Maigret and the Lazy Burglar Page 3

  She gave him a look full of surprise and anxiety, a look he was accustomed to, common to people who live in fear of misfortune.

  ‘I know you, don’t I? You’ve been here before. Wait …’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret,’ he said, entering a room filled with warmth and the smell of stew.

  ‘That’s right, yes. I remember. What are you after him for this time?’

  There was no obvious hostility, just a kind of resignation, an acceptance of fate.

  She motioned him to a chair. On the worn leather armchair, the only one in the apartment, a small ginger dog bared its sharp teeth and gave a low growl, while a cat, white with coffee-coloured patches, half opened its green eyes.

  ‘Be quiet, Toto …’

  And to Maigret:

  ‘He growls like that, but he’s not vicious. He’s my son’s dog. I don’t know if it’s because of living with me, but he’s ended up looking like me.’

  The animal did indeed have a tiny head, a pointed muzzle and thin paws, but a fat body more like a pig’s than a dog’s. It was probably quite old. Its teeth were yellow and widely spaced.

  ‘Honoré found him in the street about fifteen years ago, with two of his paws crushed by a car. The neighbours wanted the poor animal put down, but Honoré made him a little splint out of pieces of wood, and two months later, he was walking like all the others …’

  The apartment had a low ceiling and was quite dark but remarkably clean. The room served as both a kitchen and a dining room, with its round table in the middle, its old dresser, its Dutch stove of a kind almost never seen these days.

  Cuendet must have bought that stove from the flea market or a junk shop and refurbished it: he had always been good with his hands. The cast iron was almost red, the brasses glowed, and you could hear it humming.

  In the street, the market was at its busiest. Maigret recalled that the last time he had been here, he had found the old woman leaning out of the window, which was where she spent most of her time in good weather, looking down at the crowd.

  ‘What can I do for you, inspector?’

  She had kept the drawling accent of her native country. Instead of sitting down opposite him, she remained standing, on the defensive.

  ‘When did you last see your son?’

  ‘Tell me first if you’ve arrested him again.’

  He only hesitated for one second and was able to reply without lying:

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you’re looking for him? In that case, I can tell you right now he isn’t here. You only have to look around the apartment, like you did once before. You won’t find anything changed, even though that was more than ten years ago.’

  She pointed to an open door, and he glimpsed a dining room that was never used, cluttered with pointless trinkets, table mats and framed photographs: the kind of room you see in the homes of humble people who insist, in spite of everything, on keeping one for show.

  Two bedrooms looked out on the courtyard, Maigret knew that: the old lady’s room, with an iron bedstead she was determined not to get rid of, and the one that was sometimes occupied by Honoré, which was almost as simple, but more comfortable.

  A smell of warm bread rose from the ground floor and mixed with that of the stew.

  Maigret was solemn and slightly emotional.

  ‘I’m not looking for him either, Madame Cuendet. I’d just like to know …’

  Immediately, she seemed to understand, to guess, and her eyes became sharper, with a gleam of anxiety.

  ‘If you’re not looking for him and you haven’t arrested him, that means …’

  Her hair was sparsely distributed across a skull that seemed absurdly narrow.

  ‘Something’s happened to him, hasn’t it?’

  He bowed his head.

  ‘I preferred to tell you myself.’

  ‘Did the police shoot him?’

  ‘No. I …’

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘Your son is dead, Madame Cuendet.’

  She didn’t cry, but gave him a harsh look. The ginger dog, which seemed to have understood, jumped down from the armchair and came and rubbed against her fat legs.

  ‘Who did it?’

  She hissed these words between teeth as widely spaced as those of the dog, which now started growling again.

  ‘I have no idea. He was killed, we don’t yet know where.’

  ‘So how can you say …’

  ‘His body was found this morning on a path in the Bois de Boulogne.’

  She repeated, suspiciously, as if still sensing a trap:

  ‘The Bois de Boulogne? What would he have been doing in the Bois de Boulogne?’

  ‘That’s where he was found. He was killed somewhere else, then driven there by car.’

  ‘Why?’

  Trying to avoid upsetting her, he replied patiently:

  ‘That’s a question we’re asking ourselves too.’

  How would he have explained his relationship with Cuendet to the examining magistrate, for example? It wasn’t only in his office at Quai des Orfèvres that he had got to know him. And it had taken more than just one partly solved case.

  It involved thirty years on the job, including several visits to this apartment, which felt familiar to him.

  ‘It’s in order to track down his killers that I need to know when you last saw him. He hasn’t slept here in several days, has he?’

  ‘At his age, he’s entitled …’

  She broke off, her eyelids suddenly swollen.

  ‘Where is he right now?’

  ‘You’ll see him later. An inspector will come and fetch you.’

  ‘Has he been taken to the morgue?’

  ‘To the Forensic Institute, yes.’

  ‘Did he suffer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was he shot?’

  Tears were running down her cheeks, but she didn’t sob and was still looking at Maigret with a vestige of suspicion.

  ‘He was beaten.’

  ‘With what?’

  It was as if she were trying to reconstruct her son’s death in her mind.

  ‘We don’t know. A heavy object.’

  Instinctively, she raised her hand to her head and gave a grimace of pain.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ll find out, I swear to you. It’s why I’m here and it’s why I need you. Please sit down, Madame Cuendet.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  And yet her knees were shaking.

  ‘Do you have anything to drink?’

  ‘Why, are you thirsty?’

  ‘No. It’s for you. I think you should have a little something.’

  He remembered that she liked to drink and, indeed, she went and took a bottle of white brandy from the dresser in the dining room.

  Even at a time like this, she felt the need to lie a little.

  ‘I was keeping it for my son. He sometimes had a drop after dinner.’

  She filled two thick-bottomed glasses.

  ‘I wonder why they killed him,’ she repeated. ‘A boy who never harmed anyone, the quietest, gentlest man in the world. Isn’t that so, Toto? You know that better than anyone.’

  As she wept, she stroked the fat dog, which wagged its stunted tail. The scene would doubtless have seemed grotesque to Kernavel and Cajou.

  Wasn’t that son of hers a known criminal, who might, if he hadn’t been so clever, still have been in prison?

  He had only gone to prison twice, once merely remanded in custody, and both times it had been Maigret who had arrested him.

  They had spent many hours alone together at Quai des Orfèvres, two cunning men with a sense of one another’s true worth.

  ‘How long …’

  Maigret had returned to the task in hand, patiently, in an even voice, with the noises of the market in the background.

  ‘At least a month,’ she said, yielding at last.

  ‘Did he tell you anything?’

  ‘He never told me anything about
what he did outside of here.’

  It was true: Maigret had had proof of that before.

  ‘Did he come to see you even once during this time?’

  ‘No, although it was my birthday last week. He did send me flowers.’

  ‘Where did he send them from?’

  ‘He had them delivered.’

  ‘Was the name of the florist on them?’

  ‘Maybe. I didn’t look.’

  ‘Did you recognize the delivery man? Was he local?’

  ‘I’d never seen him before.’

  He didn’t ask to search Honoré Cuendet’s room for clues. He wasn’t here officially. He hadn’t been entrusted with the investigation.

  Inspector Fumel would doubtless come later, equipped with papers duly signed by the examining magistrate. He probably wouldn’t find anything. The previous times, Maigret hadn’t found anything either, just neatly arranged clothes, underwear in the wardrobe, a few books, tools that weren’t a burglar’s tools.

  ‘How long is it since he last disappeared like that?’

  She searched in her memory. She was no longer fully involved in the conversation and had to make an effort.

  ‘He spent almost all winter here.’

  ‘What about the summer?’

  ‘I don’t know where he went.’

  ‘Didn’t he offer to take you to the country, or the sea?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have gone. I lived long enough in the country not to want to go back.’

  She had probably been about fifty, perhaps a little older, when she had discovered Paris. Before that, the only city she had known was Lausanne.

  She was from a little village in the canton of Vaud, Senarclens, not far from a town called Cossonay, where her husband, Gilles, worked as a farm labourer.

  Maigret had only ever been through the country on holiday with his wife, and what he remembered above all was the inns.

  It was these inns, as it happened, clean and quiet, which had been Gilles Cuendet’s undoing. A short man with twisted legs, he wasn’t a great talker and could spend hours in a corner, drinking bottles of white wine.

  He had given up labouring and become a mole catcher, going from farm to farm laying his traps, and it was said that he smelled as strongly as the animals he caught.

  They had two children, Honoré and his sister Laurence, who had been sent to Geneva to work as a waitress and ended up marrying someone from UNESCO, a translator, if Maigret’s memory was correct, and following him to South America.

  ‘Have you heard from your daughter?’

  ‘I had New Year greetings from her. She has five children now. I can show you the card.’

  She went to fetch it from the next room, more out of a need to move than to convince him.

  ‘Look, it’s in colour.’

  The image showed the port of Rio de Janeiro beneath a purple-red sunset.

  ‘Doesn’t she ever write more than that?’

  ‘What’s the point? With the ocean between us, we’ll never see each other again. She’s made her own life, hasn’t she?’

  Honoré had made his, too, though in quite a different way. At the age of fifteen he, too, had been sent away to work, in his case as an apprentice to a locksmith in Lausanne.

  He had been a quiet, reserved young man, hardly more talkative than his father. He had lived in an attic room in an old house near the market, and it was following an anonymous tip-off that the police had burst into that room one morning.

  Honoré wasn’t yet seventeen at the time. They had found all kinds of things there, the most heterogeneous objects, the provenance of which he hadn’t even tried to explain: alarm clocks, tools, canned food, children’s clothes still with their labels attached, two or three radio sets that hadn’t been taken out of their original packaging.

  The police had thought at first that these things had all been stolen from parked vans.

  Upon investigation, they had realized that this was not the case, that young Cuendet had broken into closed shops, warehouses and empty apartments and taken at random whatever he could find.

  Because of his age, he had been sent to the reformatory at Vennes, above Lausanne, where, among the trades he had been given the chance to learn, he had chosen that of boilermaker.

  For a year, he had been a model inmate, quiet and gentle, hard-working, never breaking the rules. Then, suddenly, he had vanished without a trace, and ten years were to go by before he came to Maigret’s attention in Paris.

  His first concern, on leaving Switzerland, where he had never again set foot, had been to join the Foreign Legion, and he had spent five years first in Sidi-Bel-Abbès, then in Indochina.

  Maigret had had occasion to look through his military record and to talk to one of his commanding officers.

  There again, Honoré Cuendet had been, generally, a model soldier. The most that could be held against him was that he was a lone wolf, someone who had no friends and didn’t mix with the others, even on evenings when they got into brawls.

  ‘He was a soldier the way some people are metalworkers or cobblers,’ his lieutenant had said.

  No punishment in three years. After which, for no known reason, he had deserted, to be found again, a few days later, in a workshop in Algiers where he had been hired.

  He had furnished no explanation for his sudden departure, which could have cost him dearly, merely murmuring:

  ‘I couldn’t stand it any more.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Thanks to his three years of impeccable service, he had been treated leniently, and six months later he had done it again, this time getting caught after only twenty-four hours of freedom, found in a vegetable lorry where he had been hiding.

  It was in the Legion that he had had a fish tattooed on his left arm, at his request, and Maigret had wanted to know why.

  ‘Why a fish?’ he had insisted. ‘And above all, why a seahorse?’

  Legionnaires usually have a taste for more evocative images.

  The man Maigret had had in front of him at that time was twenty-six years old, fairly short, with reddish-blond hair and broad shoulders.

  ‘Have you ever seen a seahorse?’

  ‘Not alive.’

  ‘What about dead?’

  ‘I’ve seen one.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Lausanne.’

  ‘Where in Lausanne?’

  ‘In a woman’s bedroom.’

  The words had to be dragged from him almost one by one.

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘A woman I went with.’

  ‘Was this before you were sent to Vennes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was she on the street?’

  ‘At the end of Rue Centrale, yes.’

  ‘And in her room there was a dried seahorse?’

  ‘That’s right. She told me it was her lucky charm.’

  ‘Have you known many other women?’

  ‘Not many.’

  Maigret thought he had understood.

  ‘What did you do when you got away from the Legion and came to Paris?’

  ‘I worked.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At a locksmith’s in Rue de la Roquette.’

  The police had checked. It was true. He had been there for two years, and his work had been eminently satisfactory. They made fun of him because he wasn’t very talkative, but he was considered a model worker.

  ‘How did you spend your evenings?’

  ‘Doing nothing.’

  ‘Did you ever go to the cinema?’

  ‘Almost never.’

  ‘Did you have any friends?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about girlfriends?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  It was as if women scared him. And yet, because of the first one he had known, at the age of sixteen, he had had a seahorse tattooed on his arm.

  They had investigated thoroughly. In those days, they could afford to be metic
ulous. Maigret was only an inspector then, barely three years older than Cuendet.

  It happened rather as it had in Lausanne, except that this time there hadn’t been any anonymous letter.

  Early one morning – about four o’clock, in fact, as with the discovery of the body in the Bois de Boulogne – a uniformed officer had stopped a man carrying a heavy package. It was pure chance. The man’s first reaction had been to make as if to run away.

  In the package, they had found furs, and Cuendet had refused to explain away this strange burden.

  ‘Where were you going with that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where have you come from?’

  ‘I have nothing to say.’

  They finally discovered that the furs belonged to a furrier who worked from home, in Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.

  At the time, Cuendet was living in a rooming house in Rue Saint-Antoine, a hundred metres from the Bastille, and in his room, as in the attic in Lausanne, they had found an assortment of the most diverse merchandise.

  ‘Who were you selling your loot to?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  It seemed far-fetched, and yet it had been impossible to establish a link between Cuendet and any of the known fences.

  He didn’t have much money on him. His expenses corresponded with what he earned from his employer.

  The case had intrigued Maigret to such an extent that he had obtained permission from his then chief, Commissioner Guillaume, for the prisoner to be examined by a doctor.

  ‘He’s certainly what we call an asocial type, but he also has above-average intelligence and normal emotional responses.’

  Cuendet had been lucky enough to be defended by a young lawyer, Maître Gambier, who was later to become a leading light of the legal profession and who had obtained the minimum sentence for his client.

  Initially incarcerated in the Santé, Cuendet had spent just over a year in Fresnes, where, once again, he had been a model prisoner, which had earned him a few months’ remission on his sentence.

  In the meantime, his father had died, knocked down by a car one Saturday evening when he was on his way home, drunk, on a bicycle without lights.

  Honoré had his mother brought from Senarclens, and this woman who had only known the quietest countryside in Europe had found herself transplanted into the midst of the swarming crowds in Rue Mouffetard.