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 One of M's old "customers", Ernestine Micou, who he'd arrested 17 years earlier, comes to M to tell of her's husband's misadventure. She'd married Alfred Jussiaume, "Sad Freddie", a safecracker, and while he'd been doing a job in Neuilly, with his usual bad luck, he'd discovered the body of a dead woman and fled. When M goes to the house, where a dentist, Guillaume Serre and his mother live, they claim there's been no burglarly, and of course, no murder. However Serre's Dutch wife, the former Maria Van Aerts, supposedly left on the day Alfred saw the body, returning indefinitely to Holland. The doctor explaines that the newly replaced window pane, which Alfred had presumably removed to break in, was broken in the recent storm.
M is ready to drop the case, when he stops in at the hardware store, and learns that Serre had bought another pane, two days later, the day after the break in. From there on it becomes a battle between the two heavyweights, Serre being actually taller, broader and heavier than M. In the end, after having the house searched and Serre interrogated for hours, M realizes that it was the mother, who had no doubt poisoned her husband and Serre's former wife, using atropine, fatal to those with weak hearts, and that Maria had apparently realized she'd been given the drug, and was shot when she started to call the police, apparently by the mother, who is sent to prison, along with Serre, who serves two years in Fresnes as an accessory, having disposed of the body.
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Maigret of the Month: March, 2007
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