‘Yes. If you’d like to come with me …’
The commissioner pushed a bell and told the office boy, ‘If anyone phones or wants to see me, I’ll be back in a minute.’
They were both downcast, but Maigret also had a guilty conscience. A day that had started so well! That delicious waft of air scented with coffee, croissants and rum came back to his mind. The morning’s luminous misty air …
‘Oh, and by the way, Janvier telephoned. It seems that your Poles …’
Maigret waved a hand as if to dismiss all the Poles on earth from his mental horizon.
The commissioner had opened a glazed door. They had talked of bricking up that doorway for at least ten years, but for practical reasons nothing was ever done. The door took you straight from the Police Judiciaire to the courtrooms of the Palais de Justice and Records. It was rather like being behind the scenes in a theatre: narrow staircases, winding passages. When you had a defendant to be taken to the public prosecutor’s office …
On the right, the stairs leading to the attic storey, Criminal Records and the laboratory. Further on, a door with frosted glass panels, and beyond that door the sound of the law courts in the Palais de Justice, lawyers coming and going, curious members of the public, interested onlookers following hearings in the courts and the proceedings in criminal trials.
An officer was smoking a cigarette outside a narrower door, set for no apparent reason right in the middle of a wall. He put his cigarette out when he saw the two men coming.
Who knew about this door? The answer to that was: everyone familiar with the police headquarters building! It opened into a large cupboard, a cavity reaching some two metres back, where Victor, who wasn’t fond of taking unnecessary exercise, kept buckets and brooms.
The man on duty at the door went away. The commissioner opened it, and as there was no light in the broom cupboard struck a match.
‘There she is,’ he said.
As Cécile tumbled in, she had not even been able to fall full length, and she was wedged against the wall, while her head was bent on her chest.
Maigret suddenly felt hot, mopped his face with his handkerchief, and dug his pipe into his pocket, even though he had lit it.
There was no need for words. The commissioner and the inspector looked at one another, and the latter automatically took off his hat.
‘Do you know what I think, sir? Someone went into the waiting room and told her that I was ready to see her, but not in my office. Someone she believed was from the Police Judiciaire.’
The commissioner inclined his head.
‘It had to be done fast, do you see? She was told that, all of a sudden, I could see her. She knew who had killed her aunt. Opening this door – total darkness inside it – and when Cécile took a step …’
‘She was hit with a cosh or something like that first, to stun her.’
The ridiculous green hat, lying on the floor, confirmed this hypothesis. Besides, there was a little clotted blood in the girl’s dark hair.
‘She must have swayed, perhaps she fell, and the murderer finished her off without a sound by strangling her.’
‘Are you sure, sir?’
‘That’s what Forensics think. I wanted them to wait for you before carrying out an autopsy. Why are you surprised? Her aunt was strangled too, wasn’t she?’
‘Exactly …’
‘What do you mean, Maigret?’
‘I mean I don’t think the same man could have committed both crimes. When Cécile turned up this morning she knew who had killed her aunt.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘If she hadn’t known, she’d have raised the alarm earlier. The forensic pathologist says her aunt died before two in the morning. Either Cécile saw the murder take place …’
‘Why wouldn’t the murderer have killed her at Bourg-la-Reine as well?’
‘Maybe she hid … let me go on. Either she saw it happen, or she discovered her aunt’s body when she got up at about six thirty in the morning. I know from her alarm clock that she rose at that time. And she didn’t tell anyone. She came straight here.’
‘How strange!’
‘Not if we assume that she knew the murderer. She wanted to tell me about it in person; she didn’t trust the police in Bourg-la-Reine. And the proof that she knew him is that she was killed to keep her from talking.’
‘Suppose you had seen her as soon as you got in this morning?’
Maigret blushed, something that he very seldom did. ‘Well, yes … There’s something I’ve missed … Perhaps the murderer wasn’t able to move freely at that moment … Or else he didn’t know yet …’ He suddenly looked as if he were hunting something down. ‘No, it doesn’t hold water,’ he growled.
‘What doesn’t hold water?’
‘What I’m saying. If the old lady’s killer had turned up at the Aquarium …’
‘Aquarium?’
‘Sorry, sir, that’s what the officers call the waiting room. If he’d turned up there, Cécile wouldn’t have followed him. So someone else came. Someone she didn’t know, or someone she trusted …’
The ever-stubborn Maigret looked at the dark little heap that had fallen against the wall of the broom cupboard, among the brushes and buckets.
‘It was someone she didn’t know,’ he suddenly decided.
‘Why?’
‘She might have followed someone she knew outside, but not in here. I might as well tell you I was expecting her to be found in the Seine or on waste land somewhere. But …’
He took a couple of steps, bent to get through the low doorway of the cupboard, struck a match and then another, gently nudged the corpse.
‘What are you looking for, Maigret?’
‘Her bag.’ It was as characteristic of her as her comical green hat, a voluminous bag like an attaché case that Cécile always held on her lap like something precious when she was in the Aquarium.
‘It’s gone.’
‘From which you conclude …?’
Here Maigret, forgetting the hierarchy of rank and letting his nerves get the better of him, snapped, ‘Conclude! Conclude! Are you able to come to any conclusions?’
He noticed that the blond officer who had been posted at the door a few paces away turned his head, and then Maigret began again.
‘I apologize, sir, but you’ll agree that anyone can go in and out of this place just as they like. Someone could have gone into the waiting room and …’
His nerves were all on edge. He clenched the stem of his pipe, which had gone out, between his teeth. ‘Not to mention that damn door that should have been bricked up ages ago.’
‘If you’d seen the girl when …’
Poor Maigret was a sad sight: tall and strong, solid as a rock to all outward appearances, bending his head to look at that pile of soft clothes at his feet, that heap of inert matter, mopping his face with his handkerchief yet again.
‘Well, what are we going to do?’ asked the commissioner, hoping to change the subject.
Were they going to let the public know that a crime had been committed on the premises of the Police Judiciaire, or rather in a kind of passage linking the police headquarters to the law courts?
‘There’s one thing I’d like to ask, sir. Could Lucas take over the case of the Poles …?’
Perhaps it was hunger. Maigret hadn’t eaten since breakfast. And he had drunk three small shots of spirits, which had given him an appetite.
‘Yes, if you like.’
‘Close that door, will you?’ Maigret told the officer. ‘And stay on guard. I’ll be back right away.’
From his office, and keeping his hat and coat on, he phoned Madame Maigret.
‘No, I don’t know just when I’ll be back. … It’s too complicated to explain … no, no, I’m here in Paris!’
Should he call for some sandwiches to be brought in from the Brasserie Dauphine, as usual? But he needed fresh air. Fine rain was still falling outside. He preferred the little bar in th
e middle of the Pont-Neuf, close to the statue of Henri IV.
‘Ham,’ he ordered when he got there.
‘Are you all right, inspector?’
The waiter knew him. When Maigret’s eyelids seemed so heavy, and he had that stubborn look …
‘Work, is it?’
Some of the customers were intent on a game of cards near the counter. Others were playing the fruit machine.
Maigret bit into his sandwich, thinking that Cécile was dead. In spite of his heavy overcoat, it sent a cold shiver down his spine.
3.
When someone mused out loud in Maigret’s presence about the resignation to their lot of the humble, sick and disabled, of the thousands of people who lived reclusive lives in the honeycomb cells of the big city, seeing no better prospects ahead of them, he would often shrug his shoulders. He knew from experience that human beings will adapt to anywhere they find themselves, as soon as they can fill that place with their own warmth, odour and habits.
The concierge’s lodge, where the inspector was seated in a creaking wicker chair, measured less than two metres fifty by three metres. Its ceiling was low. The glazed door, which had no curtain over it, looked out on the darkness of the corridor, for there was no light in the stairwell until a tenant turned the time switch on. The lodge contained a bed with a red eiderdown, and on the table with its waxed brown tablecloth lay the cold remains of a pig’s trotter, part of a white loaf, a knife and a glass with purplish dregs of wine in it.
Sitting on a chair, Madame With-All-Due-Respect was talking to him, her cheek almost welded to her shoulder because of her chronic stiff neck, her throat wrapped for warmth in thermal wadding of a nasty pink shade that contrasted with her black scarf.
‘No, inspector, with all due respect I won’t take the armchair. It was my late husband’s, and in spite of my age and all my little aches and pains it wouldn’t feel right for me to sit in it myself.’
There was a musty smell in the room, spiced with tom-cat pee. The tom-cat responsible was purring in front of the stove. The electric lightbulb, dim with a layer of dust twenty years old, had a red tinge to it. It was warm. The sound of rain falling on zinc somewhere could be heard, and now and then so could the sound of a car driving fast along the main road, the din of heavy trucks passing and the squealing brakes of trams.
‘As I was telling you, with all due respect, the poor lady was our owner. Juliette Boynet. Boynet was her late husband’s name. And when I say poor lady, it’s out of respect for the dead, because she was a proper cow, God rest her soul. At least the good Lord recently did us the favour of almost depriving her of the use of her legs. It’s not that I bear any more malice than the next person, I’m not one to wish my neighbours ill, but when she could get about like everyone else life wasn’t worth living.’
At the Bourg-la-Reine police station just now, Maigret had been surprised to hear that the dead woman was not yet sixty. In spite of her badly tinted hair, her puffy face made her look older, and so did the large eyes almost popping out of her head.
Juliette-Marie-Jeanne-Léontine Boynet, née Cazenove, aged 59, born in Fontenay-le-Comte, Vendée; profession, none …
Madame With-All-Due-Respect, with her neck awry, her hair in a tight bun like a peach stone, the black wool scarf pulled tightly round her thin chest – you couldn’t help thinking that the old concierge’s chest wouldn’t be a pretty sight – was telling her rosary of grievances with much the same avid satisfaction as she must have felt when eating her pig’s trotter a little earlier. From time to time she glanced at the glazed door.
‘As you see, the house is quiet. At this time of day everyone has come home, or almost everyone.’
‘How long has Madame Boynet been the owner of this apartment building?’
‘For ever, I should think. Her husband was a building contractor. He had several apartment blocks built in Bourg-la-Reine. He died quite young, he was less than fifty, the best thing that could happen to him, poor man. When he died she came to live here. Fifteen years ago, that was. With all due respect, she was the same then as now, except that she could walk all right, and she was always jumping down my throat – the same with the tenants, too. Woe betide you if she saw a dog or a cat on the stairs. And if anyone had the nerve to ask for repairs to be done …! Guess what, our building was the last in the whole district to get electricity!’
Up on the first floor, Maigret could hear footsteps and a baby crying.
‘That’s in Madame Bourniquel’s apartment,’ Madame With-All-Due-Respect told him. ‘Her husband’s a commercial traveller. He has a little car; he must be down in the south-west at the moment. He stays away for three months at a time. They already have four children, and there’s a fifth on the way, although there’s been trouble over the pram. Madame Boynet, God rest her soul, wouldn’t have it left out in the corridor, so it had to be taken upstairs and down again twice a day … look, here comes their maid putting out the rubbish.’
The timer switch had turned the electric light on, and a small maid in a white apron came past, her shape distorted by the enormous galvanized metal rubbish bucket she was holding at arm’s length.
‘What was I saying? Oh yes … Will you take a glass of wine, inspector? Yes, yes, please do! I have a bottle open, Monsieur Bourniquel gave it to me, he’s in the wine trade, you see. Well, one fine day, it must be about a dozen years ago, Madame Boynet’s sister died in Fontenay, she was a widow too, and Madame Boynet took in her three children, two girls and a boy. Everyone around here was amazed by her generosity … she occupied the whole of the fifth floor at the time. Monsieur Gérard, the boy, he was the first to leave. He enlisted, probably so that he could move out of his aunt’s apartment. Then he married. He lives in Paris near the Bastille. He doesn’t come to visit often. I’ve an idea things aren’t going well for him.’
‘Have you seen him recently?’
‘Usually when he visits he waits outside until his sister comes downstairs. He’s not proud. His wife’s in the family way, too. He did come last week, and he went upstairs … I think he must have needed money. He wasn’t looking happy when he came down again. With all due respect, you had to be pretty spry to get anything out of his aunt … To your very good health!’
She turned abruptly and stared at the door. The timer switch had not come on, but a slight noise could be heard, and Madame With-All-Due-Respect rose and brusquely opened the door. Maigret saw the figure of a young girl retreating.
‘Wandering around on the stairs again, Mademoiselle Nouchi? Asking for trouble, if you ask me!’
She sat down again, saying peevishly, ‘And me with a big building like this to look after! Those people … they’re the tenants on the fifth floor, the landlady’s neighbours. Well, as I was saying, first Monsieur Gérard left to go into the army, then his younger sister Berthe, who didn’t get on with her aunt either, left home. She’s a salesgirl in the Galeries Lafayette. So the old lady took advantage of that to let the other half of the apartment to those Hungarians, the Siveschis. They have two daughters, Nouchi and Potsi … Potsi is the plump one, she’s always going about half-naked. But it’s a fact that Nouchi, who’s no more than sixteen, isn’t much better. She’s everywhere in the evening, all over the place, sometimes even hanging around by the front door …’
It seemed best to let the concierge talk on as she pleased and try to work it all out for himself. So on the first floor there was the Bourniquel family, four children, Bourniquel himself away a lot of the time, a maid, and Madame Bourniquel, who was expecting again.
On the fifth floor, the Siveschis. Maigret had met one of the family that morning, the plump and forthcoming Potsi, and he had just caught a sight of her thinner sister Nouchi.
‘… Their mother never tells them off. People like that, they don’t think the same way we do. Would you believe it, only last week I went upstairs with post for them? I knock on the door. “Come in,” says a voice, so I open the door, thinking nothing of it, and what
do I see? Madame Siveschi without a stitch of clothing on her, smoking a cigarette and looking back at me as bold as brass. And her daughters were there, too!’
‘What is Monsieur Siveschi’s profession?’
‘His profession – oh, my dear sir, with all due respect! He comes and goes, he always has books under his arm, he’s the one who does the family shopping. They’re behind with the rent, but he doesn’t seem to mind when the bailiff turns up. In fact you’d think it amused him. Not like poor little Monsieur Leloup – Monsieur Gaston, I call him. He keeps the bicycle shop. A good, deserving young fellow, used to be a newspaper vendor, but he bravely set up in business. He finds things difficult at the end of the month, and at those times I swear he doesn’t dare to look people in the face, not even me, although … well, he got married hardly three months ago, and what do you think? To save on their own accommodation they sleep at the back of the shop, among the tyres and spare wheels. Wait a minute – I think that little pest Nouchi …’
It was Maigret who went to open the door. He had made out the little Hungarian girl’s face behind it: her big dark eyes, her blood-red lips.
‘Did you want something?’ he asked.
To which, not in the least taken aback, she replied, ‘Oh yes, I wanted to see you. They say you’re the famous Detective Chief Inspector Maigret.’
She was looking him straight in the face. She might be thin and narrow-hipped, but she had well-shaped, pointed breasts, shown off to advantage by a blouse that fitted rather too tightly.
‘Well, you’ve seen me now.’
‘Aren’t you going to question me too?’
‘Do you have anything to tell me?’
‘I might have.’
Outraged, Madame With-All-Due-Respect sighed and shook her head so far as her stiff neck allowed.
‘Come in. So what’s it about?’
The girl seemed to be very much at home in the lodge. She was triumphant. Anyone would have thought she’d won a bet that she could succeed in approaching the inspector.
‘I wanted to talk to you about Monsieur Dandurand.’
Cécile is Dead Page 3
