The Misty Harbour Read Free Page B

road was still damp with dew.
    Hurrying across the lock, Maigret caught
     a glimpse of the sea, but only a small strip of it, perfectly still and pale blue;
     the rest was hidden by a long fogbank hanging just offshore.
    Someone called to him from the
     bridge.
    ‘Are you the detective chief
     inspector from Paris? I’m with the local police. I’m glad you’ve
     come … Have you already heard?’
    ‘Heard what?’
    ‘They say it’s
     awful! … Wait a minute … There’s the doctor’s
     car …’
    Fishing boats in the outer harbour were
     rocking gently, casting red and green reflections across the water. Some sails were
     set, probably to dry, and showed their black identity numbers.
    Two or three women waited out by the
     lighthouse, in front of the captain’s cottage. The door was open.
    The doctor’s car passed Maigret
     and the policeman, who was sticking close to the inspector.
    ‘They’re talking about
     poison,’ the officer continued. ‘It seems he’s turned a greenish
     colour …’
    Maigret entered the cottage just when
     Julie was coming slowly downstairs in tears, her eyes swollen, her cheeks
flushed. She had been shooed out of the
     bedroom so the doctor could examine the dying man.
    Under a hastily donned coat, she still
     wore a long white nightgown and her feet were bare in their slippers.
    ‘It’s terrible, inspector!
     You can’t imagine … Go up, quickly! Maybe …’
    The doctor had been bending over his
     patient and was just straightening up when Maigret entered the bedroom. The
     inspector could see from his face that it was hopeless.
    ‘Police …’
    ‘Ah! Well, it’s the end.
     Maybe two or three minutes more … Either I’m way off course, or
     it’s strychnine.’
    Joris seemed to be straining to breathe,
     so the doctor opened a window. And there again was that dreamlike tableau: the sun,
     the harbour, the boats and their unfurled sails, fishermen pouring brimming baskets
     of glittering fish into crates.
    What a contrast: the dying man’s
     face seemed yellower, or greener, an indescribable colour. A neutral tone
     incompatible with any ordinary conception of flesh. His limbs were writhing, jerking
     spasmodically, yet his face remained calm, in seeming repose, as he stared at the
     wall in front of him.
    Holding one of his patient’s
     wrists, the doctor was tracking the weakening pulse when Maigret saw a look come
     over his face that said, ‘Watch closely! He’s going
     now
 …’
    Then something amazing and quite
     poignant happened. The captain’s face had been so empty that no one could tell
     if the wretched man had recovered his reason, but now
this face came back to life. As if he were a boy on the
     verge of tears, his features crumpled into a pitiful expression of misery so deep
     that it cannot go on.
    And two great tears welled up, about to
     spill over …
    Almost at the same instant, the doctor
     announced softly, ‘It’s over.’
    Could that have happened? Could death
     have come at the very moment Joris was weeping?
    And while those tears were still alive,
     trickling down to vanish within his ears, the captain himself was dead.
    They heard footsteps in the stairwell.
     Surrounded by women, Julie was sobbing and gasping below. Maigret went out to the
     landing.
    ‘No one,’ he said slowly,
     ‘is to enter this room!’
    ‘Is he …?’
    ‘Yes!’ he replied
     firmly.
    And he went back to the sunny room,
     where the doctor, for his own peace of mind, was preparing to administer a heart
     injection.
    Out on the garden wall, there was a pure
     white cat.

2. The Inheritance
    Somewhere downstairs, probably in the
     kitchen, they could hear Julie’s shrill cries as she struggled with her grief,
     restrained and surrounded by women from the neighbourhood.
    The window was still wide open, and
     Maigret saw villagers arriving at a kind of half-run. Kids on bikes, women carrying
     babies, men in clogs – it was a disorganized