Maigret and the Man on the Bench

by Georges Simenon

  ‘The boy’s name is Albert Jorisse. I wanted to see what he looked like so I went along to the restaurant. It was packed. I finally spotted Monique at a table, but she was on her own. I sat down in another corner and had a fairly disgusting meal. The girl seemed nervous and kept glancing towards the door.’

  ‘He didn’t turn up?’

  ‘No. She spun out her lunch as long as she could. In these cheap joints they like to serve you fast and usher you out as soon as possible. In the end she had to go and she spent another quarter of an hour pacing up and down outside on the pavement.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘She was so preoccupied with her boyfriend not turning up that she didn’t notice me. She headed off towards Boulevard Saint-Michel, and I followed her. You probably know the bookshop, the one on the corner with boxes of books outside on the pavement.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘She went inside and spoke to one of the sales assistants, who directed her to the cashier. I could see her being very insistent, but she grew increasingly despondent. Finally, she left.’

  ‘Didn’t you follow her?’

  ‘I thought it would be more useful to concentrate on the young man. I went into the bookshop myself and asked the manager if he knew a certain Albert Jorisse. He told me he did, but that he worked only in the morning. When I looked surprised he explained that that was normal there, as they mainly employed students, who weren’t free to work an entire day.’

  ‘Jorisse is a student?’

  ‘Hold on. I wanted to know how long he had been at the bookshop. He had to look it up. He has been working there for just over a year. At the start he worked full days. Then, about three months ago, he announced that he would be pursuing studies in Law and could only come into the shop in the mornings.’

  ‘Do you have his address?’

  ‘He lives with his parents on Avenue de Châtillon, almost opposite the Montrouge church. There’s more. Albert Jorisse didn’t turn up for work today, something that has happened only two or three times this year, and on previous occasions he has always phoned in to tell them. Not today.’

  ‘Was he at work yesterday?’

  ‘Yes. I thought you would find all this interesting, so I took a taxi to Avenue de Châtillon. His parents are ordinary, decent people who live in a very well-kept apartment on the third floor. The mother takes in ironing.’

  ‘Did you tell them that you were from the police?’

  ‘No. I told them I was a friend of their son and that I needed to see him urgently.’

  ‘Did she direct you to the bookshop?’

  ‘You guessed it. She doesn’t know a thing. He left this morning at quarter past eight as usual. She knew nothing about this so-called Law course. Her husband works for a fabric wholesaler on Rue des Victoires. They aren’t rich enough to pay for their son to study.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I made out that I must have mistaken him for another Jorisse. I asked them if they had a photo of their son. She showed me one on the sideboard in the dining room. She’s a good woman and doesn’t suspect a thing. All she was interested in was making sure her iron didn’t get cold and not burning the linen. I made a bit more small talk . . .’

  Maigret said nothing but didn’t appear very enthusiastic. It was obvious that Santoni hadn’t been in his squad for long. Everything he said – and even the manner in which he said it – was out of keeping with the thinking of Maigret and his colleagues.

  ‘On the way out, when she wasn’t looking . . .’

  He held something out.

  ‘Hand it over.’

  As if he didn’t know that Santoni had pinched the photo. It showed a thin, nervous-looking young man with very long hair, the sort who was attractive to women and was aware of it.

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘We’ll see if he returns home tonight, shall we?’

  Maigret sighed.

  ‘We’ll see, yes.’

  ‘Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  What was the use? Santoni would learn, as others had learned. It was always the same when they took on an inspector from another squad.

  ‘I didn’t follow the girl because I know where I can find her. Every day at five thirty, quarter to six at the latest, she goes back to the office to drop off the money she has collected and to make her report. Do you want me to go there?’

  Maigret hesitated and almost told him not to bother any more. But he realized that that would be unfair, as the inspector had done his best.

  ‘Make sure that she comes back to the office, then catches her train home.’

  ‘Maybe her lover will meet her there?’

  ‘Maybe. What time does he normally go home to his parents?’

  ‘They have dinner at seven o’clock. He is always there, even if he has to go out in the evening.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they have a telephone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about their concierge?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s not the sort of place that has telephones. But I’ll check.’

  He consulted the phone book that was arranged by streets.

  ‘Go there around seven thirty and question the concierge. Leave the photo with me.’

  Since Santoni had taken it, he might as well hold on to it. It might come in useful.

  ‘Will you be here in the office?’

  ‘I don’t know where I’ll be, but stay in contact with headquarters.’

  ‘What shall I do until then? I’ve got nearly two hours before I need to go to Rue de Rivoli.’

  ‘Go down to the Hotel Agency. Maybe they have a form in the name of Louis Thouret.’

  ‘You think he had a room in town?’

  ‘Where do you think he left his yellow shoes and bright tie when he went home?’

  ‘That’s true.’

  It had been a good two hours since the photograph of Monsieur Louis had appeared in the afternoon papers. It was just a small photo in the corner of the page, with the words:

  Louis Thouret, who was murdered yesterday afternoon in an alleyway off Boulevard Saint-Martin. The police are following a lead.

  It wasn’t true, but the papers always say that. It was strange, come to think of it, that the inspector hadn’t received a single telephone call. In fact, it was because he expected to receive some that he had returned to his office, where he was now killing time dealing with his paperwork. Almost always in cases like this people believe, rightly or wrongly, that they recognize the victim. Or else they have seen a suspect hanging around the location of the crime. Most of these claims turn out to be false on further investigation. But sometimes they can also lead to the truth.

  For three years, Monsieur Louis, as his former colleagues and the concierge at Rue de Bondy called him, had been leaving Juvisy on the same train every morning, with his lunch wrapped in an oilcloth, as he had done all his life.

  What became of him when he got off the train at Gare de Lyon? That remained a mystery. Except for those first few months, when, so it seemed, he was desperately seeking a new job. Along with many others, he would have queued up in front of the newspaper offices to lay his hands on addresses supplied in the job ads. Maybe he even tried selling vacuum cleaners door to door?

  He had had no luck, since he had to resort to borrowing money from Mademoiselle Léone and the old book-keeper.

  After this, for several months, he had disappeared from sight. Not only did he have to find the equivalent of his salary from Kaplan’s every month, he also had to raise the funds to pay back his two lenders.

  During this whole time, he went home every evening as if everything were normal, acting like a man who had just put in a day’s work.

  His wife hadn’t suspected a thing. Neither had his daughter. Nor his sisters-in-law. Nor his two brothers-in-law, who both worked for the railways.

  Then one fine day he had turned up in Rue de Clignancourt with the money he owed Mademoiselle
Léone, as well as a present for her and some sweets for her old mother.

  Not to mention the yellow shoes on his feet!

  Were these yellow shoes part of the reason Maigret was so interested in this man? He would never admit it, but for years he too had longed to wear goose-poo shoes. They were fashionable at the time, along with those very short beige raincoats popularly known as bum-freezers.

  Once, early in his marriage, he had decided to buy himself a pair of yellow shoes and he had almost blushed when he went into the shoe shop. As it happened, it was on Boulevard Saint-Martin, opposite the Théâtre de l’Ambigu. He hadn’t dared wear them straight away, and when he had unwrapped them in front of Madame Maigret she had looked at him and burst out laughing.

  ‘You’re not thinking of wearing them, are you?’

  He never did wear them. She was the one who had taken them back to the shop, making out that they pinched his feet.

  Louis Thouret had bought himself some yellow shoes too, and in Maigret’s eyes that was a significant detail.

  Firstly, it symbolized liberation; he would swear to it. Whenever he had these famous shoes on his feet he would have felt like a free man. It meant that, until he had to change back into his black shoes, his wife, sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law had no hold over him.

  It had another meaning. The day when Maigret had bought his shoes, the detective chief inspector of the Saint-Georges precinct, where he was working at the time, had come to tell him that he had been given a pay-rise of ten francs a month; and ten francs in those days was a tidy sum.

  Monsieur Louis too must have been feeling flush. He had given the old book-keeper a meerschaum pipe and paid back the two people who believed in him. Now he could come to visit them again, especially Mademoiselle Léone. Now he could visit the concierge in Rue de Bondy again too.

  Why did he not talk to them about what he was doing?

  By chance the concierge had spotted him on a bench in Boulevard Saint-Martin one morning at eleven o’clock.

  She hadn’t spoken to him but made a detour so that he wouldn’t see her. Maigret understood. What had bothered her was the bench. You don’t expect to find a man like Monsieur Louis, who had worked ten hours a day all his life, lazing around on a bench! Not on a Sunday, or at the end of the working day, let alone at eleven in the morning, when all the offices and shops were in full swing.

  And Monsieur Saimbron had also spotted his former colleague sitting on a bench, in Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle this time, just a stone’s throw from Boulevard Saint-Martin and Rue de Bondy.

  In the afternoon, Monsieur Saimbron hadn’t shown the same discretion as the concierge. Or maybe Louis Thouret had spotted him first?

  Was the former warehouseman there to meet someone? Who was that man who had hung around the bench as if waiting for a signal to come and sit down?

  Monsieur Saimbron didn’t describe him; he mustn’t have paid him much attention. But what he said was revealing nonetheless: ‘the sort of man you see sitting on benches in this neighbourhood’. One of those people with no fixed employment who sit on benches on the boulevards for hours, vaguely watching the world go by. The ones you see in the Saint-Martin area weren’t like those you see in some squares and gardens, in Parc Montsouris, for ex-ample, who are usually residents of the neighbourhood.

  Residents don’t go to Boulevard Saint-Martin to sit down, or if they do, they sit at the terrace of a café.

  On the one hand there were the yellow shoes; on the other, the bench. And in Maigret’s mind these two details didn’t fit together.

  Finally, and most importantly of all, there was the fact that Louis, at around 4.30 on a grey, rainy day, went down an alleyway where he had apparently no business, that someone followed him without a sound and stuck a knife between his shoulder-blades, less than ten metres from the crowded pavement of the boulevard.

  The photograph had been printed, but no one had rung in. Maigret carried on annotating reports and signing forms. Outside the gloom was deepening, sliding into full darkness. He had to turn on the lamp and, when he noticed by the mantelpiece clock that it was three o’clock, he got up and fetched his large overcoat from the hook.

  Before setting off, he opened the door to the inspectors’ room.

  ‘I’ll be back in an hour or two.’

  It wasn’t worth bothering with the car. At the end of the street he hopped on the back of a bus and then got off a few minutes later at the intersection of Boulevard Sébastopol and the Grands Boulevards.

  The previous day at the same time Louis Thouret was still alive and wandering around the neighbourhood too with time on his hands before he had to exchange his yellow shoes for his black ones and head off to Gare de Lyon to catch his train for Juvisy.

  The streets were extremely busy. At every corner the crowds clustered together, waiting for the signal to cross the road. ‘That must have been the bench,’ he thought, spotting a bench on the pavement opposite Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle.

  There was no one sitting there, but from here he could see a crumpled, greasy piece of paper that he was sure must have contained some slices of salami.

  Working girls were plying the corner of Rue Saint-Martin. There were a few others in a small bar where four men were playing cards at a round table.

  At the counter he recognized a familiar silhouette, that of Inspector Neveu. He stopped and waited for him, and one of the women thought he had stopped there for her; he absently shook his head at her.

  As Neveu was here, he must have questioned them already. He was from the neighbourhood and knew them all.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Maigret asked him as he came out of the bar.

  ‘You came along too?’

  ‘Just to have a look round.’

  ‘I’ve been tramping the streets since eight this morning. I must have spoken to five hundred people.’

  ‘Did you find the place where he had lunch?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘I was sure he must have had his midday meal here-abouts, and he was the sort of man who likes to frequent the same place.’

  ‘Over there,’ said Neveu, pointing out a quiet-looking restaurant. ‘He had his own napkin and ring.’

  ‘What did they have to say?’

  ‘The waitress who served him – because he sat at her table every day, at the back, near the counter – is a tall, dark-haired mare with hairs on her chin. Do you know what she called him?’

  As if Maigret could possibly know!

  ‘Her little man . . . That’s what she told me.

  ‘“So, my little man, what will it be today?”

  ‘She said he really liked it. He talked to her about the weather, rain or shine. He never made a pass at her.

  ‘The waitresses in that restaurant get two hours off between the end of lunch and setting up for dinner.

  ‘It turns out that she’d often see Monsieur Louis sitting on the bench when she came out at three o’clock. Each time, she waved at him.

  ‘One day, she shouted out:

  ‘“Hey there, my little man, make sure you don’t overdo it!”

  ‘He replied that he worked nights.’

  ‘Did she believe him?’

  ‘Yes. She seemed to worship him.’

  ‘Has she read the paper?’

  ‘No. She found out from me that he had been killed. She couldn’t credit it.

  ‘It’s not an expensive restaurant, but it’s not one of those fixed-price joints either. Every lunchtime, Monsieur Louis would treat himself to a decent half-bottle of wine.’

  ‘Did anyone else in the neighbourhood see him?’

  ‘About ten people so far. One of the girls on the corner of the street bumped into him almost every day. The first time she tried to proposition him, but he politely declined, without making an issue out of it, and so every time she met him after that she would say:

  ‘“So, is today the day?”

  ‘They both had a laugh about it. When she was going off
with a customer, she would give him a wink.’

  ‘He never went with any of them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They never saw him with a woman?’

  ‘They didn’t, but one of the salesmen in the jewellery shop did.’

  ‘The shop next to where he was killed?’

  ‘Yes. When I showed his photo to the sales staff, one of them recognized him.

  ‘“That’s the fellow who bought a ring here last week!” he exclaimed.’

  ‘Was Monsieur Louis with a young woman?’

  ‘Not particularly young. The sales assistant didn’t pay that much attention to her, because he thought that they were married. All he noticed was that she wore a silver fox stole around her neck and a necklace with a pendant in the form of a four-leaf clover.

  ‘“We sell the same type here.”’

  ‘Was it an expensive piece?’

  ‘Gold-plated with a fake diamond.’

  ‘Did they say anything in front of him?’

  ‘They spoke to each other like a married couple. He didn’t remember what they said. Nothing interesting.’

  ‘Would he recognize her?’

  ‘He’s not sure. She was dressed in black and wore gloves. She almost left one behind on the counter after she had tried on the ring. It was Monsieur Louis who came back for it. She waited for him by the door. She is taller than him. When they were outside, he took her arm, and they headed off towards Place de la République.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘These things take time. I started further up, towards Rue Montmartre, but I drew a blank there. I almost forgot: you know the waffle-makers on Rue de la Lune?’

  They cooked their waffles almost in the open air, in open-fronted shops, like at the fair, and you caught a whiff of that sugary smell as soon as you turned the corner.

  ‘They remembered him. He often went there to buy some waffles, always three at a time, but he didn’t eat them there; instead, he took them away.’

  The waffles were enormous. The sign claimed that they were the biggest in Paris. It was unlikely that Monsieur Louis would have been able to polish off three of them after eating a large lunch. And he wasn’t the sort of man who would eat them sitting on a bench. Did he share them with the ring woman? If so, she can’t have lived far away.