Maigret and the Tall Woman

by Georges Simenon

  ‘Had he been drinking?’

  ‘He doesn’t drink or smoke. I wouldn’t allow it. He lives in fear of having a fit and he is always deeply ashamed when it happens to him in the middle of the street, with lots of people gathering round and feeling sorry for him. Before he left he told me:

  ‘“I think this one will be our ticket to the country.”’

  Maigret had started taking notes, and surrounding them with doodles.

  ‘What time did he leave Quai de Jemmapes?’

  ‘Around eleven in the evening, like on the previous days.’

  ‘So he must have got to Neuilly at about midnight.’

  ‘Probably. He never cycles very fast. On the other hand, there’s not much traffic at that time of night.’

  ‘When did you see him again?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘And did you think something must have happened to him?’

  ‘He telephoned me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At five in the morning. I wasn’t asleep. I was worried. He always has this fear of having a fit in the street, but I always think it could happen while he is on a job, do you understand? I heard the telephone ring in the bar downstairs. Our room is directly above it. The bar owners didn’t get up, so I guessed it was for me and went down. I could tell from his voice that there had been a hitch. He was whispering:

  ‘“Is that you?”

  ‘“Yes.”

  ‘“Are you alone?”

  ‘“Yes. Where are you?”

  ‘“Next to Gare du Nord, in a little café.

  ‘“Listen, Tine” – he always calls me Tine – “I have to make myself scarce for a while.”

  ‘“Were you spotted?”

  ‘“That’s not it. I don’t know. A guy saw me, but I don’t think he was from the police.”

  ‘“Do you have the money?”

  ‘“No, it happened before I finished.”

  ‘“What happened?”

  ‘“I was working on the lock when my torch lit up a face in a corner of the room. I thought someone had come in without a sound and was looking at me. But then I noticed that the eyes were dead.”’

  She observed Maigret.

  ‘I’m sure he wasn’t lying. If he had killed someone, he would have told me. I’m not spinning you a line. I could tell he was close to fainting at the other end of the phone. He is so afraid of death . . .’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t give any detail. He seemed in a hurry to hang up. He was afraid of being overheard. He told me he was going to catch a train a quarter of an hour later . . .’

  ‘For Belgium?’

  ‘Probably, as he was next to Gare du Nord. I checked a timetable. There is a train at five forty-five.’

  ‘And you don’t know which café he was ringing from?’

  ‘I wandered round the area yesterday, asking questions, but drew a blank. They must have thought I was a jealous wife, because no one wanted to tell me anything.’

  ‘So basically all he told you was that there was a dead body in the room where he was working?’

  ‘I got a bit more out of him. He said it was a woman, and that her chest was covered with blood, and that she was holding a telephone receiver in her hand.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘No. Just as he was about to get away – and I can just imagine the state he was in! – a car pulled up outside the gate—’

  ‘He actually said “gate”?’

  ‘Yes, I distinctly remember him using the word. It struck me. Someone got out and headed for the door. While the man came into the hallway, Alfred slipped out of the house through the window.’

  ‘And his tools?’

  ‘He left them behind. He had cut out a windowpane to get in. I’m sure of that, because that’s what he always does. I think he would do it even if the door was open, because he’s a bit of an obsessive, or maybe just superstitious.’

  ‘So he wasn’t seen?’

  ‘Yes, he was. When he ran across the garden.’

  ‘He mentioned a garden too?’

  ‘I’m not making this up. I’m saying that as he was running across the garden someone looked out of the window and shone an electric torch on him, probably Alfred’s own torch, which he hadn’t managed to pick up. He leaped on to his bike and rode off without turning round, right down to the Seine – I don’t know where exactly – and threw his bike into the river, in case it would help identify him. He didn’t dare come home. He made his way to Gare du Nord on foot and telephoned me and begged me to say nothing. I pleaded with him not to run away. I tried reasoning with him. In the end he promised to write to me poste restante to tell me where he was so that I could join him.’

  ‘Has he written yet?’

  ‘There hasn’t been enough time for a letter to arrive. I went to the post office this morning. I’ve been thinking about it for the last twenty-four hours. I bought all the newspapers, expecting to read a report about a murdered woman.’

  Maigret picked up the phone and rang the police station at Neuilly.

  ‘Hello! Police Judiciaire here. Have you had any murder recorded in the last twenty-four hours?’

  ‘Just a moment. I will hand you over to the secretary. I’m just the orderly.’

  Maigret made absolutely sure:

  ‘No bodies found on the public highway? No night calls? No bodies fished out of the Seine?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing, sir.’

  ‘No one reported a gunshot?’

  ‘No one.’

  La Grande Perche waited patiently, like someone on a social visit, her hands joined and resting on her bag.

  ‘You understand why I came to see you?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘At first, I thought that perhaps the police had seen Alfred, in which case his bicycle alone would have given him away. Then there are the tools that he left behind. Now that he’s fled over the border no one will believe his story. And . . . he is no safer in Belgium or Holland than he is in Paris. I’d rather see him in prison for attempted burglary, even if it means he goes down for another five years, than to see him accused of murder.’

  ‘The problem is,’ said Maigret, ‘that there is no corpse.’

  ‘You think he made it up, or that I made it up?’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘It will be easy for you to find the house where he did the job that night. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m sure you will think of it yourself. It’s almost certain the safe is one that he installed himself. Planchart surely have a list of their clients. There can’t be many in Neuilly who bought a safe from them at least seventeen years ago.’

  ‘Did Albert have any other girlfriends apart from you?’

  ‘Ah! I should have seen that one coming. I’m not the jealous type, and even if I was I wouldn’t be telling you lies just to get my revenge, if that’s what you’re thinking. He doesn’t have a girlfriend because he doesn’t want one, the poor man. If he did, I’d be able to fix him up with whatever he wanted.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t have much fun in his life.’

  ‘Do you have any money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’ll get by, you know me. I’m only here to tell you that Freddie didn’t kill anyone.’

  ‘If he wrote to you, would you show me the letter?’

  ‘You’ll read it before me. Now that you know he said he’d write to me poste restante, you’ll monitor all the post offices in Paris. You forget that I know how things work.’

  She had stood up, very tall; she looked at him, sitting at his desk, from head to toe.

  ‘If everything I’ve heard about you is true, there is a chance that you will believe me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because otherwise you’d be a fool. And you aren’t. You’re going to telephone Planchart.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you k
eep me informed?’

  He considered her without replying and realized that, despite himself, there was a smile of amusement playing about his lips.

  ‘Please yourself, then,’ she sighed. ‘I could be of use to you. No matter how long you’ve been in this game, there are still things that people like us know better than you.’

  This ‘us’ obviously referred to a whole world of people, the one that La Grande Perche belonged to, living on the other side of the barrier.

  ‘If Inspector Boissier wasn’t on holiday, I’m sure he would back up everything I have told you about Alfred.’

  ‘He isn’t on holiday. He leaves tomorrow.’

  She opened her bag and took out a piece of paper.

  ‘I’ll leave you the phone number of the bar downstairs from us. If you ever need to come and see me, I promise you I won’t strip off. Nowadays I prefer to keep my dress on!’

  There was just a slight hint of bitterness in her voice. But then, a moment later she was poking fun at herself:

  ‘Much better for all concerned!’

  It was only after he had closed the door behind her that Maigret realized that he had quite naturally shaken the hand that she had offered to him. The wasp was still buzzing round just below the ceiling, as if looking for a way out, completely oblivious of the wide-open windows. Madame Maigret had said this morning that she would be going to the flower market and asked him, if he was free around midday, to meet her there. It was midday. He hesitated, leaned out of the window, from where he saw the splashes of vivid colours behind the parapet of the embankment.

  Then he picked up the phone with a sigh.

  ‘Ask Boissier to come and see me.’

  Seventeen years had elapsed since the farcical events of Rue de la Lune, and Maigret was now an important person at the head of the Murder Squad. A funny notion came into his head, an almost childish craving. He lifted the phone again.

  ‘Brasserie Dauphine, please.’

  At the exact moment that Boissier was coming through the door, he said:

  ‘Send me up a Pernod, please.’

  Then, seeing the inspector with large rings of sweat under the arms of his shirt, he added:

  ‘Make that two. Two Pernods. Thank you.’

  Boissier, a true southerner, twitched his blue-black moustache with pleasure and went to sit on the window-sill, where he mopped his brow.

  2.

  In which we encounter Inspector Boissier, and then a house with a garden and gate in front of it, and hear of a meeting Maigret has in front of this gate

  After taking a swig of his Pernod, Maigret launched in:

  ‘Tell me, Boissier, old man, what do you know about Alfred Jussiaume?’

  ‘Sad Freddie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Immediately Boissier’s brow darkened, and he cast Maigret a sly glance. Forgetting to sip his drink, he asked in a worried voice:

  ‘Has he done a job?’

  It was always like this with him, and Maigret knew why. By treating him with the utmost care, Maigret was the only one who found favour in Boissier’s eyes. By rights, Boissier should have advanced much further in the police and would have done years ago but for his inability to spell and his elementary handwriting, which had meant he failed even the most basic exams.

  For once, however, the top brass had made the right call. They had appointed Detective Chief Inspector Peuchet, a dozy old buffer, as head of the squad, and, apart from drawing up reports, it was Boissier who did all the work and managed his team.

  Their department didn’t deal with homicides, as Maigret’s did. Nor did they deal with the amateurs, the sales assistants who make off with the takings and other such small fry.

  The clients Boissier and his team dealt with were the professionals of the ignoble art of stealing, from the jewel thieves who trawled the big hotels along the Champs-Élysées to the housebreakers and hustlers who, like Jussiaume, hung out in the seedy corners of the city.

  Because of this, they had a quite different outlook to the Crime Squad. In Boissier’s world, there were professionals on both sides of the divide. Their battle was a battle between specialists. It wasn’t a matter of psychology; rather it involved detailed knowledge of all the tics and personal foibles of all their opponents.

  It was not unusual to see Inspector Boissier sitting entirely at his ease on a café terrace in the company of a cat burglar. Maigret, for example, would never have had a conversation of this type with a murderer:

  ‘Hey, Julot, you haven’t done a job for a while.’

  ‘You’re quite right, inspector.’

  ‘When was the last time I hauled you in?’

  ‘It must have been around six months ago.’

  ‘The coffers are a bit empty, then? I’d wager you’re planning something.’

  The thought of Sad Freddie pulling off a job without him knowing about it rubbed Boissier up the wrong way.

  ‘I don’t know if he’s been on a job recently, but I’ve just had La Grande Perche in my office.’

  That was enough to reassure Boissier.

  ‘She doesn’t know anything,’ he confirmed. ‘Alfred is not the sort to confide in a woman, not even his own wife.’

  The portrait that Boissier painted of Jussiaume was fairly similar to the one Ernestine had presented, except that he placed more emphasis on the man’s professionalism.

  ‘I hate it when I have to arrest someone like him and send him down. The last time, when he got five years, I almost felt like giving his lawyer a piece of my mind; he had no idea what to do. He’s a waste of space, that one.’

  It was hard to define quite what Boissier understood by ‘waste of space’, but you knew exactly what he meant.

  ‘There’s no one in Paris as good as Alfred at getting into an inhabited house and doing it over without making a noise, without even waking the cat. From a technical point of view, he’s an artist. What’s more, he doesn’t need anyone to tip him off, act as lookout or any of that. He works alone and never loses his nerve. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t talk, he doesn’t go round the bars playing the hard guy. A man of his skills should be rich as Croesus. He knows the exact location and the mechanical specifications of hundreds of safes he has installed himself; you’d think he’d only have to go in there and help himself. But every time he goes for it, something goes wrong, or else he ends up with peanuts.’

  Perhaps Boissier was speaking like this because he saw in Sad Freddie an image of his own life, with the difference that he enjoyed an iron constitution that could withstand all the aperitifs drunk on café terraces and the countless nights spent on stakeouts in all weathers.

  ‘The funny thing is, if you put him away for ten, twenty years, he’d still start again the moment he got out, even if he was seventy years old and on crutches. He tells himself he just needs one big payday, just one; he feels he deserves it after all these years.’

  ‘He’s had a bad break,’ Maigret explained. ‘It appears that, on the point of cracking a safe in Neuilly, he noticed that there was a dead body in the room.’

  ‘What did I tell you? It could only happen to him. So he scarpered? What’s he done with his bike?’

  ‘Thrown it in the Seine.’

  ‘Is he in Belgium?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘I’ll telephone Brussels, unless you don’t want him found.’

  ‘I very much want him found.’

  ‘Do you know where it happened?’

  ‘I know it was a house in Neuilly, and it has a garden and a gate out front.’

  ‘Easy. I’ll be right back.’

  While he was away, Maigret had the good grace to order two more Pernods from the Brasserie Dauphine. The smell evoked not only Rue de la Lune but also the Midi, particularly a little bar in Cannes where he had once conducted an investigation, and suddenly the case seemed different from the norm and almost took on the feeling of a holiday jaunt.

  He hadn’t made a definite arrangement to meet Mad
ame Maigret at the flower market, and she knew him well enough not to wait. Boissier returned with a dossier, from which he produced some identification photos of Alfred Jussiaume.

  ‘That’s his face.’

  The face of an ascetic, really, rather than a thug. There was hardly any flesh on his bones, his nostrils were long and pinched, and there was something almost mystical in his gaze. Even in these stark mug shots, without a false collar and with his Adam’s apple protruding, you could sense the deep loneliness of the man, and a sadness that was in no way aggressive.

  Jussiaume had been born to be hunted, and he found it completely normal.

  ‘Would you like me to read you his record?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary today. I’d prefer to read it later in my own time. What I would like to see is the list.’

  These words pleased Boissier, and Maigret knew it when he said them, because they paid homage to his colleague’s professionalism.

  ‘You knew that I’d have it?’

  ‘I was sure that you would.’

  Indeed, Boissier did know his trade. The list in question was the one taken from the records of Planchart of all the safes installed during the time of Alfred Jussiaume.

  ‘Let me find Neuilly. You’re sure it was Neuilly?’

  ‘That’s what Ernestine says.’

  ‘You know, she’s no fool coming to see you. But why you?’

  ‘Because I arrested her, sixteen or seventeen years ago, and she played a mean trick on me.’

  That came as no surprise to Boissier; it was all part of the game. They both knew how the thing worked. The gently glinting Pernod in their glasses had filled the office with its scent, driving the wasp to new heights of frenzy.

  ‘A bank . . . That can’t be it . . . Freddie never does banks, he doesn’t like the electrical alarm systems . . . An oil company, but it closed down ten years ago . . . A perfumier . . . went bust last year.’

  Finally, Boissier’s finger landed on a name and address.

  ‘Guillaume Serre, dentist, 43a, Rue de la Ferme, Neuilly. Do you know it? It’s just past the Botanical Garden, runs parallel with Boulevard Richard-Wallace.’

  ‘I know it.’

  They looked at each other for a moment.

  ‘Are you busy?’ asked Maigret.