Maigret and the Ghost

by Georges Simenon

  Maigret hung up and turned to Janvier.

  ‘Phew! What on earth could I say to her? … Lapointe questioned the girls from the beauty salon this morning and none of them knows where Marinette spent her Sundays … She went off without any luggage, without a change of clothes, in the pouring rain. She’d know that in a hotel she’d immediately be spotted.

  ‘Either she’s staying with a girlfriend she trusts, or she’s gone somewhere she knows well, a discreet place, a guest house in the suburbs, for example …

  ‘She’s a keen swimmer … It is highly unlikely that she could afford to go to the seaside every week … There are hundreds of possible spots, by the Seine, the Marne or the Oise …

  ‘Go and see this Jean-Claude and try to find out where they used to go.’

  Moers, in the adjacent office, was waiting for his turn, carrying a little cardboard box containing the bullets and the three cartridges.

  ‘The expert agrees, chief. It is definitely a 7.63 calibre and the gun used is almost certainly a Mauser.’

  ‘Fingerprints?’

  ‘I wonder what you’ll think. They found Inspector Lognon’s all over the living room, including on the wireless knobs …’

  ‘Not on those of the television?’

  ‘No. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator and a tin of ground coffee … His prints were also found on the electric coffee-maker … Why are you smiling? Am I saying something stupid?’

  ‘No. Go on.’

  ‘Lognon used the glass and the cup. As for the bottle of brandy, it has both Lognon and the young woman’s prints on it.’

  ‘What about the bedroom?’

  ‘No trace of Lognon. Not one of his hairs on the pillow but a woman’s hair. Not the slightest trace of mud either, even though, from what I was told, Lognon arrived at Avenue Junot in the pouring rain.’

  With Moers and his team, no detail was neglected.

  ‘He seems to have stayed sitting in the armchair in front of one of the French windows. I suppose that’s when he turned the radio on. At another moment, he opened that window, leaving a perfect set of prints on the handle, and I picked up one of his cigarette ends from the balcony. You’re still smiling …’

  ‘Because that confirms the hunch I had earlier while listening to my wife talk …’

  Did not everything suggest that Hard-Done-By, reduced to slavery by his wife, had finally allowed himself a love affair, and that he consoled himself at Avenue Junot for the dismal hours spent in the apartment in Place Constantin-Pecqueur?

  ‘I’m smiling, Moers my friend, at the idea that his colleagues suddenly think he’s a Don Juan. I’d swear, you see, that there was nothing going on between them, and I’m almost sad for him that there wasn’t.

  ‘He spent his evenings in the front room, the living room, generally by the window, and young Mademoiselle Marinette trusted him sufficiently to go to bed, despite his presence …

  ‘You didn’t find anything else?’

  ‘A little sand, in the young woman’s shoes, flat shoes that she must have worn in the countryside. It’s river sand. We have hundreds of different samples up there, but it will take hours, and a lot of luck, to identify where that sand comes from.’

  ‘Keep me posted … Is anyone else waiting for me next door?’

  ‘An inspector from the eighteenth.’

  ‘With a little brown moustache?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s Chinquier. Tell him to come in as you go past.’

  It was starting to rain again, a fine drizzle, a sort of fog that softened the light. The clouds in the sky were barely moving and gradually turning into a dense grey canopy.

  ‘Well, Chinquier?’

  ‘I haven’t finished with the street and my men are still making door-to-door inquiries. Luckily there are only forty or so numbers on each side. That’s still some two hundred people to be questioned.’

  ‘What interests me most of all are the buildings opposite.’

  ‘If you’ll allow me, sir, I’ll come to that in a minute, because I think I know what you’re driving at. I began with the residents of the building poor Lognon came out of. On the ground floor, there’s only an elderly couple, the Guèbres, who have been in Mexico for a month, visiting their married daughter who lives there …’

  From his pocket he’d produced an old notebook, several pages of which were covered with names and sketches. With him too, you had to take things slowly to avoid upsetting him.

  ‘The other floors all have two apartments. On the first floor is a widow, Madame Faisant, who’s a sales assistant in a fashion house, and a couple of independent means, the Laniers, who rushed over to the window immediately after the shooting. They saw the car drive off, but they weren’t able to make out the number plate.’

  His eyes half closed, Maigret listened vaguely to the inspector’s meticulous report, as if to a hum, occasionally drawing on his pipe.

  He began to pay attention when he heard the name of a certain Maclet, who occupied the second floor of the building next door. According to Chinquier, he was a cantankerous old man who had shut himself away once and for all, content to watch the world from his window with a cynical expression.

  ‘He’s crippled with rheumatism and drags himself around with two sticks, in a filthy apartment where no cleaning woman is allowed to cross the threshold. Each day, he places a note on his doormat to order food, which the concierge leaves outside his door.

  ‘He doesn’t have a wireless, doesn’t read the newspapers. The concierge claims he’s rich, even though he lives almost like a pauper. He has a married daughter, who’s tried several times to have him put away …’

  ‘Is he really mad?’

  ‘You’ll see. I had a terrible job getting him to open his door to me and I had to threaten to come back with a locksmith. When he finally made up his mind, he looked me up and down for ages, sighing:

  ‘ “You’re a bit young for this job, aren’t you?” ’

  ‘I replied that I was thirty-five and he repeated two or three times:

  ‘ “A boy! … A boy! … What does a person know at thirty-five? How much is a person capable of understanding?” ’

  ‘Did he tell you anything new?’

  ‘He spoke to me mainly about the Dutchman opposite … It’s the building we saw this morning from the balcony, the little private mansion with the second floor glazed like an artist’s studio …

  ‘That house was built fifteen years ago by a certain Norris Jonker, who is now sixty-four and whose wife, a beauty by all accounts, is much younger than him …’

  Once again, Maigret wished he could have carried out these door-to-door inquiries himself. He would like to have met this rheumatic old misanthrope who had withdrawn from the world in the middle of Paris, in the middle of Montmartre, and spent his time spying on the people across the road.

  ‘All of a sudden he became talkative. Since he has a habit of jumping from one idea to another and slipping commentaries into his speech, I’m worried I might leave something out …

  ‘I saw the Dutchman later, and it would be best if I told you about him straight away … He’s a charming, elegant and cultured man who belongs to a very well-known and very wealthy family in Holland … His father was the head of the Jonker, Haag & Company Bank in Amsterdam … He himself has never been interested in finance and he spent years travelling the world.

  ‘When he realized that the only place where he was happy was Paris, he had this mansion built in Avenue Junot, while his brother Hans has taken over the running of the bank since their father’s death.

  ‘Norris Jonker is content to receive the dividends and convert them into paintings—’

  ‘Paintings?’ echoed Maigret.

  ‘He’s said to own one of the most beautiful art collections in Paris—’

  ‘Just a moment! … You rang the bell … Who opened the door?’

  ‘A very fair-haired, rosy-cheeked manservant, quite young …’
r />   ‘Did you say you were from the police?’

  ‘Yes. He didn’t seem surprised and he showed me into the entrance hall where he offered me a seat … I don’t know anything about art, but I deciphered the signatures of painters even I’d heard of: Gauguin, Cézanne, Renoir … Lots of nude women …’

  ‘Did you wait for long?’

  ‘About ten minutes … The double door between the hall and the drawing room was open and I saw a young woman with black hair walk past, still in her bathrobe, at three o’clock in the afternoon … I could be wrong, but I had the impression that she had come to inspect me … A few minutes later, the manservant invited me to cross the drawing room and I was shown into a study lined with books from floor to ceiling …

  ‘I was greeted by Norris Jonker, dressed in flannel trousers, an open-necked silk shirt and a black velvet jacket … His hair is very white, his complexion almost as rosy as that of his servant …

  ‘There was a tray with a decanter and glasses on the desk.

  ‘ “Have a seat … How can I help …?” he asked without the trace of an accent.’

  It was clear that Inspector Chinquier had been overwhelmed by the opulence and the paintings as much as by the Dutchman’s distinguished air.

  ‘I confess I didn’t know where to begin … I asked him whether he’d heard the shots and he replied that no, his bedroom was on the other side of the house from Avenue Junot, and that you couldn’t hear much through the thick walls.

  ‘ “I hate noise,” he told me before offering me a glass of a liqueur that was new to me, a very strong liqueur, with an aftertaste of orange …

  ‘ “But you must be aware of what happened last night across the street from your house?”

  ‘ “Carl spoke to me about it when he brought me my breakfast, at around ten. He’s my manservant, the son of one of our farmers. He told me that Avenue Junot was in turmoil because a police officer had been attacked by gangsters.” ’

  ‘How did he sound?’ asked Maigret, fiddling with his pipe.

  ‘Calm, smiling, unexpectedly polite for a man who has been disturbed without warning.’

  ‘ “If you wish to question Carl, I will gladly put him at your disposal, but he also sleeps on the garden side of the house and he stated that he hadn’t heard anything either.”

  ‘ “Are you married, Monsieur Jonker?”

  ‘ “I most certainly am. My wife was shocked to hear what had happened a few metres from our home.” ’

  At this point in his report, Chinquier displayed a slight awkwardness.

  ‘I don’t know if I did the right thing, chief. I would have liked to ask him a lot of other questions. I didn’t dare, telling myself that ultimately, it was more urgent to update you …’

  ‘So let’s go back to the elderly invalid.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s because of him that I’d have liked to talk to the Dutchman about certain things. One of the first things Maclet said, in fact, was:

  ‘ “What would you do, inspector, if you were married to one of the most beautiful women in Paris? … Ha! Ha! You’re not answering … And you’re a long way off sixty-four or sixty-five … Right! Let’s put it another way … What does a man of that age do who has a magnificent creature available to him day and night?

  ‘ “Well! The gentleman opposite must have very particular ideas on the subject … I sleep little … I’m not interested in politics or the disasters that the radio and the newspapers talk about …

  ‘ “I entertain myself by thinking … You understand? … I look out of the window and I think … Few people realize how amusing it is to think …

  ‘ “For example, about that Dutchman and his wife … They don’t go out much – once or twice a week, her in an evening gown, him in a dinner-jacket, and they rarely come home after one o’clock in the morning, which means that they are content to have dinner with friends or go to the theatre …

  ‘ “They themselves never have dinner parties … Nor do they have guests for luncheon … And what’s more, they rarely eat before three o’clock in the afternoon …

  ‘ “You see … A person entertains himself as best he can … He watches … He guesses … He puts two and two together …

  ‘ “So when a couple of times a week he sees a pretty girl ring the doorbell, at around eight o’clock in the evening, and not leave until very late at night, if not at dawn …” ’

  Maigret most definitely regretted not having questioned that eccentric old man.

  ‘ “And that’s not all, Mister police inspector … Admit that my ramblings are beginning to interest you … Especially if I tell you that it is never the same young lady …

  ‘ “They usually arrive by taxi, sometimes on foot … From my window, I see them looking at the numbers on the buildings, which means something too, don’t you agree?

  ‘ “It means they’ve been asked to come to a particular address …

  ‘ “You know I haven’t always been an old, sick animal shut away in his lair, and I know a thing or two about women …

  ‘ “And you can also recognize those who live on the edge, so to speak – cabaret dancers, theatre or film extras who won’t say no to the chance to earn a bit of cash …” ’

  Maigret sprang to his feet.

  ‘I say, Chinquier, do you get it?’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘How it all started for Lognon. At night, he often walked down Avenue Junot, where he knew most of the residents … If, on several occasions, he saw the women you describe going into the Dutchman’s house …’

  ‘I thought of that too. But there’s no law against a man, even of a certain age, enjoying variety.’

  True, that wasn’t a sufficient reason for Hard-Done-By to seek and find a way of staking out a private residence.

  ‘There must be an explanation.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That he was waiting for one of these visitors to leave. It’s even possible that he came across a prostitute he’d had dealings with before …’

  ‘I see … Even so, everyone is free to …’

  ‘It depends what went on in the house, or on what the woman saw there … What else did this charming old man tell you?’

  Because Maigret felt increasingly drawn to the strange fellow at his window.

  ‘I asked him all the questions that occurred to me and wrote down all his replies.’

  Chinquier consulted his black notebook again.

  ‘Question: Did these women not come for the servant?

  ‘Reply: First of all, the manservant is in love with the dairymaid at the bottom of the street, a plump little thing who’s always bursting out laughing … She comes and waits for him several nights a week … She stays in the shadows, about ten metres from the house, I could show you the exact spot, and he soon appears …

  ‘Question: At around what time?

  ‘Reply: At around ten … I suppose he waits at table, and the Jonkers tend to eat late … The pair go for a stroll, arm in arm, stop to kiss and, before parting, cling to each other for a good while in the recess you see to the right …

  ‘Question: He doesn’t walk her home?

  ‘Reply: No. She walks down the street alone, happy, skipping … She sometimes looks as if she’s about to start dancing … There’s another reason why it is impossible that the women I told you about would be seeing the manservant … On several occasions they have rung at the door in his absence …

  ‘Question: Who opened the door?

  ‘Reply: Precisely! … Here’s another very funny peculiarity … Sometimes it’s the Dutchman, and sometimes his wife …

  ‘Question: Do they have a car?

  ‘Reply: Yes. A big American car.

  ‘Question: A driver?

  ‘Reply: Carl puts on a chauffeur’s livery and drives.

  ‘Question: Are there other live-in servants?

  ‘Reply: A cook and two maids … The maids often don’t stay long …

  ‘Question: Do they
receive many visitors, apart from the ladies in question?

  ‘Reply: A few … The one who drops by most often, in the afternoons, is a man of around forty, American-looking, who drives a yellow sports car …

  ‘Question: Does he stay long?

  ‘Reply: An hour or two …

  ‘Question: He never comes in the evening, or at night?

  ‘Reply: I’ve seen him in the evening twice, around a month ago, at around ten o’clock, in the company of a young woman. He simply went in and came straight out, leaving his companion in the house.

  ‘Question: Was it the same woman both times?

  ‘Reply: No.’

  Maigret imagined the sardonic, almost sensual smile of the old man who revealed these small mysteries.

  ‘Reply: There’s also a man who’s bald, even though he’s still young, who arrives by taxi, after dark, and who leaves carrying packages.

  ‘Question: What kind of packages?

  ‘Reply: They could be paintings. They could also be just about anything …

  ‘ “That’s more or less everything I know, inspector … I haven’t talked so much for years, and I hope I don’t have to do so again for a long time … I warn you, there’s no point summoning me to a police station or to an investigating magistrate’s chambers …

  ‘ “And above all, don’t count on me to testify in court, if this case gets that far …

  ‘ “We’ve had a chat … I’ve told you my little ideas. Now they’re yours and I refuse to put myself out for any reason whatsoever …” ’

  Immediately afterwards, Chinquier was to prove that the local inspectors knew their job.

  ‘Later, as I was coming out of the Dutchman’s house, I wondered whether the fellow opposite had been making fun of me. I thought that, if I could check one of the things he’d told me, that would make the rest credible.

  ‘So I stopped by the dairy. I waited outside until the girl was alone in the shop. She was indeed the plump little thing the old fellow had described, a girl recently arrived from the country and who was still thrilled to find herself in Paris …