‘Wouldn’t you like to come up for a moment, inspector?’
It was Mademoiselle Blanche, who often left her door half opened, and who must have heard the conversation.
As regards Mademoiselle Blanche, something quite funny was happening. Since Maigret had been living in the house, her famous uncle had no longer dared to come and see her, so he must have been waiting more impatiently than anyone else for the inquiry to be over.
‘I don’t know if it’s important, but I couldn’t help hearing what you were saying on the telephone, and it gave me an idea.’
Her room was full of cigarette smoke. There were cakes on a plate, near the bed, which bore the indentation of a young woman’s body. She was in her dressing gown, as always, and it was clear that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
Her immodesty was calm and unpremeditated.
‘Sit down. Forgive me for making you come upstairs. It’s about the people opposite.’
Sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs crossed, she held out the plate of cakes.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Bear in mind that I don’t know them and have never spoken to them. Except that I’m at home almost all day. From my bed, I can see through the window. I’m not particularly curious.’
It was true. She clearly wasn’t interested in anyone but herself – and the characters in the novels that she devoured.
‘And yet there’s one detail that I’ve noticed, I don’t know why. Some days their blind is up all day, and I can see the woman in her bed through the lace curtains.’
‘And on other days?’
‘On other days the blind stays lowered from morning till evening, and they don’t even open the window to air the room.’
‘Does that often happen?’
‘Often enough for me to have been struck by it. The first time, I wondered if the woman was dead. Since I was used to seeing her in her bed … I talked about it to Mademoiselle Clément …’
‘Was that a long time ago …?’
‘Oh! Yes …’
‘Months?’
‘Longer. More than two years. It was a few weeks after I moved here. I was all the more surprised because it was the summer and, on the previous days, the windows had been wide open all day.’
‘You don’t know if that happens at regular intervals?’
‘I didn’t pay attention. But sometimes it lasts three days.’
‘Have you ever seen anyone else in her room?’
‘Only the concierge, every day, several times a day, sometimes an old woman, and her husband every now and again. When he’s been there for several weeks, he’s the one who does the housework, except the big clean on Saturday. I was forgetting the doctor, obviously.’
‘Does the doctor go there often?’
‘It depends what you mean by often. Perhaps once a month. I don’t spend all my time looking through the window. If I hadn’t heard you on the telephone, I wouldn’t have thought about it. Do you think it’s going to be useful to you? Bear in mind that I have nothing bad to say about them. I’ve never spoken to them.’
‘Would you think about it again? When you went to your window, after the shot was fired …’
‘I know what you’re thinking. I’m almost sure, now, that there was no light on opposite.’
‘Was the blind lowered?’
‘I don’t think so. When it’s lowered, it’s a light patch, because it’s an off-white blind. It seems to me, on the contrary, that the patch was black, like a window open on to an unlit room.’
Was Mademoiselle Clément going to sulk right back at him? When Maigret went downstairs, she avoided appearing as she usually did. Perhaps she was jealous of Mademoiselle Blanche.
‘It’s me again,’ Maigret announced, entering Madame Keller’s lodge.
‘I was just going to bring Madame Boursicault her meal.’
She was just putting it on a tray.
‘Does your tenant sometimes spend the whole day with the curtains drawn?’
‘The whole day! Three or four days, more like it! I’ve had some fine quarrels with her …’
‘What reason does she give you for living in semi-darkness?’
‘You see, inspector, you shouldn’t try to understand sick people. Sometimes I’m about to get angry. Then I put myself in her place and tell myself that I’d probably be worse than her. I think that sometimes she suffers from neurasthenia. I’ve talked to the doctor about it.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He told me not to worry. It takes her in bursts. At those times I could swear that she hates me. If she could lock herself away, she probably would. She doesn’t just tell me to lower the blinds or lower them herself, she forbids me to tidy up. She claims to have a migraine, that the slightest sound, the slightest movement in the room drives her mad.’
‘Does that happen often?’
‘Unfortunately.’
‘Does she eat anyway?’
‘As usual. I’m just allowed to make her bed and dust the bedroom.’
‘How many rooms are there in the flat?’
‘Four, plus a box room and a toilet. There are two bedrooms, one of which isn’t used, a dining room and a sitting room, which isn’t used either. They don’t pay very much, because Monsieur Boursicault has been in the house for over twenty years. He was there even before I was.
‘Her too?’
‘They got married about fifteen years ago, when neither of them was young.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Forty-eight.’
‘And him?’
‘He will be sixty next year. He confessed as much when he told me he was about to retire and that the flat would be free.’
‘You told me you were the one who posted Madame Boursicault’s mail?’
‘I don’t “post” it. The postman collects it from the lodge in the course of his round.’
‘Who does she write to?’
‘Her husband. Sometimes her mother-in-law.’
‘Is that all?’
‘I’ve never seen any other letters.’
‘Does she receive many?’
‘From her husband, yes. The old lady never writes.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Rarely. Sometimes I’ve taken up an envelope with a typed address.’
‘How many times?’
‘Four or five. Otherwise, it’s the gas company, or the electric, or advertising fliers.’
‘Do they have a telephone?’
‘He had one installed five years ago when she fell ill, so that she can call the doctor more easily in an emergency.’
‘Would you mind not telling her I’ve asked you about her?’
‘I’ve already spoken about it. Was that a mistake? I always try to give her some interesting gossip. I’ve talked to her about the questions you’ve been asking about everyone in the street. I joked that if her husband had come back a few hours earlier, he would have been a suspect. Please excuse me.’
‘How did she react?’
‘She didn’t react. She looks very tired. I wouldn’t be surprised if she started having one of her migraines today or the day after.’
‘You can take up her dinner. Tell her I would like to talk to her. Say I’ve questioned all the tenants and that I have two or three questions to ask her.’
‘Straight away?’
‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’
He wanted to get a bit of fresh air, and particularly to go and have a glass of white wine at the Auvergnat’s bistro.
Behind the curtain of the sitting room opposite, Mademoiselle Clément was watching him, and he nearly stuck his tongue out at her.
6.
Concerning a defenceless woman in a bed and a detective chief inspector who grows fierce
Basically, he needed to give himself courage. Even during the days before, when he was disturbing peaceful households eating soup to ask them questions while staring at them with his big eyes, he was
more uneasy than he wanted to appear.
And yet he knew Madame Boursicault from having spotted her through the window, just a bare arm on the first day, when her husband had left, then, the next day, her face and the shape of her thin body under the sheet.
She was an ageless creature now, with an emaciated face, colourless and lifeless, like saints are sometimes portrayed in religious paintings, and he awkwardly remembered the two or three occasions when their eyes had met across the street. Did she know who he was? Did she just think he was a new tenant at Mademoiselle Clément’s? Had the concierge talked to her about him while she was doing her housekeeping?
He still had a sense of having made personal contact. Her pupils were small and dark, and they were where all her vital strength seemed to be concentrated.
‘You’re a big, strong man, you’re in good shape, you can come and go in the street, and here you are, leaning on a window, studying a poor, sick woman as if she were an exciting spectacle …!’
Maybe that wasn’t what she was thinking at all. In all likelihood it only existed in Maigret’s imagination.
Still, it was unpleasant, and he flinched as he climbed towards her flat, giving her time to finish the meal that the concierge had brought her. Madame Keller must, while cleaning, have told her his visit was of little importance, a mere matter of routine.
She was probably going to tidy the place up a little, change the sheets, the pillow-cases.
‘Same again!’ he said.
He ordered the same thing three times in a row and only left the bistro when he felt a certain warmth in his throat and his head. On the opposite pavement he saw Mademoiselle Isabelle coming back and giving him a cheerful smile. She looked healthy, full of vitality, of …
Where were his thoughts taking him? He stuffed his pipe. Then he put it in his pocket, remembering that he was going to see a sick person, and frowned at the thought that he might not be able to smoke for some time.
He climbed the stairs and knocked at the door, which showed a chink of light at the bottom, even though it was still daylight outside.
‘Come in!’
It was the concierge. She opened the door to him. The tray rested on a chair with a red velvet seat. Only half of the soup had been eaten, and a kind of purée had been poked with the tip of the fork.
‘I’m sorry for bothering you, Madame Boursicault …’
He hadn’t been mistaken. Clean sheets had been put on, and the woman’s nightdress had been changed. Madame Keller had even done her hair. Her brown hair, mixed with grey, still bore the trace of the comb.
She was sitting in her bed and, with a bony hand, she pointed to an armchair by her bedside.
‘I have to go back downstairs, Madame Françoise. I will come and say goodnight to you when the inspector has finished with you. Most importantly, let me say it again: don’t worry.’
She spoke to her with that lightness that people affect when talking to the dying, and Maigret was surprised to find himself doing the same.
‘There’s no reason to worry,’ he reassured her. ‘You will be aware that a crime has been committed in the street, outside your window. I have questioned all the neighbours, some of them several times, because it’s important to reconstruct the facts as precisely as possible.’
She hadn’t yet opened her mouth. She looked at him gravely, as some children who are said to be too old for their age look at grown-ups.
‘Madame Keller told me you wouldn’t mind receiving me …’
Then she said her first words.
‘You can smoke your pipe.’
She must have seen him at his window, smoking his pipe all day.
‘My husband smokes too. It doesn’t bother me.’
And as he continued to hesitate:
‘Please …’
Perhaps because of that, he felt obliged to give her long explanations.
‘In an inquiry of this kind, the hardest thing is to establish everyone’s comings and goings with certainty. Not because people lie, but because their memories are almost always imprecise. It has occurred to me that a person who only perceives the outside world from their bed must register some details more precisely than everyone else. I suppose, Madame Boursicault, that you were in bed when the shot was fired?’
‘Yes, inspector. I get up so rarely! If I listened to them, I would never get up. I barely do so except in secret.’
She spoke slowly, in an unmodulated voice which gave her words a bleak tone.
‘You were waiting for your husband that night, isn’t that so?’
‘I knew he would be back at around one in the morning.’
‘And yet you had gone to sleep?’
‘I wasn’t sleeping. I’d just turned the light out. After a while light tires me.’
‘Was your window closed?’
‘I think it was half open. Probably a few centimetres.’
‘Was the blind down?’
‘Probably. I don’t remember.’
‘Did you hear the gunshot?’
‘How would I not have heard it?’
‘Did you know straight away that it was a gunshot?’
‘There were no cars going down the street. So it couldn’t have been a tyre blowing.’
‘You didn’t hear footsteps beforehand?’
‘No.’
‘Not the sound of a door or window being opened or closed?’
‘Not before, but afterwards. The neighbours looked out of their windows. Someone came out of the house opposite.’
‘Just a moment. Immediately after the bang, weren’t there any hurried footsteps?’
‘I think there were.’
‘You’re not sure?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t get up?’
‘Not straight away.’
‘But you did get up?’
‘When I heard a murmur of voices on the pavement opposite.’
‘Did you turn on the light?’
She seemed to think.
‘No. I certainly didn’t do that. I was in my nightdress, and some of the windows opposite were lit. I wouldn’t have shown myself.’
‘What did you see?’
‘Several people were standing around the body. Others were arriving.’
‘Did you stay at the window for a long time?’
‘Until a police car arrived.’
‘So you didn’t see or hear anything that could help me with my inquiry?’
‘I’m sorry, inspector. Madame Keller came upstairs a little later to tell me what was happening. I didn’t confess that I’d gone to the window, because she would have told me off.’
It was hot in the stuffy room. Maigret was sitting uncomfortably in an armchair that was too low for him and, out of a kind of modesty, he was smoking only in very small puffs.
‘Can I ask you how old you are, madame?’
‘Forty-eight. I’ve only been married for fifteen years. You can see that I was already what they call an old maid.’
She glanced towards an enlarged portrait facing the bed, above the fireplace, which showed her in a wedding dress on the arm of a man who was taller than she was, older, serious-looking, even a bit solemn.
‘Is that your husband?’
‘Yes. He was a widower. His first wife died of pneumonia after seven years of marriage.’
She added in a slightly muffled voice:
‘She died in this room, in this bed. They had no children.’
From then on Maigret didn’t have to ask any questions; she seemed to be telling her long story for her own benefit, monotonously, like a running tap.
She didn’t look at him; she stared at a point in space in front of her, and there were silences while she got her breath back.
‘You see, Boursicault is the best man on earth. Everyone will tell you that, at Chargeurs, where they adore him. He joined them at the age of sixteen, as a runner, and he made it all by himself, by studying, by making sacrifices. His parents were poor and lived
in Bordeaux. His father was a drunk whose wife had to go from police station to police station trying to find him every Saturday.
‘That’s why he’s always had such a horror of drink. I feel awkward about not being able to offer you anything. There is never a drop of alcohol, not even of wine, in the house.
‘I think that at first he feared he would inherit it, and that’s why he stuck to such extremely strict rules …’
Maigret opened his mouth, but she didn’t give him time to speak again, and he resigned himself to listening to the rest.
‘Some people make fun of him, especially on board the boats, where they drink a lot. He doesn’t gamble, he doesn’t chase women. On board, he spends his evenings in his cabin reading and working. He has learned five or six languages all by himself, and he speaks several local dialects fluently.’
The furniture was old, like all the objects that decorated the room. Because of the daylight coming in from outside, the electric light looked drearier and gave the surroundings a muted, dusty appearance.
He had come to ask precise questions and he was being subjected to interminable confidences.
‘I met him when he was in Paris between two boats, because even after he was widowed he came back to Paris, where he had kept his flat.’
‘Doesn’t his mother live in Paris?’
She wasn’t surprised that he was aware of this.
‘Yes! He brought her here a long time ago, during his first marriage. She’s always complied with his needs, because he’s an only child. He moved her into a rented flat on Rue des Tournelles. He adores his mother. She’s very old, now. She still comes to see me from time to time, and those are her only outings, as it were.’
‘Why didn’t she come and live with you?’
‘She was the one who didn’t want to. She claims it always goes badly, that every household needs its independence.’
‘Do you get on well with her?’
‘I love her as much as if she were my mother. When I met Boursicault I was a saleswoman in a gentleman’s outfitters on Boulevard Saint-Michel. He came in to buy some socks and black ties. Even though he didn’t woo me, I saw that he was looking at me attentively, as if he was struck by something in me. I learned later what it was that had moved him so much. He didn’t try to hide it from me. Apparently I am the image of his first wife. Go over to the fireplace. There’s a little photograph of her on the left, in the mahogany frame.’
Maigret Takes a Room Page 9
