The Methods of Maigret ( PDFDrive )

“I don’t know.”
It was true. On the one hand he railed every time a case came along to
interrupt his daily routine. On the other hand as soon as he was left in peace for
several days he would become restless, as though anxious.
“Do you sleep well on trains?”
“I sleep well anywhere.”
“The train doesn’t make you think?”
“I think so little, you know!”
It embarrassed him to see the compartment full of the smoke of his pipe, the
more so as the Englishman didn’t smoke.
“So you don’t know what line you are going to start on?”
“Quite right. I don’t even know if there is a line.”
“Thank you.”
One could feel that Mr. Pyke had registered Maigret’s every word, had
carefully arranged them in order in his brain for use later on. It could not have
been more putting off. One could imagine him, on his return to Scotland Yard,
gathering his colleagues round him (why not in front of a blackboard?) and
announcing in his precise voice:
“A case conducted by Chief Inspector Maigret…”
And what if it was a flop? If it was one of those stories where one flounders
about and only finds out the solution ten years later, by the merest fluke? If it
was a humdrum affair, if tomorrow Lechat rushed up to the carriage door,
announcing: “All over! We’ve arrested the drunkard who did it. He’s
confessed.”
If… Madame Maigret hadn’t put a dressing gown in his suitcase. She hadn’t
wanted him to take the old one, which looked like a monk’s habit, and he had
been meaning to buy a new one for the last two months. He felt indecent in his
nightshirt.
“How about a nightcap?” suggested Mr. Pyke, offering him a silver whisky
flask and cup. “That’s what we call the last whisky before going to bed.”
He drank a cupful of whisky. He didn’t like it. Perhaps, equally, Mr. Pyke
didn’t like the Calvados that Maigret had been making him take for the last three
days?
He slept and was conscious of snoring. When he woke he saw olive trees on
the edge of the Rhône and knew they had passed Avignon.
The sun was shining, a light golden mist above the river. The Englishman,