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Maybe Madame Swaan had found nobody waiting for her at the appointed place. Maybe her assignation had had time to get away? Maybe he was dead.
Maigret was looking for a man!
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.
But it was alive.
The rocks underfoot were covered in seaweed and Maigret’s soles kept slipping and sliding. Hissing sounds came from all around – crabs fleeing in their hundreds, or air bubbles bursting, algae popping, mussels quivering on the wooden beams they’d colonized halfway to the top. At one point Maigret lost his footing, plunging knee-deep into a rock pool.
In the end he got across by hanging on to the ironwork supporting the stilts.
wondered if he was seeing things: the man was so perfectly still that he could have been one of those rocks that from afar take on the shape of a human being. He got to the point where he had water slapping about between his legs. Maigret was not the sea-going type.
suddenly, without transition, he pounced on the stationary figure, put his neck in an arm-lock and pulled him down backwards.
The man hadn’t seen who was attacking him, and he slithered like a snake.
Maigret didn’t want to strangle him.
His opponent didn’t struggle for long. He’d only fought out of spontaneous reaction, like an animal.
‘Would you like to talk, Hans Johannson?’
Later still, Maigret confessed with great honesty that he had had to hang on to his prisoner’s foot to haul himself back up the slope.
Pietr went down first, stumbled when he was three metres in, slipped over, coughed up seawater, then stood up.
Maigret plunged in.
the two of them eventually found themselves dripping on the pebbles of the shore. ‘Did she talk?’ Pietr asked
‘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.
‘Come on …’ Maigret said. ‘To the police station?’ Maigret sounded resigned, or rather, indifferent. ‘No …’
Chez Léon, where he’d noticed an entrance
gave onto a room that was turned into a fairly grand dining room in high season. In winter,
though, sailors were happy to drink and eat oysters and herring in the main bar.
‘Monsieur Léon! … Monsieur Léon! …’ ‘Give me a room …’ the inspector said when Léon came in. ‘Monsieur Maigret! … But you’re soaking! … Did you? …’ ‘A room, quickly! …’ ‘There’s no fire made up in any of the rooms! …
‘Don’t you have a pair of bathrobes?’ ‘Of course … My own … but …’ He was shorter than the inspector by three heads! ‘Bring them down.’
‘Hot toddy, right? … Full strength! …’ ‘Good idea … But get those bathrobes first …’
Maigret realized he was falling ill again, from the cold. The injured side of his chest felt like a block of ice.
Monsieur Léon handed them his two bathrobes
‘I’ll have the larger one,’ the inspector said. Pietr compared them for size. As he handed over the larger one to Maigret he noticed the wet bandage, and a nervous twitch broke out on his face. ‘Is it serious?’ ‘Two or three ribs that’ll have to be removed sooner or later …’
Monsieur Léon gathered up the two soggy and dripping heaps on the floor
‘Come on then, Henriette … Where’s that toddy?’ Then he tracked back to the bedroom and gave this advice:
‘Don’t talk too loud in here … There’s a travelling salesman from Le Havre in the room next door … He’...
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The Latvian was the one who took the bottle of rum and expertly mixed the toddy. After taking a few sips, Maigret asked: ‘Did you mean to kill her?’
‘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.
‘Was she married to Pietr? … He was the same as Olaf Swaan, wasn’t he?’
‘The two brothers of Pskov … Twins, I suppose? You’re Hans, the one who was looking lovingly and tamely at the other one …’
… He didn’t call me his servant – he said: slave … He’d noticed I liked that … Because I did like it, I still don’t know why … He was everything to me …
later on I came to love a woman, I don’t think I was capable of any greater devotion …
When the accounts of the Ugala Club were done, it turned out that Pietr had used the group mainly to enrich himself.
‘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.’
‘Which of you was the forger?’
‘Mainly, we doctored cheques … I could turn a cheque for ten marks into a cheque for ten thousand, and Pietr would cash it in Switzerland or Holland or even, one time, in Spain …
‘Pietr wasn’t on his own. He’d linked up with several international gangs … He travelled abroad a lot and he used me less and less. Only occasionally, for forgeries, because I’d got very good at that …
he also asked me to supply him with a set of false passports, which I did.’ ‘And that’s how you met the woman who became Madame Swaan …’ ‘Her name was Berthe …’
‘She was very young, but a serious person. She made me think of having a house and children …
‘One evening she was lecturing me when I wasn’t too drunk. I wept in her arms and I think I promised I would start over and become a new man.
‘One day I went into my brother’s room without knocking. He had Berthe in his arms …’
‘I suppose I can only make women feel sorry for me. When I woke up there was a Jewish girl taking care of me … She got the idea she should stop me drinking, just like the last one! … And she treated me like I was a child, as well!
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! …’
with Anna … It’s a mystery why she loved me … But she did love me, no doubt about that … So I treated her the way my brother had always treated me … I threw insults at her … I was constantly humiliating her …
