The file on Picratt’s owner may have been bulky but it contained almost nothing of substance. At twenty he had done his military service in the penal units of the Battalions of Light Infantry of Africa because he was living off the earnings of a prostitute on Boulevard Sébastopol at the time and had already been arrested twice for assault and battery.
The file then jumped forwards several years to find him in Marseille, where he was procuring women for a number of brothels in the south. He was twenty-eight. He wasn’t a big gun yet but he was already high enough up in the hierarchy of that world not to have to get mixed up in brawls in the bars on the Vieux Port any more.
He hadn’t had any convictions at this point, just some pretty serious trouble over a girl who was only seventeen and had been employed in the Paradis in Béziers with false papers.
Another gap. All that was known was that he had left for Panama on an Italian vessel with a cargo of five or six women and had become some kind of a kingpin down there.
At forty he was in Paris, living with Rosalie Dumont, known as Rose, a rapidly fading beauty who ran a massage parlour on Rue des Martyrs. He spent a lot of time at the races and the boxing and was thought to take bets.
He finally married Rose, and together they opened Picratt’s, which was just a little neighbourhood bar at first.
Janvier was over at Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette as well, although not in the apartment. He was still questioning the neighbours who lived in the building, but also the local shopkeepers and anyone who might have known anything. Meanwhile Lucas was finishing off the Javel burglary case on his own, which was doing nothing for his mood.
It was ten to five and had been dark for a long time when the telephone rang and Maigret finally heard the words:
‘Police Emergency Service here.’
‘The countess?’ he asked.
‘A countess, at any rate. I don’t know if it’s yours. We’ve just had a call from Rue Victor-Massé. A few minutes ago the concierge discovered that one of her tenants had been killed, probably last night.’
‘A countess?’
‘The Countess von Farnheim.’
‘Shot?’
‘Strangled. That’s all we’ve got so far. The local police are on the scene.’
Moments later, Maigret jumped into a taxi that wasted an interminable amount of time crossing the centre of Paris. Passing Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, he spotted Janvier coming out of a greengrocer’s, told the driver to stop and called to the inspector:
‘Get in! The countess is dead.’
‘A real countess?’
‘I’ve no idea. It’s just round the corner. It’s all happening in this neighbourhood.’
It was less than 500 metres, in fact, from the bar on Rue Pigalle to Arlette’s flat, and the bar was roughly the same distance from Rue Victor-Massé.
Unlike that morning, twenty or so onlookers were gathered round a policeman at the door of a well-appointed, sedate-looking building.
‘Is the detective chief inspector here?’
‘He wasn’t in the office. It was Inspector Lognon who …’
Poor Lognon, so desperate to distinguish himself! Every time he leaped on a case, it was all but inevitable that he would see Maigret show up and snatch it from his grasp.
The concierge wasn’t in her lodge. The stairwell had faux marbled walls and a thick dark red carpet on the stairs, held in place by brass rods. The building smelled slightly musty, as if it was inhabited solely by old people who never opened their windows, and it was strangely silent; no hint of rustling doors as Maigret and Janvier passed. Only on the fourth floor did they hear any noise, and a door opened. They glimpsed the long lugubrious nose of Lognon, who was in conversation with a very short, very fat woman whose hair was pulled into a tight bun on the top of her head.
The room they walked into was dimly lit by a standard lamp with a parchment shade. The atmosphere was much more stifling here than in the rest of the building. Without knowing exactly why, they suddenly felt that they were a very long way from Paris and the world, from the damp air outside, the people walking on the pavements, the taxis blowing their horns, the buses pounding by, their brakes screeching every time they stopped.
It was so hot that Maigret immediately took off his overcoat.
‘Where is she?’
‘In her bedroom.’
The room was a sort of living room, or at least what had once been a living room, but they were entering a world where things no longer had names. An apartment that was up for auction might look like that, with all its furniture in unexpected places.
Bottles were scattered everywhere, and Maigret noticed that they were all red wine, litres of the sort of cheap red you see workmen drinking from the bottle on building sites as they eat salami. There was salami too, for that matter, not on plates but on greasy paper, and leftover chicken, the bones of which they found on the carpet.
Like everything in the room, the carpet was threadbare and incredibly dirty. A chair was missing a leg, horsehair was sticking out of an armchair, and the parchment lampshade, shiny from use, was bent completely out of shape.
In the bedroom next door, on a bed without sheets which looked as if it hadn’t been made for days, a body was stretched out half-naked – exactly half, with the upper part more or less covered by a camisole, and the puffy, greyish flesh from the waist to the feet bare.
Maigret instantly saw the little blue spots on the thighs and knew he was going to find a syringe somewhere. He found two, one with a broken needle, on what had served as a bedside table.
The dead woman looked at least sixty. It was hard to tell. No one had touched her yet. The doctor hadn’t arrived. But it was clear that she had been dead for a long time.
As for the mattress she was lying on, there was a fairly long cut in the cloth, and part of the stuffing had been ripped out.
There were bottles and leftovers in here too, and a chamber pot with urine in it right in the middle of the room.
‘Did she live on her own?’ Maigret asked, turning towards the concierge.
The woman nodded, tight-lipped.
‘Did she have many visitors?’
‘If she had, she’d probably have cleaned up all this filth, don’t you think?’
As if she felt personally criticized, the concierge then added:
‘It’s the first time I’ve set foot in this apartment for at least three years.’
‘Didn’t she let you come in?’
‘I didn’t want to.’
‘She didn’t have a maid, a cleaning lady?’
‘No one. Just a friend, another mad woman like her, who’d come every now and then.’
‘Do you know her?’
‘I don’t know her name but I sometimes see her around the neighbourhood. She isn’t quite as far gone yet. At least not the last time I saw her, which was a while ago.’
‘Did you know your tenant was on drugs?’
‘I knew she was half-crazy.’
‘Were you the concierge here when she rented the apartment?’
‘She wouldn’t have got it if I had been. We’ve only been here for three years, my husband and I, and she’s been in this flat for a good eight. I’ve tried everything to get her to leave.’
‘Is she really a countess?’
‘Apparently. At any rate, she was married to a count, but she can’t have amounted to much before that.’
‘Did she have money?’
‘It looks like it, since she didn’t starve to death.’
‘Did you see anyone going up to her apartment?’
‘When?’
‘Last night or this morning.’
‘No. Her friend hasn’t been. Or the young man.’
‘What young man?’
‘A short, polite, sickly-looking young man, who used to go up to see her and call her his aunt.’
‘You don’t know his name either?’
‘I didn’t have anything to do with her carry-on. It’s
a quiet place otherwise. On the first floor there are people who are hardly ever in Paris, and on the second there’s a retired general. You see what sort of building it is. This woman was so dirty I held my nose when I passed her door.’
‘Did she never send for the doctor?’
‘Oh, only twice a week. When she was as drunk as a skunk on wine, or who knows what, she would get it into her head that she was dying and telephone her doctor. He knew what she was like and would take his time coming over.’
‘A local doctor?’
‘Doctor Bloch, who lives three buildings along.’
‘Did you ring him when you found the body?’
‘No. That was none of my business. I told the police straight away. The inspector came. Then you.’
‘Do you want to try Doctor Bloch, Janvier? Tell him to come as quickly as possible.’
Janvier looked for the telephone, which he eventually found in another little room among a slew of old magazines and ripped-up books on the floor.
‘Is it easy to get into the building without you knowing?’
‘All buildings are the same, aren’t they?’ the concierge replied tartly. ‘I do my job just like anyone else, better than most, in fact, and you won’t find a speck of dust on the stairs.’
‘Are these the only stairs?’
‘There’s a backstairs, but almost no one uses it. Anyhow, you have to go past the lodge to get to it.’
‘Are you in the whole time?’
‘Except when I’m doing my shopping. Concierges still have to eat.’
‘What time do you do your shopping?’
‘Around half past eight in the morning, straight after the postman’s been and I’ve taken up the letters.’
‘Did the countess get a lot of post?’
‘Only brochures. Tradesmen would see her name in the telephone directory and be amazed by her title.’
‘Do you know Monsieur Oscar?’
‘Which Oscar?’
‘Any Oscar.’
‘There’s my son.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Seventeen. He’s a carpenter’s apprentice in a workshop on Boulevard Barbès.’
‘Does he live with you?’
‘Of course!’
Janvier, who had hung up, announced:
‘The doctor’s at his surgery. He’s got two more patients to see and then he’ll come straight after that.’
Inspector Lognon was taking care not to touch anything and pretending not to be interested in the concierge’s answers.
‘Your tenant never received letters on bank sta-tionery?’
‘Never.’
‘Did she go out often?’
‘Sometimes she wouldn’t leave her apartment for ten, or even twelve days. I’d actually start wondering if she was dead, because you wouldn’t hear a sound. She must have been sprawled out on the bed, all sweaty and filthy. Then she’d get dressed, put on a hat and gloves, and you’d almost have taken her for a lady, except she still had that wild-eyed look of hers.’
‘Would she be gone for long?’
‘It depended. Sometimes a few minutes, sometimes the whole day. She’d come back with masses of packages. She got wine delivered by the crate. Always cheap red, which she’d buy at the grocer’s on Rue Condorcet.’
‘The deliveryman would go into her flat?’
‘He’d leave the crate at the door. I even had an argument with him once because he refused to use the backstairs, which he thought were too dark. He didn’t want to break his neck, he said.’
‘How did you know she was dead?’
‘I didn’t know she was dead.’
‘You opened the door, though, didn’t you?’
‘I didn’t have to put myself to any trouble and I shouldn’t have.’
‘Explain.’
‘We’re on the fourth floor here. On the fifth there’s a disabled old gentleman who I clean for and whose meals I take up. He used to be a tax man. He’s lived in the same apartment for years and years, and his wife died six months ago. You may have read about it in the paper: she was knocked down by a bus as she was crossing Place Blanche at ten o’clock in the morning on her way to Rue Lepic market.’
‘What time do you do his housework?’
‘About ten o’clock in the morning. I sweep the stairs on my way down.’
‘Did you sweep them this morning?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Before that, do you go up with the post first?’
‘Not up to the fifth because the old gentleman doesn’t get many letters and is in no rush to read them. The people on the third both go out to work and leave early, around eight thirty, so they pick up their post in the lodge on their way past.’
‘Even if you’re not there?’
‘Even when I’m doing my shopping, yes. I never lock up. I buy what I need in the street and take a quick look in the building now and then. Would you mind if I opened the window?’
Everyone was hot. They had gone back into the first room, except for Janvier, who, as he had done that morning at Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, was riffling through drawers and cupboards.
‘So you only take the post up to the second floor?’
‘Yes.’
‘Around ten o’clock you went up to the fifth floor and you passed this door?’
‘I noticed it was open slightly. That surprised me a little, but not that much. Coming back down, I didn’t pay it any mind. I had got everything ready for my gentleman and didn’t have to go back up until four thirty, because that’s when I take him his dinner. When I came back down I saw the door was open again and I automatically called quietly: “Countess!” Because everyone calls her that. She has a difficult name to pronounce, something foreign. It’s easier to say countess. There was no answer.’
‘Were there any lights on in the flat?’
‘Yes. I didn’t touch anything. This lamp was on.’
‘And the one in the bedroom?’
‘And that one, because it is now and I haven’t touched it. I don’t know why I had a bad feeling. I put my head round the door to call again. Then I reluctantly went in. I am very sensitive to smells. I glanced into the bedroom and I saw her. Then I ran downstairs to call the police. As there was no one else in the building apart from the old gentleman, I went to tell the concierge next door, who is a friend, so I wouldn’t be all alone. People asked us what was going on. There were a few of us at the door when the inspector arrived.’
‘Thank you. What is your name?’
‘Madame Aubain.’
‘Thank you, Madame Aubain. You can go back to your lodge. I hear footsteps, it must be the doctor.’
It wasn’t Doctor Bloch yet, as a matter of fact, but the Public Records doctor, who had also performed the examination at Arlette’s that morning.
Going to the bedroom door, after a handshake for Maigret and a vaguely patronizing wave for Lognon, he couldn’t help exclaiming, ‘Again!’
The bruises on her throat left no doubt as to how the countess had been killed. The blue spots on her thighs were equally conclusive about the extent of her addiction. He sniffed one of the syringes and shrugged: ‘Morphine, obviously.’
‘You knew her?’
‘Never seen her. But I know some of her kind around here. Ah, looks like someone did this to rob her.’
He pointed to the slash in the mattress and the horsehair sticking out.
‘Was she rich?’
‘We’ve no idea,’ answered Maigret.
Janvier who had been jiggling the lock of a chest of drawers with the tip of his knife for a while, announced:
‘Here’s a drawer full of papers.’
Someone young was hurrying up the stairs. It was Doctor Bloch.
Maigret noticed that the Public Records doctor merely gave him a fairly dry nod by way of a greeting and refrained from shaking his hand, as one colleague to another.
4.
Doctor Bloch’s skin was pasty, his e
yes were too bright, and he had black, greasy hair. He couldn’t have stopped to listen to the gawkers in the street, or even to speak to the concierge. Janvier hadn’t told him on the telephone that the countess had been murdered, just that she was dead and that the detective chief inspector wanted to talk to him.
After taking the stairs four at a time, he looked around anxiously. Maybe he’d shot up before leaving his surgery? He didn’t seem surprised that his colleague wouldn’t shake hands and didn’t make a thing out of it. He had the attitude of someone who expects trouble.
But the moment he set foot in the bedroom, his relief was palpable. The countess had been strangled. It was nothing to do with him now.
It took him less than thirty seconds to regain his poise, as well as a slightly peevish arrogance.
‘Why was I sent for and not another doctor?’ he asked first, as though testing the ground.
‘Because the concierge told us you were this woman’s doctor.’
‘I only saw her a few times.’
‘What was wrong with her?’
Bloch turned deferentially to his colleague, as if to say they were both equally well informed.
‘I imagine you’ve gathered she was a drug addict? When she’d heavily indulged, she suffered fits of depression, as often happens, and she’d send for me in a panic. She was very scared of dying.’
‘Had you known her long?’
‘I only moved into the neighbourhood three years ago.’
He wasn’t much over thirty. Maigret would have sworn that he was a bachelor and that he had become addicted to morphine himself as soon as he had started practising, or perhaps even when he was still at medical school. It was no coincidence that he had chosen to set up in Montmartre, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the circles within which he recruited his patients.
A brilliant career did not lie ahead of him, that was obvious. He was another person who wouldn’t be around for much longer.
‘What do you know about her?’
‘Her name and her address, which are on my index cards. And that she had been taking drugs for fifteen years.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Forty-eight or forty-nine.’
Looking at the emaciated body stretched across the bed, the scraggly, colourless hair, it was hard to believe.
Maigret at Picratt's Page 5