After a long run of episodes set hither and yon, this one puts us back right in the middle of Paris. Literally so, bang on the quaysides of the River Seine under the bridge at Austerlitz where the body of a tramp is fished out of the water by bargees who just happen to be moored up there coincidentally. Or are they?
The tramp survives, but even when out of his coma, he refuses to speak at all, let alone explain how he came by a violently cracked skull. A young girl who sleeps rough near the tramp's patch fills in some background from which it slowly emerges that the tramp is in fact a fully qualified medical doctor, with a wife and daughter living in some haute bourgeoise splendour nearby. Unravelling how it has come to this and who would have wanted to murder him (and for what reason) forms the substance of the episode as Maigret - Crémer looking older than his actual years and heavily burdened with what looks like world-weariness - plods about from hospital to quayside and back again trying to establish the truth.
There is the usual parade of disaffected spouses and dysfunctional families in evidence, not least the tramp's adult (and prestigiously married) daughter, utterly conflicted by the situation in which she now finds herself (having hitherto believed her father was still practicing medicine in darkest Africa). There's a strange pair of implied lovers in the shape of a married man and his upstairs neighbour, a much younger lad with a paralysing stammer that Maigret is kind enough to ignore, though their nocturnal exploits getting rid a monstrously big dead dog in the river seems highly suspicious. And are the bargees all they seem?
The resolution to all this is nicely parcelled out, clue-by-clue, and ends up embracing not just an attempted murder - the mute tramp survives but resolutely refuses to identify his attacker even though becoming unwontedly loquacious late on - but unearths a previous, successful one in the process. Yet no-one is arrested and no-one charged, even though everyone knows who did it, and why.
In the end, we're left with a sliver of hope for the future and the possibility that shattered lives may be rebuilt because of the wider concept of forgiveness, and the application of moral - as opposed to legal - justice. It's very satisfying and remarkably touching, and immaculately acted by all concerned. Don't miss it.
