Cécile is Dead

by Georges Simenon

  The door of the fourth-floor apartment was still closed, and the lights inside were on. The telephone was on Dandurand’s desk.

  ‘Hello? Torrence?’

  ‘Is that you, sir? I’m still in Rue du Pas-de-la-Mule.’

  ‘Gérard?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him. Listen … it’s rather complicated. I’m not sure about telling you all this over the phone …’

  ‘Quiet … Wait a minute.’

  Inspector Torrence must be wondering why he was asked to keep quiet. The fact was that Maigret had just heard footsteps overhead. He worked out that they must be in Juliette Boynet’s bedroom. The sound was perfectly distinct. It was all very well for Monsieur Charles to wear slippers and take precautions; his movements were audible all the same.

  ‘Hello … are you still there, sir?’

  ‘Quiet, I said.’

  ‘Shall I stay on the line?’

  ‘Keep quiet, I tell you.’

  Suddenly he ran for the door, leaving the telephone receiver lying on the desk. When he reached Madame Boynet’s apartment, Monsieur Charles was already at the front door, his expression impassive but sombre.

  ‘Was that your telephone call?’ he asked.

  ‘I haven’t finished it yet. Will you come downstairs, please …’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was afraid of being indiscreet.’

  This time Maigret had the impression that there was annoyance or perhaps anxiety in the eyes of that cold fish Monsieur Charles.

  ‘I’ll follow you down, inspector. If I’d known that …’

  ‘You first, please.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Back to your study. Right … close the door and stay where you are. Would you be good enough to put your hands on the table?’ He had picked up the receiver again.

  ‘All right, Torrence, I’m listening.’

  ‘Oh, I thought we’d been cut off. Well, it’s like this, sir. When I got here I questioned the concierge, and she told me that Gérard Pardon hadn’t come home, but his wife was in. So I positioned myself less than three metres from the entrance, and it began to rain …’

  ‘Never mind that.’

  ‘Well, I’m soaked … I didn’t dare go to the corner café to get a drink. I was there for hours. A few minutes ago, quarter of an hour at the most, a young woman arrived in a taxi. I recognized her by her red hat – Gérard Pardon’s sister Berthe – you pointed her out to me …’

  ‘And then?’

  Little did Torrence know that, as he made his report, the inspector was listening with only one ear, while he looked Monsieur Charles up and down. As for the former lawyer himself, he kept both his hands flat on the desk, maintaining a deliberately awkward position.

  What had the man been doing upstairs? It was the first time since Juliette’s death that he had been in her apartment on his own.

  ‘Carry on, I’m listening.’

  ‘I didn’t have any instructions … well, the girl went upstairs. After a few minutes, I thought she might have been bringing bad news, so I went up myself. I knocked on the door, and the girl opened it. There isn’t a front hall, and Madame Pardon was in the kitchen, sobbing. She looked at me, wild-eyed, asking, “Is he dead?”’

  There must have been an expression of great surprise on Maigret’s face, because Monsieur Charles frowned.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I was terribly embarrassed, I can tell you, sir. I asked the girl what she’d been doing, and she told me we were brutes, and if anything bad happened to her brother it would be our responsibility … One of them in floods of tears, the other calling me names, and I couldn’t get any sense out of them! Well, I waited patiently, and finally I found out that Gérard had been to see his sister. He’d been carrying on like a madman, telling her he wanted money at once. She tried to calm him down and find out what he wanted the money for. He said, with a sarcastic laugh, that she’d find out from the newspapers tomorrow, and for heaven’s sake she must give him everything she had. So she gave him a hundred and thirty francs exactly, keeping only ten francs for herself, and he rushed out. She tried to follow him, but he jumped on a bus that was just moving away.

  ‘So I don’t know what to do, sir. I left the two girls to come and phone you. Should I go back to them? Gérard Pardon’s wife says he’ll kill himself. If you ask me, I …’

  ‘That will do,’ Maigret interrupted him.

  ‘But … but what should I do?’

  However, the inspector had already hung up and without any further remark he told Monsieur Charles, ‘Empty your pockets!’

  ‘You want me to …?’

  ‘Empty your pockets!’

  ‘If you say so.’

  He complied slowly, taking the items out one by one and placing them on his desk: a well-worn wallet, a key, a penknife, a handkerchief that was far from clean, papers, a small box containing cough sweets, a tobacco pouch, a pipe and a box of matches.

  ‘Turn your pockets inside out … turn your jacket inside out …’

  ‘Would you like me to take all my clothes off?’

  With some minor changes of wording, Madame Maigret might have made the same remark that she had addressed to her husband: ‘I do wonder why you haven’t been slapped in the face.’

  In fact, of the two of them Monsieur Charles was more composed, colder, and his chilly manner was not without a touch of insolence. Taking off his jacket, he revealed shirt-sleeves with worn and grubby cuffs. His waistcoat matched them. His braces were in no better state than his shirt, and his underpants showed above his trousers.

  ‘Shall I go on?’

  If the inspector had not restrained himself, it wasn’t a slap in the face that he would have given him, but a punch on the nose.

  ‘Do you want me to take my slippers off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Although one of his socks had a hole in it, his slippers did not contain so much as the smallest scrap of paper.

  ‘Let me point out, inspector, that it is eleven o’clock at night, and at this hour even if you had a search warrant in due form I would be within my rights to show you the door. I’m not doing that, I say so only to point out that …’

  ‘Sit down.’

  And he dialled a telephone number.

  ‘Be my guest,’ said the former lawyer sarcastically.

  ‘Hello … Put Lucas on the line, will you? … Is that you? … Not yet? You’ll have to carry on, old fellow … No, I don’t have the time. … Who else is there? Berger? … That’s his bad luck! Tell him to get into a taxi and come to Bourg-la-Reine … Yes, the fourth floor. Thanks, and good luck!’

  He hung up and stood motionless, staring at the desk in front of him.

  ‘If you’re thinking of staying much longer, perhaps we could have that little drink.’

  A single glance from Maigret silenced the other man. Ten minutes passed, a quarter of an hour. Cars drove by on the main road. The piano had fallen silent. The building was asleep.

  At last the front door was heard closing down below, and soon footsteps came up the stairs.

  ‘Come in, Berger.’

  It must be raining harder than ever, for Inspector Berger’s hat and his shoulders were wet, even though he had come by taxi.

  ‘This is Monsieur Charles. He’s rather upset this evening, and I’m afraid he might do something stupid. I have pointed out to him that it is not entirely within the letter of the law for us to occupy his apartment tonight, but he doesn’t mind that. I’ll leave him in your care. He can go to bed if he wants, and in that case I’d like you to watch over him as if he were a sick member of your family. I shall certainly be back here tomorrow morning. If I’m late, don’t worry and don’t let him go out, because he might catch cold …’

  He buttoned up his overcoat, filled his pipe and tamped the tobacco down with his thumb.

  ‘And I wouldn’t touch his cognac if I were you … I don’t think it’s top quality.’

  He took Dandurand’s wallet of
f the table, along with the papers that the lawyer had taken out of his pocket.

  ‘Did you tell the taxi to wait?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Too bad. Well, good night.’

  And he left the two men together. For a moment he almost went up to the fifth floor, but what use would that be? Dandurand wasn’t someone to leave traces behind him.

  In the ground-floor corridor, he found Madame With-All-Due-Respect in her night-clothes, with her head tilted even further towards her shoulder than ever.

  ‘What’s going on, inspector? Has another crime been committed in this building?’

  He wasn’t listening and hardly heard the indistinct words. Automatically, he replied, ‘Possibly. Let me have the cord, please.’

  9.

  It was still raining in the morning, a soft, dismal rain with the resignation of widowhood. You didn’t see it falling; you didn’t feel it, yet it covered everything with a cold film, and the surface of the Seine was pitted with thousands of lively little circles. At nine, you still felt as if you were off to catch an early train, for day was reluctant to dawn, and the gas lamps were still lit.

  As Maigret climbed the stairs in the Police Judiciaire building, he couldn’t help casting a glance at the Aquarium, and he still felt as if he would see Cécile sitting where he had last seen her, a humble figure patiently waiting. Why did such a distressing thought cross his mind this morning? On his way, not fully roused from sleep yet, brushing past dripping wet buildings, no doubt he had vaguely thought of the girl beside him in the cinema, and then of Nouchi, Monsieur Charles … And now, as he reached the corridor of the Police Judiciaire building, he was wondering whether there had been anything between Cécile and Monsieur Dandurand.

  There was nothing to give rise to that hypothesis. It bothered him. It sullied a memory, and yet from then on the inspector often thought about it.

  ‘Don’t go in … there’s someone here. The commissioner wants you to go and see him first.’

  It was the clerk, preventing Maigret from going into his office.

  ‘Someone here?’ he repeated.

  The next moment he was knocking at the commissioner’s door.

  ‘Come in, Maigret … feeling better? Look, I let a visitor wait in your office. I didn’t know where else to put him, and it’s you he wants to see anyway. Read this.’

  Maigret, as if baffled, read the card, which informed him:

  Jean Tinchant

  Principal private secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would like you to facilitate the work of Mr Spencer Oats of the Institute of Criminology of Philadelphia, who has been warmly recommended to us by his embassy.

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘He wants to study your methods.’

  And the commissioner could not suppress a smile as Maigret left, his shoulders hunched, his fists clenched, as if he were about to crush the American criminologist.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, inspector.’

  ‘Just a minute, Monsieur Spencer. Hello? Get me the duty office. Maigret here. Hasn’t he been found? Get Number 19 at Bourg-la-Reine on the line, please.’

  The American looked all right. A tall young man of the university lecturer type, red hair, thin face, correct and well-cut suit, a slight and quite attractive accent.

  ‘Is that you, Berger? Well?’

  ‘No news, sir. He slept on the sofa fully clothed. Guess what? I was beginning to get hungry, and there isn’t anything to eat in the apartment. I don’t like to go downstairs to buy croissants … Will you be here soon? … No, he’s behaved perfectly well … He even said he didn’t bear you a grudge, he’d have done the same in your place, and you’d soon realize you had made a mistake.’

  Maigret hung up and went to sit in front of his stove. The sight of it had surprised the American.

  ‘And how can I help you, Monsieur Spencer?’ he asked.

  He called the man by his first name because he hadn’t the faintest idea how to pronounce Oats.

  ‘First of all, detective chief inspector, I’d like to hear your ideas on the psychology of criminals.’

  Meanwhile Maigret was opening his post, which he had found on his desk.

  ‘What criminals?’ he asked as he read.

  ‘Well … criminals in general.’

  ‘Before or after?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Maigret was smoking his pipe, reading his letters, warming his back and did not seem to think much of this desultory conversation.

  ‘I was asking whether you’re talking about criminals before they commit a crime or after they’ve committed it … because before, obviously, they aren’t yet criminals. For thirty, forty, fifty years, sometimes more, they’ve been people like everyone else, don’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes, of course …’

  Maigret finally looked up and said, with a tiny spark of malice in his eyes, ‘Then why, Monsieur Spencer, do you expect their mentality to change all of a sudden because they’ve just killed one of their fellow men?’

  He went over to the window to look at the circular patterns made by rain falling on the river.

  ‘That would lead us to think,’ the American concluded, ‘that criminals are people just like everyone else?’

  There was a knock on the door. Lucas came in with a file and, on seeing the visitor, looked as if he were about to leave again.

  ‘What is it, old fellow? Ah, yes … take this file to the public prosecutor’s office … I assume the Hôtel des Arcades is still under surveillance?’

  They exchanged a few remarks about the Poles, but Maigret did not lose track of his train of thought.

  ‘Why does a man commit a crime, Monsieur Spencer? Out of jealousy, greed, hatred, envy, more rarely out of necessity … in short, when he is impelled by one of the human passions. We all have those passions in us to a greater or lesser degree. Suppose I hate my neighbour, who always opens his window on summer evenings to play the horn … It’s not very likely that I’ll kill him. However, only about a month ago, a former colonial who had suffered from fever, so he wasn’t as patient as I am, fired a revolver at his neighbour upstairs because the neighbour had a wooden leg, and walked up and down in his apartment all night, with that leg pounding away on the floor …’

  ‘Yes, I see what you’re getting at. But what about the mentality of a criminal after he has committed a crime?’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with me. That’s up to the jurors and the governors of prisons and penal colonies … my role is to find out who committed crimes. For that, all I have to think about is their mentality before they did it. To know whether such and such a man was capable of committing such and such a crime, and when and how he committed it.’

  ‘The commissioner of the Police Judiciaire suggested that you might perhaps let me sit in on …’

  And not for the first time! Too bad for the American!

  ‘I know that you’re investigating the case at Bourg-la-Reine, and I’ve read everything the newspapers have to say about it … Do you know who’s guilty of the murder yet?’

  ‘At least I know someone who isn’t guilty of it but all the same … Let me ask you a question in my own turn, Monsieur Spencer. A man believes that he is a suspect, thinking whether rightly or wrongly that the police have evidence against him. His wife is expecting a baby any time now. He turns up at his sister’s lodgings, asking her for all the money she has … His sister gives him a hundred and thirty francs. What does he do with that sum?’

  And Maigret pushed yesterday’s evening paper over to the American. It was the one that had published the photograph of Maigret himself placing his hand on Gérard Pardon’s shoulder.

  ‘Is that the boy?’

  ‘That’s him, yes. Working from this office last night, I sent out his description to all the police forces in France, and the frontiers are being watched. A hundred and thirty francs …’

  ‘You think he’s innocent?’

  ‘I’m convinced that h
e didn’t kill either his aunt or his sister. Now if he’d asked for that sum of money before nightfall yesterday, I might have thought he wanted to buy a revolver and commit suicide …’

  ‘But if he didn’t commit the murders?’

  ‘Exactly, Monsieur Spencer. That’s what I was getting at. There are innocents who have the soul of a guilty man, and guilty men who have the soul of an innocent … Fortunately, when his sister gave him that hundred and thirty francs, the gunsmiths had shut up shop for the night. So I assume he was trying to get away. In that case, how far can you go on a hundred and thirty francs? No further than Belgium …’

  He picked up his phone and asked for Criminal Records.

  ‘Hello … Maigret here. Who’s this on the line? … Oh, it’s you, Jaminet … Can you take another man with you, and bring your cameras … Yes. Wait for me downstairs in a taxi.’ And he added, to the American, ‘We may be about to make an arrest.’

  ‘You’ve discovered the murderer?’

  ‘Possibly, but I’m not certain. To tell you the truth, I’m inclined to think that … Will you wait for me here a minute, Monsieur Spencer?’

  Maigret made for the Palais de Justice, taking the notorious short cut through the door that should have been bricked up so long ago … and but for which Cécile might not have been murdered. It was just so useful … All very well for people to have been saying so for ten years, twenty years …

  The inspector knocked on the door of the examining magistrate’s office, but said he wouldn’t sit down.

  ‘I’ve only got a moment; there’s someone waiting for me. I wanted to ask how awkward it would make things for you if I were to arrest a man who may be innocent? He’s not a nice character, by the way, he’s served a sentence on a vice charge and he won’t have the nerve to complain …’

  ‘Well, in that case … give me the name, and I’ll make a note of it.’

  ‘Charles Dandurand.’

  Ten minutes later, Maigret and Spencer Oats joined the two specialists from Criminal Records in the taxi waiting on Quai des Orfèvres. A little after ten, the car stopped in Bourg-la-Reine, where the misty, drizzling rain made Juliette Boynet’s apartment building look like a half-faded old photograph.