'Maigret' Recap: Season 2 Episode 3

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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Director Guichard is becoming skeptical of Maigret’s outside-official-guidelines approach to solving crimes. To curb him, Guichard dumps two high-profile cases on Maigret at the same time while also transferring his right-hand woman, Lucas. She goes to work with Maigret’s antagonist Cavre, while Cavre’s colleague George Bonfils excitedly joins Maigret’s team. As a stickler for the rules, Bonfils struggles to immediately. adapt.

The first case seems like a trifle. Olga Borysenko was a live-in nanny for Armand Giroux, a cosmetic surgeon for the rich and famous. She drowned while swimming in a lake three weeks ago in an incident ruled an accident, but her family now believe Giroux was in an inappropriate relationship with her and killed her to silence her, so her body has been exhumed for an autopsy. 

Giroux shows up outside the autopsy and asks what it revealed. Maigret refuses to divulge anything, but Moers tells Giroux that Olga was three months pregnant. Maigret asks Giroux to come to the police for an interview tomorrow, and sets a watch on his house overnight so he doesn’t flee. Giroux notices he is being watched and promises he won’t flee. 

He’s used to scrutiny: clients are sometimes unhappy with the results of their plastic surgery and sue, unsuccessfully. He uses the money he makes on surgeries to finance reconstructive surgery for people in war zones.  

Giroux’s wife died of septicemia after giving birth to their third child. He hired Olga because he was overwhelmed raising his kids alone; he also has a research assistant named Martin Vignolet, who helped out at Giroux’s home lab. 

Vignolet tells Janvier that Olga swam everyday, and he usually joined her – but he overslept the day she died. They were lovers, but he’s shocked to hear that she was pregnant. He lets Janvier look at Giroux’s lab, where the surgeon keeps a black mamba snake.

Moers explains that Giroux may have been synthesizing peptides for skin care from the snake’s venom. But there may have been a different poison involved in Olga’s death: the autopsy reveals that she was poisoned with ricin, whose effects probably led to her drowning. 

Maigret calls Lucas back to his team to help Janvier evacuate everyone from Giroux’s house, lest there be more poison there.

The other case Guichard foists on Maigret is the disappearance of an anti-corruption crusader, Andre Delteil. Maigret reluctantly meets with Andre’s brother Pascal, who said he last spoke to his brother on the phone at 10:00 the previous night, after which Andre turned his phone off because he was going into a meeting. An Instagram post from 10:35 shows that Andre was at a night club owned by a major player in the gambling business with connections to organized crime, and the gambling business was a main target of Andre. Pascal thinks powerful people had been spreading rumors that Andre has taken money for favors, but insists that his brother is incorruptible. Maigret says that Andre is probably already dead, then – there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who is incorruptible.

Lapointe lets Bonfils distract the taciturn man who runs the night club with questions while Lapointe talks – and flirts with – one of the club’s dancers, Vera Bilyk, who also serves as the cleaner. She lets him into the security room, where he downloads CCTV footage and tells her that he lives with his family; his father left them. 

Lapointe manages to evade the detection of the club’s manager. Bonfils gets the manager to send the CCTV footage by pointing out various code violations. But when it comes through, it’s 23 seconds shorter than the footage obtained by Lapointe, although it’s unclear what’s missing.

Vera told Lapointe that the manager told her to offer Andre a private dance and Andre refused. The security footage shows that a man then approached him with a stack of papers and Andre brushed him off. He ran into the man again shortly before leaving – and also took a phone call at that time, 10:45, after he had turned his phone off. He must have a second phone. 

Maigret recognizes the man who approached Andre at the club: Baron Francois Lagrange. He interrupted Louise as she was walking with her friend Helene Pardon, asking Helene, his doctor, for more of a prescription. When he found out Louise was married to Maigret, he begged to meet him, inviting himself to a dinner Louise was hosting at home with Helene and her husband that evening. Louise tried and failed to refuse. 

But Lagrange failed to show. He then asked Helene to send Maigret to him the next morning. Maigret reluctantly visited and found Lagrange paranoid and near-schizophrenic, veering from trusting Maigret to suspecting him as an antagonist. Helene has been worried Lagrange is in trouble, as he has been experiencing symptoms of stress lately. His wife died 10 years ago and he raised their three kids on his own. Only the youngest, Alain, still lives with him. 

Lagrange eventually kicked Maigret out, accusing him of recording everything. Maigret tells Helene, whom Lagrange at one point accused of trying to poison him before praising her to Maigret, that he thinks Lagrange is taking them both for a ride. 

Then Alain appears at Maigret’s door, to Louise’s shock. He wants to speak to Maigret but won’t go to the police station. He waits at Maigret’s home but disappears before Maigret can return home.

Lagrange had told Maigret that he was sick in bed the previous night, but now Maigret sees that he met Andre at the night club. Maigret returns to Lagrange to question him and Lagrange says he can’t remember; he’s been having blackouts. He tells Maigret that his two children beside Alain have betrayed him. He goes to bed, and Maigret pokes around, spotting a pile of news clipping about himself on Lagrange’s desk. 

The CCTV cameras at Lagrange’s building have been cut, but Lapointe gets footage from a bar across the street showing a courier arriving that morning and taking out a large trunk. Someone wearing a dressing gown that matches the one Lagrange is currently wearing then signed for the delivery, and there’s a pile of things on the floor of Lagrange’s flat that were likely dumped out of the trunk. 

Lapointe and Bonfils track the package to an airport. Maigret has them open it. Inside is Andre Delteil, dead. 

Louise calls Maigret. A revolver he kept in a locked case at home, given him by the FBI, has disappeared. Alain must have taken it.