Maigret Sets a Trap Read online

  They soon moved to the dinner table. It was still hot outside, but towards the end of the meal a fine rain began to fall, and its sound, audible through the open windows, was the accompaniment to the rest of the evening.

  Professor Tissot was not taking a holiday because, although he owned an apartment in Paris, he returned almost every evening to his country property in Ville d’Avray, south-west of the capital.

  Like previous guests, he began, while talking of this and that, to observe the inspector with rapid glances, as if each impression added another touch to the image he was forming of him. It was once they had retired to the drawing room, and the women had grouped themselves spontaneously in a corner, that he made a direct inquiry:

  ‘Does your responsibility not terrify you a little?’

  Maigret understood at once: ‘I presume you’re referring to the murders in Montmartre.’

  His interlocutor blinked agreement. And it was true that, for Maigret, this case was one of the most distressing in his career. It was not simply a matter of the police finding the murderer. And for society in general, it was not, as it normally would be, a question of punishing the killer.

  It was a matter of defence. Five women had died, and there was no reason to think it would stop there.

  Yet the normal defence mechanisms were not working. If proof were needed, it was that immediately after the first murder a large-scale police operation had been launched, but it had failed to prevent the subsequent attacks.

  Maigret believed he could see what Tissot meant when he spoke of his responsibility. It was upon him, or rather upon his approach to the problem, that the fate of a certain number of women depended.

  Had Pardon felt conscious of this as well, and was that the reason for his arranging this meeting?

  ‘Although it is in a sense my area of expertise,’ Tissot had added, ‘I wouldn’t care to be in your position, with the public panicking, the press doing nothing to reassure people, and the authorities calling for contradictory measures in response. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘I assume you have noted the characteristic features of the different crimes?’

  He was getting directly to the heart of the matter, and Maigret might have thought he was talking to one of his colleagues at the Police Judiciaire.

  ‘May I ask, between ourselves, what has struck you most about them?’

  This was almost like being asked an examination question, and Maigret, to whom this seldom happened, felt himself colouring.

  ‘The type of victim,’ he replied however, without hesitation. ‘You are asking about the principal feature, I take it? I haven’t told you about the others, which are quite numerous.

  ‘When, as in this case, we have a series of crimes, our first concern at Quai des Orfèvres is to look for points they have in common.’

  Tissot, a glass of Armagnac in his hand, nodded approval: the dinner had brought high colour to his cheeks.

  ‘The time of day, for example?’ he asked.

  It was easy to guess his desire to show that he knew about the case, that he too, by reading the press reports, had studied it from every angle, including that of the police investigation.

  It was Maigret’s turn to smile, since this was quite touching.

  ‘Yes, indeed, the time of day. The first attack took place at eight in the evening, in February. At that time of year, it was dark. The crime on the 3rd of March was a quarter of an hour later, and so on with the other murders, ending in July, with an attack a little before ten o’clock. Evidently, the killer was waiting for darkness to fall.’

  ‘And the dates?’

  ‘I’ve studied them twenty times, until they’re going round and round in my head. In my office, you’d find a calendar covered in notes in blue, black and red ink. As if I were trying to decipher some secret language, and I have tried every system and code I could think of. Some people wondered at first whether it was anything to do with the full moon.’

  ‘People do tend to attach a lot of importance to the moon when something happens that they can’t understand.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Speaking as a doctor, no.’

  ‘And as a man?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to apply here, at any rate, because only two of the attacks took place on nights when the moon was full. So I tried other approaches. The day of the week, for instance. Some people get drunk on Saturday nights. But only one of the crimes was committed on a Saturday. And there are certain occupations where the day off isn’t Sunday, but some other day.’

  Maigret had the feeling that Tissot had, like him, envisaged all these different hypotheses.

  ‘The first constant, if I can call it that, which we identified was the district of Paris, the neighbourhood west of Montmartre. It’s clear that the murderer knows this like the back of his hand. It’s as a result of this knowledge of the streets, the places that are well lit or not, and the distances between any two given points, that he has managed not only not to be caught, but even to avoid being seen.’

  ‘The papers have mentioned witnesses who claim to have seen him.’

  ‘We took statements from them all. The woman who lives on the first floor in Avenue Rachel, for instance, the one who was most categorical, claims the man was tall and thin, wearing a cream-coloured raincoat and a felt hat pulled down over his eyes. In the first place, that sounds like a very standard description, the kind you get too many of in cases like this, and at Quai des Orfèvres we tend not to trust them. And in any case, from the window where this woman says she was standing, it’s impossible to see the place she meant.

  ‘As for the statement from the little boy, that was more convincing, but so vague it can’t be used – it was about the attack in Rue Durantin, remember that?’

  Tissot nodded.

  ‘So, in short, this man knows the local streets very well indeed, and that’s why people imagine he lives there, which has created a particularly distressing atmosphere locally. Everyone is watching the neighbours with suspicion. We’ve received hundreds of letters informing us about the strange behaviour of perfectly normal people.

  ‘We tried thinking in terms of a man who might not live in the neighbourhood, but who might work there.’

  ‘That sounds very time-consuming.’

  ‘Thousands of man-hours. Not to mention going through our files, checking and updating our lists of known criminals and maniacs. You must have received, like the other hospitals, a questionnaire about any patients discharged in recent years.’

  ‘Yes, my colleagues sent in our reply.’

  ‘The same questionnaire was sent to mental hospitals all over France and even abroad, and to doctors who might have treated such patients.’

  ‘You suggested there was some other constant.’

  ‘You will have seen the photographs of the victims in the papers. They were published at different dates, obviously. I don’t know whether you had the curiosity to line them up side by side?’

  Tissot nodded again.

  ‘These women came from different backgrounds – geographically in the first place. One of them was born in Mulhouse in Alsace, another in the south of France, another in Brittany, and the other two in either Paris or the suburbs.

  ‘From the point of view of occupation, there is nothing to connect them: a prostitute, a midwife, a dressmaker, a post-office worker and a full-time mother.

  ‘They didn’t all live in the local area.

  ‘We’ve established that these women did not know each other, and it is more than probable that they had never even met.’

  ‘I hadn’t realized that you conducted your inquiries from such varying perspectives.’

  ‘We went further than that. We checked, for example, whether they might have worshipped at the same church, or shopped at the same butcher’s, that they weren’t patients of the same doctor or dentist, that they didn’t happen to go on a particular day of th
e week to the cinema or perhaps to a dance hall. So when I say thousands of man-hours …’

  ‘And all this has yielded no result?’

  ‘Nothing. In fact, I wasn’t really expecting that it would, but I was obliged to do the checks. We can’t let even the slightest possibility be overlooked.’

  ‘Did you think about holidays?’

  ‘I know what you mean. They might all have taken their holidays in the same resort, in the country or by the sea, but no, it wasn’t the case.’

  ‘So it seems that the murderer picked them by chance, just as the occasion presented itself.’

  Maigret was sure that Professor Tissot did not believe this, and that he had in fact noticed the same thing as himself.

  ‘No. Not entirely. These women, as I suggested, if you look carefully at their photographs, do have something in common: none of them is thin. If you don’t look at their faces, but pay attention to their build, you will see that they are all quite short and rather plump, even running to fat, with thick waists and generous hips, even Monique Juteaux, the youngest of them.’

  Pardon and the professor exchanged glances, and it was as if Pardon was saying ‘I told you so, didn’t I? He spotted it too.’

  Tissot smiled.

  ‘My compliments, my dear chief inspector, I see that you have nothing to learn from me.’

  He added, after a brief hesitation:

  ‘I did mention something about this to Pardon, wondering whether the police had noticed it. It was in part because of that, but also because I had been keen to meet you for a long time, that he invited my wife and me here tonight.’

  The men had been standing up all this while. Their host suggested they go and sit in a corner by the window overlooking Rue Picpus, from which they could hear the distant sounds of radio sets. The rain was still falling, but it was so fine that the drops seemed to be alighting delicately on top of each other, to form a sort of dark lacquer on the cobblestones.

  Maigret broke the silence.

  ‘Do you know, professor, the question that troubles me most, the one that would, in my view, help us lay hands on the killer, if we could only answer it?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘This man is not a child any longer. He’s lived for a number of years – twenty, thirty, maybe more – without committing any crime. And then in the space of six months, he has killed five times. The question I ask myself is, how did this start? Why, on the 2nd of February, did he suddenly stop being an inoffensive citizen, and turn into a dangerous maniac? You’re a man of science, do you see any explanation?’

  This made Tissot smile and once more he glanced across at his medical colleague.

  ‘We men of science, as you call us, are readily assumed to have knowledge and powers that we don’t possess. But I’m going to try and give you an answer, concerning not only the initial shock but the case in itself.

  ‘And I’m not going to use any particular scientific or technical jargon, because that often only masks our ignorance. Don’t you agree, Pardon?’

  He must have been alluding to colleagues towards whom he felt some animosity, since the two medical men seemed to understand one another.

  ‘Faced with a series of crimes like the one we’re talking about, most people will react by assuming that it must be the work of a maniac, a madman. And by and large, that is true. To kill five women in the circumstances surrounding these five murders, for no apparent reason, and then to lacerate their garments, certainly does not correspond to the behaviour of a normal man as we would think of it.

  ‘As for being able to determine why and how it began, that’s an extremely complex question, to which it is hard to give an answer.

  ‘Almost every week, I’m called on to testify as an expert witness at the Assizes. In the course of my career, I have seen the definition of responsibility in criminal matters change so rapidly that, in my view, all our conceptions of justice have been altered, if not overturned.

  ‘We used to be asked:

  ‘“At the time of the crime, was the accused responsible for his actions?”

  ‘And the word “responsible” had a fairly clear meaning.

  ‘Nowadays, it is the responsibility of Man, with a capital M, that we’re being asked to evaluate, to the point where I often get the impression that it isn’t the jury or the judges who decide the fate of a criminal, but us, the psychiatrists.

  ‘Yet in most cases, we know no more than a layman would.

  ‘Psychiatry can be described as a science when there is some trauma, say, or a tumour, or an abnormal transformation of a gland or a function.

  ‘In cases like that, we can state in all conscience whether a given man is either healthy or sick, responsible for his actions or not.

  ‘But those are the rarest of cases, and most of such individuals are already in institutions.

  ‘So why do some other people, such probably as the one we’re talking about, do things differently from their fellow men?

  ‘I think, chief inspector, that in those cases, you know as much if not more than we do.’

  Madame Pardon had come over to them, carrying the bottle of Armagnac.

  ‘Don’t let me interrupt you, gentlemen. We are exchanging recipes. A little Armagnac, professor?’

  ‘Just a drop.’

  They carried on chatting in the evening twilight, which was as soft as the rain falling outside, until past one in the morning. Maigret could not later remember all of their conversation, which had often veered on to parallel topics.

  He did remember that Tissot had said, with the irony of a man who has an old score to settle:

  ‘If I subscribed blindly to the theories of Freud or Adler, or even today’s psychoanalysts, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that our man is a sexual maniac, even though none of his victims was attacked sexually …

  ‘I could talk about complexes too, and impressions formed in early childhood.’

  ‘And you would reject such an explanation?’

  ‘I wouldn’t reject anything, but I distrust glib solutions.’

  ‘And you don’t have a personal theory?’

  ‘Theory, no. An idea perhaps, but I’m a little afraid, I confess, to mention it to you, because you carry responsibility for the investigation on your shoulders. It’s true that your shoulders are as broad as mine. Son of a farmer?’

  ‘From the Allier.’

  ‘I’m from the Cantal. My father’s eighty-eight and still lives on his farm.’

  And anyone would have sworn that the professor was prouder of that than of his scientific qualifications.

  ‘I have had pass through my hands many deranged or perhaps semi-deranged people, if I can use an unscientific expression, who have committed criminal acts, and if there is a constant, to use your own word just now, it is one that I have always identified in them: a conscious or unconscious need to assert themselves. Do you see what I mean by that?’

  Maigret nodded his assent.

  ‘Almost all of them have been regarded by those around them, rightly or wrongly, as spineless, mediocre or incompetent individuals, and they have felt humiliated by that. What is the mechanism that makes this long-repressed humiliation suddenly burst out, in the form of a crime, an attack or some gesture of defiance or bravado? Neither I, nor I think my colleagues, have been able to establish that with any certainty.

  ‘What I’m saying now isn’t orthodox opinion, especially when put very briefly, but I am convinced that so-called motiveless crimes are above all a display of pride.’

  Maigret looked thoughtful.

  ‘That fits with something I’ve noticed,’ he murmured.

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘That if criminals did not feel the need, sooner or later, to boast of their acts, there would be a great many fewer of them in prison. Do you know where we look first for the suspect, after the kind of crime we describe as squalid? In the old days it was in the brothels; now that they have been abolished we have to question streetwalk
ers. Because the men talk! They’re sure that with such women they are safe, it doesn’t matter, they’re not risking anything, which is in most cases true. They describe their crimes, sometimes with embellishments.’

  ‘Have you tried that lead this time?’

  ‘Over the last few months, we’ve approached all the prostitutes in Paris, especially in the Clichy–Montmartre neighbourhood.’

  ‘And that hasn’t produced anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it’s worse.’

  ‘You mean that, not having been able to get it off his chest, he’s bound to start again?’

  ‘I’d be inclined to think so.’

  Maigret had in recent days been studying historical examples with analogies to the Montmartre case, from Jack the Ripper to the Düsseldorf Vampire, by way of the Lamplighter of Vienna, and the homicidal Polish farmer in the French département of Aisne.

  ‘Do you think that such men would ever stop of their own accord?’ he asked. ‘Still, there is the example of Jack the Ripper, who stopped committing murders almost overnight.’

  ‘What evidence is there that he wasn’t himself the victim of an accident, or died of some disease? I’d go further than that, inspector, and here it’s not the director of Sainte-Anne talking, because I’m going to leave official theories a long way behind.

  ‘Individuals of the kind you’re after are driven, unconsciously, by the need to be caught, and that’s another form of pride. They can’t stand the idea that people around them should continue to think of them as quite ordinary, humdrum individuals. They have to be able to shout out loud to the whole world what they’ve done, what they’re capable of.

  ‘It doesn’t mean that they allow themselves to be caught deliberately, but, almost always, they take fewer and fewer precautions as their crimes mount up, in a way that seems to be taunting the police, tempting fate.

  ‘Such men have confessed to me that it was actually a relief to be arrested at last,’ Tissot added.

  ‘I have heard similar confessions.’

  ‘There you are!’