Maigret's Holiday (20 page)

‘Yes …'

‘You promise?'

Silence.

‘Hello! … Hello! Mademoiselle
… Don't cut us off … What? … He has hung up? …'

He hurriedly put on his hat, dashed out of
the door and hurtled down the stairs. Almost outside the door, he saw the convertible
car belonging to the leather goods shop owner next door and the latter, his hat on his
head, came out of his shop and said a few words to his wife.

‘Would you drive me to Doctor
Bellamy's, please?'

‘With pleasure.'

It was only three hundred metres away, but
it seemed to Maigret that during the short time it took to get there, he was no longer
breathing. His companion looked at him in surprise, so overawed that he didn't
dare ask any questions.

He braked hard.

‘Shall I wait for you?'

‘No thank you …'

He rang the electric bell.
He pressed the button for a long time. Through the door he heard a woman's voice,
that of Doctor Bellamy's mother, saying:

‘Francis, go and see who that lout is
…'

Francis opened the door, stunned to find
himself face to face with Maigret in such a state of agitation.

‘Is he upstairs?'

‘In the library, yes … In any
case, he was fifteen minutes ago …'

Madame Bellamy senior, her walking stick in
her hand, appeared in the doorway to one of the drawing rooms, but he didn't
bother to greet her. He raced up the stairs. He paused outside Odette's room for a
moment. He heard a noise in the corridor. Perhaps otherwise he might have tried to open
the door.

Philippe Bellamy was waiting for him,
standing stiffly, as in a portrait, with the library's lavishly bound books behind
him.

‘What are you afraid of?' he
asked, as Maigret got his breath back.

A cold irony made his lip curl.

He stepped aside and indicated the room
where, the previous evening, the three of them had sat talking, and motioned to his
visitor to sit in one of the armchairs.

‘You see that I waited for
you.'

Why could Maigret not take his eyes off his
white hands, as if he were looking for bloodstains?

That gaze too, the doctor understood.

‘You do not believe me?'

A hesitation. A moment's thought.
Bellamy must be
horrendously tense. He wiped his hand across his
forehead.

‘Come.'

He preceded him in the corridor, taking a
small key out of his pocket as he walked. Then he stopped outside his wife's door.
He turned round and looked at Maigret. Perhaps he was still uncertain?

At last he opened it, slowly, and Maigret
saw the gilded atmosphere of the room, whose curtains were drawn.

In a vast silk-padded bed, light-coloured
hair was spread over the pillow. A face was visible in half profile, long eyelashes, the
curve of a nose with quivering nostrils, the pout of a protruding lip and, on the golden
eiderdown, a bare arm lay limply.

Philippe Bellamy stood stock still against
the doorpost. And, when Maigret turned towards him, he saw that the doctor's eyes
were closed.

‘Is she alive?' asked Maigret in
a whisper.

‘She's alive.'

‘Is she asleep?'

‘She's asleep.'

Bellamy spoke like a sleepwalker, his eyes
still closed, his hands clenched.

‘Bourgeois came to see her this
morning and gave her a sedative. She must sleep.'

When they were quiet, the young
woman's regular breathing could just be heard, as light as the beating of a
moth's wings.

Maigret took a step towards the door, then
turned round one more time towards the sleeping woman.

The doctor said
impatiently:

‘Come.'

He carefully locked the door, slipped the
key into his pocket and made his way towards the library.

They were ensconced in the library again,
Bellamy in his usual chair, at the desk, Maigret in one of the leather armchairs, and
they both remained silent. It was not an awkward or hostile silence, but one that
afforded a kind of respite.

It was then, after lighting his pipe, that
Maigret noticed that a change had come over Bellamy − since the previous day or in
the past few minutes? He now looked like a man suffering from a great weariness but who
was controlling himself, determined to hold out until the end. There was a thin, deep
shadow under his eyes, and his skin was so ashen, so dull, that his mouth seemed red in
contrast, as if he were wearing lipstick.

He was conscious of Maigret's
unintentional scrutiny, but he did not allow it to trouble him and, when he finally came
out of himself, it was to reach for the bell. His gaze, for the first time, seemed to be
asking for permission. It cannot be said that he was smiling, and yet his face somehow
lit up with something very vague, bitter, a sort of irony towards Maigret, with a hint
of self-pity.

Was he thinking, as he pressed the button,
that this was perhaps the last time he was acting as a free, wealthy man, in these
surroundings that he had so lovingly created?

The way he wiped his hand across his
forehead that day
was like a nervous twitch; he did it twice just
waiting for Francis to appear.

‘Whisky for me,' he said,
‘and for you, Monsieur Maigret?'

‘Even though it's still early,
I'll have something dry, brandy or Armagnac.'

Once the tray was on the table and the
drinks poured, the doctor, lit cigarette in hand, said dreamily:

‘There are several solutions
…'

As if it were merely a matter of a problem
that they needed to resolve together.

‘There is never only one
solution,' sighed Maigret, echoing him.

And Maigret rose heavily, and went over to
the telephone sitting on the desk.

‘May I? … Hello! Mademoiselle,
put me through to 118 at La Roche-sur-Yon, please … Pardon? … There's
no wait? Hello! … I'd like to speak to the examining magistrate Alain de
Folletier … This is Doctor Bellamy … Bellamy, yes …

‘Hello! … Is that you, Judge
Folletier? … Maigret here… Sorry? … No, no … I am in his office
and I'll pass him to you right away … I think he wants to ask you to join us
without delay …'

As if it had been arranged beforehand, he
passed the receiver to the doctor, who took it with an air of resignation. Their eyes
met for a second. They had understood one another.

‘It's me, Alain … Yes, I
would like you to come and see me as soon as you can get here … Pardon? Knowing
you,
if you start having lunch, you'll be at it for half the
afternoon … Could you not, just this once, make do with a sandwich and jump into
your car? … Your wife has taken it to go to Fontenay? … In that case, take a
taxi … Yes … we'll wait for you … It is quite important
…'

He hung up and silence reigned again, broken
a little later by the ringing of the intercom. Bellamy seemed to be asking for
permission to reply, Maigret batted his eyelids.

‘Hello! … Yes, Mother … No
… I'm going to be busy for quite a while … No, no … Please have
lunch on your own … I shan't be coming downstairs …'

When he had hung up, he said:

‘Admit that you have no
proof.'

‘That is true.'

There was nothing arrogant about Philippe
Bellamy. He was not challenging Maigret. He was simply making a statement, without
crowing. They were two men calmly examining the facts.

‘I don't know how you intend to
proceed with Alain, but given the current state of the investigation, I doubt that you
will obtain an arrest warrant. Not only because he is my friend. Any examining
magistrate would be reluctant to take on such a responsibility.'

‘But,' said Maigret, ‘I
have to take that responsibility. Do you not think, doctor, that there have been enough
victims already?'

Bellamy bowed his head, and it was perhaps
to look at his hands.

‘Yes,' he finally conceded.
‘I thought so before your arrival. For two days, I have been following your
reasoning,
hour by hour, by watching your actions. This morning, I
understood Olga's role before you did, then I saw you going from door to door on
Le Remblai and I knew that you'd eventually end up at her place. I was one step
ahead of you. While you were going around questioning people, I could have rung the
back-door bell—'

‘Do you think that would have been
sufficient?'

‘Mind you, even with Olga's
testimony, you have no charge against me. Assumptions perhaps, on which no jury would
find a man in my position guilty. What I would like you to understand is that I can
still hold my own, play the game, and that I would probably come out of it if not with
glory, at least as a free man.'

He gaze seemed to caress his surroundings
and once again there was a glimmer of the same irony.

‘Only—' he began.

‘Only,' Maigret interrupted him,
‘you would have to add to the list. And you are beginning to tire of it,
aren't you? Even if you hurried, you wouldn't arrive in time. There is
something you have forgotten, a person. For the rest you acted alone. But you had to ask
for someone's help over one tiny detail.'

Frowning, the doctor racked his brains, as
if trying to resolve an equation.

‘The picture postcard,' Maigret
prompted him. ‘The card that had to be posted from Paris without going there. Let
me go to Paris tomorrow and summon your mother-in-law to my office at Quai des
Orfèvres, let me question her for several hours if necessary … Are you with
me? She'll talk eventually …'

‘Maybe.'

‘And I must say, it is one of the
factors that most surprised me. How did you happen to have a picture postcard of Paris
to hand? I went into the bookshop but they didn't have any.'

The doctor shrugged, rose and went over to
take something out of a drawer.

‘As you can see, I didn't go to
the trouble of destroying the others. I must have bought it one day from a beggar or a
pedlar. It has been in this drawer for years.'

He held out an envelope that contained
around twenty very crude postcards on which was written: ‘France's major
cities'.

‘I wouldn't have thought you
capable of imitating a person's handwriting so perfectly.'

‘I didn't imitate it.'

Maigret looked up sharply, amazed,
admiring.

‘You mean …?'

‘That he wrote it himself.'

‘Dictated by you?'

The doctor shrugged, as if to say that it
was too easy. Almost at the same time signalling to Maigret not to move. Then he tiptoed
over to the communicating door and flung it open.

The maid was there, all flustered. Bellamy
pretended to believe that she had just arrived.

‘Did you want to speak to me,
Jeanne?'

At last, Maigret caught sight of her. She
was a skinny girl, flat-chested and with no hips, and had an unattractive face with
irregular features and bad teeth.

‘I thought you were
having lunch and I came to clean the room.'

‘I would rather, Jeanne, that you went
to clean my consulting room. Here is the key.'

Once the door had closed, he sighed:

‘Now I wouldn't have needed to
kill that girl there. Do you understand? I have no idea what she thinks. I don't
know how much she has guessed.

‘But even if I had killed half the
town, even if I were the most heinous monster, you wouldn't get a word out of
her.'

A moment ticked by, then the doctor
sighed:

‘That girl loves me …'

Humbly, but passionately, without hope,
despite the other love that fired hers.

Jeanne loved him, and the way she jealously
surrounded Odette Bellamy with her protective care was another manifestation of that
love.

Was the doctor still following
Maigret's thinking step by step? In any case, having lit another cigarette and
taken a sip of whisky he shook his head.

‘You are mistaken. She's not the
one …'

He took his time before adding, with a quiet
melancholy:

‘It's my mother! And she loves
me too, at least I presume so, since she is as jealous of me as I have ever been of my
wife. Doubtless you are wondering how I found out about everything?

‘It's both straightforward and
silly. In my wife's boudoir, there is a little rosewood Louis XV desk. On it there
is a writing case and a blotter. Now no one hates writing more
than
Odette. I often used to tease her about it and it was I who had to write to our few
friends to accept or refuse an invitation.

‘But one morning when my wife was in
the garden, Mother showed me the blotter. “It looks as if Odette has changed her
habits,” she simply said.