Maigret Gets Angry by Georges Simenon Page B

Amorelle and of her son-in-law, that of Ernest Malik, the most luxurious of
all, that of Campois, halfway up the hill, almost rustic, although solidly bourgeois with its
pink walls. On the other side of the water was the quaint, dilapidated little manor house of
Monsieur Groux, who preferred to mortgage his properties rather than see his woods turned into
quarries.
    He wasn’t far away, Monsieur Groux. You
could see him, bareheaded in the sun, dressed as always in khaki, sitting in a green canoe
moored between two poles and fishing with a rod and line.
    There wasn’t a breath of wind, no ripples
on the water.
    ‘You know about these things, don’t
you. Tell me, will there be a moon tonight?’
    ‘That depends what time. It will rise just
before midnight behind the wood you see upstream. It’s in its first quarter.’
    Maigret was fairly pleased with himself and yet
he couldn’t rid himself of a little knot of anxiety that had lodged in his chest and was
growing instead of abating as the time passed.
    A
pang of nostalgia too. He had spent an hour at Quai des Orfèvres, with men he knew so well
that they still called him chief, but who …
    What had they said to each other after he had
left? That he was missing the job, naturally! That life in his rural retreat wasn’t as
rosy as he would have them believe! That he had seized on the first opportunity to experience
the thrills of the past again!
    An amateur, in other words! He looked like an
amateur.
    ‘Another drop of white?’
    The lock-keeper didn’t say no. He had the
habit of wiping his mouth with his sleeve after every sip.
    ‘I am sure that young Malik –
Georges-Henry – must have gone fishing lots of times with your son?’
    ‘Oh yes, sir.’
    ‘I expect he loved that, didn’t
he?’
    ‘He loved the water, he loved the woods, he
loved animals!’
    ‘A good boy!’
    ‘A good boy, yes. Not proud. If you could
have seen the pair of them with the little young lady … They’d often go out together
in the canoe. I’d offer to let them through the lock, even though we don’t normally
allow small boats through. But they were the ones who said no. They preferred to carry the boat
to the other side of the lock. I’d see them going home at dusk.’
    At dusk, or rather after dusk had fallen, Maigret
himself had an unsavoury job to do. Then, everyone would know. They’d know whether he had
got it wrong, if he was just
an old dog who had
deserved his retirement, or whether he was still good for something.
    He paid and set off slowly along the riverbank,
puffing away at his pipe. The wait was long, as if that evening the sun refused to go down. The
shimmering water flowed slowly, silently, with only a barely perceptible murmur. The midges
hovered dangerously close to the surface of the water, taunting the fish and making them
jump.
    He saw no one, neither the Malik brothers, nor
their household servants. That evening everything was at a standstill. Shortly before ten
o’clock, leaving behind him the light shining in Jeanne’s room at L’Ange and
in the kitchen where Raymonde sat, he made his way to the station, as he had done the previous
night.
    The little glasses of white wine had doubtless
had their effect, because the crossing-keeper was not at his post outside his house. Maigret was
able to walk past unseen and follow the track.
    Behind the curtain of hazelnut trees, more or
less at the spot where he had hidden the previous night, he found Mimile in position, a calm
Mimile, legs apart, a cigarette that had gone out dangling from his lips, who seemed to be
taking a breath of fresh air.
    ‘No sign of him yet?’
    ‘No.’
    They stood waiting in silence. From time to time,
they whispered a few words. As on the previous night, there was a window open in Bernadette
Amorelle’s apartment and they occasionally glimpsed the old lady moving around in the
faint glow.
    It
was not until half past ten that a figure appeared in the Maliks’ garden and