Cécile is Dead (2 page)

‘I've called in the manager for
ten o'clock. He'll have to talk.'

‘Go carefully, will you? He has a
parliamentary deputy
protecting him, and I
don't want a lot of fuss. What about your Poles, Maigret?'

‘I'm still waiting. I'm
planning to investigate their hideout myself tonight. If there's nothing new
tomorrow I'll try to have a heart-to-heart with the woman.'

A nasty bunch. Three crimes committed within
six months, all at isolated farms in the north of the country. Coarse, brutal banditry,
axe murders …

The fog was turning golden. Electric light
wasn't necessary now. The commissioner of the Police Judiciaire drew a file
towards him. ‘If you have a moment this morning, Maigret … here's some
research into family interests. A young man of nineteen, the son of a large
industrialist, who …'

‘Let me have a look.'

The briefing went on for half an hour, while
the air in the room was filled with pipe and cigarette smoke, and was interrupted from
time to time by phone calls.

‘Yes, sir … certainly,
minister.'

And there was a constant racket of police
officers coming and going in the huge corridor, doors opening and closing, telephone
conversations in the offices.

Maigret, his file under his arm, went back
to his own office. He was thinking of the gang of Poles. Automatically, he put the file
down on the form that Cécile had filled in. Almost as soon as he was sitting down, the
clerk knocked on his door.

‘It's about that girl
…'

‘Yes?'

‘Are you going to see her?'

‘In a little
while.'

First he wanted to finish dealing with the
case that the boss had handed him. He knew where to find the young man concerned; he had
already had dealings with him.

‘Hello … get me the Hôtel Myosotis,
Rue Blanche.'

It was a shabby hotel, where the young man
and others like him met, took cocaine and made no secret of their habit.

‘Hello? Listen to me, Francis, I think
you're finally going to have to close that place of yours … What? Well,
that's just too bad … You're going too far. If you want some good advice,
send me young Duchemin right away. Or even better, bring him here yourself. I have a
couple of things to say to him … Of course. He's with you … And if he isn't
I'm sure you'll manage to unearth him for me before midday … Yes, I'm
counting on it.'

Someone was already calling him on another
phone. An embarrassed examining magistrate.

‘Is that Detective Chief Inspector
Maigret? It's about Pénicaid, inspector. He claims that you intimidated him into
confessing, he says you got him to undress in your office and then left him there for
five hours completely naked …'

And there were still orders to be given to
the junior inspectors waiting in the next-door office, hats tipped over their ears,
cigarettes in their mouths. It was eleven before he remembered Cécile, and he pressed
the electric bell.

‘Ask the girl to come in.'

The clerk returned alone a few moments
later. ‘She's left, inspector.'

‘Oh.'

First he shrugged his shoulders. Then,
sitting down again, he frowned. This wasn't like Cécile, who had once spent seven
hours in the waiting room without moving. He looked for her form among the papers
littering his desk, and finally found it under young Duchemin's file.

You simply must see me. A terrible thing
happened last night.

CÉCILE PARDON

The clerk came back when he rang again.

‘Listen, Léopold,' (the
man's name wasn't Léopold, but his resemblance to the former king of the
Belgians had earned him that nickname) ‘when did she leave?'

‘I don't know, sir. I've
been called into all the offices. Half an hour ago she was still there.'

‘Were there many people in the waiting
room?'

‘Two to see the boss. A middle-aged
man wanting to know about our legal warrants. And then … well, you know how it is in the
morning, all that coming and going. I can only tell you that the young lady wasn't
there.'

Maigret felt a small and unpleasant
sensation, a niggling anxiety, in his chest. He didn't like it. They had made too
much fun of poor Cécile.

‘If she should come back, you
…'

No. He changed his mind and called one of
his inspectors.

‘The proprietor of the Hôtel Myosotis
will be here in a few minutes' time with a young man called Duchemin. Get them to
wait. If I'm not back by midday, keep the
young man here and send the hotelier back to his own
business.'

Once at Pont Saint-Michel, he almost hailed
a taxi, which could be a sign. Just because it could be a sign he didn't do it and
waited for a tram. He didn't want to ascribe too much importance to Cécile, which
would be tantamount to admitting that …

The fog, instead of lifting, had come down
more densely, although it wasn't so cold. Maigret smoked his pipe on the platform
of the tram, with his head bobbing to the jerky movements and the intermittent braking
of the vehicle.

When had Cécile first visited the Police
Judiciaire? About six months ago. He had left his notebook on his desk, but he could
check when he got back. She had asked immediately for Detective Chief Inspector Maigret.
True, she could have seen his name in the newspapers. She was calm. Did she realize that
the story she told sounded like the work of an over-fertile imagination?

She was trying to speak with composure,
looking the inspector straight in the face, and she corrected the more extravagant
passages of her story with a smile.

‘I assure you, inspector, I'm
not making anything up, and I'm not gullible either. I know where everything in
the room ought to stand, since I do the housework myself. My aunt would never have a
maid. The first time it happened I might have thought I was mistaken. But after that I
paid careful attention. And yesterday I looked for certain marks. I've gone
further than that. I stretched a thread across the front doorway … and not only had two
chairs changed places, my thread was broken. So someone has
been in our apartment. Someone has spent a certain amount of
time in the sitting room, and in particular opened my aunt's desk, because I left
a clue there as well. That's the third time in two months. These days my aunt can
do almost nothing, no one has the key to the apartment, yet the lock hadn't been
forced. I didn't want to talk to Aunt Juliette about it for fear of worrying her.
However, I'm certain that nothing has gone. She'd have told me if it had,
because she has a very suspicious nature.'

‘So the fact is,' Maigret had
summed up, ‘you are saying that for the third time in two months some unknown
person entered the apartment where you and your aunt live, that this person spent time
in the sitting room and changed the position of the chairs …'

‘And the blotting pad too,' she
pointed out.

‘Changed the position of the chairs
and the blotting pad and searched your aunt's desk, which was locked but shows no
signs of being forced …'

‘And I should add that someone was
smoking there that evening,' she persisted. ‘My aunt doesn't smoke,
nor do I, and no man called to see us yesterday. But the sitting room smelled of tobacco
this morning.'

‘I'll come and look …'

‘Oh, that's what I'd like
to avoid. My aunt isn't easy to deal with. She'd be cross with me,
especially as I didn't tell her about it …'

‘Then what do you expect the police to
do?'

‘I don't know … I trust you …
maybe if you were to spend a few nights on the staircase outside …?'

Poor thing, imagining that a detective chief
inspector
of police had nothing better to do
than spend the night in a stairway to check up on a girl's stories!

‘I'll send you Lucas
tonight.'

‘You won't come
yourself?'

No, for heaven's sake no! She was
going too far. And her resentment – here Maigret's colleagues were right – was
like that of a woman in love.

‘You see, it might not be tonight. It
could be in three, five, maybe ten days. How do I know? I'm afraid, inspector. The
idea of a man …'

‘Where do you live?'

‘In Bourg-la-Reine, a kilometre from
Porte d'Orléans, on the main road … just opposite the fifth tram stop. It's
a big five-storey apartment building, brick, and there's a bicycle shop and a
grocer's on the ground floor. We live on the fifth floor.'

Lucas had gone there and had asked the
neighbours questions. When he came back he was sceptical.

‘An old lady who hasn't been out
of the place for months, and her niece who acts as her maidservant and looks after her
in general.'

The local police were asked to keep an eye
on the building, which was under surveillance for almost a month. No one ever saw anyone
but the tenants going in and out of it by night.

And yet Cécile kept returning to Quai des
Orfèvres.

‘He's been back again,
inspector. This time he left ink marks on the blotter. I'd changed the blotting
paper yesterday evening.'

‘And he didn't take anything
away?'

‘No,
nothing.'

Maigret had been imprudent enough to tell
the story to his colleagues, and the whole of Quai des Orfèvres was greatly amused.

‘Maigret has made a
conquest.'

They went to take a look at the young lady
with the squint through the glazed partition of the waiting room and then visited
Maigret's office.

‘Quick – there's someone to see
you!'

‘Who is it?'

‘Your love-sick admirer.'

Lucas had spent eight nights running lying
in wait in the stairwell of the building and had neither seen nor heard anything.

‘It could be tomorrow,' Cécile
said.

It was left at that.

‘Cécile is here …'

Cécile was famous. Everyone called her
Cécile. If a junior officer wanted to see Maigret, he was told, ‘Careful.
There's someone in there.'

‘Who is it?'

‘Cécile.'

Maigret changed to another tram at Porte
d'Orléans and got off at the fifth stop. A building rose on the right, by itself,
alone between two tracts of waste land; you might have thought you were on a thin slice
of road, cut from a block of Neapolitan ice cream.

Nothing out of the ordinary. Cars were
driving towards Arpajon and Orléans. Trucks were coming back from Les Halles. The door
of the apartment building was wedged
between
the bicycle shop and the grocery. The concierge was peeling carrots.

‘Has Mademoiselle Pardon come home
yet?'

‘Mademoiselle Cécile? I don't
think so. You can always ring the bell, and Madame Boynet will open the door.'

‘I thought she was
disabled.'

‘Almost, but she's had a system
rigged up so that she can open the door from her armchair, like in my lodge here.
That's to say, if she wants to.'

Five floors. Maigret hated stairs. These
were dark, and the stairwell was covered with wallpaper the colour of tobacco juice. The
walls were well seasoned; the smell changed from landing to landing, depending on what
people were cooking. So did the noises. Piano music, children yowling, and somewhere the
echoes of a heated argument.

There was a dusty business card, saying
‘Jean Siveschi', under the electric bell on the left-hand door on the fifth
floor, so it must be the door on the right that he wanted. He rang the bell there. The
sound passed from room to room, but there was no click, and the door did not open. He
rang again. His uneasiness was turning to anxiety and his anxiety to remorse.

‘What is it?' asked a
woman's voice behind him.

He turned and saw a plump young woman whose
blue dressing gown made her look even more alluring.

‘Madame Boynet …'

‘I'm sure she's in,'
the young woman replied with a slight foreign accent. ‘Hasn't anyone
answered the door? That's odd …'

She rang the bell
herself, revealing a little flesh as she raised her arm to reach the cord that worked
it.

‘Even if Cécile is out, her aunt
should …'

Maigret stood around on the landing for ten
minutes and then had to walk nearly a kilometre to find a locksmith. Not only did the
young woman come running again at the sound of the bell, so did her mother and her
sister.

‘Do you think there's been an
accident?'

It proved possible to open the door without
forcing the lock, which showed no traces of violence. Maigret was the first to enter the
apartment. It was crowded with old furniture and knick-knacks; he didn't notice
the details. A sitting room. A dining room. An open door, and on a mahogany bedstead an
old lady with tinted hair who …

‘Please go away, do you hear?'
he called, turning to the three neighbours. ‘If you find this kind of thing
entertaining, I can only say I'm sorry for you.'

A strange corpse: a plump little old woman,
heavily made up, her hair light blonde, over-bleached – you could see white at the roots
– wearing a red dressing gown and a stocking, just one stocking on the leg which was
dangling over the edge of the bed.

There could be no possible doubt about it;
she had been strangled.

He went out on the landing again and, his
voice harsh and anxious, said,‘Someone find me a local police officer.'

Five minutes later, he was phoning from the
glazed telephone booth of a nearby bistro.

‘Hello? Detective Chief Inspector
Maigret, yes … Who's
this on the phone?
All right … Tell me, young man, has Cécile come back? … Then go to the public
prosecutor's office … Try to see the public prosecutor himself … Tell him … Are
you listening?. … No, I'm staying here. Hello! And tell Criminal Records … If by
some miracle Cécile does turn up there … What was that? No, young man, this is no time
for silly jokes …'