The Misty Harbour (5 page)

‘He's not the only
one …'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Nothing, really. I heard about a
stranger seen prowling around … But nothing definite.'

‘Who saw him?'

‘I don't know. People talk,
that's all … Could you manage a quick drink?'

For the second time, Maigret settled
into the bar, where he was welcomed with handshakes.

‘Well! Those
gentlemen from the public prosecutor's office certainly got their job done in
a hurry.'

‘What's your
pleasure?'

‘I'll have a
beer.'

The sun had been out all day long. But
now streamers of mist were threading their way from tree to tree, and vapour began
rising from the canal.

‘Another pea-souper,' sighed
the captain.

And at the same instant, they heard the
fog horn.

‘It's the light buoy, out at
the entrance to the harbour channel.'

‘Did Captain Joris go often to
Norway?' asked Maigret abruptly.

‘When he sailed for the Compagnie
Anglo-Normande, yes! Especially right after the war, when there was a shortage of
wood. It's a lousy cargo, wood is – gets in the way of handling the
ship.'

‘Did you work for the same
company?'

‘Not for long. I was mostly with
Worms, in Bordeaux. I ran the “ferry”, we called it, just the one run:
Bordeaux to Nantes, Nantes to Bordeaux. For eighteen years!'

‘What's Julie's
background?'

‘A fishing family, Port-en-Bessin.
If you can call them fisherfolk … The father never did much of anything.
Died during the war. The mother must still be peddling fish in the streets, when she
isn't swilling red wine in bistros …'

For the second time, thinking of Julie,
Maigret smiled to himself. He remembered her arriving in his office in Paris, neat
as a pin in her blue suit, a determined little thing …

And that very
morning, when she struggled so clumsily, like a child, to keep him from taking her
brother's letter.

Joris' house was already fading
into the mist. There was no light any more upstairs, where the body had lain, or in
the dining room, only the light in the front hall and probably at the back of the
house, in the kitchen, where the two women were keeping Julie company.

Some lock workers now came in from the
harbour but, sizing up the situation, went off to a table in the back to play some
dominoes. The lighthouse lit up.

‘The same again!' called the
captain, pointing to the glasses. ‘This one's on me.'

When Maigret asked the next question,
his voice sounded strangely soft, almost velvety.

‘If Joris were alive right now,
where would he be? Here?'

‘No! At home. In his
slippers.'

‘In the dining room? In his
bedroom?'

‘In the kitchen. With the evening
paper. And then he'd read one of those books on gardening. He'd fallen
head over heels for flowers. Just look at his garden! Still full of them, although
it's late in the season.'

The other men laughed, but were a trifle
chagrined at not having a passion for flowers instead of haunting their beloved
tavern.

‘He never went hunting?'

‘Not often … A few
times, when he was invited.'

‘With the mayor?'

‘When the shooting was good,
they'd go off to the duck blind together.'

The place was so poorly lit that it was
difficult to see the
domino players
through the smoky haze. A big stove made the air even heavier. Outside, it was
almost evening, but the fog turned this darkness more oppressive, almost sinister.
The fog horn was still sounding. Maigret's pipe made faint sizzling
noises.

Leaning back in his chair, he half
closed his eyes, trying to piece together his scattered clues floating in a formless
mass.

‘Joris vanished for six weeks only
to return with a cracked and patched-up skull,' he murmured, without realizing
that he was speaking out loud.

Then poison is waiting for him on the
day he comes home!

And Julie doesn't find her
brother's note in the pantry cupboard until the next day …

Maigret heaved a great sigh and
muttered, ‘So: someone tried to kill him. Then someone got him back on his
feet. Then someone finished him off. Unless …'

For these three statements did not fit
together. Then he had an outlandish idea, so outlandish that it startled him.

‘Unless this someone wasn't
trying to kill him that first time? And was only trying to affect his
reason?'

Hadn't the doctors in Paris
affirmed that his operation could only have been performed by a highly skilled
surgeon?

But does one fracture a man's
skull to steal away his mind?

And besides! What proof was there that
Joris had lost his mind for ever?

The others watched Maigret in respectful
silence. The customs official simply signalled to the waitress for another
round.

And they sat off
in their corners in the fug of the tavern, each in a reverie slightly blurred by
drink.

They heard three cars go by: the public
prosecutor's party was returning to Caen after the Grandmaisons'
reception. By now Captain Joris' body was already in a cold room at the
Institut Médico-Légal.

No one spoke. Dominoes clicked on the
unvarnished wooden table. The puzzling crime, it seemed, had gradually come to weigh
heavily on everyone's mind. They felt it hanging, almost visibly, over their
heads. Their faces creased into scowls.

The youngest of the customs officials
grew so uneasy that he rose and blurted out, ‘Time I was getting home to the
little woman …'

Maigret handed his tobacco pouch to his
neighbour, who filled his pipe and passed the tobacco along. Then Delcourt stood up
as well to escape the now oppressive atmosphere.

‘How much does it come to,
Marthe?'

‘These two rounds? Nine francs
seventy-five. And the gentleman's from yesterday, that's three francs
ten.'

Everyone was on his feet. Moist air
swept in through the open door. There were handshakes all around.

Once outside, the men strode off into
the mist in every direction, as the fog horn boomed over the sound of their
footsteps.

Maigret stood listening to all the
footsteps heading off in every direction. Heavy footsteps, sometimes pausing, or
suddenly darting away …

And he realized that somehow there was
now fear in
the air. They were afraid, all
those men going home, afraid of nothing, of everything, of some nebulous danger,
some unforeseeable disaster, afraid of the dark and the lights in the mist.

‘What if it isn't
over?'

Maigret knocked the ashes from his pipe
and buttoned his overcoat.

‘Do you like it?' inquired
the hotel-owner anxiously about each dish.

‘It's fine! Fine!'
replied the inspector, who wasn't actually quite sure what he was eating.

He was alone in a hotel dining room
spacious enough for forty or fifty guests. The hotel was for Ouistreham's
summer visitors. The furniture was the kind found in any seaside hotel. On the
tables, small vases of flowers.

No connection at all with the Ouistreham
that the inspector found interesting and was beginning to understand.

That was what pleased him. What he hated
the most, in an inquiry, were the first steps, with all the attendant false moves
and misinterpretations.

The word Ouistreham, for example. In
Paris, it had conjured up a complete fantasy, a port city like Saint-Malo. The
evening he arrived, Maigret had decided that it was really a forbidding hole full of
gruff, taciturn people.

Now he had got his bearings. Felt more
at home. Ouistreham was an ordinary village at the end of a bit of road planted with
small trees. What truly counted was the harbour: a lock, a lighthouse, Joris'
cottage, the Buvette de la Marine.

And the workaday rhythm of this harbour
as well: the
twice-daily tides, the
fishermen lugging their baskets, the handful of men exclusively devoted to the
constant traffic through the lock.

Some words now meant more to Maigret:
captain, freighter, coaster. He was watching all that in action and learning the
rules of the game.

The mystery had not been resolved. He
still could not explain the things that had stymied him from the first. But at least
now the cast of characters was clear: all were accounted for, with their settings
and little everyday routines.

‘Will you be staying here
long?' asked the hotel-owner as he served the coffee himself.

‘That I don't
know.'

‘If this had happened during the
season it would have hit us hard.'

Now Maigret could distinguish among
precisely four Ouistrehams: the Harbour, the Village, the Villas, the Seaside Resort
– this last temporarily on holiday itself.

‘You're going out,
inspector?'

‘Just a stroll before
bedtime.'

The tide was almost full in. The weather
was much colder than it had been; the fog, while still opaque, was turning into
droplets of icy water.

Everything was dark. Everything was
closed. Only the misty eye of the lighthouse was visible. And up on the lock, voices
called to one another.

A short blast from a ship's
whistle. A green light and a red one drawing near; a mass gliding along, level with
the wall …

Maigret had learned the drill. A steamer
was coming in.
The shadowy figure now
approaching would pick up the hawser and secure it to the nearest bollard. Then, up
on the bridge, the captain would give the order to reverse engines.

Delcourt passed close by the inspector,
looking anxiously out towards the jetties.

‘What's going on?'

‘I can't
tell …'

The harbourmaster squinted hard, as if
it were possible to see into the pitch dark through sheer force of will. Two men
were already moving to close the lock-gates.

‘Wait a minute!' Delcourt
yelled to them.

And exclaimed in astonishment:

‘It's them!'

Just then a voice not fifty metres away
called out, ‘Hey there! Louis! Down jib and stand by to come alongside port
side-to …'

The voice had come from the darkness
below, over by the jetties. A firefly of light was coming closer. Someone seemed to
be moving around; canvas fell as rings clattered along a stay.

Then a mainsail slipped past, close
enough to touch.

‘How in heaven did they pull that
off!' grumbled Delcourt, who then turned towards the schooner and yelled,
‘Get her nose in under the port quarter of the steamer, so's we can
close the gates!'

A man had leaped ashore with a mooring
line and now stood looking around him, hands on his hips.

‘The
Saint-Michel
?'
Maigret asked Delcourt.

‘The same … They must
have flown over the water.'

There was only a
small lantern down on the schooner's deck, illuminating a confused scene: a
cask, a pile of gear, the silhouette of a man leaving the tiller to dash forwards to
the schooner's bows.

The lock workers seemed particularly
interested in the boat, arriving one after the other to take a look at it.

‘The lock-gate winches, men! Back
to work! Let's go!'

With the gates closed, water roared in
through the sluices, and both vessels began to rise. The lantern's pale light
drew closer. As the schooner's deck drew level with the quay, the man there
hailed the harbourmaster.

‘All's well?'

‘All's well,' replied
Delcourt guardedly. ‘Didn't expect you so soon!'

‘Had the wind at our backs, and
Louis put up all the canvas we had. We even left a freighter in our wake!'

‘Heading for Caen?'

‘We'll be unloading there,
yes. Anything new around here?'

Maigret was a few paces away, Big Louis
a bit further off, but they could barely see each other. Only Delcourt and the
Saint-Michel
's captain were talking, and now the harbourmaster,
at a loss, looked over at Maigret.

‘I heard it's in the paper
that Joris has come back. Is that true?'

‘He came back and he left
again,' replied Delcourt.

‘What do you mean?'

Big Louis had taken a step closer. With
his hands in his pockets and the one shoulder crooked, he looked rather flabby in
the darkness, like a shapeless hulk.

‘He's
dead …'

Now Big Louis went right up to
Delcourt.

‘Is that true?' he
grunted.

Hearing his voice for the first time,
Maigret found that flabby, too, in a way: hoarse, and somewhat drawling. He still
could not see his face.

‘The first night he was
home,' explained Delcourt, ‘he was poisoned. And here,' he quickly
pointed out, ‘is the inspector from Paris who's in charge of the
case.'

Having worried for some time how to
prudently reveal this information, the harbourmaster now seemed relieved. Had he
been afraid the men of the
Saint-Michel
might accidentally get themselves
into trouble?

‘Ah! So this gentleman is with the
police …'

The schooner was still rising. Her
skipper swung his legs over the rails and dropped down on to the quay, but then
hesitated before shaking hands with Maigret.

‘Hard to imagine …' he
said slowly, still thinking about Joris.

He seemed worried as well, and even more
obviously than Delcourt.

Louis, his tall form swaying, his head
tilted to one side, barked out something the inspector could not understand.

‘What did he say?'

‘He was grumbling in dialect. He
said: “a filthy business”!'

‘What was a filthy
business?' the inspector asked the ex-convict, but Big Louis simply looked him
in the eye. They had moved closer and could now see each other's faces. Big
Louis' features looked swollen; one cheek was
bigger than the other, or simply seemed so because of the
way he always tilted his head to one side. Puffy flesh, and big eyes that seemed to
start from his head.

‘You were here yesterday!'
said the inspector sharply.

The water was at the proper level; the
upper gates were opening. The steamer moved smoothly into the canal, and Delcourt
hurried over to record her tonnage and provenance.

A voice shouted down from the bridge:
‘Nine hundred tons! … Rouen!'

The
Saint-Michel
remained in
the lock, however, and each of the men stationed there to deal with her, aware that
something unusual was happening, waited, wrapped in shadows, listening
carefully.

Delcourt returned, writing the necessary
information in his notebook.

‘Well?' asked Maigret
impatiently.

‘Well, what?' grumbled
Louis. ‘You says I was here yesterday! That's 'cause I
was …'

It was hard to understand him, because
he had a peculiar way of chewing on his words with his mouth almost closed, as if he
were eating. Not to mention his thick local accent …

‘Why did you come here?'

‘See my sister.'

‘And, not finding her at home, you
left her a note.'

In the meantime, Maigret was stealthily
observing the schooner's captain, who was dressed just like Louis. There was
nothing special about him; indeed, he seemed more like a seasoned bosun's mate
than the skipper of a coaster.

‘We were
three days at Fécamp for repairs,' the man now piped up, ‘so Louis
grabbed his chance to come here and see Julie!'

All around the lock, the men on duty
must have been straining to listen in, keeping as quiet as possible. The fog horn
still moaned in the distance, and the fog itself was growing wetter, leaving the
cobblestones black and gleaming.

A hatchway opened in the
schooner's deck, and a man's head emerged, with unkempt hair and a bushy
beard.

‘What's wrong? Why're
we sitting here?'

‘Shut it, Célestin!' said
his skipper quickly.

Delcourt was stamping up and down the
quay to warm himself up – and perhaps to save face as well, for he didn't know
if he should stay there or not.

‘Louis, what made you think that
Joris was in danger?'

‘Huh!' said Louis, and
shrugged. ‘He'd already had his skull stove in, hadn't he, so it
wasn't hard to work out.'

It was so difficult to make out the
syllables all mashed together in the man's grunting that Maigret could have
done with an interpreter.

The atmosphere felt intensely
uncomfortable and in a way, mysteriously threatening.

Louis looked towards the cottage but
couldn't see a thing, not even a darker patch in the night.

‘She's there, our
Julie?'

‘Yes. Are you going to go and see
her?'

Louis shook his head with big sweeps,
like a bear.

‘Why not?'

‘Sure she'll cry.'

It sounded like
‘Shore shale crah' – and in the disgusted tone of a man who can't
take the sight of tears.

They were still standing there; the fog
was thickening, soaking their shoulders, and Delcourt decided to intervene.

‘Anyone for a drink?'

A lock worker chimed in, off at his post
in the darkness.

‘They just closed the
bar!'

‘We could go below to the cabin,
if you like,' offered the
Saint-Michel
's captain.

There were four of them: Maigret,
Delcourt, Big Louis and the skipper, whose name was Lannec. The cabin wasn't
large, and the small stove gave off heat so intense that the air was hazy with
humidity. The paraffin lamp, set in gimbals, looked almost red hot.

Cabin walls of varnished pitch pine. A
scarred oak table, so worn that the entire surface was uneven. Dirty dishes still
sat out, along with some sturdy but gummy-looking glasses and a half-bottle of
red.

On either side of the cabin were wide,
rectangular recesses, like cupboards without doors, for the beds of the captain and
Louis, the first mate. Unmade beds, with dirty boots and clothing tossed on to them.
Whiffs of tar, alcohol, cooking and stuffy bedrooms, but most of all, that
indescribable smell of a boat.

Everyone looked less unsettling in the
lamplight. Lannec had a brown moustache and sharp, bright eyes. He had taken a
bottle from a locker and was rinsing glasses by filling them with water he then
poured out on the floor.

‘It seems
that you were here on the night of the 16th of September, Captain Lannec.'

Big Louis was sitting hunched over with
his elbows on the table.

‘Right, we were here,'
replied Lannec, pouring out the drinks.

‘Wasn't that unusual?
Because spending the night in the outer harbour would mean you'd have to keep
an eye on your moorings, because of the tide.'

‘It happens,' said Lannec
casually.

‘Like that you can often get
underway a few hours earlier in the morning,' added Delcourt, who seemed
determined to keep things cordial.

‘Captain Joris didn't come
and see you aboard?'

‘While we were in the
lock … Not later on.'

‘And you neither saw nor heard
anything out of the ordinary?'

‘Cheers! … No,
nothing.'

‘You, Louis, you went to
bed?'

‘Must have.'

‘What's that?'

‘I said must have … Was
some time ago.'

‘You didn't visit your
sister?'