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‘Dead, ja … It was hard …’
Every race has its own smell, and other races hate it. Despite opening the window and puffing relentlessly at his pipe, Inspector Maigret could not get rid of the background odour that made him uncomfortable.
6 Rütsep Max Johannson Tailor
The parents were placed behind two children holding hands. They were both boys, aged around six or eight, in short trousers, black long socks, in white embroidered sailor collar shirts with decorations on the cuffs. Same age! Same height! A striking likeness between them, and with the tailor. But you couldn’t fail to notice the difference in their characters. One had a decisive expression on his face and was looking at the camera aggressively, with some kind of a challenge. The other was stealing a glance at his brother. It was a look of trust and admiration.
The student with the sash and the one who was gazing at him were unquestionably the same as the lads in front of the house in Pskov, that’s to say the sons of tailor Johannson.
The diploma was written in antique-looking script on parchment, in Latin. The text was larded with archaic formulas that appointed one Hans Johannson, a student of philosophy, as a Fellow of the Ugala Club. It was signed at the bottom by the Grand Master of the Club, Pietr Johannson.
In the same canvas bag there was another package tied up with string, also containing photographs as well as letters written in Russian.
A family resemblance with Anna Gorskin was obvious at first glance. There was a photo of her too, aged around sixteen, in an ermine toque.
he did at least notice that one heavily underlined phrase recurred several times over.
Half an hour later he was at Quai des Orfèvres, listening to a translation of the letters, and he hung on to sentences such as:
Detective Chief Inspector Maigret did not smile once. He put the papers in his drawer and locked it, drafted a few telegrams and then went down to the police cells.
‘Do you deny having them taken up to his room at the Majestic together with a letter in which you declared you
were going to kill Mortimer and also made an appointment to meet outside the hotel?’
Nobody had seen her pull the trigger. Nothing remained of the letter that Pietr had burned.
‘We have an anonymous letter – we’re checking it out right now – that says he’s hiding in a villa with someone called Swaan …’ Anna glanced up at him with her dark eyes. She looked grave, almost tragic.
dropsy /ˈdräpsē/ I. noun old-fashioned or less technical term for edema. – origin Middle English: shortening of idropesie, earlier form of obsolete hydropsy, via Old French and Latin from Greek hudrōps ‘dropsy,’ from hudōr ‘water.’
She was having a fit of hysterics! Her face was all distorted, her arms and legs were writhing on the floor, and her body juddered with muscular spasms. What had been a beautiful woman was now a hideous hag tearing whole tufts of hair off her head with no thought for the pain.
If you strained your ear you could hear her muffled sobs.
Please note that when the English police turned up at the Victoria, news of Mortimer’s death hadn’t been released in the country, though it may have reached the news desks. Nonetheless the bird had flown. Stones did a bunk a few minutes before the police got there …’
‘Can you tell me which of the two I’m looking for?’
Three-quarters of an hour remained before the train left. Magistrate Coméliau studied in turn the boy who seemed to be challenging the photographer and his brother, who could be turning towards the other one to ask for his advice.
‘Photographs like that speak volumes!’ Maigret continued. ‘It makes you wonder why their parents and their teachers who saw them like that didn’t guess right...
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Whereas I’m the son of a gamekeeper on a Loire Valley estate that goes back centuries.’
‘What I’ve got to do now is lay my hands on that boy there!’
‘I met Madame Swaan …’ he said. ‘Where? When?’ ‘At the dockside … Just now … She was going towards the outer pier …’ ‘On her own?’ ‘Yes, alone. I thought of tailing her … But then I remembered Dufour was expecting me … The pier’s a dead end, so she can’t get very far …’ ‘What was she wearing?’ ‘A dark coat … I didn’t pay attention
‘Who did you see this morning?’ ‘Officer, I swear I …’ She collapsed in tears. ‘I swear … I swear …’ ‘Was it Captain Swaan?’ ‘No! … I … It was … madame’s … brother-in-law … He gave me a letter to give to madame …’ ‘Where was he?’ ‘Opposite the butcher’s … He was waiting for me there …’
It was a complete miracle that he caught sight of the man. At first glance he looked like an inanimate object, just a blur among other blurry shapes in the dark.
The man hadn’t seen who was attacking him, and he slithered like a snake. He could not free his head, but he wriggled with what must surely be counted in those circumstances as superhuman agility.
‘Would you like to talk, Hans Johannson?’
‘Did she talk?’ Pietr asked in a voice so blank that it seemed to be devoid of anything that might still harbour a will to live. Maigret was entitled to lie but instead he declared: ‘She told me nothing … But I know …’
He’d lost his moustache. He had the worried face of Fyodor Yurevich, the look of the little boy in Pskov gazing at his brother. But though his eyes were the same cloudy grey as before, they now stared with a harsh and unyielding gaze.
Maigret realized he was falling ill again, from the cold. The injured side of his chest felt like a block of ice.
It would be an exaggeration to say that in most criminal inquiries cordial relations arise between the police and the person they are trying to corner into a confession. All the same, they almost always become close to some degree (unless the suspect is just a glowering brute). That must be because for weeks and sometimes months on end the police and the suspect do nothing but think about each other.
‘Did you mean to kill her?’
The reply came straight away and it was just as straightforward: ‘I couldn’t do it.’
The determined and intelligent face of Pietr started to dissolve into the face of Fyodor, the intensely agitated Russian vagrant. Maigret didn’t bother to watch.
‘The two brothers of Pskov … Twins, I suppose? You’re Hans, the one who was looking lovingly and tamely at the other one …’
‘That kind of domination isn’t uncommon between twins,’ Maigret commented
think it was mainly because after a few glasses I could imagine a world to my own liking in which I would play a splendid part … ‘Pietr was very hard on me. He called me a “dirty Russian”. You can’t know what that means. Our maternal grandmother was Russian. But in our part of the world, especially in the post-war years, Russians were treated as drunken dreamers and layabouts.
When the accounts of the Ugala Club were done, it turned out that Pietr had used the group mainly to enrich himself. ‘He was on several of the subcommittees and he’d fiddled all the books. ‘He had to leave the country. He went to Berlin and wrote to ask me to join him there. ‘That’s where the two of us began.’
travelled abroad a lot and he used me less and less. Only occasionally, for forgeries, because I’d got very good at that …
‘He gave me small amounts of money. He always said: “You’ll never do more than drink, you filthy Russian!”
‘He’d become a merchant seaman for the time being under the alias of Olaf Swaan … He stayed at my hotel … While I sweated over the cheques for weeks on end – doctoring cheques is tricky work! – he toured the Channel ports looking for boats to buy …
‘One day I went into my brother’s room without knocking. He had Berthe in his arms …’
He married Berthe, some while later, when she’d changed job and was working in Fécamp … He never told her the truth … I can see why not! … He needed
a quiet, neat little place of his own … He had children with her! …’
‘Right up to this morning she really believed she’d married the master of an ocean-going vessel
was stupid enough to come down to Fécamp last month … Berthe gave me some advice … Then she added: “Why aren’t you more like your brother?” ‘Something suddenly occurred to me. I didn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it before … I could be Pietr,
whenever I liked!
went to Brussels to wait for him. I crossed the tracks and boarded his train from the wrong side. I hid behind the luggage until I saw him get up from his seat to go to the toilet. I got there before he did. ‘I killed him! I’d just drunk a litre of Belgian gin. The hardest part was to get his clothes off and then dress him up in mine.’
