Cécile is Dead Read online

  ‘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 …’

  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.

  2.

  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 n
iece’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 hi
s 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.

  ‘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.