Maigret Sets a Trap

by Georges Simenon

  A woman of about forty, overweight but still attractive, sitting alone at a small table with a crème de menthe in front of her, was smiling at him invitingly, evidently unaware of his identity.

  He raised his hand for the waiter.

  ‘Same again,’ he ordered.

  He had to give himself time to calm down. Just now, up in Rue de Maistre, his first instinct had been to rush back down to the Mousetrap, go into Marcel Moncin’s cell and shake him until he confessed.

  ‘Own up, you piece of filth, it was you!’

  He was so certain of this that it felt like physical pain. It was impossible that he could have been wrong from start to finish. And now it was neither pity nor curiosity that he felt for the would-be architect. It was anger, almost fury.

  It evaporated gradually in the cool of the night air, and from contact with the life of the street.

  He had made a mistake, he knew that. And now, at last, he knew what it had been.

  It was too late to make up for it, because a young woman had died, just a country girl like thousands of others who came every year to try their luck in Paris, a girl who had gone out to dance after spending all day toiling in someone else’s kitchen.

  It was even too late to verify the idea that had come to him. At this time of night, he would find nothing. And if any clues existed, if there was any chance of finding witnesses, it could wait till the morning.

  His men were as harassed as himself. The whole case had been going on too long. When they read the paper next morning, in the Métro or on the bus, on their way in to Quai des Orfèvres, they would all experience the same stupefaction and despair that had overcome Maigret himself earlier that night. And perhaps some of them would start losing faith in him.

  Lognon, when he had telephoned, had sounded embarrassed. And in Rue de Maistre he had almost seemed to be expressing his condolences.

  He could just imagine Coméliau’s reaction and the imperious phone call the magistrate would make as soon as he opened his newspaper.

  Treading heavily, he went to the counter for a telephone token. It was to call his wife.

  ‘Oh, it’s you?’ she said in surprise.

  ‘It was just to tell you I won’t be back tonight.’

  For no particular reason, in fact. He had nothing to do immediately, except stew in his own juice. He felt the need to be back in the familiar surroundings of Quai des Orfèvres, in his office, with a few of his men.

  He had no wish to sleep. There would be time for that when this was well and truly finished, and then he might even decide to apply for some leave.

  It was always the same story. He would promise himself a holiday, then when the time came, he would find excuses to stay in Paris.

  ‘How much, waiter?’

  He paid and made his way back to the little car.

  ‘To headquarters!’

  There he found Mauvoisin and two or three others, one of them eating salami and washing it down with red wine.

  ‘No, don’t disturb yourselves on my account. No more news?’

  ‘Same as before. They’re questioning passers-by. They’ve arrested a couple of foreigners without proper papers.’

  ‘Telephone Janvier and Lapointe. Ask them both to get here by five thirty in the morning.’

  For about an hour, sitting alone in his office, he read and reread the transcripts of all the statements, in particular those given by Moncin’s mother and his wife.

  After that, he collapsed into an armchair and, unbuttoning his shirt, seemed to nod off facing the window. Perhaps he did indeed snatch some sleep. He wasn’t aware of it. At any rate, he did not hear Mauvoisin come into the office at some point and then tiptoe back out.

  The windows paled, the sky turned grey, then blue, and finally the sun appeared. The next time Mauvoisin came in, he brought a cup of coffee which he had brewed over a gas-ring, and Janvier had just arrived. Lapointe would soon be here.

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Five twenty-five.’

  ‘Are they here?’

  ‘Janvier is. Lapointe …’

  ‘Just arrived, boss,’ called Lapointe’s voice.

  Both of them had shaved, whereas the overnighters had stubble and shadow on their cheeks.

  ‘Come on in, both of you.’

  Would it be another mistake not to contact the examining magistrate? If so, he’d take responsibility for it and cover the others.

  ‘Janvier, you’re going to go to Rue Caulaincourt. Take a colleague along, doesn’t matter who, whoever’s the most rested.’

  ‘To see the old lady?’

  ‘That’s right. Bring her down here. She’ll make a big fuss, and probably refuse to come.’

  ‘Certain to.’

  He handed Janvier a sheet of paper which he had just signed, pressing the nib hard enough to break it.

  ‘You just hand her this summons. As for you, Lapointe, your job is to go and fetch Madame Moncin, the wife, from Boulevard Saint-Germain.’

  ‘Do I need a summons too?’

  ‘Yes. Though in her case, I doubt it’ll be necessary. Put the two of them together in one office, make sure to lock the door, and come back to me.’

  ‘The Baron and Rougin are out in the corridor.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It’s all right, it doesn’t matter if they see them.’

  The two officers went into the inspectors’ room, where the lights were still on, and Maigret opened the door of his closet, where he always kept some shaving tackle. He shaved himself, slightly cutting his top lip.

  ‘Is there any more coffee, Mauvoisin?’ he called.

  ‘In just a minute, boss. I’m making another round.’

  Outside, the first tug-boats were starting up, setting out along the Seine to fetch the string of barges they would be towing up- or downstream. A few buses crossed Pont Saint-Michel, which was almost deserted. Near the bridge, an angler was sitting on the embankment, his legs dangling over the dark water.

  Maigret began walking to and fro, avoiding the corridor and the reporters, while the inspectors took care not to ask him anything, or even to look him in the face.

  ‘Lognon hasn’t phoned?’

  ‘He called around four o’clock, to say there was nothing new to report except that yes, the girl had been dancing, in a club near Place du Tertre. She went there every week, didn’t seem to have any regular sweetheart.’

  ‘And she left there alone?’

  ‘That’s what the waiters thought, though they weren’t sure. They said they thought she was a good girl, not flighty.’

  From the corridor came a shrill female voice, but the words were indistinguishable.

  A few seconds later, Janvier came into the office, looking like a man who has just accomplished an unpleasant duty.

  ‘Done! But what a palaver!’

  ‘She was in bed?’

  ‘Yes. First of all, she would only talk through the front door, and refused to open it. I had to threaten to fetch a locksmith. In the end, she put on a dressing gown.’

  ‘And you waited while she dressed?’

  ‘On the landing. She still refused to let me into the apartment.’

  ‘Is she on her own at the moment?’

  ‘Yes, here’s the key.’

  ‘Go and wait for Lapointe in the corridor.’

  It took another ten minutes before the two inspectors returned together to Maigret.

  ‘Both in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did any sparks fly?’

  ‘They just exchanged one look and pretended not to know each other.’

  Janvier hesitated, then risked a question:

  ‘What should we do now?’

  ‘For the moment, nothing. Sit in the next office, near the door between the two. If they decide to start talking, try to hear what they say.’

  ‘And if they don’t?’

  Maigret made a vague gesture. It see
med to mean:

  ‘It’s in the lap of the gods now.’

  8.

  Moncin’s Show of Temper

  By nine o’clock neither of the two women, locked in a tiny office, had uttered a word. Perched on upright chairs, since there was no armchair in the room, they were sitting absolutely still, as if in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room without the resource of a magazine.

  ‘One of them got up to open the window,’ Janvier told Maigret when he asked for news, ‘then she sat down again, and now there’s nothing more to be heard.’

  Maigret had not thought about it, but one of them at any rate must be in ignorance of the previous night’s murder.

  ‘Have some newspapers taken in. Just put them on the desk as if it was routine, and arrange them so that they can see the headlines from where they’re sitting.’

  Coméliau had already telephoned twice, the first time from his home, where he must have read the paper over his breakfast, and the second time from the Palais de Justice.

  ‘Tell him I’ve been seen in the building and that someone’s gone to look for me.’

  One important question had been resolved by the inspectors whom Maigret had sent out early to investigate. For Moncin’s mother, the answer was simple. She could easily enter or leave her building on Rue Caulaincourt at any time of the day or night without troubling the concierge, since as a householder she had her own key. Her concierge turned out the light in the lodge and went to bed at ten, or at latest ten thirty, every night.

  On Boulevard Saint-Germain, the Moncin couple, as tenants, did not have a front-door key. Their concierge went to bed later, at about eleven. Was that why, until last night, the attacks had always taken place fairly early in the evening? But when she was not in bed, and the street door was not locked, the concierge paid little attention to tenants returning from an evening at the cinema or theatre, or a night out with friends.

  In the morning, she opened the street door at about half past five, to drag the dustbins out on to the pavement, then went in to get dressed. Sometimes she went back to bed for an hour.

  That explained how, after the failed attack, Marcel Moncin could have left the house without being seen, to get rid of the suit by leaving it on the Seine embankment.

  Would his wife have been able to go out the previous night, and return fairly late, after midnight perhaps, without the concierge remembering pulling the door-release?

  The inspector who had been over to Boulevard Saint-Germain replied that yes, she could.

  ‘The concierge says no, of course,’ he explained to Maigret. ‘But the other tenants don’t agree. Since she’s been widowed, she’s got in the habit of having a couple of glasses of some sort of liqueur from the Pyrenees at night. You sometimes have to ring two or three times to get her to open the door and then she does it almost in her sleep, without hearing the tenants say their names as they go past.’

  Other elements of information were arriving one after another, some by telephone. They learned, for instance, that Marcel Moncin and his wife had known each other since childhood and had gone to the same neighbourhood school. One summer, when Marcel was nine, the pharmacist’s wife from Boulevard de Clichy had taken him on holiday with her children to a villa they were renting in Étretat in Normandy.

  It was also discovered that after their marriage, the young couple had lived for a few months in an apartment which Madame Moncin senior had made available to them in the building she owned on Rue Caulaincourt, on the same landing as herself.

  At half past nine, Maigret took a decision:

  ‘Go and fetch Moncin from the Mousetrap. Unless he’s already in Coméliau’s office.’

  Janvier, from his listening post, had heard one of the two women get up, and then the rustle of pages of a newspaper. He did not know which of the women it was. But still no sound of voices.

  The weather was bright once more, the sun was shining, but it felt less sultry than the previous days, as a light breeze was rustling the leaves on the trees and sometimes lifting a paper on the desk.

  Moncin entered the room without a word, looked at Maigret, whom he greeted with a very slight inclination of his head, and waited to be invited to sit down. He had been unable to shave, and his light-coloured stubble blurred the sharp outlines of his face. He looked less clear-cut, his features were vaguer, from exhaustion as well, no doubt.

  ‘You have been informed of what happened last night?’

  He replied as if reproachfully:

  ‘Nobody has spoken to me at all.’

  ‘Read this.’

  Maigret passed him the newspaper which had printed the most detailed account of the attack in Rue de Maistre. While the prisoner was reading, the inspector did not take his eyes off him, and he was sure he was not mistaken: Moncin’s first reaction was indignation. He had frowned, looking surprised and irritated.

  Despite the arrest of the interior decorator,

  another victim has been killed in Montmartre.

  He appeared to think for a moment that this was a trick, perhaps a fake newspaper, concocted on purpose to get him to confess. He read it carefully, checked the date at the top of the page, and finally accepted that this report was true.

  Did he not seem to be bursting with a kind of repressed anger, as if something had been spoiled?

  At the same time, he was obviously trying to understand, and appeared finally to find the solution to the problem.

  ‘As you see,’ Maigret said, ‘someone is trying to save you. And too bad if that has cost the life of some poor girl who’d just arrived in Paris.’

  Did a furtive smile cross Moncin’s lips? He struggled to suppress it, but it was visible all the same, a childish glee, quickly stifled.

  ‘Both women are here,’ said Maigret laconically, affecting not to look at Moncin.

  This was a strange struggle, such as he could not remember ever having had in the past. Neither of them was on firm ground. The least nuance would count, an expression, the trembling of a lip, the blink of an eyelid.

  If Moncin was tired, this was even more the case for Maigret, and furthermore, he was full of disgust. He had been tempted once again simply to send the case straight to the examining magistrate and let him sort it out.

  ‘They will be brought in shortly, and you will have to explain things to each other.’

  What was Moncin’s reaction at that moment? Fury? Possibly. His blue eyes glared more fixedly, he clenched his jaw, and directed at Maigret a reproachful glance. But perhaps there was fear in that expression too, since at the same time beads of sweat broke out, as they had the previous day, on his forehead and upper lip.

  ‘Are you still determined to say nothing?’

  ‘I’ve nothing to say.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s time all this came to an end? Don’t you think, Moncin, that there has been at least one crime too many? If you had spoken up yesterday, this one wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with me.’

  ‘You know, don’t you, which of those two women stupidly decided to save you?’

  He wasn’t smiling now. On the contrary, he looked more angry, as if he were resentful of the woman who had acted.

  ‘I’m going to tell you what I think of you. You’re sick, in all probability, since I cannot believe that a man with a normal mind would act as you have. The psychiatrists will have to settle that question. Too bad for you if they declare that you are responsible for your actions.’

  He was still watching the other man’s reactions.

  ‘Admit it, you would be seriously offended if they declared that you are not responsible for your actions?’

  And indeed a gleam of anger seemed to have crossed Moncin’s pale eyes.

  ‘Never mind. So, you were a child like any other, at least that was how things appeared. The son of a butcher. Did you feel humiliated to be the son of a butcher?’

  No need for an answer.

  ‘It humiliated your mother too,
and she saw in you a sort of aristocrat, somehow living in Rue Caulaincourt. I don’t know what your father looked like, the ordinary hardworking butcher. All those photographs that your mother has piously kept, yet I didn’t see a single one of him. She’s ashamed of him, I suppose. You, on the other hand, from a tiny boy, you were photographed at every stage, and when you were six years old, an expensive costume was specially made for you, to go as a marquis to a fancy dress party. Do you love your mother, Monsieur Moncin?’

  Still no answer.

  ‘Did it eventually become oppressive to you, being pampered like this, made much of, treated like a delicate creature needing constant care?

  ‘You could have rebelled, cut the cord, as so many others in that situation would have. Listen to what I’m saying. Other people will be handling you from now on, and they won’t treat you with kid gloves.

  ‘To me, you are still a human being. Don’t you see that that is precisely what I want to get you to show: just a tiny spark of human feeling?

  ‘But you didn’t rebel, because you are lazy, and because you have a sense of overweening pride.

  ‘Other people may be born into titles, money, servants and a life of luxury.

  ‘You were born to a mother who had to be all that to you.

  ‘If ever anything happened to you, your mother would be there for you. You knew that. You could do anything you pleased.

  ‘Only there was a price to pay: you had to be docile.

  ‘You belonged to your mother. You were her plaything. You didn’t have the right to grow up into a man like other men.

  ‘Was it your mother, afraid you might start gadding about, who arranged to get you married off at twenty?’

  Moncin was staring intently at him, but it was impossible to guess at his thoughts. One thing was clear: he was flattered that someone was taking all this notice of him, that a man of Maigret’s importance was considering his words, deeds and innermost thoughts.

  If the inspector were to make a mistake about something, would he react, protest?

  ‘I don’t think you were in love, because you’re too self-centred for that. You married Yvonne for a bit of peace and quiet, and perhaps in the hope of escaping from your mother.