It was three years later, at around the same time of year, because the lilacs were beginning to bloom. Maigret, in clogs, was planting out tender green lettuces when his wife opened the letterbox and unfolded a death announcement.
‘Goodness! She died after all …’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘The woman from the Grand Café … Madame Urbain … The dairy woman told me that for the past three months the only thing she could swallow was milk … You’ll have to go and drop off your condolence card …’
Maigret went there that evening and stayed for a few moments in the chapel of rest, where Angèle was blowing her nose in a corner.
Two days later, the funeral took place and the Maigrets came back from the cemetery arm in arm, on a glorious day that left no room for dark thoughts.
‘This reminds me of one of the worst moments of my life …’ he began suddenly, for no apparent reason.
This time, Madame Maigret had the tact to keep quiet and carry on walking, because they had left the road to make their way home along the bank of the Loire.
‘I don’t know whether you remember the butcher … I knew everything, from the very start, and even, I could say, from the moment I was told the news. But what I knew, I couldn’t tell anyone … It was a matter of honesty, honesty towards a dead man …’
Without thinking, Madame Maigret had picked a daisy, which she held in her hand like in the painting by an artist whose name Maigret had forgotten. They walked slowly, pushing their way through the tall vegetation on their path, and thistles clung to Maigret’s trousers.
‘What struck me was the butcher’s insistence on telling us that he had a lot of money in his pocket … Like most provincial shopkeepers, he’d stayed faithful to the wallet … He always had a huge one bursting with money, little notes and grubby papers in his trouser pocket, and I remember his movements when he took it out, the apron he had to lift up …
‘But that evening, he began by conspicuously taking out his wallet and opening it … so that we could see it was full … But, surprisingly, I had the impression that, although there was a one-thousand-franc note on the top of the wad, underneath, there was only ordinary paper …
‘That visit to the notary too …
‘When I was told he’d been murdered, I said to myself: “It’s too strange a coincidence …”
‘Because I’ve never seen people killed just when they were expecting it …
‘When I arrived at his place, I checked that, although the money had gone, the wallet had been put back in the dead man’s pocket …’
‘So he wasn’t murdered?’ asked Madame Maigret, shocked.
‘Not at all! And the poor man wasn’t even clever enough to disguise his suicide properly. It was amateurish. If they’d sent anyone other than Gabrielli to lead the official investigation, they would soon have realized. But Gabrielli, who is a charming young man, is better at Russian billiards than at detective work …’
She smiled and they walked on a little.
‘That’s why I had to keep quiet … That’s why I didn’t want to hear all those people’s secrets … But they came to confide in me anyway, whining or begging …’
‘I still don’t understand why the butcher did that …’
‘Because he was a poor fool, capable of the best and the worst … He was crazy about that girl and had entreated her to run away with him and, had she agreed, he’d have dumped his wife and son there and then with no regrets … He wouldn’t even have spared them a thought …
‘In any case, he’d already begun to ruin them financially, firstly by not taking care of his affairs any more or by managing them badly, and then by giving Angèle gifts she didn’t know what to do with, because she couldn’t let Urbain see them …
‘When she told the butcher she didn’t want to see him any more, he decided to kill himself … And being unhappy made him more sensitive to the unhappiness of others …
‘I’m certain that it was at that moment he thought of his wife and son … He realized that they would be left in financial difficulties … If he was going to die, it may as well serve some purpose …
‘And that’s why he took out an insurance, that’s why there could be no question of suicide, that’s why the fool was so insistent about going to see the notary and so obligingly showed us his wallet …’
‘That had never occurred to me …’ said Madame Maigret. ‘I always wondered why you allowed the culprit to go free …’
‘Others must have asked themselves the same thing, especially since Urbain, by the greatest of coincidences, had no alibi. When he came to tell me that, weeping with anxiety, I thought I was going to have to tell him the truth to prevent him from going to prison …
‘What can I say? It pained me to see the poor wretch die for nothing … Since I’m no longer a member of the police, and I’m not in the pay of the insurance companies …’
He stopped, creasing up his eyes in the sunlight, and gazed at the scenery, its charm enhanced by the murmuring waters of the Loire.
‘Anyhow, I’m glad it’s in the past,’ he sighed. ‘It was an unpleasant business …’
‘And you didn’t say a word to anyone?’
‘Not to anyone!’
‘Not even to Urbain?’
‘Not even!’
‘Or to Angèle?’
He couldn’t repress a smile.
‘Jealous?’
‘Oh! no … But now I see what men are like … So this bewitchment you told me about once can happen quite simply, out of habit, because a girl serves you an aperitif at the same time every day …?’
He continued to smile, relieved to have been able to tell his story to someone. Especially because now it was over!
The butcher’s widow, in Orléans, had remarried. Her new husband worked for the water authority, and the boy called him his uncle.
Once the mourning period was up, there was no doubt that Urbain would wed Angèle.
Today, the café was closed, with a notice edged in black on the shutter.
Madame Urbain was left alone in the cemetery and people made their way back into town, shaking off the last whiffs of death that clung, with the smell of incense, to their shoulders.
‘Would you be capable of that?’ asked Madame Maigret abruptly, as they were about to turn into the alleyway that led from the river to the wall of their garden.
‘Capable of what?’
‘I don’t know … of anything … like them …’
‘You see why one should never tell women anything!’ he teased, cupping his hands to light his pipe with a match.
And he asked mechanically:
‘What’s for lunch? I’m starving!’