Maigret Sets a Trap

by Georges Simenon

  ‘As a little girl, Yvonne was bowled over by the blond, elegant boy that you were. You seemed to be made of very different stuff from your schoolmates, for all that you were the son of a butcher.

  ‘And your mother was deceived by that. She saw Yvonne just as a little goose whom she could shape any way she wanted, and she installed the pair of you on the same landing as herself in the building she owned, so as to keep you under her wing.

  ‘But none of this explains why someone would go out and kill people, does it?

  ‘The real explanation won’t come from the doctors, who will only be able, like me, to shed light on one aspect of the problem.

  ‘You are the only one who knows the whole story.

  ‘But I don’t think you will be able to put it in words.’

  This time he was rewarded by a slightly defiant smile. Did that mean that, if he wanted to, Moncin could perfectly well make his acts understandable to other people?

  ‘I’m coming to the end. The little goose turned out not only to be a real woman, but as possessive a female as your mother. Between the two of them, it became a tug-of-war, with you as the prize, and there’s no doubt you were being pulled one way and the other.

  ‘Your wife won the first round, because she managed to get you out of Rue Caulaincourt and transplant you to the apartment on Boulevard Saint-Germain.

  ‘She gave you a new horizon, new surroundings, new friends, and from time to time you escaped to go back to Montmartre.

  ‘Did you start then to develop towards Yvonne the same resentment you’d felt for your mother?

  ‘The pair of them were preventing you from being a real man, Moncin!’

  The prisoner threw him a glance full of rancour, then looked down again at the floor.

  ‘That’s what you imagined, that’s what you tried hard to believe. But at heart, you knew quite well it wasn’t true.

  ‘You simply didn’t have the courage to be a man. You weren’t one. You needed those women, you needed the atmosphere they had created around you, with their fussing, their admiration and their indulgence.

  ‘And that was precisely what humiliated you.’

  Maigret went over to the window to take a breath, and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief, his nerves as on edge as those of an actor impersonating a desperate character.

  ‘You won’t reply. Very well, I know why it is impossible for you to reply: it would be too painful for your self-respect. Owning up to your cowardice, to the continual compromises you have had to make, would be too agonizing.

  ‘How often did you feel like killing them? I don’t mean the poor girls you killed in the street, I mean your mother and your wife?

  ‘I’d be prepared to bet that when you were a boy, or a youth, the idea sometimes entered your head of killing your mother, so as to be free.

  ‘Not a real plan of action, no. Just one of those thoughts that cross our minds and are then forgotten, that we put down to a moment of rage.

  ‘And then the same thing happened all over again with Yvonne.

  ‘You were their prisoner, a prisoner of both women: they fed and cared for you, they cosseted you, but at the same time they possessed you. You were their plaything, their treasure, and they fought each other over you.

  ‘Between Rue Caulaincourt and Boulevard Saint-Germain, you became a shadow of a man, so as to have a bit of peace.

  ‘When did it happen, what was the emotional shock, what sudden humiliation stronger than before was the trigger? I don’t know. You’re the only person who could answer that, and I’m not even sure that you can.

  ‘But you formed a plan, vague at first, then becoming clearer and clearer in your mind, to assert yourself in some way.

  ‘How could you assert yourself?

  ‘Not in your profession, because you are well aware that you’ve always been a failure in that respect, or worse, an amateur. Nobody takes you seriously.

  ‘How, then? By some dramatic act?

  ‘Because to satisfy your pride it had to be something spectacular. Something everyone would talk about, that would give you the sensation of soaring high above the crowd.

  ‘Was it at that point that you got the idea of killing the two of them?

  ‘Only that was too dangerous a game. Any investigation would inevitably focus on you, and there would be no one left to support you, flatter you and encourage you.

  ‘And yet it was these two, the dominant females, that you hated.

  ‘And it was females, picked at random, that you attacked in the street.

  ‘Did it bring you some kind of relief, Moncin, to find you were capable of killing? Did it give you a sense that you were superior to other men, or simply that now you were a man?’

  He looked Moncin sternly in the eye, and the other man almost tipped his chair over backwards.

  ‘Because murder has always been considered the greatest of crimes, and some people might think it requires exceptional courage.

  ‘I suppose the first one, on the 2nd of February, brought you a moment of relief, a kind of intoxication.

  ‘You’d taken precautions, because you didn’t want to pay the price, you didn’t want to go to the scaffold, or to prison, or to some mental institution.

  ‘Monsieur Moncin, you are a bourgeois criminal, a sissy, a criminal who needs his comforts and little luxuries.

  ‘That is why, ever since I set eyes on you, I’ve been tempted to use the methods the police get blamed for a lot. Because you’re afraid of blows, afraid of physical pain.

  ‘If I were to hit you with the back of my hand, you’d collapse, and who knows whether you wouldn’t prefer to confess than get another blow?’

  Maigret must have looked terrifying, unintentionally, because of the anger that had been mounting gradually inside him: Moncin, shrinking in his seat, had turned ashen-faced.

  ‘No need to be afraid, I’m not going to hit you. In fact, I’m not sure that it’s really you that I am most angry with.

  ‘You proved you were intelligent. You picked an area of Paris that you knew like the back of your hand, as only those who grew up there could have.

  ‘You chose a silent weapon, and at the same time it was one that gave you physical satisfaction at the moment of impact. It wouldn’t have felt the same pulling the trigger of a gun or pouring poison into a glass.

  ‘You needed a furious, violent act. You wanted to destroy and feel that you were destroying.

  ‘You stabbed, but that wasn’t enough: you went into a frenzy of rage afterwards, like a child.

  ‘You slashed the victim’s dress and her underclothes, and no doubt the psychiatrists would see that as symbolic.

  ‘You didn’t rape your victims, because you’re incapable of that, because you’ve never really been a man.’

  Moncin suddenly raised his head, and stared at Maigret, gritting his teeth as if he was about to leap at him.

  ‘Those women’s dresses, their petticoats, bras and panties – all that represented femininity and you wanted to tear it to pieces.

  ‘What I’m asking myself now is whether one of the two women suspected you, not necessarily the first time, but after that.

  ‘When you went to Montmartre, did you tell your wife you were going to see your mother?

  ‘Didn’t your wife perhaps establish a connection between the murders and these visits?

  ‘You see, Monsieur Moncin, I will remember you all my life, because in my entire career no case has disturbed me so much, or taken so much out of me.

  ‘After your arrest yesterday, neither of them assumed you were innocent.

  ‘And one of them decided she was going to save your life.

  ‘If it was your mother, she had only a short distance to go to get to Rue de Maistre.

  ‘If it was your wife, that means she was prepared, supposing we let you go, to live side by side with a killer.

  ‘I haven’t rejected either of those hypotheses. The two women have been here since early this morning, sit
ting opposite each other in an office, and neither one of them has opened her mouth.

  ‘The one who committed the murder knows she did it.

  ‘The one who is innocent knows that the other is not, and I wonder whether she isn’t secretly feeling jealous.

  ‘Hasn’t there been a struggle, a tug-of-war between them, going on for years, to see which one will love you most, possess you most fully?

  ‘And what better way to possess you than to save your life?’

  The telephone rang, just as the other man was opening his mouth.

  ‘Hello. Yes … Speaking … Yes, indeed Monsieur Coméliau … He’s here. My apologies, but I need him for another hour. No, the press wasn’t wrong … An hour. They are both here at headquarters …’

  Impatiently, he hung up and went to open the door to the inspectors’ office.

  ‘Show in the two women.’

  He needed to bring this to a close. If the momentum that had carried him this far did not enable him to make an end of it, he sensed that he would never get to the bottom of the case.

  He had asked only for an hour, not because he was sure of himself, but as a concession. In an hour, he would pass the case over, and Coméliau could do what he liked with it.

  ‘Come in, ladies.’

  His emotion was detectable only from a certain quiver in his voice, and the exaggerated calm of some of his movements, such as holding out a chair for each of the women.

  ‘I will not try to deceive you. Close the door, Janvier. No, don’t go away, stay here and take notes. I said I won’t try to deceive you and make you believe Moncin here has confessed. I could have questioned you separately. As you see, I have decided not to resort to any tricks of the trade.’

  The mother, who had refused to sit down, came towards him, mouth open, and he snapped at her sharply:

  ‘Be quiet. Not now.’

  Yvonne Moncin had sat down primly on the edge of her chair, like a young lady on a social call. She had glanced briefly at her husband and now she was staring at Maigret as if she wanted not only to listen to him but to read his lips.

  ‘Whether he confesses or not, he has killed five times, and you are both perfectly aware of that, since you know his weaknesses better than anyone else. Sooner or later, it will be established. Sooner or later, he will end up in prison or in some institution.

  ‘One of you imagined that by committing another murder, while he was in here, she would be able to clear him of any suspicion.

  ‘We simply need to find out now which of the two of you committed the murder last night of a certain Jeanine Laurent, at the corner of Rue de Maistre.’

  At last the mother got a word in:

  ‘You have no right to question us without a lawyer present. I forbid them both to say anything. It is our right to have legal assistance.’

  ‘Would you please sit down, madame, unless you have a confession to make.’

  ‘That’s the limit, as if I had anything to confess! You’re behaving like … like the uneducated lout you are, and you … you …’

  During the hours she had been sitting in a tête-à-tête with her daughter-in-law, she had been silently accumulating such a volume of bile that she was losing the faculty of speech.

  ‘I must ask you again, please sit down. If you continue to act like this, I shall have you removed elsewhere by an inspector, who will question you, while I concern myself with your son and daughter-in-law.’

  That prospect calmed her down suddenly. The change was palpable. She remained for a moment open-mouthed with stupor, then looked as if she were thinking: Just you dare!

  Was she not his mother? Were her rights not longer established and worth more than those of a girl whom her son had happened to marry?

  He had emerged not from Yvonne’s womb, but from hers!

  ‘Not only did one of you hope to save Moncin,’ Maigret now continued, ‘by committing a copycat murder while he was locked up here, but I am also sure that whichever of you it was had long been aware of what he had done. So she must have had the courage to be alone, day after day, with him in a room, without any protection or chance of escape if he took it into his head to kill her too.

  ‘And that woman loved him enough, in her way, to …’

  The look Madame Moncin senior gave her daughter-in-law did not escape him. Never had he seen so much hatred in human eyes.

  Yvonne had not moved a muscle; both hands clasped on her red leather handbag, she still seemed as if hypnotized by Maigret, not missing the slightest of his changes of expression.

  ‘I have simply this to tell you. I can say that Moncin’s head will almost certainly not roll. The psychiatrists will, as usual, disagree about his state of mind, they will argue about it in front of a jury, who won’t understand a word of what they say, and there is every chance he will get the benefit of the doubt, in which case he will be sent to a mental institution for the rest of his life.’

  The man’s lips trembled. What was he thinking at that precise moment? He must feel terribly frightened of the guillotine, and he would also fear prison. But perhaps he was imagining the scenes inside mental institutions – or lunatic asylums, as the popular imagination paints them?

  Maigret was convinced that if they could promise him a room of his own, a personal nurse, the right to special care, and the attention of some famous professor, he would willingly talk.

  ‘But for the woman involved, it won’t be the same. Paris has been living in the shadow of fear for six months, and people who have lived in such fear are not forgiving. And the jury will be made up of Parisians – fathers and husbands of women who might have been stabbed by Moncin at some street corner.

  ‘There won’t be any question of madness in her case.

  ‘In my view, the woman will pay the full price.

  ‘She knows this.

  ‘One of you is that woman.

  ‘One of you, intending to save a man, or rather, not to lose something she considered her property, was prepared to risk her head.’

  ‘I am quite prepared to die for my son,’ Madame Moncin senior declared suddenly, enunciating each syllable clearly. ‘He’s my child. What does it matter, what he’s done? What do they matter, those good-for-nothing women strutting around at night in the streets of Montmartre?’

  ‘Did you kill Jeanine Laurent?’

  ‘I don’t know her name.’

  ‘So you committed the murder last night in Rue de Maistre?’

  She hesitated, looked at Moncin, and finally said:

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In that case, can you tell me the colour of the dress she was wearing?’

  This was a detail Maigret had asked the press not to publish.

  ‘I … it, it was too dark to …’

  ‘Excuse me. You cannot be unaware that she was attacked less than five metres from a streetlamp.’

  ‘I didn’t notice.’

  ‘But when you slashed the material of the dress …’

  The crime had in fact been committed over fifty metres from the nearest streetlamp.

  Then, in the silence, they heard Yvonne Moncin’s voice, answering calmly, like a schoolgirl in class:

  ‘The dress was blue.’

  She was smiling, still sitting demurely on her chair, and turning towards her mother-in-law, at whom she now looked defiantly.

  She was the one, in her own mind, who had won this battle.

  ‘Yes, it was blue,’ said Maigret with a sigh, letting his nerves relax at last.

  And the relief was so sudden, so violent, that tears came to his eyes, perhaps tears of exhaustion.

  ‘Carry on from here, Janvier,’ he murmured, getting to his feet and picking up a pipe at random from his desk.

  The mother had shrunk into herself, suddenly ageing ten years, as if her sole reason for existing had been snatched away.

  Maigret did not look at Marcel Moncin, whose head had slumped on to his chest.

  The chief inspector pushed through the crowd o
f reporters and photographers who mobbed him in the corridor.

  ‘Who was it? Do we know?’

  He nodded and muttered:

  ‘By and by … in a few minutes …’

  And he hurried towards the glass door leading to the Palais de Justice.

  He spent barely fifteen minutes with Coméliau. When he returned, it was to issue instructions.

  ‘Release the mother, of course. Coméliau wants to see the other two as soon as possible.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘Yes, at first. He’ll be the one to give a statement to the press.’

  There was someone he would have liked to see, but not in his office, and not in the corridors or wards of an asylum: Professor Tissot, with whom he would have had a long conversation, like the one that evening at Doctor Pardon’s.

  He could not ask Pardon to organize another dinner party. And he was too tired to go over to Sainte-Anne to wait for the professor to be free to see him.

  He pushed open the door of the inspectors’ office, where all eyes turned to him.

  ‘It’s over, boys.’

  He hesitated, looked round at his colleagues, gave them a weary smile, and admitted:

  ‘And now I’m going home to bed.’

  It was true. This did not often happen, even when he had been up all night.

  ‘Tell the chief …’

  Then, in the corridor, faced with the journalists:

  ‘Go and see Coméliau. He will give you a full statement.’

  They saw him plod down the stairs, alone, his back bent, and he stopped at the first landing to spend a moment or two lighting the pipe he had just packed.

  One of the drivers asked him if he wanted a car and he shook his head. He wanted first of all to go and sit at the terrace of the Brasserie Dauphine, as he had long sat, that other night, at the terrace of another bar.

  ‘A beer, inspector?’

  Looking up, he replied in an ironic tone, and the irony was all for himself:

  ‘No, two!’

  He slept until six in the evening, in sheets damp with sweat, the window open on to the sounds of Paris, and when at last he reappeared in the dining room, his eyes still puffy, it was to announce to his wife: