The Cellars of the Majestic Page 7

  ‘The next morning, Charlotte woke me up and said: “Why didn’t you tell me you’d killed her?” …

  ‘I mean, if even Charlotte …’

  It was broad daylight now, and Maigret hadn’t noticed. Buses were streaming across the bridge, taxis, delivery trucks. Paris had come back to life.

  Then, after a long silence, in a less distinct voice, Prosper Donge murmured:

  ‘The boy doesn’t even speak French! … I made inquiries … Aren’t you going to see him, inspector? …’

  And, suddenly frightened:

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to just let him leave! …’

  ‘Hello? … Detective Chief Inspector Maigret? … The chief is asking for you …’

  Maigret sighed and left his office. It was time for his report. He spent twenty minutes in the office of the commissioner of the Police Judiciaire.

  When he returned, Donge was sitting leaning forwards, motionless, his arms folded on the table, his head in his arms.

  Despite himself, Maigret had a brief moment of anxiety. But, when he touched the prisoner’s shoulder with his finger, Donge lifted his head slowly, displaying, without false shame, his pockmarked face stained with tears.

  ‘The examining magistrate is going to question you again in his office … I advise you to repeat exactly what you told me …’

  An inspector was waiting at the door.

  ‘Sorry about this …’

  Maigret took a pair of handcuffs from his pocket, and there were two clicks.

  ‘It’s the rules!’ he sighed.

  Then, alone in his office, he went and opened the window and breathed in the damp air. At least ten minutes went by before he opened the door to the inspectors’ room.

  He looked fresh as a daisy now, and said, as he usually did:

  ‘Everything all right, boys?’

  6. Charlotte’s Letter

  Sitting on a bench with their backs to the wall and their arms folded over their chests, the two gendarmes stretched their booted legs as far as they could, thus blocking half the corridor.

  Through the door beside them came a monotonous murmur of voices. All along the corridor were other doors with benches on either side, almost all of them occupied by gendarmes, occasionally with an individual sitting handcuffed between them.

  It was midday. Maigret, his pipe between his teeth, was waiting to be admitted to Judge Bonneau’s office.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked one of the gendarmes, pointing to the door.

  The reply was both as laconic and as eloquent as the question:

  ‘Jeweller’s in Rue Saint-Martin …’

  A young girl sat slumped on one of the benches, staring ardently at another judge’s door, wiping her nose, dabbing her eyes, intertwining her fingers and pulling on them in a paroxysm of nervousness.

  Monsieur Bonneau’s menacing voice became more distinct. The door opened. Maigret mechanically stuffed his still-warm pipe in his pocket. The young man who came out, to be immediately seized hold of by the gendarmes, had the insolent attitude of a genuine delinquent. He turned and said ironically to the magistrate:

  ‘Always a pleasure to see you, judge!’

  Seeing Maigret, he frowned, then, as if reassured, winked at him. At that moment, the inspector’s eyes turned hazy, like those of a man who vaguely remembers something without quite being able to pin it down.

  Behind the door, which had remained ajar, he heard:

  ‘Show the detective chief inspector in … You may leave us, Monsieur Benoit … I shan’t need you any more this morning …’

  Maigret entered, still with that questioning look in his eyes. What was it that had struck him about the prisoner he had seen coming out of the office?

  ‘Good morning, detective chief inspector … Not too tired? … Please sit down … I don’t see your pipe … You can smoke … So, tell me about your trip to Cannes.’

  Judge Bonneau was certainly not a malicious man, but he was clearly very pleased to have obtained a result without the police being involved! He was making an effort to conceal it but could not help a bright little flame dancing in his eyes.

  ‘Funny isn’t it, that we both found out the same things, me in Paris, without leaving my office, you on the Côte d’Azur … What do you think of that?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, it is funny …’

  Maigret was smiling like a guest being forced by his hostess to take a second helping of a dish he hates.

  ‘All things considered, what do you think of this case, inspector? … This Prosper Donge? … I have his statement here … Apparently he simply repeated what he told you this morning … Basically, he admits everything …’

  ‘Except for the two murders,’ Maigret said in a low voice.

  ‘Except for the two murders, of course! That would be too much to ask! He admits he threatened his former mistress; he admits he asked her to meet him at six in the morning in the basement of the hotel, and his letter must have been quite worrying, since the poor woman ran out and bought a revolver … But then he told us a story about a flat tyre that made him late …’

  ‘It isn’t just a story …’

  ‘How do you know? … He could easily have burst his own tyre on his way to the hotel …’

  ‘He didn’t … I’ve spoken to the officer who called out to him about the tyre on the corner of Avenue Foch that morning …’

  ‘A mere detail,’ the judge hastened to say, unwilling to see his house of cards come crashing down. ‘Tell me, Inspector, have you made any inquiries into Donge’s past?’

  This time, the gleam was more visible in Judge Bonneau’s eyes, and he could not stop himself from smoothing his beard impatiently.

  ‘I don’t suppose you had time. Well, I was curious enough about him to consult Records … They brought down his file for me and that’s how I discovered that our man, however docile in appearance, is no first offender …’

  Maigret could do nothing but assume a contrite demeanour.

  ‘Strange isn’t it?’ the magistrate went on. ‘We have the Records department above our heads, in the attics of the Palais de Justice, and we so often forget to make use of it! … Look at this! At the age of sixteen, Prosper Donge, working as a washer-up in a café in Vitry-le-François, steals fifty francs from the till, runs away and is picked up on a train bound for Lyons … Promising, isn’t it? … He narrowly avoids reformatory and is placed under special supervision for two years …’

  The strangest thing was that, all the while, Maigret was asking himself: ‘Where on earth have I seen …?’

  And it wasn’t Donge he was thinking about, but the young man he had passed on the way in.

  ‘In Cannes, fifteen years later, three months’ suspended sentence for grievous bodily harm and resisting arrest … And now, inspector, it may be time for me to show you something …’

  As he said this, he held out a sheet of squared paper, the kind sold in groceries or that you find under the counter in small cafés. The text was written in purple ink, with a leaky pen, and the handwriting was that of a not very well-educated woman.

  This was the notorious anonymous letter the magistrate had received and which had informed him about the relationship between Prosper and Mimi.

  ‘This is the envelope … As you will notice, it was posted between midnight and six in the morning in the box on Place Clichy … Place Clichy, got that? … Now, look at this exercise book …’

  A school exercise book, not very clean, with grease stains. It contained cooking recipes, some cut out of newspapers and stuck on, others copied down.

  This time, Maigret blinked, and the judge was unable to hold back a smile of triumph.

  ‘You do agree it’s the same handwriting? … I was sure of it … Well, inspector, that exercise book was found in a kitchen cabinet I’m sure you know, in Saint-Cloud, in Prosper Donge’s house, in fact, and these recipes were copied out by a woman named Charlotte …’

  He was so pleased that he pr
etended to apologize.

  ‘I know that we and the police don’t always see eye to eye … You people at Quai des Orfèvres have a lenient attitude towards certain people, certain irregular situations, which the magistracy finds it hard to share … Admit, inspector, that we are not always the ones who are in the wrong … And tell me why, if this Prosper was the good man he appears, his own mistress, this Charlotte, who also pretends to be a respectable person, would send me an anonymous letter to condemn him?’

  ‘I don’t know …’

  Maigret seemed to have received a knockout blow.

  ‘You’ll see, this investigation won’t drag on for much longer! I’ve sent Donge to the Santé prison. When you’ve given this Charlotte the third degree … As for the second murder, it can be easily explained … That poor night porter – Collebœuf, I think? – must have seen something of the first murder … In any case, he knew the identity of Mrs Clark’s killer … He couldn’t sleep all day … I assume his scruples got the better of him in the end, and he went back to the Majestic to tell the murderer he was going to inform on him …’

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Hello? Yes … I’ll be right there …’

  And, to Maigret:

  ‘That was my wife, reminding me we have friends over for lunch … I’ll leave you to your investigation, inspector … I think you now have sufficient elements to …’

  Maigret was almost at the door when he changed his mind, making a gesture as if he had finally found what he had been seeking for a long time.

  ‘About Fred, your honour … It was Fred from Marseilles you were questioning when I arrived, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s the sixth time I’ve questioned him without getting the names of his accomplices …’

  ‘I met Fred about three weeks ago, at Angelino’s on Place d’Italie …’

  Bonneau looked at him, clearly wondering why that mattered.

  ‘Angelino owns a dance hall that attracts a rather dubious clientele. A year ago he hitched up with the sister of One-Eyed Harry …’

  The magistrate still didn’t understand. And Maigret, as modest and unassuming as his massive bulk allowed, concluded:

  ‘One-Eyed Harry has been sentenced three times for burglary … He’s a former stonemason who specializes in drilling through walls …’

  Finally, grabbing the door handle:

  ‘Didn’t the Rue Saint-Martin robbers get into the cellar by drilling through two walls? … Good day, your honour …’

  He was in a bad mood despite everything. That letter from Charlotte … Anyone seeing him would have sworn that it wasn’t only anger, but that he was sad.

  He could have sent an inspector. But could an inspector sniff the atmosphere of a house in his place?

  A vast new apartment block, luxurious, all in white, with a wrought-iron door, in Avenue de Madrid, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. To the right of the lobby, the glass door of the concierge’s lodge, which was a veritable salon. Three or four women sitting, shaking their heads. A tray with visiting cards. Another woman, red-eyed, who half opened the door and asked:

  ‘What is it?’

  The door of a second room was open and you could see a body on a bed, hands together, a rosary between his fingers, two candles flickering in the half-light and some box twigs in a bowl of holy water.

  People were talking in low voices, wiping their eyes, walking on tiptoe. Maigret crossed himself, sprinkled a little holy water over the dead man and stood there for a moment silently looking at the nose, which was lit strangely by the candles.

  ‘It’s terrible, inspector … Such a good man, who didn’t have an enemy in the world! …’

  Above the bed, in an oval frame, an enlarged photograph of Justin Collebœuf in a warrant officer’s uniform, at a time when he still had a big moustache.

  On the frame, a military cross with three palms had been fixed, along with his medal.

  ‘He was a career soldier, inspector … When he retired, he didn’t know what to do with himself and was determined to find another job … For a while, he was a caretaker at a club on Boulevard Haussmann … Then he was offered the post of night porter at the Majestic and he accepted … The thing is, he was a man who needed hardly any sleep … At the barracks, hardly a night went by without his getting up and doing a tour of inspection …’

  The women, who might have been neighbours or relatives, nodded solemnly.

  ‘What did he do all day long?’ Maigret asked.

  ‘He’d come back at a quarter past seven, just in time to take out the dustbins, because he never let me do the heavy work … He’d smoke a pipe in the doorway, waiting for the postman, and then chat with him for a bit … Actually, the postman had served in my husband’s regiment … Then he’d go to bed and sleep until midday … That was enough for him … When he’d had lunch, he’d set off on foot across the Bois as far as the Champs-Élysées … Sometimes, he’d go into the Majestic to say hello to his day colleague … Then he’d have his game in the little bar in Rue de Ponthieu, and by six he’d be back here, then at seven he set off again to start work at the hotel … It was so precisely timed that some of the neighbours set their clocks when they saw him pass by …’

  ‘When did he stop wearing a moustache?’

  ‘He shaved it off when he left the army … It was strange seeing him like that … He seemed quite diminished … He actually looked smaller …’

  Maigret stood for another moment, leaning over the dead man, then tiptoed out.

  He wasn’t far from Saint-Cloud. He was impatient to go there and, at the same time, for no very clear reason, he resisted his desire. Then a taxi passed and he held his arm out. Too bad!

  ‘Saint-Cloud … I’ll tell you the way …’

  It was drizzling. The sky was grey. It was only three in the afternoon, but it felt like dusk. The houses, surrounded by their bare gardens, had a desolate air.

  He rang the bell. It wasn’t Charlotte, but Gigi, who opened. In the kitchen, Charlotte bent forwards to see who the visitor was.

  Without a word, still contemptuous of him, Gigi stepped aside. It was only two days since Maigret had last been here and yet it seemed to him that the house had changed. Was it because Gigi had brought a little of her own mess with her? On the kitchen table, the remains of lunch were still lying around.

  Gigi had put one of Charlotte’s dressing gowns on over her nightdress – it was much too big for her – and on her bare feet she had a pair of Prosper’s slippers. She was smoking a cigarette, half closing her eyes because of the smoke.

  Charlotte had stood up but didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t washed or dressed. Her complexion looked muddy, and her breasts, unsupported now by any brassiere, hung wearily.

  Who would be the first to speak? They looked at each other, nervous, suspicious. To hide his embarrassment, Maigret sat down and placed his bowler hat on his knees.

  ‘I had a long conversation with Prosper this morning,’ he said at last.

  Charlotte perked up. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That he didn’t kill Mimi, or the night porter …’

  ‘Ha!’ Gigi exclaimed triumphantly. ‘What did I tell you?’

  Charlotte wasn’t sure of anything any more. She seemed all at sea. She wasn’t made for drama, and she seemed constantly to be looking for something to cling on to.

  ‘I also saw the examining magistrate. He received an anonymous letter about Prosper and Mimi …’

  No reaction. Charlotte was still looking at him curiously, her eyelids drooping, her body slack.

  ‘An anonymous letter?’

  He handed her the recipe book he had taken away with him.

  ‘It was you who wrote in this book, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes … Why? …’

  ‘Would you be so kind as to get a pen? … Preferably an old pen that leaks … Some ink … Some paper …’

  There was a bottle of ink and a penholder on the cabinet. Gigi kept looking from Mai
gret to her friend, as if ready to intervene at the first sign of danger.

  ‘Now make yourself comfortable … Start writing …’

  ‘What should I write?’

  ‘Don’t write anything, Charlotte! You never know with these people …’

  ‘Write … You’re not running any risks, I give you my word … “Your Honour, I’m taking the liberty of writing to you about the Donge case, which I read about in the newspapers …”

  ‘Why do you spell newspapers with a double p?’

  ‘I don’t know … What should I put?’

  On the anonymous letter he had in his hand, there had been a z at the end of the word.

  ‘“… The American woman isn’t really American, she used to be a dancer and her name was Mimi …”’

  Maigret shrugged impatiently. ‘That’ll do,’ he said. ‘Now look at this …’

  It was exactly the same handwriting. Only the spelling mistakes were different.

  ‘Who wrote this?’

  ‘That’s precisely what I’d like to know …’

  ‘Did you think it was me?’

  Anger was rising to her throat, and Maigret hastened to calm her.

  ‘I didn’t think anything … What I came here to ask you is who, apart from you and Gigi, knew about the relationship between Prosper and Mimi, and especially about the child …’

  ‘Can you think of anyone, Gigi?’

  They thought about this for a while, languidly. They were living in a kind of slow motion in this untidy house which had suddenly taken on a squalid appearance. Occasionally Gigi’s nostrils quivered, and Maigret realized it wouldn’t be long before she was roaming the seediest spots in search of drugs.