'Maigret' Recap: Episode 5

Maigret airs Sundays at 8:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Maigret and his wife Louise are at their friends’ apartment when a crepe seller who works outside buzzes the intercom and frantically begs their friend, a doctor, to come down. Someone has been stabbed in the street.

Antoine Batille had just bought a crepe from the seller, who then saw someone emerge from the rainy shadows to stab Antoine in the back four times, leave, then return to flip Antoine over and stab him three more times. Antoine dies in the hospital.

His family owns Lucient Perfumes and has been a mainstay of the gossip columns ever since the matriarch died a few years ago and Antoine’s sister Minou became a raucous party girl. Antoine was the well-behaved one, his father tells Maigret. He explains that a recording device found on Antoine was for a school project at the Sorbonne.

Antoine was recording the sounds of Paris in order to feel closer to those not as wealthy as his family, Minou tearfully explains to Maigret after arriving home from a party in London. She knows Antoine’s laptop password and so is able to download the recordings for Maigret. Antoine was apparently learning Arabic, given the French-Arabic dictionary on his desk. 

Maigret listens to all 40 hours of Antoine’s recordings and hears two conversations with a woman named Nadia. First, Antoine visits a café called Chez Levant, where he speaks with Nadia, who works for her Uncle Hassan there. Antoine has become a frequent visitor to the café – and Nadia seems to be the reason why, as well as the motivation behind his attempt to learn Arabic. 

In another recording, Nadia meets Antoine for an apparent date, but the recording is cut short when her Uncle Hassan appears, seemingly angry. When Maigret visits Chez Levant, however, she tells him that Antoine asked her uncle for permission to date her, and Hassan agreed, even if it’s not on Antoine’s recordings. Both Nadia and her uncle were working in their café at the time of Antoine’s death.

The press has heard rumors that Antoine was killed in a drug turf war, but a recording he made shortly before being killed points in another direction. Antoine had entered the Bar Lorraine and recorded a conversation between three men there, before one of them approached him and threatened him for listening in. All of this can be heard on Antoine’s recording. The men’s conversation seems to be about an upcoming burglary.

The bartender claims ignorance, but Janvier befriends a server who describes the man who threatened Antoine and says that another of them owns a framing shop a few streets over. All three men left the bar just minutes after Antoine.

The detectives watch the framing shop. Branchu, the owner, has a criminal record for receiving stolen goods, while another man in the shop, who matches the server’s description of the man who threatened Antoine, is identified as Xavier Mila. He has previously been charged with murder and robbery, but the charges were dropped because a key witness disappeared. 

Maigret recognizes a man who stops in the shop and receives an envelope of money as Maurice, the son of Sophie, the countess of the estate Maigret’s father managed before his death. Maigret stops Maurice in the street and warns him to stay away from Branchu and Mila. Maurice insists he didn’t know they were criminals; they just asked him, as an art critic and historian, for an opinion on some paintings.

Sophie calls Maigret and objects to him accusing her son of criminal activity.

The detectives follow Branchu and hear him discussing moving a burglary forward to that night. Cavre wants to follow him and arrest him in the act, but Kernaval insists that he include another police agency. Cavre and a team of police then arrest Branchu, Mila, and their gang while they burgle a country villa. Mila’s clothes match the crepe seller’s description of Antoine’s killer, and he has a knife on him.

Cavre thinks Mila followed Antoine after he recorded his gang planning a robbery and killed him. Cavre will question all the members, and Maigret thinks one will eventually cave and implicate another as Antoine’s murderer.

But Maigret thinks the burglary is unrelated to Antoine’s murder. Why would Mila have killed Antoine because he had recorded evidence of planning a crime, and then not take that evidence (the recording device)? And Cavre has refused to do the drudge work of combing CCTV to see if Mila followed Antoine from the bar.

Nevertheless, Maigret allows a press conference about the arrest of the burglars to take place, and, along with Cavre, lets the journalists assume it is related to the death of Antoine, despite Kernaval’s express warning not to talk about Antoine. Maigret is trying to lay bait for who he believes is Antoine’s real killer. 

When someone calls into a news show and says that they have found Maigret’s work on the case “disappointing,” it appears the killer has taken the bait. Maigret orders his team to photograph everyone who attends Antoine’s funeral.

Then, after challenging a killer, he decides to leave Paris. 

Sophie has returned to her estate at Saint-Fiacre and begun to wonder how the manager Sebastian Gautier has such expensive clothes while her family continues to go into debt. Maigret’s father definitely didn’t get rich off running the estate, and he was an honorable employee, Sophie tells Maigret when she calls to apologize for chastising him over talking to her son – Maurice was talking to crooks. 

She asks him to return to Saint-Fiacre to look into Gautier, but Maigret hasn’t been back since his father died – in part because his father died in shame, feeling that he had failed Sophie’s family in running their estate.

But then Sophie sees Gautier talking to her boyfriend, Janos, and suspects that they’re conspiring against her – especially after her overdraft request at the bank was refused, by Gautier’s daughter. Sophie is also dying, she tells Maigret, and thinks Gautier is waiting for her to do so. Maigret’s father warned her against Gautier.

But Maigret tells her he can’t help her until he’s done investigating Antoine’s murder. She responds angrily, telling him he’s weak like his father.

Despite Louise’s warnings that Sophie is simply manipulating Maigret’s feelings – and that there’s a murderer in Paris for him to find – he leaves for Saint-Fiacre. Sophie was like a mother to him after his own mother died, and this may be his chance to finally make peace with his childhood.