Cécile is Dead (3 page)

When he left the bistro, after drinking a
quick glass of rum at the bar, fifty people were stationed outside the apartment
building in a formation like a rectangular block of ice cream.

In spite of himself, he looked around for
Cécile.

Not until five in the afternoon was he to
learn that Cécile was dead.

Yet again, Madame Maigret would be waiting
beside the round dining table, where she had laid two places. She was inured to it! And
installing a telephone had been no use: Maigret forgot to let her know he'd be
late. As for young Duchemin, Cassieux was going to teach him the traditional lesson.

Slowly, with an anxious frown on his brow,
the inspector had climbed those five floors again without noticing that there were
tenants outside their apartments on all the landings. It was Cécile he was thinking of,
that ungainly girl who had been the butt of so many of their jokes. Some of them in the
Police Judiciaire called her Maigret's lovebird.

This was where she had lived, in this
ordinary suburban apartment building; she used to climb up and down these gloomy stairs
every day; this was the atmosphere that still clung to her clothes when she came, scared
and patient, to sit in the waiting room at Quai des Orfèvres.

And when Maigret did condescend to see her,
he reflected, it was to ask, with a gravity that did a poor job of concealing his
sarcasm, ‘So did any other items go for a walk in your apartment last night? Has
the inkwell made it to the other end of the table? Did the paper-knife escape from its
drawer?'

Up on the fifth floor
he told the policeman not to let anyone into the apartment. He was about to open the
door himself, then he thought better of it and examined the mechanism of the doorbell.
It was not an electric bell, but was worked by a stout red and yellow cord that hung
from it. He pulled the cord. A sound like the ringing of a convent bell was heard in the
sitting room.

‘Officer, please make sure that no one
touches this door.'

That was in case of any fingerprints,
although he doubted that there would be any. He was in a bad mood. He couldn't
shake off the image of Cécile sitting in the Aquarium – as they called the waiting room
at police headquarters, because one wall consisted entirely of glass.

He wasn't a doctor, but it had not
been difficult for him to see that the old lady's death had occurred several hours
earlier, well before her niece's arrival at Quai des Orfèvres.

Had Cécile witnessed the crime? If so, she
hadn't told anyone and she hadn't cried out. She had stayed in the apartment
until morning, with the corpse for company, and she had washed and dressed as usual. He
had paid her enough attention when he arrived at the Police Judiciaire to see that her
appearance was normal.

Furthermore, he immediately checked a detail
that struck him as important. He searched for her room and failed to find it at first.
The apartment had three rooms at the front of the building: the sitting room, the dining
room and the aunt's bedroom.

To the right of the corridor, there was a
kitchen and a scullery. But on the other side of the kitchen he opened a door and found
a small room, dimly lit by a fanlight,
furnished with an iron bedstead, a wash-basin and a wardrobe.
It obviously acted as Cécile's bedroom.

The bed was unmade, there was soapy water in
the basin, some dark hairs caught in the teeth of her comb. A salmon-pink dressing gown
had been dropped on a chair.

Did Cécile already know when she was
dressing? It was hardly light when she had come out into the street, or rather the main
road that passed in front of the building, and she had waited for the tram at the stop
at least a hundred metres away. The fog had been thick.

When she reached the Police Judiciaire she
had filled in her form and then sat down in front of the black frame containing pictures
of the police officers who had been killed in action.

At last Maigret appeared on the stairs. She
jumped to her feet. He was going to see her. She would be able to talk to him …

But she had been kept waiting for over an
hour. The corridors were full of people coming and going. Inspectors kept calling out to
each other. Doors opened and closed again. People came to sit in the Aquarium, and the
clerk called them one after another. Only she was left … only Cécile was always kept
waiting.

What had made her decide to leave?

Maigret had been automatically filling his
pipe. He heard voices out on the landing: tenants discussing what had happened, and the
local police officer quietly advising them to go home.

What had become of Cécile?

That question never left his mind for the
full hour that
he spent alone in the
apartment. It lent him the weighty look, as if he were asleep, that his colleagues knew
so well.

And yet, in his own way, he was working. He
was already impregnated with the atmosphere of the building. Right from the front hall,
or rather the long, dark corridor that did duty for a front hall, it smelled of old age
and mediocrity. In this tiny apartment there was enough furniture for twice as many
rooms, all of it old and of different periods and styles, and none of it worth anything
at all. The place reminded him of provincial auctions when suddenly, after a death or a
bankruptcy, the public was admitted into the secrets of austere middle-class
households.

On the other hand, it was neat and tidy, and
meticulous cleanliness reigned. Every surface, however tiny, was polished; the smallest
knick-knacks stood in their proper places.

The apartment might just as well have been
lit by candlelight or oil- or gas-lamps as by electricity. It was of no particular
period, and there were old fittings for oil-lamps that now held electric bulbs.

The sitting room was more like a junk shop,
its walls covered with family portraits, watercolours and worthless engravings in black
and gilt imitation carved frames made of wood. An enormous mahogany partners'
desk, such as you still see used by the stewards of grand houses, took pride of place by
the window. Wrapping his hand in a handkerchief, Maigret opened its drawers one by one.
Some of them contained keys, ends of sealing-wax sticks, boxes of pills, a lorgnette
frame, diaries twenty years old,
yellowing
bills. The desk had not been forced open. Four of the drawers were empty.

Shabby armchairs with tapestry upholstery, a
little cabinet, a work table, two Louis XIV-style case clocks. Maigret found another
clock of the same kind in the dining room. There was another in the front hall, and he
found, with almost amused surprise, that two more such clocks were among the furnishings
of the dead woman's bedroom.

She obviously had a mania for them! The
strangest thing was that all the clocks were working. Maigret realized that at midday
when they began striking one after another.

The dining room too was so full of furniture
that you could hardly move around in it. As elsewhere in the apartment, there were thick
curtains at the windows. You might have thought the inhabitants feared the light of
day.

Why was the old woman wearing a single
stocking when death took her by surprise in the middle of the night? He looked for the
other one and found it on the rug. Stout black woollen stockings. The old lady's
legs were swollen and bluish, and Maigret concluded that Cécile's aunt had dropsy.
A walking-stick that he found on the floor showed she was not entirely confined to her
bed and could get around the apartment.

Finally, hanging above the bed, there was a
cord like the one on the landing. He pulled it, listened, heard the front door opening,
went to close it again and grumbled when he saw the tenants still occupying the
landing.

Why had Cécile left Quai des Orfèvres
suddenly? What could have made her decide to do so, when she had such serious news to
give him?

Only she knew. Only
she could tell him, and Maigret was getting increasingly anxious as time went on.

In spite of himself, he wondered what the
two women did all day as he looked at all that furniture, the surfaces overloaded with
fragile spun glass and china ornaments, each uglier than its neighbour, glass globes
with the grotto of Lourdes or the Bay of Naples inside them, portrait photos
precariously balancing in copper-wire frames, an almost transparent Japanese cup with a
handle that had been stuck back on it, artificial flowers in champagne flutes that
didn't match.

He went back to the bedroom where
Cécile's aunt still lay on her mahogany bed, with that inexplicable detail of a
stocking on one leg.

It was about one o'clock when he heard
movements on the pavement outside, then on the stairs and the landing. At that moment
the inspector was sitting in the depths of one of the armchairs, in his overcoat and
with his hat on his head, and the air was blue with the smoke from his pipe. He jumped,
as if waking from a dream. Voices met his ears.

‘How are things going,
inspector?' It was Bideau, the deputy public prosecutor, offering his hand with a
smile. He was followed by the tiny figure of Marbille the examining magistrate, the
forensic pathologist and a clerk already looking for a table where he could spread out
his papers. ‘Interesting case?' Bideau continued. ‘Heavens, not
exactly cheerful here, is it?'

Next moment the van from Criminal Records
drew up beside the pavement, and the photographers invaded the apartment building with
their bulky cameras. Intimidated,
the
Bourg-la-Reine police inspector joined these gentlemen, upset that no one was paying him
any attention.

‘Go home, ladies and gentlemen,'
the local officer on duty at the door repeated to the tenants. ‘There's
nothing to see here. You'll be questioned one by one soon, but for heaven's
sake go away now! Go away! I said go away!'

It was five in the afternoon. The fog had
turned to a drizzle, and the streetlights had come on earlier than usual. Maigret, hat
well down on his forehead, went in through the icy porch of the Police Judiciaire
building and quickly climbed the dimly lit stairs.

An involuntary glance at the Aquarium, which
looked more like a real aquarium than ever in the electric light, showed him four or
five people waiting, as motionless as the waxworks in the Grévin museum. The inspector
wondered why green wallpaper and a green set of table and chairs had been chosen for the
waiting room; they cast a deathly hue on all faces.

‘I think you're wanted,
sir,' said one of Maigret's junior colleagues in passing, files tucked under
his arm.

‘The boss would like to see
you,' said the clerk in his turn, looking up from the stamps that he was sticking
on envelopes.

Without going to his own office first,
Maigret knocked on the commissioner's door. The only light in his office came from
the desk lamp.

‘Well, Maigret?' There was
silence from the inspector. ‘A tiresome case, don't you agree? I suppose
there's no news from the scene of the crime?'

Maigret sensed that
there was unwelcome information coming. He waited, his heavy brows drawn together.

‘I sent a message to warn you, but
you'd already left Bourg-la-Reine. It's about that girl … a little while ago
Victor …'

Victor, who had a stammer, was one of the
concierges in the Palais de Justice. He had a walrus moustache and a voice as raucous as
an old seadog's.

‘… Victor was going along the corridor
when he met the public prosecutor in a bad mood. Is this, the public prosecutor asked
him, what you call a properly swept floor, my friend?'

Everyone knew what it meant when the public
prosecutor called someone his friend. Maigret's mind was intent on anticipating
what the head of the PJ was going to tell him.

‘To cut a long story short, he put the
fear of God into Victor, who went straight to the broom cupboard. Guess what he found
there?'

‘Cécile,' said the inspector,
unsurprised, as he lowered his head. He had had plenty of time at Bourg-la-Reine, while
the usual procedures were going on round him, to think of all the hypotheses about
Cécile's departure, and none of them satisfied him. He kept returning to the same
question:
What can have induced her to leave Quai des Orfèvres when she had such
serious news to tell me?

He felt increasingly certain that it had not
been her own idea to leave the waiting room. Someone had joined her there, at the
headquarters of the police force itself, only a little way from Maigret, and Cécile had
followed that person.

What argument had been
used? Who had enough power over the young woman to …?

And now, suddenly, he understood.

‘I might have known it!' he
muttered, striking his forehead with his fist.