The Yellow Dog (18 page)

That was unlike him; he always opened it with his left hand. And Madame Maigret wasn't shy about being superstitious.

‘What is it? A gang?'

‘I've no idea.'

‘Are you going far?'

‘I don't know yet.'

‘You'll be careful, won't you?'

But he was already going downstairs and hardly turned around at all to wave to her. Out on the boulevard, he hailed a taxi.

‘Gare d'Orsay … Wait … How much to drive to Arpajon? … Three hundred francs, with the return trip? … Let's go!'

He almost never did this. But he was exhausted. He could barely fight off the drowsiness stinging his eyelids.

And wasn't he – just perhaps – a little perplexed, even uneasy? Not so much because of that door he'd opened with his right hand, nor because of that bizarre business of Michonnet's stolen car turning up in Andersen's garage with a dead man at the wheel.

It was rather the Danish fellow's personality that was bothering him.

‘Seventeen hours of grilling!'

Hardened criminals, crooks who'd traipsed through all the police stations in Europe hadn't stood up to that ordeal.

Maybe that was even why Maigret had let Andersen go.

That didn't prevent him from falling asleep in the back of the taxi after they'd gone through Bourg-la-Reine. The driver woke him up at Arpajon, in front of the old market with its thatched roof.

‘What hotel do you want?'

‘Take me to Three Widows Crossroads.'

It was uphill along the oil-slicked paving stones of the main road, lined on both sides by billboards advertising Vichy, Deauville, fancy hotels, brands of automotive fuel.

A crossroads. A garage with its five fuel pumps, painted red. To the left, the road to Avrainville, marked with a signpost.

All around, fields as far as the eye could see.

‘This is it!' announced the driver.

There were only three houses. First, the garage owner's, a stuccoed affair hastily erected when business was booming. A big sports car with aluminium coachwork was filling up at the pump. Mechanics were working on a butcher's van.

Across the way, a small villa of millstone grit with a narrow garden, surrounded by a six-foot-high fence. A brass plate:
Émile Michonnet, Insurance.

The last house was a good handred metres away. The wall around the grounds hid all but the second storey, a slate roof and a few handsome trees. This building was at least a century old. It was a fine country residence of times gone by, with a cottage for the gardener, outbuildings, poultry houses, a stable and a flight of front steps flanked by bronze
torchères
.

A small concrete pond had dried up. A wisp of smoke rose straight into the air from a carved chimney cap.

That was all. Beyond the fields, a belfry … farmhouse roofs … a plough abandoned at the edge of some tilled land.

And along the smooth road cars streamed by in both directions, passing one another and honking their horns.

Maigret got out of the taxi with his suitcase and paid the driver, who filled up at the garage before heading back to Paris.

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First published in French as
Le Chien Jaune
by Fayard 1931
This translation first published in the USA as
Maigret and the Yellow Dog
by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987
First published in Great Britain, under the present
title, with minor revisions, in Penguin Classics 2003
This edition, with further minor revisions, published in Penguin Classics 2013

Copyright 1931 by Georges Simenon Ltd
Translation copyright © 1987, 2003, 2013 by Georges Simenon Ltd
GEORGES SIMENON ® Simenon.tm
MAIGRET ® Georges Simenon Limited
All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-698-15749-1

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