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village surrounded by slimy bogs and pools of stagnant
water?
    He would soon find out for himself. Kicking
his heels, he waited for Cavre to reappear and then had one of the most outlandish ideas
of his career. He was within a whisker of latching on to his former colleague, dogging
his every step, and saying point-blank:
    ‘Listen, Cavre, it’s not worth
us trying to outsmart one another. You’re not here just for the hell of it.
Somebody sent for you. Tell me who it is and what they’ve got you doing
…’
    How simple a proper, official investigation
seemed to him at that moment! If he had been on a case somewhere under his jurisdiction,
he would merely have had to go into the post office, pick up the telephone and say:
    ‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret.
Put me through to the Police Judiciaire immediately … Hello! … Is that you,
Janvier? Jump in a car … Get over here … When you see Cadaver come out
… Of course, Justin Cavre … Fine … Follow him, yes, don’t take
your eyes off him …’
    Who knows? He might also have put a tail on
Étienne Naud, whom he had just seen go by at the wheel of his car, heading to
Fontenay.
    It was so easy being Maigret. You had a
whole apparatus of the most sophisticated kind at your disposal. And youonly had to casually drop your own name for people to be so dazzled they would bend
over backwards to be agreeable to you.
    Whereas here he was such an unknown that,
despite all the articles about him, all the photographs of him in the papers,
Étienne Naud had marched up to Justin Cavre at the station.
    Naud had made him welcome because of the
examining magistrate brother-in-law who had sent him from Paris, but hadn’t they
all seemed to be wondering why he was there? The subtext to Naud’s reception was
more or less:
    ‘My brother-in-law Bréjon is a
charming fellow who clearly wishes us well, but he’s been gone from Saint-Aubin
too long and he’s got some strange ideas into his head about this business. It was
good of him to think of sending you here, and it was good of you to have come. We are
going to look after you to the best of our abilities. So, eat, drink, come on the tour
of the property with me and, whatever you do, don’t feel under any obligation to
stay a moment longer in this damp, charmless little town. Nor to get involved in this
wholly insignificant business that is just between us.’
    Whom was he working for, when it came down
to it? Étienne Naud. Well, Étienne Naud would obviously rather he didn’t
conduct a serious investigation.
    As for the incident in the night, that beat
everything. Geneviève coming into his room to tell him, essentially, ‘I was
Albert Retailleau’s mistress. I am pregnant with his child. But if you say a word
I’ll kill myself.’
    Well, if she really was Albert’s
mistress, the accusationsagainst Naud acquired a terrible
plausibility. Had she thought of that? Had she knowingly accused her father?
    And what about the victim’s mother?
She hadn’t said anything or asserted anything or denied anything; she had simply
intimated, with every fibre of her being:
    ‘What business is any of this of
yours?’
    To everyone, even the old ladies hiding
behind their quivering curtains, even the kids just now who had turned to stare after
they had passed him, he was the intruder, the undesirable. No, worse, he was totally
untrustworthy, a stranger who had just turned up from who knew where to do who knew
what.
    All of which meant that, particularly in
those streets, with his hands thrust in the pockets of his big overcoat, he felt like
one of those sordid characters tormented by a secret perversion who skulk around Porte
Saint-Martin and the like, their shoulders hunched, their faces twisted, hugging the
walls whenever they see someone from the vice squad.
    Was this Cavre’s influence? Maigret
felt like fetching his suitcase from the Nauds’, catching the first train and
telling Examining Magistrate Bréjon, ‘They don’t want