten of them.

‘Hello! Inspector Boutigues here. Do
you want me to pick you up from your hotel?'

It was nine in the morning. Maigret had
opened his window and been dozing for six hours on and off, luxuriating in the knowledge
that the Mediterranean was spread out before him.

‘To do what?'

‘Don't you want to see the
body?'

‘Yes … No … Maybe this
afternoon … Ring me at lunchtime.'

He needed to wake up. In the light of
morning, the events of the previous day no longer seemed real. The memory of the two
women was more like a half-forgotten nightmare.

They wouldn't be up yet! And if Brown
had survived, he would be busy pottering in his garden or garage. All
alone. Unwashed. With a pot of cold coffee sitting on an unlit stove.

As he was shaving, Maigret noticed the
tokens on the mantelpiece. He had to make an effort to remember what part they played in
the story.

‘Brown went off on his novena and got
killed, either before getting back into his car or inside it, or while crossing the
garden, or in the house …'

He had already shaved the soap off his left
cheek when he murmured:

‘Brown can't have gone to any
of the small bars in Antibes … I'd have heard about it.'

And besides, didn't Gina discover
that he parked his car in Cannes? A quarter of an hour later, he was on the phone to the
Cannes police.

‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret,
Police Judiciaire … Could you provide me with a list of bars with fruit
machines?'

‘There aren't any now. They
were banned two months ago by order of the Prefect. You won't find any anywhere on
the Côte d'Azur …'

He asked his landlady where he could find a
taxi.

‘Going where?'

‘Cannes!'

‘Then you don't need a taxi.
There's a very regular bus service, leaving from Place Macé.'

And so there was. In the morning sun Place
Macé was even more colourful than on the previous evening. Brown must have passed
through it when he drove his two women to the market.

Maigret took the bus. Half
an hour later, he was in Cannes, where he went to the garage that he had been told
about. It was near the Croisette. White everywhere! Huge white hotels, white shops,
white trousers and dresses, white sails out at sea.

It was as if life were no more than a
pantomime fairy-tale, a white and blue fairy-tale.

‘Is this where Monsieur Brown left
his car?'

‘Here we go!'

‘Here we go what?'

‘I'm going to be given a hard
time over this! I knew this was coming when I heard he'd been killed … Yes,
it was here. I've got nothing to hide. He'd drop his car off here in the
evening, then he'd come to pick it up eight, nine, ten days later
…'

‘Drunk?'

‘Every time I saw him,
yes!'

‘Do you know where he went
afterwards?'

‘When? After he parked the car? No
idea.'

‘Did he ask you to clean it, give it
a once-over?'

‘No, never! He hadn't even
changed the oil for a year.'

‘What did you make of him?'

The garage owner shrugged his
shoulders.

‘Nothing.'

‘Bit of an eccentric?'

‘The Côte d'Azur's full
of them. You get used to them. Scarcely notice them any more! Look, just yesterday this
American girl comes by and wants me to do her a chassis in the shape of a swan … I
thought: sure, if you're willing to pay!'

There were still the fruit
machines to follow up on. Maigret went into a bar near the harbour, which was full of
nothing but yachtsmen.

‘Do you have any fruit
machines?'

‘They were banned a month ago …
But we've got a new type of machine. In two or three months they'll ban them
too …'

‘So there are no machines anywhere
else?'

The proprietor was non-committal on that
one.

‘What will you have?'

Maigret had a vermouth. He looked at the
yachts lined up in the harbour, then the sailors, who had the names of their boats
embroidered on to their jerseys.

‘Do you know Brown?'

‘Which Brown? … The one who got
killed? … He didn't come here.'

‘Where did he go?'

A vague shrug. The proprietor had other
customers to serve. It was getting warmer. Even though it was only March, Maigret was
sweating, a smell of summer.

‘I've heard people talk about
him, but I can't remember who,' the proprietor said as he came back, bottle
in hand.

‘Too bad! What I'm looking for
is a fruit machine …'

Brown took his raincoat with him during his
novenas. So it was very likely that, on his return, the two women searched through his
pockets.

Therefore the tokens dated from his final
trip …

But this was all rather vague and
insubstantial. And there was this sun which filled Maigret with a desire to sit
on a terrace, like everyone else, and watch the boats barely moving on
a calm sea.

Bright trams … beautiful cars …
He found the town's shopping street, parallel to the Croisette …

‘If Brown spent his novenas in
Cannes,' he grumbled, ‘it wasn't round here.'

He walked. He stopped now and then to go
into a bar. He drank vermouth and talked fruit machines.

‘It goes in waves. They raid us every
three months. Then we get some new ones and carry on as normal until the next time
…'

‘Do you know Brown?'

‘The Brown who was killed?'

It was monotonous. It was past noon. The
sun was beating down on the streets. Maigret wanted to accost a policeman like a tourist
out on the town and ask him:

‘Where's the party round
here?'