‘Have you read the paper?’
‘I haven’t had time.’
She went to the sitting room and fetched him the morning paper from the coffee table. A big headline first of all:
The crime on Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Then some more significant sub-headings:
Mysterious meeting Quai des Orfèvres
Detective Inspector Maigret in a fix
He groaned and, before reading the article, went and got a pipe from the rack.
In yesterday’s edition we reported in detail on the crime committed in an apartment on Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, the victim of which is a young woman, Joséphine Papet, an unmarried woman without employment.
We suggested that the murderer should be sought among several men who shared the victim’s favours.
In spite of the silence observed from the Police Judiciaire, we know that a certain number of individuals were summoned to Quai des Orfèvres yesterday for a general confrontation. It would appear that they included some quite eminent figures.
One of the suspects has attracted more attention than the others, because he was in the apartment when the murder was committed. Did he only witness it? Was he the perpetrator?
Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, who is personally in charge of the investigation, finds himself in a delicate situation. This man, Léon F—, is in fact one of his childhood friends.
Is this the reason why, in spite of the charges made against him, he is still at liberty? It is hard for us to believe that …
Maigret crumpled the newspaper and got to his feet, growling, his teeth gritted:
‘The imbeciles!’
Did the indiscretion come from one of the inspectors, who had seen no harm in it and had had it dragged out of him? He didn’t know that the reporters were ferreting around all over the place. They must have questioned the concierge, and it wasn’t unthinkable that she had proved more talkative than she had with the police.
There had also been the bearded painter, Florentin’s neighbour on Boulevard Rochechouart.
‘Has that really got to you?’
He shrugged. To tell the truth, the article only added to his perplexity.
Before leaving police headquarters, he had received the ballistic report from Gastinne-Renette, which had confirmed what the forensic doctor had told him. It was a 12-millimetre bullet, a huge calibre, very unusual, and could only have been fired with a Belgian revolver, an old model, impossible to buy commercially.
The expert added that a weapon of that kind was completely inaccurate.
It was obviously the old revolver from the bedside table. Where was it now? There was no point looking for it. It might just as easily have been thrown into the Seine or any sewer, on wasteland, in a field in the countryside.
Why had the murderer taken this compromising object away rather than leaving it where it was? Was he afraid that he might have left prints on it and hadn’t had time to get rid of them?
If that was the case, then he also wouldn’t have had time to wipe the furniture and objects he had touched.
And yet, in the bedroom, all the prints had been erased, including the ones on the door handles.
Did that lead to the conclusion that the murderer hadn’t stayed in the apartment for a quarter of an hour, as Florentin claimed?
And wasn’t it Florentin himself who had erased the traces?
All reasoning led back to him. He was the only logical culprit. But Maigret was suspicious of such reasoning.
But he was cross with himself for his patience, which seemed very close to indulgence. Wasn’t he allowing himself to be influenced by some kind of childhood loyalty?
‘It’s completely idiotic,’ he said out loud.
‘Were you really his friend?’
‘Not really … In fact, I was irritated by his clowning.’
He didn’t add that he sometimes went to the patisserie to see his fellow pupil’s sister and blushed.
‘I’ll see you later.’
She turned her cheek towards him.
‘Will you be back for dinner?’
‘I hope so.’
It had started raining, and he hadn’t noticed. His wife ran down the stairs after him with an umbrella.
On the corner of the boulevard he found an open-platform bus and let himself be rocked back and forth by the movements of the vehicle, vaguely watching those curious animals, human beings, hurrying along the pavements. They were practically running. To go where? To do what?
‘If I don’t find anything before Monday I’ll put him away,’ he promised himself, as if to put his conscience at rest.
He walked, under his umbrella, from Châtelet to Quai des Orfèvres. The wind blew in gusts, filled with lashing rain. The water’s wet, as he had said when he was a child.
No sooner had he reached his office than there was a knock at the door, and Lourtie came in.
‘Bonfils is taking over from me,’ he said. ‘She came back.’
‘At what time?’
‘At twelve twenty. I saw her calmly coming down the street holding her bag of groceries.’
‘Was it full?’
‘At any rate it was fatter and heavier than it was in the morning. She looked at me as she passed in front of me. It seemed as if she was making fun of me. Once she was in her lodge, she took down the sign hanging on the door: “The concierge is on the stairs”.’
Maigret paced his office five or six times from window to door and door to window. By the time he came to a standstill he had taken a decision.
‘Is Lapointe nearby?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell him to wait for me. I’ll be right back.’
He took a key from his drawer, the one for the door that communicated between the Police Judiciaire and the Palais de Justice. He walked down the long corridors, climbed a dark staircase and knocked at last on the door of the examining magistrate’s office.
Most of the building was silent and deserted. He had little chance of finding Page at work on a Saturday afternoon.
‘Come in,’ said a voice that seemed far away.
He was there, covered in dust, trying to establish a modicum of order in the little windowless room adjacent to his office.
‘You know what, Maigret, I’m finding two-year-old dossiers that have never been classified. It’s going to take me months to sort out all the things that my predecessor accumulated in this rag-bag.’
‘I’ve come to ask you for a search warrant.’
‘Wait while I wash my hands.’
He had to go to the wash room at the end of the corridor. He was a pleasant and conscientious fellow.
‘Have you got any news?’
‘The concierge is giving me a hard time. I’m sure that woman knows something. Yesterday, at the confrontation, she was the only one who maintained her composure, and she’s probably the only one apart from the party in question who knows who the culprit is.’
‘Why would she stay silent? Out of hatred for the police?’
‘I don’t think that would be enough to make her take risks. I even wondered if the murderer wouldn’t try to get rid of her and posted one of my men in front of the house.
‘In my view, if she’s remaining stubbornly silent, it’s because she’s been paid to do so. I don’t know how much she’s been given.
‘When she saw how important this case was becoming, she must have thought she hadn’t had her full share.
‘So this morning, like a skilled professional, she escaped the surveillance of the inspector who was following her. She was careful to go to a butcher’s first, to fool him. Once she’d made her purchase, she went just as naturally into a grocery store, and my man wasn’t suspicious. It was a quarter of an hour before he noticed that the grocery had a second exit.’
‘You don’t know where she went?’
‘Florentin was with me at Ivry Cemetery. Jean-Luc Bodard came too.’
‘Did she see one of the three others?’
‘She couldn’t have seen any of them. Lamotte went back to Bordeaux yesterday, on the evening express. Courcel is in Rouen and had friends to lunch. As for François Paré, he’s sick in bed, and it’s his wife’s turn to worry.’
‘In what name do you want me to issue a warrant?’
‘Madame Blanc … The concierge.’
The judge looked for a form in the drawer of his desk, filled in the blanks, signed and stamped it.
‘I wish you the best of luck.’
‘Thank you.’
‘By the way, don’t worry about the comments in the papers … Anyone who knows you …’
‘Thank you.’
A few minutes later he left Quai des Orfèvres with Lapointe, who was at the wheel. The traffic was dense, the people in more of a hurry than ever, as they were every Saturday. In spite of the rain, in spite of the wind, they were dashing towards the motorways, towards the countryside.
For once, Lapointe immediately found a parking space along the pavement, just outside the house. The lingerie boutique was closed. Only the shoe shop was open, but it was empty, and the shopkeeper, in the doorway, glumly watched the clouds melting into water.
‘What are we looking for, chief?’
‘Anything that can be of use to us. Probably money …’
It was the first time that Maigret had seen Madame Blanc sitting in her lodge. With steel-rimmed spectacles on her round nose, she was reading the afternoon paper, which had just come out.
Maigret pushed the door, followed by Lapointe.
‘Have you wiped your feet?’
And, as they didn’t reply:
‘What do you want from me this time?’
Maigret merely held out the search warrant. She read it and reread it.
‘I don’t see what that means. What are you going to do?’
‘Search the place.’
‘Do you mean you’re going to go through my things?’
‘I’m sorry, believe me.’
‘I wonder if I shouldn’t call a lawyer.’
‘That would prove that you have something to hide. You, Lapointe, keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t touch anything.’
In a corner of the lodge was a Henri II dresser, whose upper doors were glazed. In that part there were only glasses, a jug and a floral porcelain coffee service.
The drawer on the right contained knives, forks, spoons and a corkscrew as well as three unmatched napkin rings. The cutlery had once been silver-plated, but the brass was now showing through.
The drawer on the left was more interesting, because it contained photographs and papers. One of the photographs showed a couple. Madame Blanc must have been twenty-five and, although she was plump, one couldn’t have predicted that she would become the monster she was today. She was even smiling, turned towards a man with a blond moustache who must have been her husband.
In an envelope he found a list of tenants, with the price of each one’s rent. Then, under some postcards, he put his hand on a savings book.
The first payments went back many years. At first they were modest, ten francs, twenty francs a time. Then, regularly, she had set aside fifty francs a month. In January, the month when concierges get tips for the previous year, the sum varied between a hundred and a hundred and fifty francs …
In all, eight thousand three hundred and twenty-two francs and a few centimes.
There was no payment from the previous day or the day before that. The last one was a fortnight old.
‘You’re making progress!’
Undeterred, he went on rummaging. There were plates in the lower part of the dresser, as well as a pile of checked tablecloths.
He lifted the velvet mat that covered the round table in search of a drawer, but the table didn’t have one.
On the left was a television set. Nothing but some bits of thread, some drawing pins and a few nails in the drawer of the table that it stood on.
He went into the second room, which wasn’t only the kitchen but also served as a bedroom, because there was a bed in an alcove, behind an old curtain.
He started with the bedside table, where he found only a rosary, a missal and a sprig of boxwood. It took him a moment to guess the origin of the sprig of boxwood. It was probably the one that was dipped in holy water when a relation died, and she had kept it as a souvenir.
It was hard to imagine that woman having had a husband. But hadn’t she also been a child, like everyone?
He had seen others, men and women, who had been so hardened by life that they had almost been turned into monsters. For years, all her days, all her nights had been spent in these two dark and airless rooms, where she couldn’t walk any more than she could have done in a prison cell.
As for the outside world, she knew it only from the visits of the postman and the tenants passing by her window.
In the morning, in spite of her girth and her swollen legs, she had to clean the lift, then the stairs from top to bottom.
And what if she was no longer capable tomorrow?
He felt bad about harassing her and opened a small refrigerator, where he found half a chop, some leftover omelette, two slices of ham and a few vegetables that she had bought that morning.
There was a half-bottle of wine on the table, some clothes and underwear in a cupboard, including a corset and some elasticated knee-pads.
He was ashamed, now, of going on searching, and yet he didn’t want to admit defeat. She wasn’t a woman who would have settled for promises. If someone had bought her silence, they would have had to pay in cash.
He came back into the lodge and couldn’t conceal a flash of anxiety in his eyes.
Then he knew that what he was looking for wasn’t in the kitchen. He looked around, slowly. Where had he not searched?
Suddenly, he walked towards the television set. Some magazines were stacked on top of it. One of them showed the daily schedules as well as comments and photographs.
As soon as he opened it, he knew that he had won. The pages were parted where three five-hundred-franc notes and seven hundreds had been slipped inside.
Two thousand two hundred francs. The five-hundred-franc notes were new.
‘I assume I’m allowed to save?’
‘You forget that I’ve seen your savings book.’
‘So? Am I obliged to put all my eggs in one basket? And what if I need some money all of a sudden?’
‘Two thousand two hundred francs all at once?’
‘That’s my business. I challenge you to cause me trouble over that.’
‘You’re more intelligent than you look, Madame Blanc. It’s as if you’d predicted everything, including today’s search. If you’d brought money to the savings bank, the payment would be copied in your book, and I wouldn’t have failed to notice the size of the sum and the date …
‘You don’t trust dressers, drawers, unstitched mattresses … It’s as if you’d read Edgar Allen Poe. You simply slipped the notes into a magazine …’
‘I haven’t stolen from anybody.’
‘I’m not claiming you’ve stolen anything. I’m even convinced that, seeing you behind your door when he was going out, the murderer came to give you that money … You still didn’t know that a crime had been committed in the building.
‘He didn’t need to explain why he was so keen that no one should know he had been there that day.
‘You know him well, or else he wouldn’t be afraid of you.’
‘I have nothing to say.’
‘When you saw him in my office yesterday afternoon, you sensed that he was very frightened, of you and you alone, because you’re the only one who could testify against him.
‘Then, this morning, you decided to have another go to get hold of a larger amount, bearing in mind that the freedom of a man, particularly a rich man, is worth more than two thousand two hundred francs.’
As it had the previous day, a vague, a very vague smile, as if smudged by a rubber, floated on her lips.
‘You haven’t found anyone … You’ve forgotten that it’s Saturday.’
The woman still had the same stubborn, enigmatic expression on her round face.
‘I’m not saying anything. You can hit me.’
‘I don’t want to. We will be seeing each other again. Come on, Lapointe.’
And the two men slipped into the little black car.
7.
They did the same as everyone else, in spite of the miserable weather, with only a few sunny spells between one downpour and the next, and went to spend Sunday in the country.
When they had bought the car, they had sworn only to use it to go to their little house in Meung-sur-Loire and during the holidays. They had gone to Meung two or three times, but it was too far only to spend a few hours there, particularly when they found the house empty and Madame Maigret barely had time to dust and prepare a basic meal.
They left at about ten o’clock in the morning.
‘Avoiding motorways,’ they had agreed.
But thousands of Parisians had had the same idea, and the little roads that should have been so charming were as packed as the Champs-Élysées.
They looked for a nice inn, an enticing menu. Either they were full and they had to wait their turn or the food there was revolting.
But they still started the experiment all over again. It was like the television. When they had bought it, they had promised themselves that they would only watch the most interesting programmes.
After only a fortnight they had changed their seats at the table so that they could face the screen during dinner.
They didn’t argue, like most couples, but that didn’t mean that Madame Maigret was any less tense at the wheel. With the ink barely dry on her driving licence, she lacked confidence in herself.
‘Why don’t you overtake?’
‘There’s a double white line …’
That Sunday Maigret barely said a word to her and smoked pipe after pipe, squashed into his seat looking fiercely straight in front of him. In his thoughts, he was on Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, reconstructing every possible scenario of the events that had unfolded in Joséphine Papet’s apartment.
The characters became pawns that he moved around the board, trying out every solution. Each of them struck him as plausible for a while, and he attended to every detail, even imagining the dialogue.
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