Read Online Maigret Gets Angry by Georges Simenon - Free Book Online

through the lock in her canoe on the way down to Corbeil.’
    ‘Was your son out on the water last
night?’
    The man looked uncomfortable.
    ‘Don’t worry, I’m not
interested in poachers. I spotted him at around ten o’clock, but I’d like to know
whether he was already out an hour earlier.’
    ‘He’ll tell you himself. You’ll
find him in his workshop, a hundred metres further down. He’s the boat builder.’
    A wooden shed where two men were busy finishing
off a flat-bottomed fishing boat.
    ‘I was on the water with Albert, yes … He’s my
apprentice. First of all we put out the creels, then when we came back—’
    ‘If someone had crossed the river by boat
between the Maliks’ house and the lock at around nine o’clock, would you have seen
them?’
    ‘Definitely. First of all, it wasn’t
dark yet. Then, even if we hadn’t seen him, we’d have heard him. When you fish the
way we do, you keep your ears pricked and …’
    In the little grocer’s shop where the
bargemen stocked up, Maigret bought some tinned food, eggs, cheese and sausage.
    ‘I can tell that you’re at
L’Ange!’ commented the shopkeeper. ‘There’s never anything to eat there.
They’d do better to close down for good.’
    Maigret walked up to the station. It was merely a
halt with a crossing-keeper’s cottage.
    ‘No, monsieur, nobody came by around that
time last night, or up to ten thirty. I was sitting on a chair in front of the house with my
wife. Monsieur Georges-Henry? Definitely not him. We know him well and besides, he would have
stopped for a chat, because he knows us too and he’s not stuck-up.’
    But Maigret persisted. He peered over the hedges,
chatted to good people out gardening, nearly all of them retired.
    ‘Monsieur Georges-Henry? No, we
haven’t seen him. Has something happened to him too?’
    A big car drove past. It was Ernest
Malik’s, but it wasn’t him at the wheel, it was his brother Charles, heading in the
direction of Paris.
    It
was seven o’clock by the time Maigret got back to L’Ange. Raymonde burst out
laughing as he emptied his pockets, which were bulging with provisions.
    ‘With all that, we’ll be able to have
a bite to eat,’ she said.
    ‘Is Madame Jeanne still in bed? Has no one
been to see her?’
    Raymonde hesitated for a moment.
    ‘Monsieur Malik came earlier. When I told
him that you’d gone to the lock, he went upstairs. The two of them were up there
whispering for a quarter of an hour, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.’
    ‘Does he often come and see
Jeanne?’
    ‘He drops in occasionally. You don’t
have any news of Georges-Henry?’
    Maigret went into the garden to smoke a pipe
until dinner was ready. Bernadette Amorelle seemed to have been speaking the truth when she told
him that she hadn’t seen her grandson. True, that proved nothing. Maigret was close to
believing that they were all lying, every single one of them.
    And yet he felt that she had been telling the
truth.
    There was something in Orsenne, something in the
Malik family, that had to be hushed up at all costs. Was it in some way connected with
Monita’s death? Possibly, but it wasn’t certain.
    The fact was that two people had broken away.
First of all, old Madame Amorelle had taken advantage of her daughter and son-in-law’s
absence to be driven to Meung in the old-fashioned limousine to summon Maigret to the
rescue.
    Then, on the same day, when the former inspector happened to be in
Ernest Malik’s house, there had been a second escape. This time, it was Georges-Henry.
    Why had his father claimed that the young man was
at his grandmother’s? Why, in that case, had he not taken him there? And why had he not
seen him again the next day?
    All that was still unclear, for sure. Ernest
Malik had been right when he had looked at Maigret with a smile that was a mixture of sarcasm
and contempt. This wasn’t a case for him. He was out of his depth. This world was
unfamiliar to him, and he had