A Man's Head (15 page)

A poor old woman was moving among the tables holding out evening newspapers to customers, muttering her barely comprehensible solicitations. She was a pitiful, absurd figure.

‘How much do I …?'

She did not understand, and the blank look in her eyes was proof that the years had left her only the feeblest glimmer of intelligence.

‘Sit yourself down … You're going to have a drink with me … Waiter! A grog for the lady!'

Radek looked around him for Maigret, who, he knew, was sitting just a few metres away.

‘Right, I'll begin by buying all your papers. You'd better count them …'

The old woman was flustered and didn't know whether to do as she was told or leave. But the Czech waved a 100-franc note at her, and she began feverishly counting her newspapers.

‘Drink up! There are forty, you say? At five sous a go … But wait a minute, would you like to earn another hundred francs?'

Maigret, who could see and hear everything, did not react, He did not even look as if he had noticed what was going on.

‘Two hundred francs … Three hundred … Just one moment … Here's your money … Wait a second: would you like five hundred? But to earn it you must sing a song … Hands off! Song
first …'

‘What do you want me to sing?'

It was all too much for the witless old girl. A drop of liqueur ran stickily down her chin, which was stubbled with grey hairs. Customers sitting at nearby tables nudged each other with their elbows.

‘Sing whatever you like. Make it something cheerful. And if you dance, there'll be an extra hundred francs for you.'

It was painful to watch. The wretched old girl did not take her eyes off the banknotes. And as she started humming an unrecognizable tune in a cracked voice, her hand reached for the money.

‘Stop it!' said the other customers.

‘Sing!' ordered Radek.

He was still keeping an eye open for Maigret. More protests were made. A waiter approached the woman and ordered her to leave. She refused to go, clinging to the hope of earning fabulous wealth.

‘I'm singing for this young gent … He promised me …'

The end was more odious still. A policeman arrived and marched the old woman away. She had not seen a penny of the money. A junior waiter ran after her to give her back her newspapers.

There had been a dozen scenes of this sort in the past three days. For those three days, Maigret, beetle-browed, grim-mouthed, had been following Radek wherever he went, from morning to night and night to morning.

At first, the Czech had tried to take up the conversation where it had left off. He had repeated:

‘Since you are so determined not to let me out of your sight, why don't we go everywhere together? It would be so much more amusing.'

Maigret had refused. At the Coupole and elsewhere, he would sit at a table near Radek's. In the street, he walked conspicuously close behind him.

Radek was losing patience. It was a war of nerves.

The funeral of William Crosby had taken place, bringing together two very different worlds: the most glitzy ranks of the American colony in Paris and the motley crew from Montparnasse.

As Radek had predicted, both women wore deep mourning. The Czech himself had followed the funeral procession to the cemetery without turning a hair and without exchanging a word with anyone.

Three days of a life so unlikely that it started to feel like a nightmare.

Radek would sometimes turn to Maigret and repeat:

‘All this carry-on won't help you to understand any of it!'

The inspector pretended not to hear and remained as impassive as a blank wall. It was only once or twice that the Czech had even managed to catch his eye.

He just followed him around, that was the top and bottom of it! He didn't appear to be looking for anything in particular. He was a monstrous presence, dogged and permanently
there
.

Radek spent every morning in cafés, doing nothing. Suddenly he would summon a waiter:

‘Call the manager!'

And when the manager appeared:

‘I would like you to confirm that the waiter who has been serving me has dirty hands.'

He invariably paid with 100- or 1,000-franc notes and stuffed the change in one or other of his pockets.

In restaurants, he would send back dishes which were not to his taste. One day, for lunch, he ate a meal costing 150 francs and then told the waiter:

‘There's no tip. You weren't attentive enough!'

In the evening, he would hang around bars and nightclubs, buying drinks for the girls, keeping them on tenterhooks until the last minute, when he would suddenly throw a 1,000-franc note into the middle of the floor and say:

‘The girl who gets it keeps it!'

A fight would follow, and some girl would be ejected from the premises while Radek, as usual, would try to work out the effect the incident was having on Maigret.

He never tried to escape the surveillance to which he was being subjected. If he took a taxi, he would wait until the inspector had also hailed one.

The funeral was held on 22 October. On the 23rd, at eleven at night, Radek was finishing his dinner in a restaurant just off the Champs-Élysées.

At eleven-thirty, he left, followed by Maigret, carefully selected a comfortable taxi and gave the address to the driver in a whisper.

Two cabs were soon driving one behind the other in the direction of Auteuil. On the policeman's heavy face the casual observer would not have detected any sign of anxiety, impatience or weariness, even though he had not slept for four
days.

Except that his eyes were slightly more fixed and staring than usual.

The first taxi followed the Left Bank, crossed the Seine over Pont Mirabeau and took a route that led circuitously to the Citanguette.

Five hundred metres short of the bar, Radek stopped the car, said a few words to the driver and, with both hands in his pockets, set off on foot towards the unloading wharf directly opposite the bar.

There he sat down on a mooring bollard, lit a cigarette, made sure that Maigret had followed him and then remained perfectly still.

By midnight, nothing had happened. In the bar, three Arabs were playing dice, and a man was dozing in one corner, probably fuddled with drink. The landlord was washing wine glasses. There was no light upstairs.

At five minutes after midnight, a taxi drove along the road and stopped outside the front of the bar, and, after a brief hesitation, the figure of a woman ran quickly inside.

Radek's sardonic eye kept an even keener lookout for Maigret than ever. The woman was lit by the naked lightbulb. She was wearing a black coat and a wide tippet of some kind of dark fur. Even so it was impossible not to recognize Ellen
Crosby.

She was now leaning over the counter, talking quietly to the landlord. The Arabs had paused in their game to watch.

From outside, their voices could not be heard. But there was no doubt about the landlord's stupefied reaction and the American woman's nervous state.

Moments later, the man made his way to the bottom of the staircase behind his counter. She followed him. Then a light appeared in a first-floor window, the window of the room which Joseph Heurtin had occupied when he was on the run.

When the landlord came down again, he was alone. The Arabs called out to him, and as he answered he gave a shrug of his shoulders which very probably meant: ‘I don't understand it either! Anyway, it's none of our
business!'

There were no shutters on the first floor. The curtains were thin, and it was possible to follow more or less all the American's comings and goings inside.

‘Cigarette, inspector?'

Maigret did not answer. In the upstairs room, the young woman had moved to the side of the bed and was stripping the sheets and blankets off it.

They saw her lift some shapeless, heavy object. Then she embarked on some strange activity, became agitated and then suddenly moved to the window as if she had suddenly become worried by something.

‘Seems like she has it in for the mattress, wouldn't you say? Either I'm very mistaken or she's ripping it open. An odd thing to do for a woman who has always had a maid!'

Both men were sitting barely five metres apart. A quarter of an hour ticked by.

‘It's all getting more and more complicated, don't you think?'

The Czech's impatience could be heard in his voice. Maigret took good care neither to respond nor to react.

It was almost half past midnight when Ellen Crosby reappeared in the bar of the café. She tossed a note on the counter, turned up her fur tippet as she left and hurried to the taxi, which had been waiting for her.

‘Shall we follow her, inspector?'

All three taxis set off, one behind the other. But Mrs Crosby was not going to Paris, and half an hour later they were all at Saint-Cloud. She left her taxi near the villa.

She seemed so small as she walked along the pavement on the opposite side of the road, like someone who is not sure about something.

Suddenly, she crossed the road, searched in her handbag for a key and a moment later she was inside, while the gate swung shut behind her with a dull thud.

The lights did not come on. The only sign of life was a faint, intermittent glimmer in the rooms on the first floor, as if someone was striking a match at intervals.

The night was cool. The street lamps lining the road were fogged by a halo of dampness.

The two taxis, one Maigret's, the other Radek's, had stopped 200 metres from the villa, while Mrs Crosby's was parked, by itself, just by the gate.

Maigret had got out of his and was walking up and down, with his hands thrust deeply in his pockets, puffing fretfully on his pipe.

‘Well? Aren't you going to see what's going on?'

He did not reply but carried on pacing monotonously to and fro.

‘Maybe you're making a mistake, inspector! What if another corpse is found in there later on or tomorrow?'

Maigret did not flinch, and Radek threw down his cigarette, which was only half smoked, after snagging the paper with a fingernail.

‘How many times have I told you that you'll never understand this case …? And I'll say it again: you'll …'

The inspector turned his back on him. And then almost an hour went by. It had gone quiet. Not even the flickering flame of matches showed in the windows of the villa.

Mrs Crosby's driver started to get anxious. He got out of his seat and was almost at the gate.

‘Suppose, inspector, that there's someone else in the villa.'

Maigret turned and looked Radek straight in the eye in such a way that decided him to stay silent.

When, moments later, Ellen Crosby ran out and jumped into her cab, she was holding something in her hand, an object thirty centimetres long wrapped in white paper or a piece of cloth.

‘Aren't you curious to know what …?'

‘Listen, Radek …'

‘What?'

The American's taxi was fast disappearing in the direction of Paris. Maigret gave no sign that he was anxious to follow.

The Czech was jumpy. His lips moved, trembling slightly.

‘Do you think we should go inside too?'

‘But …'

He hesitated. He had the air of a man who has worked out a scheme and suddenly finds himself faced with an unexpected hitch.

Maigret laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.

‘And now we're going to understand everything, the two of us. Ready?'

Radek laughed. But the laugh was half-hearted.

‘Can't make up your mind? Are you afraid, as you said a while back, that you might find yourself dealing with another dead body? … Well now, who could that be, I wonder. Madame Henderson is dead and buried, and her maid is
also dead and buried. Crosby is dead and buried, and his wife has just left, alive and kicking. And Joseph Heurtin is snug and safe in the sick bay of the Santé prison. Who's left? Edna? But what would she be doing here?'

‘After you,' growled Radek through gritted teeth

‘Right, we'll start at the beginning. Before we can get into the house, we'll need a key …'

But it was not a key that Maigret took out of his pocket but a small cardboard box, which it took him some time to open and from which he eventually extracted the key to the gate.

‘There we are! Now all we have to do is go in as if we were walking into our own house, because there isn't anybody inside … Isn't that the truth? No one at home?'

How had this sudden change in him come about? And why? Radek had stopped looking sarcastically at his companion but was staring at him with a degree of apprehension which he could not hide.

‘Would you mind keeping this little box in your pocket? We might find a use for it later on …'

Maigret turned on the light switch, tapped his pipe on his heel to knock out the ash and then refilled it.

‘Let's go upstairs … Obviously getting in was as easy for whoever killed Madame Henderson as it is for us. Two sleeping women! No dog! No janitor! And on top of that, carpets everywhere! … Come on!'

The inspector did not even bother to try to see what the Czech was doing.

‘You were right back there, Radek … It would come as a nasty surprise to me if we really did find a body … You know Monsieur Coméliau's reputation … He's already got it in for me because I
didn't prevent Crosby from killing himself, which he did more or less in my presence … He's also annoyed with me because I couldn't explain what happened …

‘So just imagine if there was another murder! … What would I say? … What could I do? … I allowed Madame Crosby to get away … And as for you, I could hardly accuse you, since I've not let you out
of my sight! …

‘Indeed, after the last three days, it would be difficult to say which of us has been following the other. Have you been following me? Or have I been following you?'