Cécile is Dead (8 page)

He had insisted on a proper burial, leaving
from the home of the deceased, where a chapel of rest was to be set up in the
fifth-floor apartment.

‘In this family,' he pronounced,
‘we are not in the habit of burying our dead in any old fashion.'

On that same morning, he had gone to the
railway station to meet his wife, who was also in deep mourning, and their five
children, who were to follow the procession in descending order of size, holding their
hats. Five boys, all with fair hair too unruly to submit to being combed.

This was the time of day when traffic on the
main road was especially dense. In particular, there was an uninterrupted line of vans
coming back from Les Halles. It was clear weather, the sun shining, but not strongly,
the air cold and biting; the mourners who had come were stamping their feet and digging
their hands in their pockets to keep warm.

Maigret had not slept the night before. He
and Lucas had been watching his gang of Poles from the room in Rue de Birague. He had
been feeling morose and irritable ever since the death of Cécile three days earlier. The
Poles, who prevented him from devoting his mind entirely to the Bourg-la-Reine case,
were really beginning to annoy him. At seven in the morning he made up his mind.

‘You stay here,' he told Lucas.
‘I'm going to nab the first of them to leave their quarters.'

‘Be careful, sir,' said Lucas.
‘They're armed.'

Maigret shrugged his
shoulders, went into the Hôtel des Arcades and stationed himself near the staircase. A
quarter of an hour later, the door of the Poles' room opened. A giant of a man
emerged and began coming downstairs. Maigret pounced on him from behind, and the two men
rolled over and over until they reached the ground floor, where the inspector got to his
feet after handcuffing his adversary. On hearing his whistle, Torrence came running.

‘Take him to headquarters,'
Maigret told him. ‘I'll leave it to you to grill him … until he talks,
understand? I want him squealing loud and long.'

And after knocking the dust off his
clothing, he went to eat croissants, washed down with coffee, at the bar of the nearby
café.

Everyone in the Police Judiciaire knew that
it was better not to cross him at such times, when even Madame Maigret didn't
venture to ask when he would be home for lunch or dinner.

Now he was there on the pavement outside the
Bourg-la-Reine apartment building, leaning on the window of the grocery shop and smoking
his pipe with angry little puffs. The case had been in the newspapers, and there were a
good many curious onlookers, not to mention half a dozen journalists and some
photographers. The two hearses stood outside the building, Juliette Boynet's in
front, Cécile's behind it, and the tenants of the apartments, on the initiative of
Madame With-All-Due-Respect, who claimed that it was the least they could do, had
clubbed together to buy a wreath.

In Memory Of Our
Much-Lamented Landlady
.

Outside stood the Monfils couple and their
sons, representing the family of Juliette Boynet, née Cazenove, another group
representing the family of her dead husband, the Boynets and the Machepieds, who lived
in Paris.

There was evidently no love lost between the
two groups, who glared at one another. Boynet and Machepied both claimed that they had
been robbed, saying that at the time of her husband's death the old woman had
promised that part of her fortune would return to his family some day. They had
presented themselves at Police Judiciaire headquarters as a delegation the day before,
and the commissioner had seen them, for they were persons of some importance in the
city, one of them a municipal councillor.

‘Those gentlemen say there's a
will, Maigret,' the commissioner had said, ‘and when I tell them that the
apartment has been searched, they won't listen.'

They bore Maigret a grudge, they bore
Monfils a grudge, they bore Juliette a grudge. In short, all gathered together for the
funeral considered that they had been robbed, first and foremost Gérard Pardon, who
didn't talk to anyone and seemed more nervous than ever.

Poverty had prevented him from wearing full
mourning, and he had no overcoat on, only an old khaki raincoat with a black armband on
one sleeve.

His sister Berthe stood beside him, worrying
because he was so agitated. She was a plump girl, pretty and stylish, and she had not
thought it necessary to exchange her cherry-red hat for one of a darker colour.

Monsieur Dandurand was also present, among
four or
five expensively clad gentlemen whose
fingers were laden with rings and who had arrived in a flashy car with a twelve-cylinder
engine. The Siveschi family were there too, except for the mother, who wasn't up
and dressed yet. Madame Piéchaud the grocer had left Madame Benoit in charge of her shop
for a moment, giving her time to go upstairs and sprinkle the coffins with holy
water.

The funeral director, who was nervous
because there was to be another burial at eleven o'clock, was not standing with
any of these distinct groups, but was trying in vain to find out who officially
represented the family. He was particularly anxious about the photographers. ‘Not
yet, please, gentlemen. At least wait until everyone is here!'

It would be terrible if the papers were to
print a picture of such a disorganized funeral procession!

Someone pointed out Maigret, who
didn't seem to notice. As the biers with the two coffins were being brought
downstairs, he touched the shoulder of Gérard Pardon, who jumped.

‘Give me a moment, will you?' he
whispered, drawing the young man aside.

‘What do you want this
time?'

‘Your wife must have told you that I
visited her yesterday when you were out.'

‘Are you telling me that you searched
our lodgings?' He laughed; it was a nervous, painful little snigger. ‘Did
you find what you were looking for?'

When the inspector said, ‘Yes,'
Gérard looked at him in alarm.

‘You see, at a
moment when your wife's back was turned, my attention was attracted by a pot
plant. I'm a bit of a gardener in my spare time, and something about that plant
pot didn't look quite natural to me. Sure enough, this is what I found in the
soil, which had been freshly turned over.'

And he showed the young man a small key held
in the hollow of his hand – a key that would open the front door of Juliette
Boynet's apartment.

‘Strange, isn't it?' he
went on. ‘Such a coincidence … Back in my office a little later, I found a
locksmith waiting for me, a locksmith who lives and works only a hundred metres from
here. He wanted to tell me that he had made a similar key hardly two weeks
ago.'

‘So what does that prove?'

Gérard was trembling, looking desperately
round as if in search of aid, and his glance fell on his sister's coffin as the
black-clad men were hoisting it into the hearse.

‘Are you going to arrest
me?'

‘I don't know yet.'

‘Well, if you questioned the locksmith
you must know who gave me that key.'

Cécile had given it to him; the
locksmith's statement left no doubt about that.

‘On Monday 25 September,' he had
said, ‘a young woman of about thirty came to my workshop with a Yale key to the
front door of an apartment, asking me to make her a copy of it. I asked her to leave me
the key as a model, but she said she needed it because it was the only key to that lock
she had, so I took an imprint. She came back for
the second key next day and paid me twelve francs
seventy-five. It was only when I read in the newspapers about Cécile Pardon, who had
just been murdered, and particularly when I remembered her slight squint, that I
…'

The funeral procession was setting off; the
master of ceremonies hurried over to Gérard, gesticulating, and Maigret said in an
undertone, ‘We can talk about this later.'

Gérard and his sister Berthe were placed
right behind the hearses, but they had not gone ten metres before the Monfils family,
competing with them for precedence, moved up to walk beside the brother and sister.

The Boynets and Machepieds, who were not
going to any trouble to pretend they felt deep grief, followed more discreetly,
discussing the inheritance, and after them came Monsieur Dandurand, with the gentlemen
who wore such large rings, one of whom brought up the rear of the procession, driving
their car.

From the first the pace was much too fast,
because of the horse with a mind of its own. On the other hand, when everyone had to
turn left for the church, thus crossing the main road, there was a terrible shambles,
and the traffic was held up for several minutes, including three trams one after
another.

Gérard's wife had not come, heavily
pregnant as she was. Her baby would be due in a week's time at the most. Maigret
had spent an hour with her the day before, in the couple's lodgings: a two-roomed
apartment in Rue du Pas-de-la-Mule, above a butcher's shop.

She must be barely twenty-three years old,
and the
resignation of a poverty-stricken
housewife could already be seen on her face, which had lost the bloom of youth. You
could tell that she was struggling to make those two rooms habitable, with insufficient
financial means. A number of items must already have gone on their way to the
pawnbroker's, and Maigret noticed that the gas had been turned off.

‘Gérard has never had any luck,'
she sighed, without resentment. ‘Yet he's such a nice man, and much more
intelligent than many others who have good jobs. Perhaps he's
too
intelligent?'

Her name was Hélène. Her father worked in
the indirect taxation office, and she dared not tell him the household's real
situation but let him think Gérard was working and the two of them were happy.

‘You found him a little embittered, I
expect, but put yourself in his place. Everything has gone against him for so long. He
chases round all day, answering the small ads … Oh, I hope at least you don't
suspect him, inspector. He could never do anything the least little bit dishonest …
Maybe it's because he's over-scrupulous that he's getting nowhere. You
know, in his last job, when he was working for a firm selling vacuum cleaners, there was
a theft, and Gérard suspected one of his colleagues, but he didn't say anything.
And when his boss started asking
him
questions, as if he were accusing him,
Gérard left rather than give his colleague away … Oh yes, you can look round our
lodgings. You won't find anything interesting, only bills.'

And there was the pot plant standing on the
window-sill!
Maigret had noticed that while
the soil looked freshly turned, the geranium in the pot had died some time ago. So he
took advantage of the moment when Hélène wasn't looking …

Now, with his hands in his pockets, he was
walking along the pavement, to one side of the procession, which allowed him to smoke
his pipe. Bringing up the rear, he saw the two Siveschi girls, Nouchi and Potsi, who
were acting as if they were at a party and wanted to see everything there was to be
seen. Madame With-All-Due-Respect had handed over her lodge to a woman neighbour for an
hour (she was unaware that Maigret had stationed a police officer opposite the
building). She was going to the church but not to the cemetery because of her stiff
neck; she was afraid of draughts.

Suddenly the column stopped, a halt that was
not part of the programme. The mourners craned their necks and stood on tiptoe to see
what was going on.

Juliette Boynet and Cécile were out of luck.
Another funeral procession, this one late while theirs was early, was coming out of a
road intersecting their own and making for the church. The horses pawed the road with
their hooves. Some of the men left the procession for a moment to go into a little café
for a quick drink and were seen wiping their mouths as they came out again.

Organ music was heard. Behind them, cars
were driving along the Route Nationale 20. Inside the church, the priest was giving the
last congregation his blessing at high speed, and the double doors opened for the next
funeral service.

‘Et ne nos inducas in tentationem
…'

The master of
ceremonies, in his cocked hat, was walking up and down his procession, herding them like
a sheepdog.

‘Sed libera nos a malo …'

‘Amen!'

The new party of mourners went into the
church before the last party had finished going out. There was room for only one of the
coffins, Juliette Boynet's, under the catafalque. Cécile's was placed on the
paving stones behind it, and the priest went on chanting.

‘Libera nos Domine …'

Shoes shuffled on the floor, chairs were
pushed back. Fresh air flooded in through the open door, beyond which the sunny street
could be seen. Gérard, in the front row, kept turning his head. Was it Maigret he was
looking for? Charles Dandurand's companions were acting very correctly, putting
100-franc notes in the collection. Berthe, in her cherry-red hat, was keeping an eye on
her brother as if she were afraid he would do something stupid.

‘Pater noster …'

Everyone jumped, because a news agency
photographer had had no compunction about using a magnesium flash.

Maigret, buttoned up in his big overcoat
with its velvet collar, his shoulder against a stone pillar, was moving his lips as if
in prayer. Perhaps he was indeed praying for poor Cécile, who had waited so long for him
in the Aquarium at the police headquarters on Quai des Orfèvres?

For the last three days he had been inclined
to snap at anyone who ventured to speak to him as he walked along
the corridor of the Police Judiciaire building, a bulky,
almost threatening figure, mulling over angry thoughts as he chewed the stem of his
pipe.