Maigret's Madwoman Page 4

  ‘He used to come with me when he was little. But since the age of fifteen or sixteen, I don’t think he’s seen her.’

  ‘Might he have asked her for money too?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be like him. Yes, he asks me, because I’m his mother, but he wouldn’t go to anyone else, he’d be too proud.’

  ‘Do you know this apartment well?’

  ‘Yes, pretty well.’

  ‘Where did your aunt sit when she was here?’

  ‘In that armchair by the window.’

  ‘How did she spend her days and evenings?’

  ‘Well, she’d do the cleaning first, then go shopping. After that, she’d set about preparing her food, because she wasn’t the sort of person to lunch off a scrap of cold meat on a corner of the kitchen table. She might have been all alone, but she ate proper meals in the dining room and she always laid a tablecloth.’

  ‘Did she go out much?’

  ‘If it was fine, she’d go and sit on a park bench.’

  ‘To read a book?’

  ‘No. She had trouble with her eyesight and said it was tiring to read. She just watched the passers-by, the children playing in front of her. She nearly always had a smile on her face, a slightly sad one. She was probably thinking of the past.’

  ‘She didn’t confide in you about anything?’

  ‘What would there have been to tell me? She led a very simple life.’

  ‘Did she have friends, women she might see?’

  ‘All her old friends were dead and she didn’t care to make new ones. Oh, I’ve just remembered, that was why she changed from her usual bench.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Last summer, but towards the end of summer. She always used to sit on the same bench in the Tuileries Gardens. Then, one day, she saw a woman about her own age who asked her if the place beside her was free. She couldn’t very well refuse. You can’t save places on public benches. And from the first day, this woman started talking, telling her all about herself, how she was Russian in origin and had been a famous dancer.

  ‘Next day, my aunt found her sitting in the same place, and this woman she didn’t know talked to her for an hour about all her old successes. How she’d been in Nice for years. She didn’t stop for a moment, complaining about the climate in Paris.

  ‘This was one of the rare events my aunt actually told me about.

  ‘“I was so fond of my bench,” she would sigh. “I had to change not only the bench, but the part of the gardens I went to, or she’d have come along and sat by me again.”’

  ‘And did this Russian woman ever come here?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. And knowing my aunt, she would certainly never have invited her.’

  ‘So, all in all, you have no idea who could have murdered her?’

  ‘No, none at all, inspector. What should I do about the funeral?’

  ‘Leave me your telephone number and I’ll keep you informed. By the way, do you have any recent photographs of your aunt?’

  ‘The last must be from over twelve years ago, because Uncle Antoine took it. It’s better if you phone me in the evening because during the day I’m usually out seeing my clients.’

  There was still a uniformed policeman standing at the street door.

  ‘What do you think of her, chief?’

  ‘She’s willing to talk and seems pretty certain about everything.’

  Janvier was looking around the room, wide-eyed.

  ‘Is the whole apartment in the same style?’

  ‘Yes, the bedroom’s even more old-fashioned. Lapointe! Since you already know something about the building, can you go and knock on every door? Ask people if they ever met the old lady, how they got on with her, whether they saw her receive any visitors.’

  In the sitting room, there was only one modern piece of furniture, a television set, placed opposite an armchair with a chintz cover.

  ‘And now,’ Maigret said to Janvier, ‘we’re going to go through this place methodically, noting where everything is. It was because she found that her things had been slightly moved that she began to worry.’

  The parquet floor, in which gaps had opened up over the years, was not covered by a carpet but by several rugs, one of them under the three legs of the round table.

  They lifted the table and pulled up the rug to make sure nothing was hidden there. They then replaced the table, which was covered with a sort of lacy cloth. They took care to put the objects from it back in their correct place: a large seashell with Dieppe written on it, a china shepherdess, and a pseudo-bronze statuette of a schoolboy, satchel on his back, dressed in a sailor suit.

  On the mantelpiece, a series of photographs was lined up, showing two men, the two husbands presumably, who had perhaps merged in the old lady’s mind. One of them was bald-headed and clean-shaven, with a plump, almost corpulent face, and had chosen to take up an imposing stance for the camera. That must be the one with an important post with the Paris City Council.

  The other, looking more modest, had a greying moustache. He was the kind of man you see all the time in the Métro or on the bus. He could have been a clerk, a civil servant, a foreman or a salesman in a department store, which was in fact the case. This one was smiling, and the smile was sincere. You sensed that he was a man content with life.

  ‘By the way, Janvier. How did the niece get in? Did she have a front-door key?’

  ‘No, she rang the bell and I opened the door.’

  ‘This desk is locked. There must be some keys somewhere.’

  He looked first in the old lady’s handbag, the white leather bag she must have taken out of her wardrobe for the first days of spring. It contained no lipstick, just a compact of slightly blue-tinged face powder. An embroidered handkerchief bore the initial L, and they were soon to find that Madame Antoine’s first name was Léontine.

  No cigarettes. Obviously she didn’t smoke. A little bag of violet-flavoured lozenges, bought on Rue de Rivoli. They must have been there a long time, as the sweets had stuck to each other.

  ‘Here are the keys.’

  He’d been almost certain he would find them in the handbag that she always had with her. There were three furniture keys, another that could be a bedroom key, and the one for the front door.

  ‘She must have turned the key and put it back in her bag before she pushed the door open. Otherwise the keys would have been left in the lock or we’d have found them on the floor. She had just had time to put her bag on the chair before she was attacked.’

  Maigret was talking more or less to himself, automatically, rather than to Inspector Janvier. He could not rid himself of a certain uncomfortable feeling. But even if he had come here the day before, what difference would it have made? He would not have found enough signs to justify sending someone to watch the apartment round the clock. And the murderer, being unaware of his visit, would have acted as he did, yesterday afternoon.

  He tried the keys one after another in the drawer of the desk, and finally found the right one.

  The drawer was full of papers and photographs. On the right, a savings book in the name of Léontine Antoine, Quai de la Mégisserie, totalling some ten thousand francs. It registered only deposits, no withdrawals, and the deposits had begun twenty-five years earlier. Which explained why the name Antoine had been written above the name de Caramé, which was crossed out.

  Twenty-five years of a life, of savings. Shopping every morning. The park bench in the afternoon or perhaps, if it was raining, the cinema.

  Another book contained records of a bank account at a branch of the Société Générale. Here the total was twenty-three thousand two hundred francs. Two thousand five hundred francs had been taken out shortly before Christmas.

  ‘That sum doesn’t ring a bell?’

  Janvier shook his head.

  ‘The television set. I bet she decided to spend the two thousand five hundred francs on that. She gave herself a Christmas present.’

  There had been anoth
er withdrawal, twelve years earlier, no doubt for the funeral expenses of her second husband.

  Some postcards. The largest number were signed Jean, and came from towns all over France, Belgium and Switzerland; they must have been sent whenever her husband attended a conference. The message was always the same: ‘Affectionately, Jean.’

  Jean was Monsieur de Caramé. Antoine had had little occasion to travel alone, and there were no postcards from him. On the other hand, there were plenty of photographs, of him on his own, or of the couple. The camera, which was quite a sophisticated one, was in the same drawer.

  It looked as if the Antoines as a couple had gone to a different place every year for their holidays, and they liked making trips. They had been to Quimper, La Baule, Arcachon and Biarritz. They had travelled in the Massif Central and stayed on the Côte d’Azur. The photographs showed them at different ages, and it would have been possible to compose a chronological record of them.

  There were a few letters there as well, mostly from the niece who was a masseuse, Angèle Louette. They too were from addresses in the provinces.

  ‘Émile and I are enjoying our holidays here. Émile is a big boy now and spends his days playing in the sand dunes.’

  There was just one photograph of this Émile who was now calling himself Billy. He was about fifteen and looking straight ahead with an air of defiance against the whole world.

  ‘No secrets. Nothing unexpected,’ Maigret sighed.

  On a small table were some pencils, a penholder, an eraser and some unheaded writing paper. The aged Léontine could not have written many letters. Who would she have written to?

  She had outlived the people she had known, they had all died before her. The only ones left were the niece and the great-nephew, of whom, apart from one photograph and a mention in an old letter from his mother, there was no trace.

  They went meticulously through everything in the kitchen, and Maigret noticed various implements unfamiliar to him which did not seem to have been shop-bought. For instance, there was a cleverly designed tin-opener, and a simple but ingenious device for peeling potatoes.

  They understood why when, after crossing the corridor, they opened a little room with the second key. This was outside the apartment proper, and was not much more than a large cupboard, with a window overlooking the courtyard. It contained a workbench and the walls were covered with tools, all hung up in perfect order.

  So it was here that Antoine indulged his passion for making things. In one corner, on a plank, were piles of technical magazines and a drawer contained notebooks with sketches of devices, including one of the potato-peeler.

  How many people were there like him, or couples like this, among the millions of Parisians? Small-scale, orderly, well-organized lives.

  What was incongruous was the death of the frail little old lady with such pale grey eyes.

  ‘We’ve just got the bedroom left now and the cupboards.’

  The wardrobe contained nothing more than an astrakhan winter coat, another black woollen one, two warm dresses, one of them mauve, and a few summer frocks.

  There were no men’s clothes. When her second husband had died, she must have got rid of his things, unless she had access to one of the attic rooms on the sixth floor or some storage space in a loft. He would have to ask the concierge.

  Everything was clean and neat and the drawers were lined with white paper.

  But in the drawer of the bedside table, they noticed a rather large patch of grease or oil, although the drawer was empty.

  Maigret, intrigued, sniffed at it, and had Janvier sniff it too.

  ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘Grease of some sort.’

  ‘Yes, but not just any kind of grease. This has been used to oil a gun. The old lady must have had a revolver or an automatic in this drawer.’

  ‘So what’s happened to it?’

  ‘We didn’t find it in the apartment, although we’ve searched everywhere. But this stain looks fairly fresh. Perhaps the person who killed the old lady …’

  It was difficult to believe, though, that the murderer, whether man or woman, would have thought to take away the revolver.

  This stain, discovered at the very last minute, completely altered the complexion of the case.

  Had the old lady bought a gun in order to defend herself if she had to? It seemed improbable. As Maigret remembered her, she looked as if firearms would terrify her. And he found it hard to imagine her going into a gunsmith’s shop, asking for a pistol, and trying it out in their basement.

  But why not, after all? Had he not been surprised by her energy? She was frail, with wrists no thicker than a child’s, but she kept her apartment in apple-pie order, as well as or even better than the most house-proud of women.

  ‘It probably belonged to one of the husbands.’

  ‘But what’s become of it now? Can you get this paper to the lab for them to analyse the grease? But I’m sure of the reply in advance.’

  They heard a bell ring and, in spite of himself, Maigret looked round for a telephone.

  ‘It’s the doorbell,’ Janvier said.

  He opened the door to an exhausted Lapointe.

  ‘You’ve visited all the tenants?’

  ‘All the ones who were in. The worst of it was they’d hardly let me ask them questions, they kept asking me. How did she die? What kind of weapon was it? Why didn’t we hear shots?’

  ‘Any results?’

  ‘In the apartment just above this one is a bachelor of about sixty, who’s apparently a quite well-known historian. I saw his books on the shelves. He doesn’t go out much. He has a little dog, and a housekeeper comes in every morning to clean and cook his meals. I call her a housekeeper, because that was the word he used. I saw her. She’s known as Mademoiselle Élise, and she’s very dignified. His place is practically as old-fashioned as this one, but a little more elegant. At one point he said to me:

  ‘“If only she hadn’t bought that damned television set! She has it on almost every night until about eleven. But I get up at six a.m. for my morning walk.”’

  And Lapointe added:

  ‘He’s never spoken to her. He’s lived here for twenty years. When they met on the stairs, he would just nod to her. He remembers the husband, because he made a lot of noise too. Apparently there’s a workshop here with lots of machine tools and in the evening you could hear him hammering, drilling, sawing, all sorts.’

  ‘And the apartment opposite him?’

  ‘There was nobody in. I went downstairs to ask the concierge. They’re a young couple. The man is a sound engineer for a film company and his wife a film editor in the same firm. They usually eat out in the evenings and get home late. They get up late too, because they only start work at midday.’

  ‘And the third floor?’

  Lapointe consulted his notes.

  ‘Family called Lapin. I only saw the grandmother and the baby. The wife works in a clothes shop on Rue de Rivoli and the husband’s in insurance. He travels a lot.’

  ‘And the other apartment?’

  ‘Just a minute. I questioned the grandmother, and she said:

  ‘“No monsieur, I didn’t have anything to do with her. That woman was too immoral for me. If you want to know why, just look at her, with her two husbands. I’m a widow too. Did I get married again? Did I go on living in the same apartment, with the same furniture, with another man?”’

  Lapointe returned to his notebook.

  ‘Father Raymond. Not sure what order he belongs to. Very old and practically never leaves his flat. He didn’t even recognize the name of Léontine Antoine, ex-Léontine de Caramé.

  ‘Moving on to the next floor up: there’s one empty apartment, which is being renovated for people to move into in two weeks: repainted and generally made as good as new. A couple aged about forty with school-age children.

  ‘I saw the old man that the concierge does for. He’s in a wheelchair which he manages with extraordinary skill. I th
ought I’d find a bitter old fellow, tired of life, but on the contrary he was full of good humour.

  ‘“Oh,” he said, “she’s been killed, has she? Nothing’s happened in this building for fifty years or more. And now we have a juicy murder on our hands. Do they know who did it? I suppose it can’t have been a crime of passion.”’

  Lapointe added:

  ‘That made him laugh. He was really cheerful. If he’d been able to get downstairs, he’d probably have asked us if he could visit the crime scene.

  ‘There’s a woman living opposite him, Madame Blanche, about sixty, works as cashier in a bar. I didn’t see her, because she only gets home at midnight.’

  A small world, everyone living cheek by jowl. The old woman on the first floor had been murdered, and it had created little stir. Only:

  ‘Who killed her?’

  ‘How did they do it?’

  ‘Why didn’t she call out?’

  Most of them had vaguely greeted her on the stairs, but without speaking to her. Everyone had been in his or her own little retreat, behind closed doors.

  ‘Stay here until I send someone to relieve you,’ Maigret told Janvier. ‘It may sound silly, but I think the man or woman who was searching this apartment might come back.’

  ‘Send Torrence if he’s free. He loves watching television.’

  Maigret took with him the paper with the grease stain. At Quai des Orfèvres, he went straight upstairs to Moers’ laboratory.

  ‘Can you examine this stain for me?’

  Moers sniffed at it, looked at Maigret as if to say, this won’t be difficult, and took the paper over to one of the specialists in the huge room under a sloping roof.

  ‘Just as I thought. Gun grease.’

  ‘I need an official analysis, because this is the only clue we have so far. Has it been there long?’

  ‘My man will tell you that, but he needs more time.’

  ‘Thank you. Have the results sent to me.’

  He went downstairs to his office and then into the inspectors’ room. Torrence was there with Lapointe, who was already writing up his notes.

  ‘Torrence, tell me. Are you hungry?’

  The bulky Torrence looked startled.