Cécile is Dead (4 page)

‘What do you mean?'

‘I might have guessed she
wouldn't leave this building. I should have known nothing would make her leave it
…'

He was furious with himself.

‘Dead, of course,' he growled,
looking at the floor.

‘Yes. If you'd like to come with
me …'

The commissioner pushed a bell and told the
office boy, ‘If anyone phones or wants to see me, I'll be back in a
minute.'

They were both downcast, but Maigret also
had a guilty conscience. A day that had started so well! That delicious waft of air
scented with coffee, croissants and rum came back to his mind. The morning's
luminous misty air …

‘Oh, and by the way, Janvier
telephoned. It seems that your Poles …'

Maigret waved a hand as if to dismiss all
the Poles on earth from his mental horizon.

The commissioner had opened a glazed door.
They had talked of bricking up that doorway for at least ten years, but for practical
reasons nothing was ever done. The door took you straight from the Police Judiciaire to
the courtrooms of the Palais de Justice and Records. It was rather like being behind the
scenes in a theatre: narrow staircases, winding passages. When you had a defendant to be
taken to the public prosecutor's office …

On the right, the
stairs leading to the attic storey, Criminal Records and the laboratory. Further on, a
door with frosted glass panels, and beyond that door the sound of the law courts in the
Palais de Justice, lawyers coming and going, curious members of the public, interested
onlookers following hearings in the courts and the proceedings in criminal trials.

An officer was smoking a cigarette outside a
narrower door, set for no apparent reason right in the middle of a wall. He put his
cigarette out when he saw the two men coming.

Who knew about this door? The answer to that
was: everyone familiar with the police headquarters building! It opened into a large
cupboard, a cavity reaching some two metres back, where Victor, who wasn't fond of
taking unnecessary exercise, kept buckets and brooms.

The man on duty at the door went away. The
commissioner opened it, and as there was no light in the broom cupboard struck a
match.

‘There she is,' he said.

As Cécile tumbled in, she had not even been
able to fall full length, and she was wedged against the wall, while her head was bent
on her chest.

Maigret suddenly felt hot, mopped his face
with his handkerchief, and dug his pipe into his pocket, even though he had lit it.

There was no need for words. The
commissioner and the inspector looked at one another, and the latter automatically took
off his hat.

‘Do you know what I think, sir?
Someone went into the
waiting room and told
her that I was ready to see her, but not in my office. Someone she believed was from the
Police Judiciaire.'

The commissioner inclined his head.

‘It had to be done fast, do you see?
She was told that, all of a sudden, I could see her. She knew who had killed her aunt.
Opening this door – total darkness inside it – and when Cécile took a step …'

‘She was hit with a cosh or something
like that first, to stun her.'

The ridiculous green hat, lying on the
floor, confirmed this hypothesis. Besides, there was a little clotted blood in the
girl's dark hair.

‘She must have swayed, perhaps she
fell, and the murderer finished her off without a sound by strangling her.'

‘Are you sure, sir?'

‘That's what Forensics think. I
wanted them to wait for you before carrying out an autopsy. Why are you surprised? Her
aunt was strangled too, wasn't she?'

‘Exactly …'

‘What do you mean, Maigret?'

‘I mean I don't think the same
man could have committed both crimes. When Cécile turned up this morning she knew who
had killed her aunt.'

‘Do you think so?'

‘If she hadn't known,
she'd have raised the alarm earlier. The forensic pathologist says her aunt died
before two in the morning. Either Cécile saw the murder take place …'

‘Why wouldn't the murderer have
killed her at Bourg-la-Reine as well?'

‘Maybe she hid …
let me go on. Either she saw it happen, or she discovered her aunt's body when she
got up at about six thirty in the morning. I know from her alarm clock that she rose at
that time. And she didn't tell anyone. She came straight here.'

‘How strange!'

‘Not if we assume that she knew the
murderer. She wanted to tell me about it in person; she didn't trust the police in
Bourg-la-Reine. And the proof that she knew him is that she was killed to keep her from
talking.'

‘Suppose you had seen her as soon as
you got in this morning?'

Maigret blushed, something that he very
seldom did. ‘Well, yes … There's something I've missed … Perhaps the
murderer wasn't able to move freely at that moment … Or else he didn't know
yet …' He suddenly looked as if he were hunting something down. ‘No, it
doesn't hold water,' he growled.

‘What doesn't hold
water?'

‘What I'm saying. If the old
lady's killer had turned up at the Aquarium …'

‘Aquarium?'

‘Sorry, sir, that's what the
officers call the waiting room. If he'd turned up there, Cécile wouldn't
have followed him. So someone else came. Someone she didn't know, or someone she
trusted …'

The ever-stubborn Maigret looked at the dark
little heap that had fallen against the wall of the broom cupboard, among the brushes
and buckets.

‘It was someone she didn't
know,' he suddenly decided.

‘Why?'

‘She might have followed someone she
knew outside, but not in here. I might as well tell you I was expecting her to be found
in the Seine or on waste land somewhere. But …'

He took a couple of steps, bent to get
through the low doorway of the cupboard, struck a match and then another, gently nudged
the corpse.

‘What are you looking for,
Maigret?'

‘Her bag.' It was as
characteristic of her as her comical green hat, a voluminous bag like an attaché case
that Cécile always held on her lap like something precious when she was in the
Aquarium.

‘It's gone.'

‘From which you conclude …?'

Here Maigret, forgetting the hierarchy of
rank and letting his nerves get the better of him, snapped, ‘Conclude! Conclude!
Are
you
able to come to any conclusions?'

He noticed that the blond officer who had
been posted at the door a few paces away turned his head, and then Maigret began
again.

‘I apologize, sir, but you'll
agree that anyone can go in and out of this place just as they like. Someone could have
gone into the waiting room and …'

His nerves were all on edge. He clenched the
stem of his pipe, which had gone out, between his teeth. ‘Not to mention that damn
door that should have been bricked up ages ago.'

‘If you'd seen the girl when
…'

Poor Maigret was a sad sight: tall and
strong, solid as a
rock to all outward
appearances, bending his head to look at that pile of soft clothes at his feet, that
heap of inert matter, mopping his face with his handkerchief yet again.

‘Well, what are we going to do?'
asked the commissioner, hoping to change the subject.

Were they going to let the public know that
a crime had been committed on the premises of the Police Judiciaire, or rather in a kind
of passage linking the police headquarters to the law courts?

‘There's one thing I'd
like to ask, sir. Could Lucas take over the case of the Poles …?'

Perhaps it was hunger. Maigret hadn't
eaten since breakfast. And he had drunk three small shots of spirits, which had given
him an appetite.

‘Yes, if you like.'

‘Close that door, will you?'
Maigret told the officer. ‘And stay on guard. I'll be back right
away.'

From his office, and keeping his hat and
coat on, he phoned Madame Maigret.

‘No, I don't know just when
I'll be back. … It's too complicated to explain … no, no, I'm here in
Paris!'

Should he call for some sandwiches to be
brought in from the Brasserie Dauphine, as usual? But he needed fresh air. Fine rain was
still falling outside. He preferred the little bar in the middle of the Pont-Neuf, close
to the statue of Henri IV.

‘Ham,' he ordered when he got
there.

‘Are you all right,
inspector?'

The waiter knew him. When Maigret's
eyelids seemed so heavy, and he had that stubborn look …

‘Work, is
it?'

Some of the customers were intent on a game
of cards near the counter. Others were playing the fruit machine.

Maigret bit into his sandwich, thinking that
Cécile was dead. In spite of his heavy overcoat, it sent a cold shiver down his
spine.

When someone mused out loud in
Maigret's presence about the resignation to their lot of the humble, sick and
disabled, of the thousands of people who lived reclusive lives in the honeycomb cells of
the big city, seeing no better prospects ahead of them, he would often shrug his
shoulders. He knew from experience that human beings will adapt to anywhere they find
themselves, as soon as they can fill that place with their own warmth, odour and
habits.

The concierge's lodge, where the
inspector was seated in a creaking wicker chair, measured less than two metres fifty by
three metres. Its ceiling was low. The glazed door, which had no curtain over it, looked
out on the darkness of the corridor, for there was no light in the stairwell until a
tenant turned the time switch on. The lodge contained a bed with a red eiderdown, and on
the table with its waxed brown tablecloth lay the cold remains of a pig's trotter,
part of a white loaf, a knife and a glass with purplish dregs of wine in it.

Sitting on a chair, Madame
With-All-Due-Respect was talking to him, her cheek almost welded to her shoulder because
of her chronic stiff neck, her throat wrapped for warmth in thermal wadding of a nasty
pink shade that contrasted with her black scarf.

‘No, inspector,
with all due respect I won't take the armchair. It was my late husband's,
and in spite of my age and all my little aches and pains it wouldn't feel right
for me to sit in it myself.'

There was a musty smell in the room, spiced
with tom-cat pee. The tom-cat responsible was purring in front of the stove. The
electric lightbulb, dim with a layer of dust twenty years old, had a red tinge to it. It
was warm. The sound of rain falling on zinc somewhere could be heard, and now and then
so could the sound of a car driving fast along the main road, the din of heavy trucks
passing and the squealing brakes of trams.

‘As I was telling you, with all due
respect, the poor lady was our owner. Juliette Boynet. Boynet was her late
husband's name. And when I say
poor lady
, it's out of respect for
the dead, because she was a proper cow, God rest her soul. At least the good Lord
recently did us the favour of almost depriving her of the use of her legs. It's
not that I bear any more malice than the next person, I'm not one to wish my
neighbours ill, but when she could get about like everyone else life wasn't worth
living.'

At the Bourg-la-Reine police station just
now, Maigret had been surprised to hear that the dead woman was not yet sixty. In spite
of her badly tinted hair, her puffy face made her look older, and so did the large eyes
almost popping out of her head.

Juliette-Marie-Jeanne-Léontine Boynet,
née Cazenove, aged 59, born in Fontenay-le-Comte, Vendée; profession, none …

Madame
With-All-Due-Respect, with her neck awry, her hair in a tight bun like a peach stone,
the black wool scarf pulled tightly round her thin chest – you couldn't help
thinking that the old concierge's chest wouldn't be a pretty sight – was
telling her rosary of grievances with much the same avid satisfaction as she must have
felt when eating her pig's trotter a little earlier. From time to time she glanced
at the glazed door.

‘As you see, the house is quiet. At
this time of day everyone has come home, or almost everyone.'

‘How long has Madame Boynet been the
owner of this apartment building?'

‘For ever, I should think. Her husband
was a building contractor. He had several apartment blocks built in Bourg-la-Reine. He
died quite young, he was less than fifty, the best thing that could happen to him, poor
man. When he died she came to live here. Fifteen years ago, that was. With all due
respect, she was the same then as now, except that she could walk all right, and she was
always jumping down my throat – the same with the tenants, too. Woe betide you if she
saw a dog or a cat on the stairs. And if anyone had the nerve to ask for repairs to be
done …! Guess what, our building was the last in the whole district to get
electricity!'