The Hotel Majestic (4 page)

“Would it be a great nuisance if I came in for a moment?”

Maigret could have sworn that the poor great oaf's legs were trembling, that his throat was constricted and that he felt ready to faint. He finally managed to stutter: “If you like . . .”

He opened the door with his key, pushed his bike into the hall, and announced, in what was probably his usual way: “It's me!”

There was a glass door at the end of the passage, leading to the kitchen; the light was on. Donge went in.

“This is . . .”

Charlotte was sitting by the stove, with her feet on the hob, and was sewing a shrimp-pink silk petticoat, lolling in her chair.

She looked embarrassed, took her feet off the stove and tried to find her slippers under the chair.

“Oh! There's someone with you . . . Please excuse me, monsieur . . .”

There was a cup with some dregs of coffee on the table, and a plate with some cake crumbs.

“Come in . . . Sit down . . . Prosper so rarely brings anyone home . . .”

It was hot. The wireless—a smart new one—was on. Charlotte was in her dressing-gown, with her stockings rolled down below the knee.

“A superintendent? What's going on?” she said anxiously, when Donge introduced Maigret.

“Nothing, madame . . . I happened to be working at the Majestic today, and I met your husband there . . .”

At the word husband, she looked at Prosper and burst out laughing.

“Did he tell you we were married?”

“I imagined . . .”

“No, no! . . . Sit down . . . We're just living together . . . I think we're really more like friends than anything else . . . Aren't we, Prosper? . . . We've known each other so long! . . . Mind you, if I wanted him to marry me . . . But as I always say to him, what difference would it make? . . . Everyone who knows me knows I was a dancer, and then a nightclub hostess, on the Riviera . . . And that if I hadn't got so fat, I wouldn't have needed to work in the cloakroom in a club in the Rue Fontaine . . . Oh, Prosper . . . did you remember the payment on the wireless?”

“Yes, it's all done . . .”

An agricultural programme was announced on the radio and Charlotte switched it off, noticed that her dressing-gown was open and pinned it together with a large nappy pin. Some leftovers were heating in a pan on the stove. Charlotte wondered whether to lay the table. And Prosper Donge didn't know what to do or where to go.

“We could go into the sitting-room . . .” he suggested.

“You forget there's no fire there . . . You'll freeze! . . . If you two want to talk, I can go up and get dressed . . . You see, superintendent, we play a sort of game of musical chairs . . . When I get back, he goes out . . . When he gets back it's almost time for me to go, and we just about have time to have something to eat together . . . And even our days off hardly ever seem to coincide, so that when he has a free day he has to get his own lunch . . . Would you like a drink? . . . Can you get him something, Prosper? . . . I'll go up . . .”

Maigret hurriedly interrupted: “Not at all, madame . . . Do please stay . . . I'm just off . . . You see a crime was committed this morning, at the Majestic . . . I wanted to ask your . . . your friend a few questions, as the crime occurred in the basement, at a time when he was almost the only person down there.”

He had to make an effort to continue the cruel game, because Donge's face—did he look like a fish, or was it a sheep?—Donge's face expressed so much painful anguish. He was trying to keep calm. He almost succeeded. But at the cost of how much inner turmoil?

Only Charlotte seemed unmoved, and calmly poured out the drinks in small gold-rimmed glasses.

“Something to do with one of the staff?” she said with surprise, but still unperturbed.

“In the basement, but not one of the staff . . . That is what is so puzzling about the whole affair . . . Imagine to yourself a hotel guest, from one of the luxury suites, staying at the Majestic with her husband, her son, a nanny and a governess . . . A suite costing more than a thousand francs a day . . . Well, at six o'clock in the morning she is strangled, not in her room, but in the cloakroom in the basement . . . In all probability, the crime was committed there . . . What was the woman doing in the basement? Who had lured her down there, and why? . . . Especially at a time when people of that sort are usually still fast asleep . . .”

It was barely noticeable: a slight knitting of the brows, as if an idea had occurred to Charlotte and was immediately dismissed. A quick glance at Prosper who was warming his hands over the stove. He had very white hands, with square fingers, covered with red hairs.

But Maigret continued relentlessly: “It won't be easy to find out what this Mrs. Clark had come down to the basement to do . . .”

He held his breath, forced himself to remain motionless, to look as if he were studying the oilcloth tablecloth. You could have heard a pin drop.

Maigret seemed to be trying to give Charlotte time to regain her composure. She had frozen. Her mouth was half open, but no words came out. Then they heard her make a vague noise which sounded like: “Ah!”

Too bad! It was his job. His duty.

“I was wondering if you knew her . . .”

“Me?”

“Not by the name of Mrs. Clark, which she has only been called for a little over six years, but under the name of Émilienne, or rather Mimi . . . She was a hostess, in Cannes, at the time when . . .”

Poor plump Charlotte! What a bad actress she was. Looking at the ceiling like that as if she were racking her memory. Making her eyes look much too rounded and innocent!

“Émilienne? . . . Mimi? . . . No! I don't think . . . You're sure it was Cannes?”

“In a club which was then called La Belle Étoile, just behind the Croisette . . .”

“It's strange . . . I don't remember a Mimi . . . Do you, Prosper?”

It was a miracle he didn't choke. What was the point of forcing him to talk, when his throat was constricted as if by a vice?

“N—no . . .”

Nothing had outwardly changed. There was still that pleasant homely smell in the kitchen, the walls of the little house exuding a reassuring warmth, still the familiar smell of meat braising on a bed of golden onions. The red-and-white-checked oilcloth on the table. Cake crumbs. Like most women who have a tendency to grow fat, Charlotte probably went in for orgies of solitary cake-eating.

And the shrimp-pink silk petticoat!

Then suddenly, the tension evaporated. For no apparent reason. Someone coming in would probably have thought that the Donge family were quietly entertaining a neighbour.

Only none of them dared say a word. Poor Prosper, his skin pitted as a sieve with pock marks, had shut his periwinkle-blue eyes and was standing swaying by the stove, looking as though he would fall on the kitchen floor at any minute.

Maigret got up with a sigh.

“I'm so sorry to have disturbed you . . . It's time I . . .”

“I'll come to the door with you . . .” Charlotte said quickly. “It's time I got dressed anyway . . . I have to be there at ten, and there's only one bus an hour in the evenings . . . So . . .”

“Goodnight, Donge . . .”

“Goo—”

He possibly said the rest, but they didn't hear him. Maigret found his bicycle outside. She shut the door. He nearly looked through the keyhole, but someone was coming down the road and he didn't want to be caught in that position.

He braked all the way down the hill, and stopped in front of a bistro.

“Can you keep this bicycle for me, if I send for it tomorrow morning?”

He swallowed the first thing that came to hand and went to wait for the bus at the Pont de Saint-Cloud. For more than an hour Police Sergeant Lucas had been telephoning frantically, trying in vain to locate his boss.

“There you are at last, Monsieur Maigret!”

Standing in the doorway of his flat in the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, the superintendent couldn't help smiling, not because his wife called him “Monsieur Maigret,” which she often did when she was joking, but at the warm smell which came to meet him and which reminded him . . .

It was a long way from Saint-Cloud and he lived in a very different milieu from that of the unmarried Donge couple . . . But nevertheless, on his return he found Madame Maigret sewing, not in the kitchen, but in the dining-room, her feet not on the cooker but on the dining-room stove. And he could have sworn that here too there were some cake crumbs tucked away somewhere.

A hanging lamp above the round table. A cloth with a large round soup tureen in the middle, a carafe of wine, a carafe of water, and table-napkins in round silver rings. The smell coming from the kitchen was exactly the same as that from the Donges' stew . . .

“They've rung three times.”

“From the House?”

That was what he and his colleagues called Police Headquarters.

He took off his coat with a sigh of relief, warmed his hands over the stove for a minute, and remembered that Prosper Donge had done exactly the same a short while ago. Then he picked up the receiver and dialled a number.

“Is that you, chief?” asked Lucas's kindly voice at the other end of the line. “All right? . . . Anything new? . . . I've got one or two small things to report, which is why I'm still here . . . First, about the governess . . .

“Janvier has been shadowing her since she left the Majestic . . . Do you know what Janvier says about her? . . . He says that in her country she must be a gangster, not a governess . . .

“Hello! . . . Well I'll give you a brief run-down of what happened . . . She left the hotel soon after talking to you . . . Instead of taking the taxi the doorman had called for her, she jumped into a taxi which was passing and Janvier was hard put to it not to lose her . . .

“When they got to the Grands Boulevards, she leapt down the métro . . . then twice doubled back on her tracks. Janvier didn't give up and followed her to the Gare de Lyon . . . He was afraid she might take a train, because he hadn't enough money on him . . .

“The Rome Express was about to leave from Platform 4—in ten minutes' time. Ellen Darroman looked in all the compartments . . . Just as she was turning back, disappointed, a tall, very elegant bloke arrived, carrying a bag . . .”

“Oswald J. Clark . . .” said Maigret, who was looking vaguely at his wife, while listening. “She obviously wanted to warn him . . .”

“According to Janvier, it appears that they met rather as good friends than as an employer and his employee . . . Have you seen Clark? He's a great tall, lanky devil; muscular, with the open, healthy face of a baseball player . . . They went along the platform arguing, as if Clark was still thinking of going . . . When the train started, he still hadn't made up his mind, because it looked for a minute as though he was going to jump into the train.

“Then they went out of the station. They hailed a taxi. A few minutes later, they were at the American Embassy, in the Avenue Gabriel . . .

“They then went to the Avenue Friedland, to see a consulting barrister, a
solicitor
as they call it . . .

“The solicitor telephoned the examining magistrate, and threequarters of an hour later all three of them arrived at the Palais de Justice and were taken at once to the magistrate's office . . .

“I don't know what went on inside, but the magistrate wanted you to telephone him as soon as you got back . . . It seems it is very urgent . . .

“To conclude Janvier's story, after leaving the Palais de Justice, our three characters went to the Forensic Laboratory to identify the body officially . . . Then they went back to the Majestic and there, Clark had two whiskies in the bar with the solicitor while the young woman went up to her room . . .

“That's all, chief . . . The magistrate seems very anxious to have a word with you . . . What time is it? He'll be at home until eight; Turbigo 25-62 . . . Then he's having dinner with some friends, whose number he gave me . . . Just a minute . . . Galvani 47-53 . . .

“Do you need me any more, chief? Goodnight . . . Torrence will be on duty tonight . . .”

“Can I serve the soup?” Madame Maigret asked, sighing, shaking little bits of cotton off her dress.

“Get my dinner-jacket first . . .”

As it was after eight, he dialled Galvani 47-53. It was the number of a young deputy. A maid answered and he could hear the sound of knives and forks and an excited buzz of conversation.

“I'll go and call the magistrate . . . Who is speaking? Superintendent Négret? . . .”

Through the open door of the bedroom, he could see the wardrobe and Madame Maigret taking out his dinner-jacket . . .

“Is that you, superintendent? . . . Hum . . . Ha . . . You don't speak English, do you? . . . Hello! Don't ring off . . . That's what I thought . . . I wanted to say . . . Hum! . . . it's about this case, naturally . . . I think it would be better if you didn't concern yourself with . . . I mean not directly . . . with Mr. Clark and his staff . . .”

A slight smile hovered round Maigret's mouth.

“Monsieur Clark came to see me this afternoon with the governess . . . He's a man of some standing, with important connections . . . Before he came to see me, I had had a call from the American Embassy who gave me a very good account of him . . . So you see what I mean? . . . In a case like this, one must be careful not to make a mistake . . .

“Monsieur Clark was with his solicitor and insisted on his statement being taken down . . .