The Strangers in the House

  Georges Simenon

  * * *

  THE STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE

  Translated by Howard Curtis

  Contents

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  About the Author

  Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1903. He is best known in Britain as the author of the Maigret novels, and his prolific output of over 400 novels and short stories has made him a household name in continental Europe. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life.

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  The Strangers in the House

  ‘I love reading Simenon. He makes me think of Chekhov’

  – William Faulkner

  ‘A truly wonderful writer … marvellously readable – lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with the world he creates’

  – Muriel Spark

  ‘Few writers have ever conveyed with such a sure touch, the bleakness of human life’

  – A. N. Wilson

  ‘One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century … Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories’

  – Guardian

  ‘A novelist who entered his fictional world as if he were part of it’

  – Peter Ackroyd

  ‘The greatest of all, the most genuine novelist we have had in literature’

  – André Gide

  ‘Superb … The most addictive of writers … A unique teller of tales’

  – Observer

  ‘The mysteries of the human personality are revealed in all their disconcerting complexity’

  – Anita Brookner

  ‘A writer who, more than any other crime novelist, combined a high literary reputation with popular appeal’

  – P. D. James

  ‘A supreme writer … Unforgettable vividness’

  – Independent

  ‘Compelling, remorseless, brilliant’

  – John Gray

  ‘Extraordinary masterpieces of the twentieth century’

  – John Banville

  Part One

  1

  ‘Hello? Rogissart?’

  The public prosecutor was standing by the bed in his nightshirt, his wife looking up at him in surprise. He was cold all over, but especially his feet: he had got up so abruptly, he hadn’t found his slippers.

  ‘Who is this?’ he said into the receiver.

  He frowned at the answer and repeated for his wife’s benefit:

  ‘Loursat? Is that you, Hector?’

  Intrigued, his wife pushed back the blanket and reached out a long, excessively white arm to the other earpiece.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Maître Loursat, Madame Rogissart’s first cousin, calmly announced:

  ‘I’ve just found a stranger in my house. In a bed on the second floor. He was dying when I got there. You’re going to have to deal with it, Gérard. I’m really sorry. I think he might have been murdered.’

  When the prosecutor hung up, Laurence Rogissart, who hated her cousin, said:

  ‘He’s drunk again!’

  And yet that evening, everything had appeared to be in its place, especially as it was raining, which added to the general feeling of stagnation. It was the first cold rain of the season, which meant that, apart from a few loving couples, the cinema in Rue d’Allier hadn’t had any patrons. The box-office lady was all the more furious at being stuck inside her glass cage for no reason, freezing as she watched the raindrops falling past the globe-shaped lights.

  Moulins was the Moulins of early October. In the various hotels – the Hôtel de Paris, the Dauphin, the Allier – commercial travellers ate from fixed-price menus, served by girls in black dresses, black stockings and white aprons. Every now and again, a car passed in the street, on the way to somewhere: Nevers, Clermont, perhaps even Paris.

  The shops were all shut, and the rain fell on their signs: the huge red hat at Bluchet’s, Tellier’s giant stopwatch, the gold horse’s head over the horse-meat butcher’s.

  The whistle heard behind the houses was the local train from Montluçon, with barely ten passengers on board.

  At the Prefecture, a dinner was being held for about twenty: the monthly dinner, regularly attended by the same guests.

  Most shutters were closed, and there weren’t many people at lighted windows. What few footsteps there were in the maze of rain-slicked streets were furtive, almost ashamed.

  Standing at the corner of a street filled with notaries and lawyers, the house of the Loursats – the Loursat de Saint-Marcs, to be precise – appeared even drowsier, even more secretive than the others, with its wings, its paved courtyard separated from the street by a high wall, and in this courtyard, in the middle of an empty ornamental pond, an Apollo that no longer spat water through the tube sticking out of his mouth.

  In the dining room on the first floor, Hector Loursat sat with his stooped back to the fireplace, in which lumps of coal were burning on a grate, giving off yellowish smoke.

  He had bags under his eyes, pretty much as on any other evening, and his eyes themselves were watery, making his gaze vague and disturbing.

  The table was round, the tablecloth white. Facing Loursat, his daughter Nicole ate with calm, glum concentration.

  Neither spoke. Loursat was a messy eater, bent over his plate as if to graze, chewing noisily, sighing occasionally with boredom or fatigue.

  When he had finished with one dish, he pushed back his chair a little in order to make space for his belly and waited.

  It was so obvious that he was waiting, it became a signal for Nicole to turn slightly towards the maid, who was standing by the wall.

  At this, the maid opened a hatch and shouted into the dumb waiter:

  ‘Next!’

  Downstairs, deep in the grey kitchen, which was vaulted like a chapel, a thin, ugly little woman eating at the end of a table stood up, took a dish from the oven and slid it into the dumb waiter.

  As always happened, after a few metres the mechanism stalled: something had jammed, and the operation had to be restarted several times until by some miracle the maid, waiting upstairs, saw the expected food arrive at last.

  The chimney didn’t draw. The house was full of things that either didn’t work or worked badly.

  They were all aware of it.

  His elbows on the table, Loursat heaved a sigh each time the dumb waiter broke down, and, whenever a gust of wind made the smoke from the coal billow, Nicole showed her displeasure by tapping on the table.

  ‘Well, Angèle?’

  ‘Here you are, Mademoiselle.’

  Nicole drank white wine from the carafe, while her father served himself from a bottle of Burgundy, timing things so that he would finish it during the meal.

  ‘Could Mademoiselle settle my wages straight after dinner?’

  Loursat listened, although without paying undue attention. He barely knew the maid, a tall girl, stronger than those they were used to, well-built, energetic and happily disrespectful.

  ‘Did you fill out your book?’

  ‘I gave it back to Fine.’

  Fine was Joséphine, the grimacing dwarf downstairs who was sending the dishes up.

  ‘Very well.’

  Loursat didn’t ask his daughter why the maid was leaving, if she had handed in her notice herself or was being dismissed. There was a new maid every two weeks, but he didn’t care.

  He ate boiled chestnuts and managed to get them all over his black velvet smoking jacket. Not that it mattered: the jacket was already filthy. They could hear water dripping in a drainpipe – probably another thing that needed repairing.

  Once he had finished his chestnuts, Loursat waited a moment to make sure there was nothing else to eat, rolled his napkin into a ball, put it down on the table – he could never be bothered to fold it – and stood up.

  It was the same thing every evening, without the slightest variation. He didn’t look at Nicole. Already turned towards the door, he muttered:

  ‘Good night.’

  By now his gait was heavy and stumbling. Since morning, Loursat had had time to drink two or three bottles of Burgundy, more likely three, always the same kind, which he would go down and fetch from the cellar as soon as he woke and cautiously bring upstairs.

  Anyone watching outside could have followed his progress from the slivers of light filtering through the shutters one after the other, leading eventually to his study, the last room in the right wing.

  The door of the study was padded, and always had been, ever since the days of Loursat’s father, who was also a lawyer, perhaps even since the days of his grandfather, who had been mayor of the town for twenty years. The black percale was torn in places, like an old country billiard table.

  In the fireplace, instead of andirons or a grating, they had once, for some reason, had to temporarily install a little cast-iron stove, and there it had remained, with its curved pipe.

  It purred and soon grew red, and occasionally Loursat approached it as he might approach an obedient dog, fed it hearty shovelfuls of coal and crouched to poke it.

  The local train from Mont
luçon had left. Another whistle sounded across the town, but it was only a goods train. A film flickered on the screen for the few people scattered around the cinema auditorium, which smelt of wet clothes. The prefect led his guests to the smoking room and opened a box of cigars.

  Prosecutor Rogissart had taken advantage of the fact that there was no bridge party tonight to go to bed early, and his wife was reading beside him in bed.

  Loursat blew his nose the way old men and peasants did, first unfolding his handkerchief to its full extent, making a trumpet-like sound, three times, five times, then folding the handkerchief just as meticulously.

  He was alone in his overheated lair, the door locked as usual – he preferred it that way, though Nicole called it a vice of his.

  His grey hair was naturally dishevelled and he made it even more so by running his fingers through it the wrong way. His beard was vaguely cut to a sharp point, and his moustache had turned yellow-brown where he held his cigarette.

  There were cigarette ends everywhere, on the floor and in the ashtrays, on the stove and on the bindings of the books.

  Loursat smoked for a while, then trudged over to get the bottle that was waiting for him, warming up in the corner of the fireplace.

  Cars passed in Rue de Paris, several blocks away, their windscreen wipers moving, rain in the headlights, pallid faces inside.

  Loursat did nothing, let his cigarette go out, relit it and spat the butt out, while his hand pulled out a book and opened it at random.

  He read a little, sipped at his wine, grunted, and crossed and uncrossed his legs. Books were piled up to the ceiling. There were more in the corridors and in most of the rooms in the house, some that were his, some that had belonged to his father or grandfather.

  With no particular aim in mind, he would plant himself next to one of the shelves, then, forgetting perhaps that he was there, smoke a whole cigarette, before grabbing a book and taking it back with him to his desk like a young dog hiding bread crusts under the straw in its kennel …

  This had been going on for twenty years, eighteen to be precise, and in all that time nobody had ever got him to accept a dinner invitation – not his cousins the Rogissarts, who gave a dinner followed by bridge every Friday, not the senior member of the bar association, who had been a good friend of his father’s, not his brother-in-law Dossin, who entertained politicians, and not successive prefects, who, when they started out, not knowing the score, would automatically invite him.

  He scratched himself, snorted, coughed, blew his nose and spat. He felt hot. His smoking jacket was now covered in fine ash. He read ten pages of a legal treatise, then switched to the middle of a book of seventeenth-century memoirs.

  As the hours passed, he would become heavier, his eyes increasingly watery, his gestures almost hieratically slow.

  The master bedroom, the room in which for generations the masters of the house had slept and which he himself had occupied with his wife, was in the other wing of the same floor. But he hadn’t been in there for a long time. When the bottle was empty, sometimes about midnight, sometimes much later, at one or three in the morning, he would get to his feet, never forgetting to switch off the main light, or to half open the window for fear of the smoke from the stove.

  Then he would proceed to a nearby room that had once been his secretary’s office, where he had set up an iron bed, and, leaving the door open, would undress, smoke some more, already lying down, and eventually fall asleep with a noisy sigh.

  That evening – it was the second Wednesday of the month, the day of the regular dinner at the Prefecture – Loursat topped up the stove with particular care, because, thanks to the cold outside and the rain on the windowpanes, the heat in the room was becoming ever more voluptuous.

  He could hear the raindrops and, occasionally, the squeak of a shutter that hadn’t been properly shut; the wind was rising and sudden gusts swept through the streets. He could also hear, with the clarity of a metronome, the ticking of his gold stopwatch in his waistcoat pocket.

  He had reread some pages from the journeys of Tamberlaine, a book that smelt of old paper, the binding falling apart. He might have been about to get up and look for something else to browse through when he slowly raised his head, surprised and intrigued.

  Usually, apart from the whistles of the goods trains and the distant passing of cars, no noise reached him other than the footsteps of Joséphine the Dwarf, who at ten o’clock – the time never varied – would go upstairs to her room, which was just above the study, and who was in the habit, before going to bed, of walking around the room twenty times in all directions.

  But Fine had been in bed for a long time now. The noise that had reached Loursat in his torpor was a new noise, something completely unaccustomed.

  He thought at first of the cracking of a whip, the kind he heard in the morning when the dustman drove his horse-drawn cart along the street.

  But it hadn’t come from the street and it wasn’t a whip. The echo of the noise was deeper and longer than that. In actual fact, it was as if something had hit him in the chest. He pricked up his ears, his face expressing annoyance, displeasure and even a feeling that might not have been anxiety but looked a lot like it.

  The extraordinary thing about it was the silence afterwards. A silence of abnormal density in which it seemed as if shockwaves were uneasily stirring the air.

  He didn’t stand up immediately. He poured himself a glass of wine and gulped it down, put his cigarette back in his mouth, got warily to his feet, walked to the door and stood listening before opening it.

  In the corridor, he turned on the light switch. The three dusty ceiling lamps along the length of the corridor shone down on nothing but solitude and silence.

  ‘Nicole!’ he said in a low voice.

  He was certain now that what he had heard was a gunshot. He kept telling himself it might have come from outside, but didn’t believe it.

  He wasn’t in a panic. He walked slowly, his shoulders stooped as always, swaying like a bear – his cousin, Rogissart’s wife, accused him of adopting that gait to intimidate people. And that wasn’t the only thing she said about him!

  He reached the top of the white stone staircase with its iron banister and leaned over to look at the hall downstairs. It was empty.

  ‘Nicole!’

  As softly as he spoke, his voice echoed through the house.

  He might have been about to turn round and plunge back into the warm peace of his study when he thought he perceived furtive footsteps above his head, even though nobody lived in that part of the second floor, which was full of attic rooms that had been used by the domestic staff in the days when they had a butler, a chauffeur, a gardener and several maids.

  Nicole slept at the end of the left wing, and her father advanced along a corridor similar to the one that led to his study, except that one of the three ceiling lights was missing. Stopping outside a door, he had the impression that light was coming out from underneath it and that this light went off abruptly.

  ‘Nicole,’ he called again.

  He knocked at the door. His daughter asked:

  ‘What is it?’

  He could have sworn that the sound didn’t come from the bed, which must be to the left – at least it had been there the last time Loursat had gone into his daughter’s room by chance, perhaps two years earlier.

  ‘Open up!’ he said simply.

  ‘Just a minute …’

  The minute was a very long one. Behind the door, someone moved, trying hard to make his or her movements as silent as possible.

  At the end of the corridor was a spiral staircase that served the whole house: the backstairs, for the use of tradesmen.

  Loursat was still waiting when a step on that staircase creaked. There was no doubt about it. And when he turned, as quickly as he could, he was certain, absolutely certain, that he saw someone pass, a man rather than a woman, he would even have sworn it was a young man in a beige raincoat.

  The door opened, and Nicole stood looking at her father with her usual calm, devoid of curiosity or affection, a calm born of perfect indifference.

  ‘What do you want?’