Maigret Sets a Trap Read online

‘Anything to report? No anonymous letters?’

  ‘Just letters from people pointing the finger at their neighbours.’

  ‘Check them out. And I want Mazet brought up.’

  Mazet had not had to sleep in the cells but had gone home, leaving the Palais de Justice by an unmarked door. He was supposed to be back in the Mousetrap by eight in the morning.

  ‘Shall I go down myself?’

  ‘That would be best.’

  ‘Still no handcuffs?’

  ‘No.’

  He did not wish to go to such lengths of deception for the journalists’ sake. Let them simply draw their conclusions from what they were seeing. Maigret would not go so far as to deal cheating cards.

  ‘Hello? Get me the station at Grandes-Carrières, please … Inspector Lognon … Hello! Lognon? Any news your end?’

  ‘Someone was waiting for me this morning outside my front door, and he followed me. He’s standing opposite the station now.’

  ‘Not hiding, then?’

  ‘No, I think he’s a journalist.’

  ‘Get his papers checked. Everything going as planned?’

  ‘I’ve located three rooms, belonging to friends. They don’t know what it’s about. Do you want the addresses?’

  ‘No. Get here in about three quarters of an hour.’

  The same scene as before was then re-enacted in the corridor, when Pierre Mazet made his appearance, flanked by two inspectors, once more holding his hat in front of his face. The photographers got to work. The journalists called out questions which were left unanswered. Maguy managed to dislodge the hat which she picked up off the floor, as the ex-colonial policeman hid his face with his hands.

  The door closed behind him, and Maigret’s office quickly took on the appearance of a command centre.

  In the peaceful streets of Montmartre, where many of the small shops were closed for a month or a fortnight because of the summer holidays, the planned scenario was still being silently launched.

  Over four hundred people had a part to play, not only the watchers in hotel bedrooms or in the few private apartments made available without risk of indiscretion, but also those who were going to take up set positions outside Métro stations, at bus stops, and in the smallest bistros and restaurants open in the evening.

  So that it would not look too much like an invasion, the operation was to proceed in stages.

  The policewomen were also receiving detailed instructions by telephone, and as in military headquarters, maps had been spread out, with the location of each person marked.

  Twenty inspectors, chosen from those who did not as a rule appear in public, had hired, not only in Paris but in the suburbs, and as far away as Versailles, cars with innocuous number plates, which would be parked at an agreed time in strategic places, where they would not stand out from other vehicles.

  ‘Order some beer up, Lucas.’

  ‘Sandwiches?’

  ‘Yes, you’d better.’

  Not only for the benefit of the journalists, to make them think further questioning was taking place, but because they were all busy and no one would have time to go out for lunch.

  Lognon arrived in turn, still wearing his red tie and his straw hat. At first sight, the others wondered what had changed about him and they were surprised to realize how much the colour of a necktie can transform a man. He looked quite debonair.

  ‘Did the man follow you?’

  ‘Yes, he’s in the corridor now. He is indeed a reporter.’

  ‘Did one of them stay up at your station?’

  ‘One of them’s actually inside the station.’

  An early newspaper edition reported on events at about midday. It repeated the information carried by the morning papers, adding that there was a frenzied atmosphere at Quai des Orfèvres, suggesting major developments afoot, but that total secrecy still surrounded the man who had been arrested.

  If the police had been able to, the article remarked, ‘the man would no doubt have been issued with an iron mask’.

  This amused Mazet. He was helping the others, making phone calls along with them, drawing crosses in red or blue pencil on the street map, very happy to be breathing in the atmosphere of headquarters where he already felt at home again.

  The atmosphere changed when the waiter from the Brasserie Dauphine knocked at the door, since even for him it was necessary to put on a show, after which everyone fell on the beer and sandwiches. The afternoon papers carried no message from the murderer, who did not seem to have any intention of contacting the press.

  ‘I’m going to take a nap, boys. Tonight I’ll need to be alert and wide awake.’

  Maigret crossed the inspectors’ large office and went into a small empty room where he settled in an armchair; a few minutes later he had dozed off.

  At about three o’clock, he sent Mazet back to the Mousetrap, and ordered Janvier and Lucas to take it in turns to get some rest. As for Lapointe, he was clad in a workman’s blue overalls and driving round the streets of the Grandes-Carrières neighbourhood in a three-wheeled delivery van. Cloth cap aslant on his head, cigarette glued to his lower lip, he looked about eighteen, and from time to time, if he stopped in some café for a white wine and Vichy water, he telephoned headquarters.

  As time passed, everyone’s nerves became more frayed, and Maigret himself was losing some of his assurance.

  There was no indication that anything at all would happen that evening. Even if the man decided to kill again in order to assert himself, it might be the next evening, or the one after that, or in eight, ten days’ time, and it would be impossible to keep so many officers on this high level of alert.

  It would also be impossible to keep for a whole week a secret that was shared among so many people.

  And what if the man decided to act right away?

  His conversation with Professor Tissot was still echoing inside Maigret’s head, and snatches of it kept coming back to him.

  At what moment would the impulse strike? Just now, while they were all occupied in setting the trap, he would be appearing to anyone he encountered as an ordinary man, like everyone else. People were talking to him, no doubt, serving him food, or shaking his hand. He would be talking too, smiling or laughing perhaps.

  Had the trigger already been activated? Had it happened this morning when he read the papers?

  Or would he not be more inclined to tell himself that, since the police thought they had the culprit, the investigation would be stood down, and therefore he would be safe.

  What proof was there that Tissot and Maigret were on the right track, and that they had correctly judged the reaction of the man the professor had called ‘the patient’?

  Until now, he had struck only at night-time, waiting for it to be dark. But even at this hour of day, given the holidays and the heat, there were plenty of streets in Paris where several minutes could go by before any passer-by appeared.

  Maigret recalled how streets felt in the south of France in summertime, at the siesta hour, the closed shutters and drowsy atmosphere of a whole village or town in the heat of the sun.

  Today in Montmartre there were streets almost like that.

  The police had however made a certain number of calculations.

  At each spot where one of the murders had taken place, the topography was such that the attacker had been able to disappear within a very short time. Shorter at night than in the daytime, of course. But even in broad daylight, with favourable circumstances, he would still have been able to slash his victim’s clothes and make his getaway in under two minutes.

  Indeed, did this all necessarily take place in the street? What was there to prevent him knocking at a door where he knew a woman would be alone, and acting in the same way as on the public thoroughfare? Nothing, except that manic individuals, like most criminals – even thieves – almost always employ the same method and repeat themselves in the smallest details.

  It would be light until about nine o’clock, and not really dark u
ntil about nine thirty. The moon, in its third quarter, would not be too bright, and there was a good chance that, as on the previous evening, it would be veiled in cloud because of the heat.

  All these details had their importance.

  ‘Are they still out in the corridor?’

  ‘Just the Baron.’

  The reporters generally arranged among themselves to leave one person on guard, who would alert the others if anything happened.

  ‘At six o’clock, everyone is to go off as usual, except for Lucas, who will hold the fort here, and Torrence will join him at eight.’

  With Janvier, Lognon and Mauvoisin, Maigret went to take an aperitif at the Brasserie Dauphine.

  At seven he returned home and sat down to dinner, looking out through the open window on to Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, calmer now than at any other time of the year.

  ‘You’ve been feeling the heat!’ remarked Madame Maigret, scrutinizing his shirt. ‘If you’re going out again, you’d better change.’

  ‘I am going out.’

  ‘He hasn’t confessed?’

  He preferred not to reply, since he disliked lying to her.

  ‘Will you be late back?’

  ‘More than likely.’

  ‘Is there any hope that when this case is over, we might take a holiday?’

  During the winter they had talked of going to Brittany, a place called Beuzec-Conq, near Concarneau, but as happened almost every year, their holiday plans had been postponed month after month.

  ‘Possibly,’ Maigret sighed.

  If not, it would mean that his scheme had failed, and that the killer had slipped through the net, or had not reacted in the way he and Tissot had predicted. It would also mean more victims, exasperation from the public and the press, irony or bad temper from Coméliau and, as happened only too often, questions in the National Assembly and explanations to be delivered in high places.

  Above all, it would mean more dead women, short, plump women, looking like ordinary housewives popping out in the evening to go to the shops or visit someone nearby.

  ‘You look tired.’

  He was in no hurry to leave. After dinner he loitered in the apartment, smoking his pipe, wondering whether to have a small glass of plum brandy, and sometimes moving to the window, where finally he stood, leaning on his elbows.

  Madame Maigret did not disturb him again. Only, when he made to pick up his jacket, she brought him a clean shirt and helped him on with it. He tried to be as discreet as possible, but she still saw him open a drawer and take out his automatic, which he slipped into his pocket.

  This did not happen often. He had no wish to kill anyone, even somebody as dangerous as in this case. Nevertheless, he had ordered all his colleagues to be armed, and to protect the women at all costs.

  He did not return to Quai des Orfèvres. It was nine o’clock when he arrived at the corner of Boulevard Voltaire, where an unmarked police car was waiting for him with a man at the wheel. The driver, attached to the police station in the 18th arrondissement, was wearing a chauffeur’s uniform.

  ‘Where to, sir?’

  Maigret took his seat in the back, which was already in shadow as twilight fell, so that the car now looked like one of those which tourists could hire for the day from near the Madeleine or the Opera.

  ‘Place Clichy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  On the way, he did not say a word, and once they were at Place Clichy he simply muttered:

  ‘Go up Rue Caulaincourt, not too fast, as if you’re trying to read the house numbers.’

  Near the boulevards, the streets were quite busy, and almost everywhere people were taking the air at their open windows. There were crowds, some of them rowdy, seated at the terraces of even the smallest cafés, and most of the restaurants were serving their customers outside.

  It seemed impossible that a crime could be committed in those surroundings, and yet the conditions had been almost the same when Georgette Lecoin, the most recent victim, had been killed in Rue Tholozé, less than fifty metres from a dance hall with a red neon sign lighting up the pavement.

  For anyone who really knew the area well, there were, not far from these animated main streets, a hundred deserted alleyways, a hundred dark corners where an attack could take place almost without risk.

  Two minutes. They had calculated that the murderer had needed no more than two minutes and if he was quick even less.

  What was it that drove him to lacerate his victim’s clothes after committing murder?

  He didn’t touch the woman herself. There was no question here, as in certain other well known cases, of exposing the victim’s private parts. He slashed the fabric with thrusts of a knife, as if in some kind of paroxysm of rage, like a child who savages a doll or stamps on a toy.

  Tissot had talked about this too, but with reticence. One sensed that he was tempted to adopt some of the theories of Freud and his disciples, but it was as if he considered that too easy an explanation.

  ‘We’d have to know about his past, including his childhood, and find the initial trauma, which he himself may have forgotten.’

  Every time he thought like this about the murderer, Maigret was overcome with feverish impatience. He was in a hurry to imagine a face, precise features, a human silhouette, instead of the vague figure people were calling the killer, or the madman, or the monster, the figure whom Tissot, perhaps by an involuntary slip of the tongue, had called a ‘patient’.

  He was angered by his own powerlessness. It was almost as if he faced a personal challenge.

  He would have liked to be able to confront the man, never mind where, look him full in the face and order him:

  ‘Now, talk!’

  He needed to know. The wait was agonizing, preventing him from giving his full attention to material details.

  Automatically, yes, he was registering the positions of his men at the different points where he had posted them. He did not know them all. Many were not attached to his own division. But he still knew that a silhouette behind a certain window corresponded to a name, that a breathless woman hurrying past towards some unknown destination, taking short steps because of her high heels, was one of his auxiliary police officers. Since February and the first crime, the man had chosen a later hour every time to launch his attacks, from eight o’clock to nine forty-five. But what about now, when the days were getting shorter again instead of longer, and night was falling earlier?

  At any moment, one might hear the cry of a passer-by who had stumbled in the dark upon a body lying on the pavement. That was how most of the victims had been found, almost always after just a few minutes, and only once, according to the police pathologist, after about a quarter of an hour.

  The car had gone past Rue Lamarck, and was entering an area where so far nothing had happened.

  ‘What shall I do, sir?’

  ‘Keep straight on, then come back via Rue des Abbesses.’

  He could have remained in touch with some of his colleagues by using a radio car, but that would have been too conspicuous.

  What was to say whether, before every attack, the man did not watch all comings and goings in the district for several hours?

  Almost always, it is possible to sense when a murderer belongs to a particular category: even without a description, 0ne has a general idea of what he might look like, what social background he comes from.

  Please don’t let there be another victim tonight!

  This was a prayer, such as he used to offer up at bedtime, in his childhood. He did not even realize this.

  ‘See that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The drunk under the streetlamp.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Friend of mine, Dutilleux. Loves dressing up. Especially as a drunk.’

  At a quarter to ten, still nothing had happened.

  ‘Stop by the Brasserie Pigalle.’

  Maigret ordered a beer as he walked past the counter, then shut himself in the phone booth t
o call headquarters. It was Lucas who replied.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing yet. A streetwalker who’s complaining she was harassed by a foreign sailor.’

  ‘Torrence with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the Baron?’

  ‘He must have gone home to bed.’

  The time at which the last crime had been committed had gone past. Did that mean the man was less concerned with the darkness of the street than with the time of day? Or that the false arrest had had no effect on him?

  Maigret had an ironic smile on his face as he returned to the car, and the irony was addressed to himself. Who knows? The man he was tracking through the streets of Montmartre might at this very moment be on holiday at some seaside resort in Normandy, or in a family hotel somewhere in the French countryside. A wave of despondency suddenly engulfed him, from one moment to the next. His efforts and those of all his colleagues appeared to him to be vain, bordering on ridiculous.

  On what had he based this whole charade, which had taken so long to organize? On nothing. Less than nothing! On a sort of intuition he had had after a good dinner, while chatting in Pardon’s peaceful drawing room with Professor Tissot.

  But surely Tissot himself would have been alarmed, had he learned where their informal conversation had led?

  And what if this man were not driven by pride, by the need to assert himself?

  He could not now recall all those words he had pronounced, as if he were making a discovery, without feeling sick at heart. He had thought too much about it. He had worried away at the problem too long. He had lost belief in it now, almost doubting the reality of the killer.

  ‘Where to, sir?’

  ‘Wherever you like.’

  The astonishment he saw in the eyes of the driver as he turned his head towards him made him aware of his own discouragement, and he felt ashamed. He had no right to lose faith in front of his own colleagues.

  ‘Go up Rue Lepic, to the top.’

  He passed the Moulin de la Galette nightclub, and looked at the exact spot on the pavement where they had found the body of Joséphine Simmer, the midwife.

  So it was all real, here and now. Five crimes had been committed. And the killer was still at large, perhaps ready to strike again.