Maigret Gets Angry Read Free

the house, where there was a
pleasant smell of wax polish, cut hay, ripening fruit and food
simmering on the stove. It had taken Maigret fifty years to
rediscover that smell, the smell of his childhood, of his parents’ house.
    ‘You’re not going to go with that mad
old woman, are you?’
    He had left his clogs by the door. He walked
barefoot on the cool tiles, then up the polished oak stairs.
    ‘Give the driver a drink, then come
upstairs and help me pack.’
    There was a little twinkle in his eyes, a little
twinkle he recognized as he shaved in cold water and looked at himself in the bathroom
mirror.
    ‘I really don’t understand
you,’ sighed his wife. ‘Only a couple of hours ago you couldn’t relax because
of a few Colorado beetles.’
    The train. He was hot. He sat in his corner
puffing on his pipe. The grass on the embankments was yellow, the little stations with their
tubs of flowers flashed past. In the haze of the heat a man waved his small red flag and blew a
whistle, as children do, looking ridiculous.
    Maigret was greying at the temples. He was a
little calmer, a little heavier than he had been, but he did not feel that he had aged since
retiring from the Police Judiciaire.
    It was out of vanity, or rather a sort of
modesty, that for the past two years he had systematically refused to take on any of the jobs he
had been offered, especially by banks, insurance companies and jewellers, who brought him tricky
cases.
    At Quai des Orfèvres they would have
said:
    ‘Poor old Maigret’s going back to his old ways,
he’s already bored with gardening and fishing.’
    And here he was, having allowed an old woman who
had appeared through the little green door to twist him round her little finger.
    He pictured her sitting upright and dignified in
the old-fashioned limousine driven with perilous negligence by a François still wearing his
gardener’s clothes who hadn’t had time to swap his clogs for a pair of shoes.
    He heard her saying, after she had seen Madame
Maigret waving from the doorstep as they left:
    ‘That’s your wife, isn’t it?
She must have been offended when I took her for the housekeeper … And I thought you were
the gardener.’
    And the car set off on its daredevil journey,
having dropped Maigret off at Les Aubrais station in Orléans, where François, in the
wrong gear, had nearly reversed into a whole cluster of bicycles.
    It was the holiday season. Parisians swarmed all
over the countryside and the woods, driving fast cars on the roads and paddling canoes on the
rivers, and there were fishermen in straw boaters at the foot of every willow tree.
    Orsenne wasn’t a station, but a halt where
the occasional train condescended to stop. Through the trees in the vast gardens the roofs of
large houses could be glimpsed, and beyond them the Seine, broad and majestic at this spot.
    Maigret would have found it hard to say why he
had obeyed Bernadette Amorelle’s orders. Perhaps because of the Colorado beetles?
    Suddenly, he too felt as if he were on holiday, just like the
people he had sat among on the train, those he met walking down the steep path, those he saw
everywhere since he had left Meung.
    A different atmosphere from that of his garden
enveloped him. He walked with a light step amid his new surroundings. At the bottom of the
sloping path, he came to the Seine bordered by a track wide enough for vehicle traffic.
    From the station, Maigret had followed the signs
with arrows indicating the Auberge de l’Ange. He entered a garden with neglected arbours,
and finally pushed open the glass door of a veranda where the air was suffocating because of the
sunshine streaming in through the glazed sides.
    ‘Hello!’ he called.
    There was only a cat on a cushion on the floor
and some fishing rods in a corner.
    ‘Hello!’
    He descended a step and found himself in a room
where the copper pendulum of an ancient clock swung lazily to and fro, clicking with each
movement.
    ‘There’s no one in