The Night at the Crossroads

by Georges Simenon

  On the other hand, in the drawing room with its old furniture were books with foreign titles, words that Maigret didn’t understand. And these two foreigners, the brother and sister … Especially the sister, who struck a discordant note …

  A note that was too voluptuous, too lascivious? Yet she herself was not provocative. Her gestures were unaffected, and she held herself in a natural way.

  But this simplicity did not suit such a décor. The inspector would have felt more at home with the three old ladies and their monstrous passions!

  ‘Will you allow me to have a look around the house?’

  Neither Carl nor Else seemed to mind. She sat down in an armchair, while he picked up the lamp.

  ‘If you’ll just follow me …’

  ‘I suppose you use the drawing room, for the most part?’

  ‘Yes, that’s where I work and where my sister spends most of her day.’

  ‘You have no servant?’

  ‘You already know how much I earn. It isn’t enough for me to hire any help.’

  ‘Who prepares the meals?’

  ‘I do.’

  He said this easily, without any embarrassment or shame, and as the two men entered a corridor, Andersen pushed open a door and held the lamp just inside the kitchen, murmuring, ‘Please excuse the clutter.’

  The place was worse than cluttered. It was sordid. A spirit stove encrusted with boiled milk, sauces, grease, on a table covered with a scrap of oilcloth. Tag ends of bread. The remains of an escalope in a frying pan sitting right on the table and dirty dishes in the sink.

  Out in the corridor again, Maigret glanced back at the drawing room, where the only light was now the glow from Else’s cigarette.

  ‘We don’t use the dining room or the morning room at the front of the house. Would you like to see them?’

  The lamp shone on some piled-up furniture and a rather nice parquet floor, on which potatoes lay spread out. The shutters were closed.

  ‘Our bedrooms are up there …’

  The staircase was wide; one step creaked. The smell of perfume grew stronger as they went upstairs.

  ‘Here is my room.’

  A simple box mattress set on the floor, as a divan. A rudimentary dressing table. A large Louis XV wardrobe. An ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts.

  ‘You smoke a lot?’

  ‘In the morning, in bed … Perhaps thirty cigarettes, while I read.’

  In front of the door opposite his, he said quickly, ‘My sister’s bedroom.’

  But he did not open the door, and when Maigret did, Anderson scowled.

  He was still holding the lamp and did not bring it into the room. The perfume was now so cloying that the inspector almost gagged.

  The entire house lacked style, order, luxury. A campsite furnished with old odds and ends.

  But here in the dim light the inspector had the feeling of a warm, cosy oasis. The floor was completely covered with animal skins, including a splendid tiger pelt serving as a bedside rug.

  The bed itself was of ebony, covered with black velvet, on which lay some rumpled silk underwear.

  Andersen was edging down the hall with the lamp, and Maigret followed him.

  ‘The three other bedrooms are empty.’

  ‘Which means that your sister’s is the only one overlooking the road …’

  Without answering, Carl pointed out a narrow staircase.

  ‘The service staircase. We don’t use it. If you’d care to see the garage …’

  They went downstairs single file in the dancing light of the oil lamp.

  In the drawing room, the red dot of a cigarette remained the only illumination. As Andersen advanced, the lamplight invaded the room, revealing Else lounging in an armchair, gazing with indifference at the two men.

  ‘You haven’t offered the chief inspector any tea, Carl!’

  ‘Thank you, but I never drink tea.’

  ‘Well, I want some! Would you like a whisky? Or perhaps … Carl! Please …’

  Carl, self-conscious and a little on edge, set down the lamp and lit a small spirit stove on which sat a silver teapot.

  ‘What may I offer you, inspector?’

  Maigret could not put his finger on what was bothering him. The atmosphere was intimate and yet haphazard. Up on the easel, large flowers with crimson petals were in full bloom.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘first someone stole Monsieur Michonnet’s car. Goldberg was murdered in that car, which was then placed in your garage. And your car was driven to the insurance agent’s garage.’

  ‘Unbelievable, isn’t it!’

  Else spoke in a soft, lilting voice as she lit another cigarette.

  ‘My brother insisted that because the dead man was found at our place, we would be accused … He tried to run away … As for me, I didn’t want to. I was sure that people would understand that if we had really killed anyone, it would not have been in our interest to—’

  She broke off, looking for Carl, who was rummaging around in a corner.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to offer the inspector anything?’

  ‘Sorry … I … We don’t seem to have any more …’

  ‘It’s always the same with you! You never think of anything … You must excuse us, monsieur …?’

  ‘Maigret.’

  ‘… Monsieur Maigret. We drink very little alcohol and—’

  There was the sound of footsteps outside, where Maigret now saw that Sergeant Lucas was looking for him.

  3. Night at the Crossroads

  ‘What is it, Lucas?’

  Maigret was standing at the French windows, with the uneasy atmosphere of the drawing room at his back and, before him, the face of Lucas in the cool shadows of the grounds.

  ‘Nothing, chief … I wanted to know where you were …’

  And a slightly sheepish Lucas tried to see inside the house over the inspector’s shoulder.

  ‘You booked me a room?’

  ‘Yes. And there’s a telegram for you. Madame Goldberg is arriving tonight by car.’

  Maigret turned around: Andersen was waiting with bowed head; Else was smoking and wiggling one foot impatiently.

  ‘I will probably return to question you again tomorrow,’ he told them. ‘My respects, mademoiselle.’

  Else nodded to him with gracious condescension. Carl offered to walk the policemen back to the gate.

  ‘You’re not going to look at the garage?’

  ‘Tomorrow …’

  ‘Listen, chief inspector … This may seem somewhat strange to you … I’d like you to make use of me if I can be helpful in any way. I know that I am not only a foreigner, but your prime suspect as well. Yet another reason for me to do my utmost to find the guilty man. Please don’t hold my awkwardness against me.’

  Maigret looked him right in the eye. He saw the sadness in that eye, which slowly turned away. Carl Andersen relocked the gate and went back to the house.

  ‘What came over you, Lucas?’

  ‘Something was bothering me … I got back from Avrainville a while ago. I don’t know why, but this crossroads suddenly gave me such a bad feeling …’

  The two men were walking in the dark along one side of the road. There weren’t many cars.

  ‘I’ve tried to reconstruct the crime in my mind,’ continued Lucas, ‘and the more you think about it, the more bewildering it becomes.’

  They were now abreast of the Michonnet villa, which formed one point of a triangle, the other two of which were the garage and the Three Widows house, all more or less equidistant from one another. Connecting them all, the smooth, shining ribbon of the road, running like a river between two rows of tall trees.

  No light could be seen over at the Three Widows house. Two windows were illuminated at the insuranc
e agent’s villa, but dark curtains allowed only a thin streak of light to escape, an uneven line, revealing that someone was peeking through the curtains to look outside.

  Over by the garage: the milk-white globes atop the pumps, plus a rectangle of harsh light streaming from a workshop resounding with hammer blows.

  The two policemen had stopped, and Lucas, who was one of Maigret’s oldest colleagues, explained his reasoning.

  ‘First thing: Goldberg had to have come here. You saw the corpse in the morgue at Étampes? You didn’t? A man of forty-five, definitely Jewish-looking. A short, stocky guy with a tough jaw, a stubborn brow, curly hair like sheep’s wool … Showy suit … Nice linen, and monogrammed. Someone used to living well, giving orders, spending freely … No mud, no dust on his patent-leather shoes, so even if he came to Arpajon by train, he did not cover the three kilometres to get here on foot! My theory is that he arrived from Paris, or maybe Antwerp, by car.

  ‘The doctor says that his dinner had been completely digested at the time of death, which was instantaneous. And yet a large quantity of champagne and toasted almonds was found in his stomach. No hotel proprietor in Arpajon sold any champagne on Saturday night or early Sunday morning, and I defy you to find a single toasted almond anywhere in that town.’

  With a screech of rattling iron, a lorry went by at fifty kilometres an hour.

  ‘Consider the Michonnets’ garage, sir. The insurance agent has had a car for only one year. His first one was an old wreck that he simply kept in the padlocked wooden shed that opens on to the road. He hasn’t had time to have another garage built, so the new car was stolen from the shed. Someone had to drive it to the Three Widows house, open the gate, then the garage, take out Andersen’s old heap and leave Michonnet’s car in its place … And to top it off, stick Goldberg behind the wheel and shoot him dead point-blank. Nobody saw or heard a thing! … Nobody has an alibi! … I don’t know if you’ve got the same feeling I have about this, but when I was coming back from Avrainville a little while ago, while it was growing dark, I was completely at sea … I get the sense that there’s something wrong with this case, something weird, almost malignant …

  ‘I went up to the gate of the Three Widows house … I knew you were in there. The façade was dark, but I could make out a halo of yellow light in the garden.

  ‘It’s idiotic, I know! But I was afraid! Afraid for you, understand? … Don’t turn around too quickly … It’s Madame Michonnet, lurking behind her curtains …

  ‘I must be wrong about this, but I’d swear that half the drivers going by are giving us odd looks …’

  Maigret glanced from one point to another of the triangle. The fields had vanished, flooded in darkness. To the right of the main road, across from the garage, the road to Avrainville branched off, not planted with trees like the highway but lined on one side by a string of telegraph poles.

  Eight hundred metres away, a few lights: the outlying houses of the village.

  ‘Champagne and toasted almonds!’ grumbled the inspector.

  He began walking slowly, stopping in front of the garage as if out for a stroll. In the glare of an arc lamp, a mechanic in overalls was changing a tyre on a car.

  It was more of a repair shop than a garage. About a dozen cars were there, all old models, and one of them, stripped of its wheels and engine, was just a carcass hanging in the chains of a pulley.

  ‘Let’s go and have dinner! When is Madame Goldberg due to arrive?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometime this evening.’

  The inn at Avrainville was empty. A zinc counter, a few bottles, a big stove, a small billiard table with rock-hard cushions and torn felt, a dog and cat lying side by side …

  The proprietor was the waiter; his wife could be seen in the kitchen, cooking escalopes.

  ‘What’s the name of the garage owner at the crossroads?’ asked Maigret, swallowing a sardine served as an appetizer.

  ‘Monsieur Oscar,’ replied the inn-keeper.

  ‘How long has he been in this area?’

  ‘Maybe eight years … Maybe ten … Me, I’ve a horse and cart, so …’

  And the man continued serving them half-heartedly. He was not a talker. He even had the shifty look of someone on his guard.

  ‘And Monsieur Michonnet?’

  ‘He’s the insurance agent.’

  That was it.

  ‘Will you have red or white?’

  He spent a long time trying to fish out a piece of cork that had fallen into the bottle and in the end just decanted the wine.

  ‘And the people in the Three Widows house?’

  ‘I’ve never seen them … Not the lady, anyway, since it seems there’s one there … The highway’s not really part of Avrainville.’

  ‘Well done?’ called his wife from the kitchen.

  Maigret and Lucas fell silent, lost in their own thoughts. At nine o’clock, after a synthetic calvados, they went back out to the road, paced up and down for a while, then finally headed for the crossroads.

  ‘She’s not coming …’

  ‘I’d like to know what Goldberg was doing out here. Champagne and toasted almonds! … Did they find any diamonds in his pockets?’

  ‘No. Just a bit over two thousand francs in his wallet.’

  The garage was still lit up. Maigret noticed that Monsieur Oscar’s house was not by the side of the road but behind the workshop, which meant its windows could not be seen.

  Dressed in overalls, the mechanic sat eating on the running board of a car. And suddenly, just a few steps away from the policemen, the garage owner himself came out of the darkness on the road.

  ‘Good evening, gentlemen!’

  ‘Good evening,’ grunted Maigret.

  ‘A lovely night! If this keeps up, we’ll have wonderful weather for Easter.’

  ‘Tell me,’ the inspector asked bluntly, ‘does your place stay open all night?’

  ‘Open, no! But there’s always a man there who sleeps on a cot. The door’s locked. Regular customers ring the bell when they need something.’

  ‘Do you get much traffic on the road at night?’

  ‘Not a lot, no, but it never stops. Lorries on their way to Les Halles … This region’s known for its early fruits and vegetables, especially its watercress. The drivers sometimes run out of petrol, or need some little repair made … Would you like to join me for a drink?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Your loss … but I won’t insist. So! You haven’t sorted out this business with the cars yet? You know, Monsieur Michonnet is going to worry himself sick over it. Especially if he isn’t issued another six-cylinder car right away!’

  A headlamp gleamed in the distance, growing larger. A rumbling sound. A shadow went past.

  ‘The doctor from Étampes!’ murmured the garage owner. ‘He went to see a patient in Arpajon. His colleague must have invited him for dinner …’

  ‘You know every vehicle that goes past here?’

  ‘Many of them … Look! Those two side-lamps: that’s watercress for Les Halles. Those fellows can never bring themselves to use their headlamps … And they take up the entire road! … Evening, Jules!’

  A voice replied from up in the cab of the passing lorry, and then the only thing to see was the small red tail-light, which soon dissolved into the night.

  Somewhere, a train, a glowing caterpillar that stretched out into chaos of the night.

  ‘The 9.32 express … Listen, you’re sure you won’t have anything? … Say, Jojo! When you’ve finished your supper, check the third pump, it’s jammed.’

  More headlamps. But the car went on by. It was not Madame Goldberg.

  Maigret was smoking constantly. Leaving Monsieur Oscar in front of his garage, he began to walk up and down, trailed by Lucas, who kept talking softly to him
self.

  Not a single light in the Three Widows house. The policemen went past the gate ten times. Each time Maigret automatically looked up at the window he knew was Else’s.

  Then came the Michonnet villa, brand new, nondescript, with its varnished oak door and silly little garden.

  Then the garage, the mechanic busy repairing the petrol pump, Monsieur Oscar dispensing advice, both hands stuck in his pockets.

  A lorry from Étampes on its way to Paris stopped to fill up. Lying asleep atop the heap of vegetables was the relief driver, who made this same journey every night at the same hour.

  ‘Thirty litres!’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Can’t complain!’

  The clutch growled and the lorry moved off, down the hill to Arpajon at sixty kilometres an hour.

  ‘She won’t be coming now,’ sighed Lucas. ‘Probably decided to spend the night in Paris …’

  After they’d covered the 200 metres up and down from the crossroads three more times, Maigret veered off abruptly towards Avrainville. When they reached the inn, there was only one lamp still burning and no one in the café.

  ‘I think I hear a car …’

  They turned around. And two headlamps were indeed shining in the direction of the village. A car was turning slowly in front of the garage. Someone was talking.

  ‘They’re asking for directions.’

  The car came towards them at last, illuminating the telegraph poles one after another. Maigret and Lucas were caught in the light, standing across the road from the inn.

  The sound of brakes. The driver got out and opened a door to the back seat.

  ‘Is this the right place?’ asked a woman’s voice from inside.

  ‘Yes, madame. This is Avrainville. And there’s the traditional branch of fir over the front door of the inn.’

  A leg sheathed in silk. A foot placed on the ground. An impression of fur …

  Maigret was about to walk towards the woman.

  At that moment there was a loud bang, a cry – and the woman fell headlong, literally crashing to the ground, where she lay curled up in a ball while one of her legs kicked out spasmodically.