The Night at the Crossroads

by Georges Simenon

  Maigret and Lucas looked at each other.

  ‘Take care of her, Lucas!’ shouted the inspector.

  But already a few seconds had been lost. The chauffeur stood stunned, rooted to the spot. A window opened on the second floor of the inn.

  The shot had come from the field to the right of the road. As he ran, the inspector drew his revolver from his pocket. He could hear something, footsteps thudding softly on clayey soil … But he couldn’t see a thing: the car’s headlamps were shining so brightly straight ahead that they flooded everywhere else with darkness.

  Turning around he yelled, ‘The headlamps!’

  When nothing happened, he yelled it again. And then there was a disastrous misunderstanding: the driver, or Lucas, turned one of the headlamps towards the inspector.

  Now he was spotlit, a huge figure in black against the bare ground of the field.

  The murderer had to be farther on, or more to the left – or the right – but in any case, outside that circle of light.

  ‘God almighty, the headlamps!’ yelled Maigret one last time.

  He was clenching his fists in rage, running in zigzags like a hunted rabbit. That glare was disrupting even all perception of distance, which is why he suddenly saw the garage’s pumps less than a hundred metres away.

  Then there was a human figure, quite close, and a voice saying hoarsely, ‘What’s going on?’

  Furious and humiliated, Maigret stopped short, looked Monsieur Oscar up and down and saw there was no mud on his slippers.

  ‘Did you see anyone?’

  ‘Just a car asking the way to Avrainville.’

  The inspector noticed a red light on the main road heading towards Arpajon.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A lorry for Les Halles.’

  ‘He stopped?’

  ‘Long enough to take twenty litres …’

  They could hear the commotion going on over by the inn and the headlamp was still sweeping the deserted field. Maigret suddenly noticed the Michonnet villa, crossed the road and rang the bell.

  A small spy hole opened.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret. I would like to speak with Monsieur Michonnet.’

  A chain and two bolts were undone. A key turned in the lock. Madame Michonnet appeared, anxious, even upset, impulsively darting furtive glances up and down the main road.

  ‘You haven’t seen him?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s not here?’ replied Maigret gruffly, with a glimmer of hope.

  ‘I mean … I don’t know … I … I just heard a shot, didn’t I? … But do come in!’

  She was about forty, plain, with prominent features.

  ‘Monsieur Michonnet stepped out for a moment to …’

  On the left, the door to the dining room was open. The table had not been cleared.

  ‘How long has he been gone?’

  ‘I don’t know … Perhaps half an hour …’

  Something moved in the kitchen.

  ‘Do you have a servant?’

  ‘No. It might be the cat …’

  The inspector opened the kitchen door and saw Monsieur Michonnet himself, coming in through the garden door, mopping his face. His shoes were caked with mud.

  There was a moment of surprised silence as the two men looked at each other.

  ‘Your weapon!’ said the inspector.

  ‘My …?’

  ‘Your weapon, quickly!’

  The insurance agent handed him a small revolver he’d pulled from a trouser pocket. All six of its bullets were still there, however, and the barrel was cold.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Over there …’

  ‘What do you mean by “over there”?’

  ‘Don’t be afraid, Émile! They wouldn’t dare touch you!’ exclaimed Madame Michonnet. ‘This is too much, really! And when I think that my brother-in-law is a judge in Carcassonne …’

  ‘Just a moment, madame: I am speaking to your husband … You were at Avrainville just now. What did you go there to do?’

  ‘Avrainville? Me?’

  He was shaking, trying in vain to put up a front, but seemed genuinely dumbfounded by his predicament.

  ‘I swear to you, I was over there, at the Three Widows house! I wanted to keep an eye on them myself, since—’

  ‘You didn’t go into the field? You didn’t hear anything?’

  ‘Wasn’t there a shot? Has anyone been killed?’

  His moustache was drooping. He looked at his wife the way a kid looks at his mother when he’s in a tight spot.

  ‘I swear, chief inspector! … I swear to you …’

  He stamped his foot, and two tears rolled down his cheeks.

  ‘This is outrageous!’ he cried. ‘It’s my car that was stolen! It’s my car they found the body in! And no one will give my car back to me, when I’m the one who worked fifteen years to pay for it! And now I’m the one accused of—’

  ‘Be quiet, Émile! I’ll talk to him!’

  But Maigret didn’t give her the chance.

  ‘Are there any other weapons in the house?’

  ‘Only this one revolver, which we bought when we had the villa built … And the bullets are even the same ones the gunsmith put in himself.’

  ‘You were at the Three Widows house?’

  ‘I was afraid my car would be stolen again … I wanted to conduct my own investigation … I entered the grounds – or rather, I climbed up on the wall.’

  ‘You saw them?’

  ‘Who? Those two? The Andersens? Of course! … They’re in the drawing room. They’ve been quarrelling for an hour now.’

  ‘You left when you heard the shot?’

  ‘Yes. But I wasn’t sure it was a gunshot … I only thought so … I was worried.’

  ‘You saw no one else?’

  ‘No one.’

  Maigret went to the door and, opening it, saw Monsieur Oscar coming towards him.

  ‘Your colleague has sent me, chief inspector, to tell you that the woman is dead. My mechanic has gone to inform the police in Arpajon. He’ll bring back a doctor … And now, will you excuse me? I can’t leave the garage unattended.’

  At Avrainville, the pale headlamp beams could still be seen, illuminating a section of wall at the inn and some shadowy figures moving around a car.

  4. The Prisoner

  Head down, Maigret was walking slowly in the field, where the growing corn was beginning to dot the earth with pale green.

  It was morning. The sun was out and the air was vibrant with the songs of invisible birds. In Avrainville, Lucas was standing outside the inn door, waiting for representatives of the prosecutor’s office and keeping an eye on the car Madame Goldberg had hired in Paris on Place de l’Opéra for her journey.

  The wife of the diamond merchant from Antwerp was laid out upstairs on an iron bed. A sheet had been thrown over her corpse, which the doctor had partly unclothed the night before.

  It was early on a fine April day. In the very field where Maigret, blinded by the headlamps, had chased the murderer in vain and now advanced step by step, following the traces left in the darkness, two farm workers loaded a cart with beets they were harvesting from a hillock while their horses waited quietly.

  The double row of trees along the main road sliced through the countryside. The red petrol pumps at the garage sparkled in the sunlight.

  Slow, stubborn, quite possibly in a bad mood, Maigret was smoking. The footprints found in the field seemed to prove that Madame Goldberg had been shot dead with a rifle, for the murderer had not come within thirty metres of the inn.

  The footprints were unremarkable: smooth soles, average size. The trail curved around to wind up at the Three Widows Crossroads, keep
ing a more or less equal distance from the Andersens’ house, the Michonnet villa and the garage.

  In short, this trail proved nothing! It introduced no new lead and Maigret, stepping out on to the road, was biting down on his pipe stem rather grimly.

  He saw Monsieur Oscar at his door, his hands in the pockets of his baggy trousers and a smug expression on his common-looking face.

  ‘Up already, chief inspector?’ he shouted across the road.

  At that same moment someone pulled up between Maigret and the garage: it was Carl Andersen in his little old car.

  He was wearing gloves and a fedora and had a cigarette between his lips. He doffed his hat.

  ‘May I have a word with you, chief inspector?’

  After rolling down his window, he went on in his usual polite manner.

  ‘I did want to ask your permission to go to Paris, and was hoping to find you here … I’ll tell you why I must go: today is the 15th of April, the day I am paid for my work for Dumas and Son. It’s also the day when the rent is due …’

  He smiled apologetically.

  ‘Quite ordinary errands, as you see, but urgent ones all the same. I’m low on funds.’

  When he removed his monocle for a moment to resettle it more securely, Maigret turned his head away because he did not like looking into that staring glass eye.

  ‘And your sister?’

  ‘Precisely … I was about to bring this up: would it be too much to ask you to have someone look in on the house from time to time?’

  Three dark, official-looking cars came up the hill from Arpajon and turned left towards Avrainville.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘They’re from the public prosecutor’s office. Madame Goldberg was killed last night as she was getting out of a car at the inn.’

  Maigret watched his reaction. Across the street, Monsieur Oscar was strolling idly up and down in front of his garage.

  ‘Killed!’ repeated Carl. Suddenly nervous, he said, ‘Listen, chief inspector: I must get to Paris! … I can’t stay here without any money, especially on the day when I have to pay all my local bills, but as soon as I get back I want to help find the murderer. You will allow me to do this, won’t you? I don’t know anything for certain, but I feel … I don’t know how to put this … I’m beginning to see some kind of pattern here …’

  He had to pull in closer to the pavement because a lorry driver coming back from Paris was honking his horn to get by.

  ‘Off you go, then!’ exclaimed Maigret.

  Carl tipped his hat and took a moment to light another cigarette before letting in the clutch, whereupon the jalopy went down the hill and puttered up the next one.

  People were moving around over by the three cars that were parked just outside Avrainville.

  ‘Sure you wouldn’t like a little something?’

  Maigret frowned at the smiling garage owner, who just wouldn’t stop offering him a drink.

  Filling a pipe, he walked off towards the Three Widows house, where the tall trees were alive with the fluttering and chirping of birds. The Michonnet villa was on his way.

  The windows were open. Wearing a dust cap, Madame Michonnet was upstairs in the bedroom, shaking out a rug.

  Unshaven, his hair uncombed, wearing no collar, her husband was downstairs smoking a meerschaum with a cherry-wood stem and looking out at the road with a glum, abstracted air. When he noticed the inspector, he avoided greeting him by making a show of cleaning out his pipe.

  A few minutes later Maigret was ringing the bell at the Andersens’ front gate, where he waited in vain for ten minutes. All the shutters were closed. The only sound was the constant twittering of the birds, which transformed every tree into a bustling little world.

  In the end Maigret shrugged, examined the lock and let himself in with a passkey. As on the previous day, he walked around the house to the drawing room.

  He knocked but, again, without success. Then, grumbling and obstinate, he went inside, where his eye fell upon the open phonograph. There was a record on the turntable.

  Why did he start the machine? He would have been at a loss to explain. The needle was scratchy. An Argentinean orchestra played a tango as the inspector started up the stairs.

  The door to Carl Andersen’s bedroom stood open. Near a wardrobe Maigret saw a pair of shoes that seemed to have recently been cleaned, for the brush and tin of polish sat beside them and the floor was dotted with crumbled, dried mud.

  The inspector had made paper tracings of the footprints found in the field. He compared them with the shoes. A perfect match.

  And yet he never so much as blinked. He didn’t seem the least bit pleased. He went on smoking, as grumpy as he’d been all morning.

  ‘Is that you?’ a woman’s voice inquired.

  Maigret hesitated … He could not see who was speaking: the voice had come from Else’s room, but the door was closed.

  ‘It’s me,’ he finally replied, as indistinctly as he could.

  Then, a long silence.

  ‘Who’s there?’ the voice asked abruptly.

  It was too late to fool her.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret. I was here yesterday. I’d like to speak to you for a moment, mademoiselle.’

  More silence. Maigret tried to guess what she could possibly be doing behind that door, beneath which gleamed a thin line of sunlight.

  ‘I’m listening,’ she said at last.

  ‘If you’d be good enough to open the door … I can certainly wait, if you need time to dress.’

  That annoying silence again.

  A little laugh, and then, ‘What you ask of me is somewhat difficult, chief inspector!’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I’m locked in. So you will have to speak without seeing me.’

  ‘Who locked you in?’

  ‘My brother Carl … I am the one who asks him to, whenever he goes out, because I’m so terribly afraid of prowlers.’

  Without saying anything, Maigret pulled out his passkey and quietly inserted it in the lock. His throat felt tight; was he troubled by any untoward thoughts?

  And when the bolt shifted, he decided not to open the door before announcing first, ‘I’m going to come in, mademoiselle …’

  A strange sensation: he was in a dark, drab corridor – and stepped immediately into a setting alive with light.

  Although the shutters were closed, the horizontal slats admitted great beams of sunshine.

  The entire room was thus a jigsaw puzzle of darkness and light. The walls, objects, even Else’s face were as if striped in luminous bands. Then there was the young woman’s heavy perfume, plus such incidental details as the silk underwear tossed on to a bergère, the Turkish cigarette smouldering in a china bowl on a lacquered pedestal table, and finally there was Else, lounging on the black velvet couch in a deep red peignoir.

  Eyes wide open, she watched Maigret come towards her with amused astonishment and, just perhaps, a tiny tremor of fear.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you. Please forgive me if I’m disturbing you …’

  She laughed like a little girl. When her peignoir slipped off one shoulder, she pulled it up again but remained lying on or, rather, nestled in the low couch striped with sunlight like the rest of the room.

  ‘You see? … I wasn’t doing much of anything. I never do!’

  ‘Why didn’t you go to Paris with your brother?’

  ‘He doesn’t want me to. He says having a woman around gets in the way when men discuss business.’

  ‘You never leave the house?’

  ‘But I do! I take walks around the property.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘We have three hectares here, enough for me to stretch my legs, don’
t you think? … But do sit down, chief inspector. It’s rather funny, having you here in secret …’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That my brother will have a fit when he gets back. He’s worse than any mother. Worse than a jealous lover! He is the one who looks after me and he takes this responsibility seriously, as you can see.’

  ‘I thought you were the one who wanted to be locked in, because of your fear of burglars.’

  ‘There’s that, too … I’ve grown so used to solitude that now I am afraid of people.’

  Maigret had sat down in a large upholstered armchair and placed his bowler on the rug. And whenever Else looked at him he turned his face away, still unable to meet her gaze with his usual composure.

  The previous day, she had simply seemed mysterious to him. In the dim light, a formal, almost regal figure, she’d had the presence of a film star, and their first meeting had taken on a theatrical air.

  Now he was trying to discover her human side, but something else was bothering him: the very intimacy of their encounter.

  Else relaxing in her peignoir, dangling a slipper from the tip of a bare foot in that perfumed bedchamber, while the middle-aged Maigret sat slightly flushed, his hat on the rug …

  Wasn’t that a perfect illustration for La Vie Parisienne?

  Rather clumsily, the inspector put his pipe away in his pocket even though he hadn’t cleaned it out.

  ‘So, you find it boring here?’

  ‘No … Yes … I don’t know … Do you smoke cigarettes?’

  She waved towards a pack of Turkish cigarettes, the price of which was marked on the band: 20 francs 65 centimes. Maigret recalled that the Andersens lived on 2,000 francs a month, and that Carl had been obliged to hurry and collect his wages so as to pay the rent and local bills on time.

  ‘Do you smoke a lot?’

  ‘A pack or two a day …’

  She held out a delicately engraved lighter, then heaved a sigh that caused the neckline of her peignoir to open a little more revealingly.

  The inspector did not immediately hold it against her, though. Among the clientele of luxury hotels he had seen showily dressed foreign women whom the average citizen would have taken for tarts.

  ‘Your brother went out, last night?’