Cécile is Dead

by Georges Simenon

  ‘I’ll be happy to see Maître Leloup at my office when he has a statement to make to me,’ replied Maigret. ‘Good day to you, gentlemen.’

  Henri Monfils couldn’t get over it. ‘What was the matter with him? What on earth came over him?’

  The lawyer, sitting back in his rattan chair and warming the brandy glass in his podgy hand, murmured optimistically, ‘Take no notice, the police are like that. They don’t care for dealing with businessmen, you see, so it annoyed him to find me here. You can rely on me to …’

  He interrupted himself, putting his mind to biting off the end of the cigar that his client had offered him. ‘Believe me, if you …’

  The first editions of the evening paper had just come out and they contained photographs of the funeral. One of them had a good view of Maigret beside Cécile’s grave, next to the deacon with his aspergillum.

  Jourdan, still kicking his heels outside the building in Bourg-la-Reine, where lights were beginning to come on in the windows; the head of the Sûreté Nationale, phoning from his office and not sure what to say to the public prosecutor; and Madame Maigret, busy scouring her pans, would all have been greatly surprised to see Maigret, his hands in his pockets, pipe between his teeth, walking down Boulevard Montparnasse with a grumpy expression on his face, stopping outside a cinema with its foyer plastered with brightly coloured posters, and then finally going up to the ticket office, and holding out some cash.

  ‘A balcony seat, please,’ he asked.

  He then followed the young girl in a black silk dress with a Peter Pan collar who went ahead of him, shining the narrow beam of her electric torch on the steps.

  ‘Excuse me … excuse me … excuse me.’

  He made his way along a row of seats, aware that he was annoying everyone and treading on toes as he passed.

  He had no idea what film was being shown. Loud voices apparently coming from nowhere filled the auditorium, while on screen a ship’s captain was throwing a girl down on the bunk in his cabin.

  ‘So you came here to spy on me!’

  ‘Have mercy, Captain Brown! If not on me, then at least on …’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a timid little voice on the inspector’s right, and his neighbour pulled away the skirt of her coat, on which Maigret was sitting.

  7.

  Maigret was warm. Nice and warm, as he used to say when he was a child, and if the lights in the auditorium had suddenly come on, revealing him wrapped up in his overcoat, hands in his pockets, his body leaning slightly backwards and his eyes half-closed, he would have looked the very essence of bliss.

  In fact it was a little trick that he used on himself when he had been thinking of the same subject for too long and he felt his mind about to start running on empty. In summer he would have gone to sit on the terrace of a café in the sun, where he would have let himself muse quietly over a beer.

  When they had put in central heating at Quai des Orfèvres, and the inspector had asked and been granted permission to keep his old coal-burning stove, the younger inspectors had shrugged their shoulders. In fact it was for the sake of the same trick. When he was stuck, when he had been poring over a problem for so long that it seemed to be empty of all substance, no more than an web of incoherent, cold thoughts, Maigret added more fuel to the stove, warmed himself up sometimes facing it, sometimes with his back to it, poked the burning coals, allowed it to draw, and little by little he relaxed with a sense of well-being. His eyelids tingled, and everything round him seemed blurred, an impression to which the smoke of his eternal pipe contributed.

  In this state of physical lethargy, his mind seized upon connections that sometimes seemed absurd, following paths along which pure reason would not have led him.

  Madame Maigret had never understood. When she touched his arm at the end of an evening spent like this in the cinema, she always sighed, ‘You’ve been asleep again, Maigret … I wonder why you pay twelve francs for a cinema seat when you have such a good bed at home.’

  The auditorium was dark, full of the warmth of humanity, alive with the hundreds of people sitting there side by side, but all the same knowing nothing of each other. The long triangle of pale light from the projection room passed above their heads, attracting tobacco smoke.

  If anyone had asked Maigret what the film was, he couldn’t have said. It didn’t matter. He watched the images without seeing any connection between them. Then his glance moved lower, having noticed a slight movement close to him.

  Though he was a powerful man who for nearly thirty years had been dealing, so to speak, with passion taken to the utmost, in other words to crime, Maigret was personally chaste, and he coughed, shocked by the behaviour of the woman next to him and her companion, although all he could actually see of the latter was a white hand. Just now, however, when he inadvertently sat on his neighbour’s coat he had thought she was young. She wasn’t moving. Her face, pale like the man’s hand and the part of her thigh that it was exposing, remained turned to the screen.

  ‘Ahem!’ the inspector coughed, feeling uneasy. ‘Ahem!’

  The lovers paid him no attention. She must be much the same age as Nouchi.

  In fact, when Nouchi had seen Gérard entering the Bourg-la-Reine apartment building at seven in the evening – or had she really seen him? – she too had been with a lover, in the dark, no doubt up against a wall.

  He heard the whisper of a kiss close to him. He had a taste like someone else’s saliva in his mouth. He hunched even further down into his overcoat.

  Nouchi had been enticing him in the most brazen way a little while ago. If he had wanted … Were there many girls of that age who threw themselves at mature men who could lay claim to some kind of celebrity, or merely some social standing?

  I wouldn’t be surprised if her companion is a good deal older than her, he thought, meaning the lover of the girl in the seat beside him.

  This was his way of thinking without really thinking, in snatches of ideas that he didn’t try to connect with each other.

  Had the Hungarian girl been lying about Monsieur Charles? Probably not. Dandurand was exactly the kind of man to leave his door ajar, watching out for a young girl and offering to show her pornographic photographs. Nouchi, for her part, was capable of doing everything in her power to keep him in suspense, ready to call for help when …

  What was disturbing was the fact that she claimed to have seen Gérard Pardon at seven in the evening, exactly the time when Madame With-All-Due-Respect, on her way up to the Deséglise apartment, was not keeping an eye on the stairs.

  When her statement was official …

  Well, then a perverse girl’s statement would be enough to send a man to prison, and who knew …

  He felt very ill at ease. It wasn’t just the idea of Gérard coming out of the Boulevard Arago gate of La Santé prison first thing in the morning … He was still looking at the screen, and he frowned. For a few moments he felt that something wasn’t natural, and then he realized what it was; the lips of the characters in the film were moving, but not quite in time with their words. In fact the people on screen were speaking English, but you heard French; it was a dubbed soundtrack, and wasn’t perfectly synchronized.

  The behaviour of the couple beside him was getting worse and worse, but the inspector’s mind was elsewhere. What exactly was it that had been throwing him off the track for the last three days? He hadn’t worked it out, but now he understood. Something basic was wrong. What was it? He didn’t know yet.

  With his eyes half-closed he saw, more clearly than if he had been there in front of it, the building like a slice of Neapolitan ice cream on Route d’Orléans, the bicycle shop, the widow Piéchaud’s grocery store. As he had known since the day before, she was not really a widow; her husband had run off with a woman of ill repute, as she put it, and she was so ashamed of it that she claimed to have been widowed.

  But then there was Madame With-All-Due-Respect, in her stuffy lodge, her head askew, her neck wrapped in therm
al wadding to keep it warm …

  Because she hadn’t pulled the cord to let any stranger into the building, he had concluded over-hastily that no such person had come in or gone out of it on the night in question.

  However, he now knew that it was possible to get in at seven in the evening without being seen by the concierge. What proof was there that there weren’t other such fixed moments during the day?

  Up at the top of the building, that old obsessive Juliette Boynet surrounded herself with mystery to receive Charles Dandurand and discuss her investments in institutions that were, to say the least, unedifying. It was improper, but it was human. In the course of his career, Maigret had encountered other phenomena of that sort.

  And other men like Dandurand.

  So what was it that jarred? What was not quite natural about the set-up?

  The old woman had been strangled, no doubt when, after Dandurand had left, she was about to go to bed. She was still wearing one stocking.

  Must he assume that there was a third key, and it was in the hands of Monsieur Charles? Should he think that Monsieur Charles had gone back up to the apartment to kill the old lady?

  He had done well out of the association. Juliette was worth more to him alive than dead.

  What about his underworld friends? They weren’t beginners, cowardly thugs ready to try anything, but men who had made it, who were well established in life and were not at all anxious to take risks. They were sincere when they said they were upset by the murder and it did them harm.

  Gérard Pardon?

  Maigret almost exploded. ‘For heaven’s sake keep quiet!’ His neighbours in the seats next to him were really going too far; they were acting as if they were alone in the huge, dark auditorium.

  … Gérard, hidden in his sister’s room since seven in the evening … Gérard listening in, without revealing himself, on the conversation between Juliette Boynet and Monsieur Charles, perhaps seeing the wads of banknotes and deciding to grab them once his aunt was on her own.

  If so, then he must assume that, having committed the crime, Gérard had stayed in the apartment until morning, since the concierge had not opened the front door of the building to anyone.

  He must also assume that it was Gérard whom Cécile had come to denounce, when she was waiting for Maigret in the Aquarium at Quai des Orfèvres.

  Finally, he must then suppose that it was Gérard who had followed her to the broom cupboard.

  How could Gérard Pardon, who had never had anything to do with the police, have known not only about that cupboard, but about the door giving access to the Palais de Justice from the Police Judiciaire?

  A sudden movement beside him, a skirt being pulled down, the words ‘The End’ on the screen, and at the same time all the lights coming on, and there was much stamping of feet.

  Standing up like everyone else, Maigret followed the rest of the audience out and looked curiously at his neighbour. He saw a calm little face, a fresh complexion, round cheeks and innocently smiling eyes. He had been right about the man with her: he was about forty and wore a wedding ring.

  Still dazed, the inspector found himself in noisy, teeming Boulevard Montparnasse. It must be six o’clock. Night had fallen. Dark shapes walked swiftly past brightly lit shop-window displays. He felt thirsty, went into La Coupole, sat down by a window and ordered a beer.

  A kind of weariness had come over him. He delayed the moment of returning to the harsh light of reality. The right thing to do would have been to make haste to Quai des Orfèvres, where Lucas was grappling with his Poles.

  Instead, he ordered a ham sandwich, and his eyes went on wandering aimlessly over the busy crowd passing by. It had taken him a few minutes just now – perhaps quarter of an hour – to work out what had shaken him in the cinema: the lack of synchronization between the movements of the actors’ lips and the words on the soundtrack.

  How much time would it take him to find out what was wrong in the Bourg-la-Reine case? The sandwich was a good one. The beer was good as well, and he ordered another.

  In the course of every notably successful investigation, or almost every one of them, there was at least one journalist who published a column on what had now to some extent become a traditional subject: The Methods of Detective Chief Inspector Maigret.

  Let the journalist try to solve it then, Maigret thought, leaving the cinema … having a bite to eat, drinking beer. Sitting at the steamed-up window of La Coupole, he looked like some stout provincial astonished by all the hurry and bustle of Paris.

  To be honest, he wasn’t thinking of anything. He both was and was not in Boulevard Montparnasse, for wherever he went he took the building like a slab of Neapolitan ice cream with him. He went into it. He came out again. He watched Madame With-All-Due-Respect in her lair … he went up the stairs, he came down them again.

  The pensioner with the tinted hair had been strangled: fact one. Her money and the paperwork relating to it had disappeared: fact two.

  Eight hundred thousand francs in thousand-franc notes. He tried to imagine what such a pile of banknotes looked like.

  Cécile in the Aquarium, the waiting room at Quai des Orfèvres; she had been there since eight in the morning.

  It was strange, but he was already having difficulty in conjuring up her face, familiar to him as its features had been. He saw in his mind’s eye the black coat, the green hat, and on her knees that enormous, ridiculous handbag. It looked like an attaché case, and she took it everywhere with her.

  Cécile herself had been murdered, and the bag had disappeared …

  Maigret stayed where he was, his glass of beer on hold, hardly aware of what he was looking at. Anyone who spoke to him at that moment would have had to bring him back from very far away.

  The jarring aspect of the case …

  He mustn’t go too fast. He mustn’t scare the truth away, for fear of losing sight of it again.

  Cécile. The handbag. The broom cupboard …

  Her aunt who had been strangled …

  Because Cécile with her squint had been strangled too, it had been assumed – Maigret himself had assumed – that the two crimes …

  He heaved a sigh of relief and took a large, frothy mouthful of beer.

  His mistake, the mistake that had left him going round in circles like a blind carousel horse, was to have looked for a single murderer.

  Why not two? Why suppose from the first that the same person had committed both crimes?

  L’Intransigeant from the sixth … ask to see L’Intran for the sixth of the month, he told himself.

  A waiter brought him the newspaper, and he looked at it. The photograph splashed all over the front page made him frown. It showed him larger than he imagined himself, larger than he thought he really was, his pipe fiercely clamped in his jaws, one hand on the shoulder of a young man in a trenchcoat, none other than Gérard. He didn’t remember placing his hand on Cécile’s brother’s shoulder. He must have done it without thinking.

  The reporter had drawn his own conclusions, for the wording under the picture ran:

  Pure chance? It rather looks as if the heavy hand of the law, in the person of Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, is coming down on the trembling shoulder of a guilty man.

  ‘Idiot!’ exclaimed Maigret. ‘Waiter … what do I owe you?’

  He was both furious and satisfied. He left La Coupole with a firm tread very different from his gait when he had left the cinema and entered the café. He would take a taxi – never mind the cashier’s insistence that the Métro was the quickest way to get from A to B.

  Ten minutes later, he was making his way into the Police Judiciaire and opening the door of his office. The Pole was there, perched on the front of a chair, while Lucas was ensconced in the inspector’s own armchair. A gesture from Maigret, and Lucas followed his boss into the inspectors’ office.

  ‘Janvier and I have been questioning him for ten hours. He hasn’t cracked yet, but I get the impression he’s beginning to
waver. If I’m not much mistaken, he’ll be ready to talk some time in the small hours.’ He wouldn’t be the first whose endurance had to be pushed to its limits. ‘Maybe if you could come back at about two or three in the morning and deliver the final blow …’

  ‘I just don’t have time,’ Maigret growled.

  The offices were beginning to empty; there would be only one light left on in the huge, dusty corridor, and a single man on watch at the switchboard. So the Pole would be left facing the persistent Lucas in Maigret’s office, with Janvier taking over from Lucas now and then, giving both officers time for a beer and a bite to eat in the Brasserie Dauphine.

  ‘Did anyone phone for me?’

  ‘A man called Dandurand.’

  ‘Any message from him?’

  ‘Yes, he said he wouldn’t be leaving his apartment, but he has some interesting news for you.’

  ‘And no one called in person?’

  ‘I don’t know … you’d have to ask the clerk.’

  The clerk said yes, there had been someone to see Maigret. ‘A young fellow in a raincoat with a mourning band on one sleeve. He was in a bad way, very upset, wanted to know when you’d be back. I said I didn’t know. Then he wanted your home address, but I wasn’t giving him that.’

  ‘Gérard Pardon?’

  ‘A name like that, yes. Didn’t want to fill in a form.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About half an hour ago.’

  ‘And he’ll have had a newspaper in his hand, or in his pocket,’ said the inspector, to the clerk’s surprise.

  ‘Yes, you’re right, sir. It was L’Intran. He was holding it all crumpled up.’

  Maigret went back into the inspectors’ office. ‘Who’s free at the moment? Torrence?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be going to Bourg-la-Reine, sir.’

  ‘Never mind that. Go to Rue du Pas-de-la-Mule instead. Number 22. Would you recognize the lad?’

  ‘Cécile’s brother, yes. I saw him in Bourg-la-Reine.’

  ‘Right. Ring his doorbell, and I hope he’ll be back there. If he is, find a reason to stick close to him. We don’t want him doing anything stupid, understand? Go gently with him, don’t scare him – the opposite, in fact.’