“What’s the Veau Marengo like?”

“Excellent, Monsieur Maigret.”

Without realizing it, he was subjecting the waiter to a look that could not have been sterner if he had been a suspect under interrogation.

“Beer, sir?”

“No. A half-bottle of claret.”

He was just being perverse. If the waiter had suggested wine, he would have ordered beer.

“Where to now chief?”

It was just eleven o’clock.

“Stop at the first bistro you come to.”

“There’s one next door to the shop.”

Somehow, he felt shy of going in there, under Leone’s watchful eye.

“We’ll find one round the corner.”

He wanted to ring Monsieur Kaplan, and to consult the street guide, to find Monsieur Saimbron’s exact address on the Quai de la Megisserie.

While he was there, having started the day with a Calvados, he thought he might as well have another, and drank it standing at the bar counter.

We danced all through it, comfortably and close. We drank brandy from big Napoleon glasses. The music got hot. The place filled up, got warm and noisy.

“Peter,” she said, inhaling smoke through a long holder with a finger loop, “I’m beginning not to like it here. Can’t we go somewhere else where it is quieter?”

“Do you like Sibelius?”

“I adore Sibelius.”

“I have Sibelius in quantities on wax discs and I have a lovely fireplace and I have oil paintings that cost me much, and I have a book of pornographic studies dating back to the fifteenth century. No etchings. But I have Pernod.”

“Sibelius and Pernod. You are a wicked man”

I came back and I asked, “How about some of the finest Sidecars ever concocted?”

“If you let me watch.”

“Why not?”

She trailed behind me. I turned and pushed her against the wall of the kitchen and kissed her hard.

“That for inspiration? she gasped.

“That’s for nothing,” I said.

I went to work with lemons and Cointreau and Cognac.

We brought the mixer into the living room, and in no time at all, fleece gathered.

He said, “I had a Scotch and water. I always have that, never anything else. Give me just a minute now, to see if I can get hers. It was all the way down near the bottom –“

The barman came back with a large tin box.

Henderson said, rubbing his forehead, “There was a cherry left in the bottom of the glass and – “

“That could be any one of six drinks. I’ll get it for you. Was the bottom stemmed or flat? And what color was the dregs? If it was a Manhattan the glass was stemmed and dregs, brown.”

Henderson said, “It was a stem-glass, she was fiddling with it. But the dregs weren’t brown, now, they were pink, like.”

“Jack Rose,” said the barman briskly. “I can get it for you easy, now.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table in 7, Albert Street, their small suburban house in Teddington. They had a bottle of brandy between them.

The inspector accepted a drink and knocked it back in one swig. When talking to the recently bereaved he needed all the lubrication he could get.

He had, indeed, felt but little his want of success in regard to money, but he had encountered failure in one or two other matters which had touched him nearly. In some things his life had been successful; but these were matters in which the world does not write down a man’s good luck as being generally conducive to his happiness. He had never had a headache, rarely a cold, and not a touch of the gout. One little finger had become crooked, and he was recommended to drink whisky, which he did willingly,—because it was cheap. He was now fifty, and as fit, bodily and mentally, for hard work as ever he had been.

On the next morning, when John Gordon reached the corner of the road at which stood Croker’s Hall, he met, outside on the roadway, close to the house, a most disreputable old man with a wooden leg and a red nose. This was Mr. Baggett, or Sergeant Baggett as he was generally called, and was now known about all Alresford to be the husband of Mr. Whittlestaff’s housekeeper. For news had got abroad, and tidings were told that Mr. Baggett was about to arrive in the neighbourhood to claim his wife. Everybody knew it before the inhabitants of Croker’s Hall. And now, since yesterday afternoon, all Croker’s Hall knew it, as well as the rest of the world. He was standing there close to the house, which stood a little back from the road, between nine and ten in the morning, as drunk as a lord. But I think his manner of drunkenness was perhaps in some respects different from that customary with lords. Though he had only one leg of the flesh, and one of wood, he did not tumble down, though he brandished in the air the stick with which he was accustomed to disport himself. A lord would, I think, have got himself taken to bed. But the Sergeant did not appear to have any such intention.