The Hotel Majestic Read Online Free PDF

don’t think . . . You’re sure it was Cannes?”
    â€œIn a club which was then called La Belle Étoile, just behind the Croisette . . .”
    â€œIt’s strange . . . I don’t remember a Mimi . . . Do you, Prosper?”
    It was a miracle he didn’t choke. What was the point of forcing him to talk, when his throat was constricted as if by a vice?
    â€œN—no . . .”
    Nothing had outwardly changed. There was still that pleasant homely smell in the kitchen, the walls of the little house exuding a reassuring warmth, still the familiar smell of meat braising on a bed of golden onions. The red-and-white-checked oilcloth on the table. Cake crumbs. Like most women who have a tendency to grow fat, Charlotte probably went in for orgies of solitary cake-eating.
    And the shrimp-pink silk petticoat!
    Then suddenly, the tension evaporated. For no apparent reason. Someone coming in would probably have thought that the Donge family were quietly entertaining a neighbour.
    Only none of them dared say a word. Poor Prosper, his skin pitted as a sieve with pock marks, had shut his periwinkle-blue eyes and was standing swaying by the stove, looking as though he would fall on the kitchen floor at any minute.
    Maigret got up with a sigh.
    â€œI’m so sorry to have disturbed you . . . It’s time I . . .”
    â€œI’ll come to the door with you . . .” Charlotte said quickly. “It’s time I got dressed anyway . . . I have to be there at ten, and there’s only one bus an hour in the evenings . . . So . . .”
    â€œGoodnight, Donge . . .”
    â€œGoo—”
    He possibly said the rest, but they didn’t hear him. Maigret found his bicycle outside. She shut the door. He nearly looked through the keyhole, but someone was coming down the road and he didn’t want to be caught in that position.
    He braked all the way down the hill, and stopped in front of a bistro.
    â€œCan you keep this bicycle for me, if I send for it tomorrow morning?”
    He swallowed the first thing that came to hand and went to wait for the bus at the Pont de Saint-Cloud. For more than an hour Police Sergeant Lucas had been telephoning frantically, trying in vain to locate his boss.

3
    CHARLOTTE AT THE PÉLICAN
    â€œThere you are at last, Monsieur Maigret!”
    Standing in the doorway of his flat in the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, the superintendent couldn’t help smiling, not because his wife called him “Monsieur Maigret,” which she often did when she was joking, but at the warm smell which came to meet him and which reminded him . . .
    It was a long way from Saint-Cloud and he lived in a very different milieu from that of the unmarried Donge couple . . . But nevertheless, on his return he found Madame Maigret sewing, not in the kitchen, but in the dining-room, her feet not on the cooker but on the dining-room stove. And he could have sworn that here too there were some cake crumbs tucked away somewhere.
    A hanging lamp above the round table. A cloth with a large round soup tureen in the middle, a carafe of wine, a carafe of water, and table-napkins in round silver rings. The smell coming from the kitchen was exactly the same as that from the Donges’ stew . . .
    â€œThey’ve rung three times.”
    â€œFrom the House?”
    That was what he and his colleagues called Police Headquarters.
    He took off his coat with a sigh of relief, warmed his hands over the stove for a minute, and remembered that Prosper Donge had done exactly the same a short while ago. Then he picked up the receiver and dialled a number.
    â€œIs that you, chief?” asked Lucas’s kindly voice at the other end of the line. “All right? . . . Anything new? . . . I’ve got one or two small things to report, which is why I’m still here . . . First, about the governess . . .
    â€œJanvier has been shadowing her since she left the Majestic . . . Do you know what Janvier