Maigret and the Killer

by Georges Simenon

‘How did you have that knife at such a young age?’

  ‘I had stolen it a few months earlier from one of my uncles … I was wild about penknives … One Sunday at my uncle’s I noticed that Swedish knife and took it … My uncle looked for it everywhere without thinking of me for a moment …’

  ‘How did your mother not find it, for example?’

  ‘The wall of our house, facing the garden, was covered with Virginia creeper and its dark foliage framed my window. When I didn’t have my knife in my pocket, I hid it in the thickest part of the vine.’

  ‘No one thought of you?’

  ‘That’s what surprised me. They arrested a sailor, whom they then had to release … They thought of every possible suspect, except a child …’

  ‘What was your state of mind?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I felt no remorse. I listened to what the women said in the street, I read the newspaper from Montluçon which talked about the crime, without feeling concerned.

  ‘I felt no emotion as I watched the funeral passing by … For me, at that moment, it was already part of the past … Part of the inevitable … I had nothing to do with it … I don’t know if you understand? I think it’s impossible, if you haven’t been through it …

  ‘I continued going to school, where I had become distracted, and my marks showed as much. Apparently I was rather pale and my mother took me to our doctor, who gave me a cursory examination.

  ‘“It’s his age, Madame Bureau. This boy is a bit anaemic.”

  ‘I think I felt I wasn’t entirely in the real world. I wanted to get away. Not to get away from possible punishment, but get away from my parents, the town, go very far away, anywhere at all …’

  ‘Are you thirsty?’ Maigret asked; he was thirsty himself.

  He poured two cognacs with water and held one out to his visitor, who drank greedily, emptying his glass in a breath.

  ‘When did you become aware of what was happening to you?’

  ‘You believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘I’ve always been convinced that no one would believe me … It happened bit by bit … As time passed, I felt more different from everyone else … Stroking my knife in my pocket, I said to myself:

  ‘“I’ve killed somebody. No one knows.”

  ‘I almost wanted to tell them, to tell my fellow pupils, my teachers, my parents, the way you boast of an exploit … Then, one day, I caught myself following a girl along the canal. She was the daughter of some bargees, going back to her boat. It was winter, and night had already fallen …

  ‘I said to myself that I would only have to take a few quick steps and take my knife out of my pocket …

  ‘All of a sudden I started shaking. I turned around without thinking and ran back to the first houses in the town, as if I would feel safer there.’

  ‘Has that happened to you often since then?’

  ‘Since I was a child?’

  ‘At any time.’

  ‘About twenty times … In most cases I didn’t have a particular victim in mind. I would be outside, and suddenly I would think:

  ‘“I’ll kill him.”

  ‘I found myself murmuring those words under my breath. They weren’t directed at anyone in particular. It was just anyone.

  ‘“I’ll kill him.”

  ‘I remembered later that when I was a child, when my father smacked me and sent me to my room to punish me I would mutter the same thing:

  ‘“I’ll kill him.”

  ‘I don’t suppose I could have another glass?’

  Maigret poured him one, and poured one for himself at the same time.

  ‘What age were you when you left Saint-Amand?’

  ‘Seventeen. I knew I wouldn’t pass my school leaving exam. My father didn’t understand and watched me uneasily. He wanted to make me join the printworks. One night I left without a word, taking a suitcase and my modest savings.’

  ‘And your knife!’

  ‘Yes. A hundred times I tried to get rid of it but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I don’t know why. You see …’

  He tried to find the right words. He clearly wanted to be as truthful and precise as possible, and it was difficult for him.

  ‘In Paris, at first, I was hungry, and I ended up, like many others, unloading vegetables at Les Halles. I read the classifieds and sometimes hurried to wherever there was a job to be had. That’s how I ended up working for the insurance company.’

  ‘Did you have any steady relationships?’

  ‘No. Every now and again I would settle for picking up a woman in the street. One of them tried to take a banknote from my wallet, and I nearly took out my knife … My forehead was sweating … I tottered away …

  ‘I realized that I couldn’t get married …’

  ‘Did you try?’

  ‘Have you lived alone in Paris, without parents, without friends, and come back to your lodgings all alone in the evening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you must understand. I didn’t want friends either, because I couldn’t be honest with them without risking prison for the rest of my days.

  ‘I went to the Sainte-Geneviève library. I devoured psychiatric treatises, always hoping to discover an explanation. I probably lacked knowledge of the basics. When I thought that my case corresponded to a particular mental illness, I realized that I didn’t have this symptom or that.

  ‘I became more and more anxious.

  ‘“I’ll kill him.”

  ‘In the end I looked out for those words on my lips, and then I would run home, shut myself away and throw myself on my bed … Apparently I groaned …

  ‘One evening, a neighbour, a middle-aged man, came and knocked at my door. I automatically took my knife out of my pocket.

  ‘“What is it?” I asked through the door.

  ‘“Is everything all right? Are you ill? I thought I heard groaning. I’m sorry …”

  ‘He went away.’

  8.

  Madame Maigret appeared in the doorway and gave him a sign which he didn’t understand, so far removed was it from this atmosphere, then she murmured:

  ‘Would you come here for a moment?’

  In the kitchen, she whispered:

  ‘Dinner’s ready. It’s after eight. What shall we do?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We need to eat.’

  ‘It isn’t over.’

  ‘Perhaps he could eat with us?’

  He looked at her, dumbfounded. For a moment her suggestion even struck him as quite natural.

  ‘No. We don’t need a laid table, a family dinner. It would make him horribly uncomfortable. Do you have any cold meat or cheese?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In that case make some sandwiches and serve them with a bottle of white wine.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Calmer and more lucid than I feared. I’m beginning to understand why he didn’t get in touch all day. He needed to take a step back.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From himself. Did you hear?’

  ‘At fourteen and a half he killed a boy …’

  When Maigret came back into the living room, Robert Bureau, embarrassed, murmured:

  ‘I’m keeping you from your dinner, aren’t I?’

  ‘If we were at Quai des Orfèvres I’d have sandwiches and beer sent up. There’s no reason not to do the same thing here. My wife is making us sandwiches and she will serve them with a bottle of white wine.’

  ‘If I’d known …’

  ‘If you’d known what?’

  ‘That someone might understand me. You’re probably an exception. The examining magistrate won’t have the same attitude, and neither will the jury. I’ve spent my life being afraid, afraid of striking again, without intending to …

  ‘I watched myself all the time, in a sense, wondering if I wasn’t about to have an attack. At the slightest headache, for example …

  ‘I’ve seen I don
’t know how many doctors … I didn’t admit the truth to them, of course, but I complained of violent headaches accompanied by a cold sweat. Most of them didn’t take it seriously and prescribed aspirin.

  ‘A neurologist in Boulevard Saint-Germain gave me an electro-encephalogram. According to him there’s nothing wrong with my brain.’

  ‘Was that recently?’

  ‘Two years ago. I almost wanted to whisper to him that I wasn’t normal, that I’m sick. Since he couldn’t work it out by himself.

  ‘Sometimes when I passed by a police station I wanted to go in and say:

  ‘“I killed a kid when I was fourteen … I feel I risk killing again … It needs to be cured … Lock me up … Have me looked after …”’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because I read the crime pages. At almost every trial, psychiatrists give statements, and often people make fun of them. When they talk about diminished responsibility or mental illness, the jury doesn’t take it into account. At best it reduces the sentence to fifteen or twenty years.

  ‘I tried to muddle through on my own, to feel the attacks coming, to run and lock myself away at home … That worked for a long time …’

  Madame Maigret brought them a tray of sandwiches, a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé and two glasses.

  ‘Bon appétit.’

  She withdrew discreetly to go and eat alone in the kitchen.

  ‘Help yourself.’

  The wine was cold and dry.

  ‘I don’t know if I’m hungry. There are days when I barely touch food, others, on the contrary, when I feel terrible hunger. That may be a sign as well. I look for signs everywhere. I analyse all my responses. I attach importance to my slightest thoughts.

  ‘Try to put yourself in my place. At any moment I could …’

  He bit into his sandwich and was the first to be surprised to find himself eating normally.

  ‘And to think I was afraid of being wrong about you. I had read in the papers that you were humane and that sometimes brought you into conflict with the public prosecutor’s office. On the other hand, they also talked about how you make people talk during interrogations. You treat the accused gently and cordially to win his trust and he doesn’t realize that you’re gradually drawing the truth out of him.’

  Maigret couldn’t help smiling.

  ‘Not all cases are the same.’

  ‘When I called you, I weighed each of your words, each of your silences …’

  ‘You finally came forward.’

  ‘I no longer had any choice. I felt that everything was collapsing … Wait! Let me confess something to you. Yesterday, at one point, on the Grands Boulevards, the idea came to me of attacking some random person in the midst of the crowd, to strike out around me, wildly, in the hope of getting myself shot down …

  ‘Can I pour myself some more?’

  He added, with slightly sad resignation:

  ‘I won’t be able to drink anything like this for the rest of my days …’

  For a moment, Maigret tried to imagine what Poiret’s face would have been like if he had been able to witness this exchange.

  Bureau went on:

  ‘There were three days of torrential rain … People often talk about the moon in relation to people like me. I have observed myself. I haven’t noticed my impulses being more frequent or stronger when the moon is full.

  ‘Instead what counts is a certain intensity. In July, when it’s very hot, for example. In winter, when big snowflakes fall …

  ‘It’s as if nature is going through a crisis and …

  ‘Do you understand?

  ‘That incessant rain, the squalls, the noise of the wind shaking the shutters of my bedroom, it all put my nerves on edge.

  ‘In the evening I left my lodgings and started walking through the storm. After a few minutes I was drenched, and I deliberately lifted my head to receive the sheets of water fully in my face.

  ‘I didn’t hear the signal or, if I did, I didn’t obey … I should have gone home rather than carrying on … I didn’t look where I was going … I walked and walked … Eventually my hand gripped the knife in my pocket …

  ‘I saw the lights of a little bar in quite a dark street … I heard footsteps in the distance but they didn’t worry me …

  ‘A young man in a light-coloured jacket came out, with his long hair plastered to the back of his neck, and something clicked …

  ‘I didn’t know him. I’d never seen him before. I couldn’t see his face … I stabbed him several times … Then, as I left the scene, I realized that the relief hadn’t come, and I retraced my steps to stab him again and lift his head.

  ‘That’s why they talked about a frenzied attacker. They also talked about a madman.’

  He fell silent and looked around him, as if surprised by the setting in which he found himself.

  ‘I’m definitely mad, aren’t I? There’s no way I’m not sick … If someone could cure me … That’s been my hope for so long … But you’ll see, they’ll just settle for sending me to jail for the rest of my days.’

  Maigret didn’t dare to reply.

  ‘You’re not saying anything?’

  ‘I’d like you to receive treatment.’

  ‘You don’t really expect it to happen, do you?’

  Maigret drained his glass.

  ‘Drink up. In a little while we’ll go to Quai des Orfèvres.’

  ‘Thank you for listening to me.’

  He emptied his glass in one, and Maigret topped it up.

  Bureau hadn’t been wrong about much. At the Court of Assizes, two psychiatrists came and declared that the accused was not insane in the legal sense of the word, but that his responsibility was largely diminished because he found it difficult to resist his impulses.

  The lawyer begged the jury to send his client to a psychiatric hospital, where he could be kept under surveillance.

  The jury accepted the attenuating circumstances but still sentenced Robert Bureau to fifteen years’ imprisonment.

  After which the judge cleared his throat and said:

  ‘We realize that this verdict does not correspond completely to reality. At present, alas, we have no establishments where a man like Bureau could be treated effectively while remaining under strict surveillance.’

  In the dock, Bureau looked around for Maigret and gave him a resigned smile. He seemed to say:

  ‘I predicted this, didn’t I?’

  When Maigret left, his shoulders were a little heavier than before.

  1.

  ‘You killed her to rob her, didn’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t want to kill her. The proof is, I only had a toy gun.’

  ‘You knew she had a lot of money?’

  ‘I didn’t know how much. She’d worked all her life so by the age of eighty-two or eighty-three, she must have had savings.’

  ‘How many times did you go and ask her for money?’

  ‘I don’t know. A few times. When I came to see her, she knew why I was there. She was my grandmother and would always give me five francs. Just think what you can do with five francs when you’re unemployed.’

  Maigret was solemn and brooding, a little sad. It was a mundane case, a sordid crime of the kind committed almost every week: a boy still in his teens who mugs an elderly woman living alone to fleece her. The difference with Théo Stiernet was that he’d attacked his grandmother.

  The boy was much calmer than expected and he answered the questions as best he could. He was a slightly chubby, listless boy, with a round face, almost no chin, bulging eyes and thick lips, so red that at first glance he appeared to be wearing lipstick.

  ‘Five francs, the same as a kid coming to get his weekly pocket money!’

  ‘Is her husband dead?’

  ‘He died nearly forty years ago. She ran a little haberdashery in Place Saint-Paul for ages. It’s only in the past two years that she’s had difficulty walking and had to give up the shop.’

  ‘What about you
r father?’

  ‘He’s in the nut house at Bicêtre.’

  ‘Is your mother still around?’

  ‘I haven’t lived with her for a long time. She’s always drunk.’

  ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

  ‘I’ve got a sister. She left home at fifteen and no one knows what became of her.’

  He spoke without emotion.

  ‘How did you know that your grandmother kept her money in her apartment?’

  ‘She didn’t trust banks, not even the Savings Bank.’

  It was nine o’clock. The murder had been committed the previous evening at the same hour. It had taken place in the old building in Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, where Joséphine Ménard lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor. A resident from the fourth floor had passed Stiernet on the stairs as he was leaving his grandmother’s. She knew him well, and they’d greeted one another.

  At around 9.30, another neighbour, Madame Palloc, who lived in the apartment opposite, had dropped by for a chat with the old woman, as she often did.

  She knocked, but there was no reply. The door wasn’t locked and she turned the handle. Joséphine Ménard was dead, huddled on the floor, her skull split open, her face a pulp.

  By six o’clock in the morning, Théo Stiernet had already been found on a bench at the Gare du Nord, where he was sleeping.

  ‘What gave you the idea of killing her?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to. She attacked me and I was frightened.’

  ‘You threatened her with your toy gun?’

  ‘Yes. She didn’t bat an eyelid. Maybe she saw straight away that it was only a toy.

  ‘“Get out of here, you thug!” she said. “If you think I’m afraid of you …”

  ‘She grabbed the scissors from the round table and came towards me, repeating: “Go away …! Go away, I say, otherwise you’ll be sorry for the rest of your life …”

  ‘She was tiny and she seemed frail, but she was very energetic.

  ‘I panicked. I thought she was going to gouge my eyes out with those open scissors. I looked around for something to defend myself with. Next to the stove, there was a poker and I grabbed it.’

  ‘How many times did you hit her?’

  ‘I don’t know. She wouldn’t fall down. She carried on staring straight at me.’