'Maigret' Recap: Season 2 Episode 1

Maigret airs Sundays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous episode.
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A bomb threat is called into the Banque de Vincennes in Paris, interrupting Maigret’s birthday celebration at the office. The typewritten threat, which inveighs against the oil industry, was delivered by courier. As the bomb squad searches the bank, Maigret watches the crowd outside and sees a woman suspiciously clutching a pink backpack leave the area. He and his colleagues follow.

No bomb is found at the bank, so Maigret assumes it’s in the woman’s backpack. Lapointe conceives of a plan to switch the bag with one bought from a tourist stand while Janvier distracts the woman, and Maigret agrees. He approaches the woman with his badge out after she hurls her phone into the Seine following a phone call. She notices her bag has been switched and pulls out a gun. 

Maigret says he doesn’t want to harm her; she responds that he already has. “Now you’ll know what it feels like,” she says before shooting herself in the head.

She doesn’t have ID, her phone is gone, the gun is illegal, and the backpack contains just a men’s suit with bloodstains, so the police can’t identify her. When Maigret goes to the hospital to look at her body, his wife Louise joins him – it’s the hospital where she works. A man tries to come in, recognizes Maigret, and apologizes. He’s a medical salesman checking in on a client, he says. Louise gets his business card – his name is Claude van Damme – thinking that he knows the dead woman.

Maigret visits Claude at the neighborhood restaurant he bought for his wife to run and dispenses with small talk to have numerous shots with Claude in order to intimidate him. But Claude denies knowing the dead woman.

She has been identified by her mother, Isabelle Jeunet, who saw footage of her death. Isabelle and Adeline have been estranged for 10 years; Adeline’s father has been out of the picture her whole life. Despite their lack of wealth, Adeline got into a molecular biology program but neglected her studies once at college for activism, which led to a fight with her mother. Their only contact over the past decade has been a birthday card from Adeline every year.

The coroner manages to provide more recent information on Adeline, figuring out that she works at a public health clinic from chemical traces on her body. He even finds the specific clinic, which shares Adeline’s address with him. 

Her apartment is small, with a typewriter and drafts of bomb threats. Adeline left her wallet there. There’s roughly 30,000 euros worth of burned money in addition to some 215,000 more hidden under her mattress, even though she made very little money and lived in a rough neighborhood. 

The police look through lists of science students who were at school with Adeline and find that one is now a vice president at the Banque de Vincennes where she made the bomb threat. But Genevieve Belloir says she studied astronomy and didn’t know Adeline. Her father worked at the bank and got her a job. She shares two other employees of the bank (both of whom work abroad) who were also students at the same college with Adeline at the same time.

But Janvier doesn’t trust her, noting a nervous tic, and leaves her phone in Genevieve’s office to record. She returns quickly, saying she forgot it, and hears on the recording that Adeline called Claude and told him the police questioned her. Claude also went to college with both of them.

Maigret thinks Adeline was blackmailing Claude and Genevieve, and that they are the source of her money. He tries to get a warrant to search them, but the judge refuses. (Janvier’s recording was sub rosa, after all, and neither Claude nor Genevieve have criminal records.) Kernaval is supportive, but the director Guichard, who promoted Maigret, is less sure of Maigret’s tactics even as he promises not to intervene. Guichard wonders why Maigret is investigating the suicide at all, since it’s not a criminal case. But Maigret is haunted by Adeline’s suicide in front of him and blames himself, so he wants to keep digging. 

Guichard warns Kernaval that colleagues have begun noting that Kernaval may be too close to Maigret and thus overly inclined to sanction his unorthodox tactics. 

Maigret is being investigated for the police’s actions leading up to Adeline’s suicide, and there’s also media attention on their tactics. His former colleague Cavre is part of the investigation alongside George Bonfils. They question Maigret, who claims that switching Adeline’s backpack was his idea in order to protect Lapointe, who has already apologized to Maigret for suggesting it. Maigret admits he made a mistake.

Cavre visits his old office and takes a photo of Maigret’s investigation board before being noticed by Janvier, who is working late to scour the serial numbers of the euros in Adeline’s apartment. Lapointe is also working late to figure out why Adeline had a photo of a church on the wall of her apartment. He identifies it as being in a town outside Paris, and then goes through criminal reports to learn that a man hanged himself from the church door a decade ago. This man worked at Adeline’s college in the science department while she was there. 

When Lapointe and Janvier call Maigret to share this new information, he is leaving Claude’s restaurant after another series of Calvados shots and a revelation that the police know Claude spoke to Genevieve even though he claimed not to know her. Claude still revealed nothing, instead yelling at Maigret to get out. 

As Maigret leaves with a promise to return everyday, he takes the call from his colleagues. They hear as a car runs him over.