Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse Read online

  ‘Several months. When Madame Manu started working for me, I took her upstairs because the previous maid had left the place in a mess and the room was indescribably filthy.’

  ‘So that was around six months ago?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You haven’t been back up there since? Your husband neither, I suppose?’

  ‘He never went up to the sixth floor in his life. What would he have done up there?’

  ‘And what about you, madame?’ he asked Madame Fabre.

  ‘I haven’t been up there for years. Not since Olga, who was so nice to me. I’d sometimes go up and see her in her room. Do you remember, mother? That must be nearly eight years ago …’

  ‘There was paper stuck around the windows, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Yes, to keep the dust out.’

  ‘The paper had been ripped and we found the window open. Someone had been lying on the bed, a man, probably, who smoked quite a few cigarettes.’

  ‘Are you sure it was last night?’

  ‘Not yet. I have come to ask for your permission to go up with my men and examine the place thoroughly.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s up to me to give you permission.’

  ‘Naturally, if you wish to be present—’

  She stopped him by shaking her head.

  ‘Did your last maid have a lover?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. She was a hard-working girl. She got engaged and left us to get married.’

  Maigret made for the door. Why did he have the feeling again that there was a certain wariness, or animosity, between the mother and the daughter?

  Once outside, he would have liked to know how they behaved when they were alone together, what they were saying to each other. Madame Josselin had maintained her composure, but Maigret was still convinced that she’d had a shock.

  And yet he could have sworn that this business with the maid’s room was not as much of a surprise to her as it had been to him. As for Véronique, she had turned abruptly to her mother with a questioning look in her eye.

  What had she wanted to say when she’d opened her mouth?

  He joined the three men at Le Clairon and drank another beer before going with them to the backstairs of the building. The locksmith opened the door. They had difficulty getting rid of him because he kept trying to make himself useful so he could stay.

  ‘How will you lock it again without me?’

  ‘I’ll seal the door.’

  ‘You see, chief,’ Torrence was saying, pointing to the bed, the still-open window and the half-dozen or so cigarette ends on the floor.

  ‘What I’d like to know first of all is whether those cigarettes were smoked recently.’

  ‘That’s easy.’

  The expert inspected a cigarette butt, sniffed it, delicately undid the paper and rubbed the tobacco between his fingers.

  ‘The laboratory tests will be more conclusive, but already I can tell you that these cigarettes were smoked not long ago. Besides, you’ll notice that there’s still a faint smell of tobacco in the air even though the window’s open.’

  The man unpacked his apparatus, with the slow, painstaking gestures of those who work in forensics. For them, there weren’t any dead, or rather, the dead had no identity, as if they had no family, no personality. A crime was merely a scientific puzzle. They dealt with precise things: marks, clues, prints, dust.

  ‘It’s lucky the room hasn’t been cleaned for a long time.’

  And, turning to Torrence:

  ‘Did you move around the room a lot? Did you touch anything?’

  ‘Nothing, except for one of the cigarette ends. The locksmith and I stayed by the door.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Will you drop in to my office to give me the results?’ asked Maigret, unsure what to do with himself.

  ‘What about me?’ asked Torrence.

  ‘Go back to headquarters.’

  ‘May I wait for a few minutes to see if there are any fingerprints?’

  ‘If you insist.’

  Maigret lumbered down the stairs, tempted to ring the bell of the third-floor service entrance. His last conversation with the two women had left him with a vaguely unpleasant feeling. He had a sense that things hadn’t gone to plan.

  Nothing, in fact, was going normally. But can you speak of ‘normal’ when you are dealing with people in whose home a murder has suddenly been committed? Supposing the victim had been a man like Pardon, for instance … How would Madame Pardon, her daughter and her son-in-law have reacted?

  He couldn’t imagine them, even though he’d known the Pardons for years and they were the Maigrets’ closest friends.

  In the heat of the moment, would Madame Pardon too have been dazed, unable to speak, and not wanted to stay beside her husband’s body for as long as possible?

  He’d just told them that a man had taken the key to the maid’s room from the kitchen and hidden himself up there for hours, and that he’d probably still been there when the two women were left alone after the departure of the police in the middle of the night.

  But Madame Josselin had shown no emotion. As for Véronique, she had immediately looked at her mother, who seemed be stopping her from speaking out.

  One thing was certain: the murderer hadn’t stolen anything. And seemingly no one, at the present stage of the investigation, stood to benefit from René Josselin’s death.

  Josselin’s death changed nothing for Jouane and his partner. And how could Jouane, who had only been to Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs half a dozen times, know where the automatic was kept, or the key in the kitchen, or be familiar with the allocation of the maids’ rooms on the sixth floor?

  It was likely that Fabre had never been up there. And Fabre would have had no reason to hide in the maid’s room. In any case, he wasn’t there but at the hospital, initially, and then upstairs in the third-floor apartment, where Maigret had interviewed him.

  On reaching the ground floor, Maigret abruptly headed for the lift, went up to the first floor and rang the Arescos’ bell. Music could be heard coming from inside, and voices, a hubbub. When the door opened, he glimpsed two children chasing each other and a fat woman in a housecoat who was trying to catch them.

  ‘Are you Dolores?’ he asked the girl standing before him, now wearing a light-blue uniform with a matching cap on her black hair.

  She was smiling broadly. In this apartment, everyone seemed to be laughing and smiling, living in joyful chaos all day long.

  ‘Sí, señor …’

  ‘Do you speak French?’

  ‘Sí …’

  The fat woman spoke to the maid in Spanish, while looking Maigret up and down.

  ‘Does she not understand French?’

  The girl shook her head and burst out laughing.

  ‘Tell her that I’m from the police, like the inspector you saw upstairs, and that I’d like to ask you some questions.’

  Dolores translated, speaking with extraordinary rapidity, and the voluptuous woman grabbed one of the children by the arm, dragged him into a room and closed the glass door. The music was still playing. The girl remained in the doorway without inviting Maigret in. Another door opened a fraction, revealing the face of a man with dark eyes, and then closed noiselessly.

  ‘What time did you go upstairs to bed last night?’

  ‘Half past ten maybe … I didn’t look.’

  ‘Were you alone?’

  ‘Sí, señor …’

  ‘Did you meet anyone on the stairs?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘What time did you hear a noise in the next room?’

  ‘At six o’clock this morning, when I got up.’

  ‘Someone walking around?’

  ‘Cómo?’

  She didn’t understand the question and he mimed walking, which set her off laughing again.

  ‘Sí … Sí …’

  ‘Did you see the man who was walking around? Did the door open at all?’

  ‘Was it a man?’r />
  ‘How many people sleep up on the sixth floor?’

  It took her a while to understand each question. She seemed to be translating word for word before grasping the meaning.

  She showed two fingers, saying:

  ‘Only two … There’s the maid of the people on the fourth floor …’

  ‘The Meurats?’

  ‘I don’t know … The Meurats, are they on the left or the right?’

  ‘The left.’

  ‘Then no. It’s the others … They left with guns … I saw them yesterday morning putting them in the car.’

  ‘Did their maid leave with them?’

  ‘No. But she didn’t come home to sleep. She has a boyfriend.’

  ‘So you were alone, last night, up on the sixth floor?’

  That made her laugh. Everything made her laugh. She didn’t realize that there had been only a partition between her and a man who was almost certainly a murderer.

  ‘All alone … No boyfriend.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  There were faces, dark eyes, behind the curtain over the glass door and most likely, once Maigret had left, more laughter would erupt.

  He stopped in front of the lodge. The concierge wasn’t there. He found himself face to face with a man in braces holding a baby in his arms, which he hastily put in its cradle as he introduced himself.

  ‘Officer Bonnet … Come in, inspector … My wife has just popped out to buy a few things … I’m on night duty this week so she’s making the most of it.’

  ‘I wanted to tell her that she wasn’t mistaken. It seems that someone did enter the building last night and didn’t leave.’

  ‘Has he been found? Where?’

  ‘No, he hasn’t, but we found evidence in one of the maids’ rooms … He must have left this morning, while your wife was battling with the reporters.’

  ‘Is it my wife’s fault?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  If it weren’t for the extended holidays that most of the residents enjoyed, there would be five or six maids on the sixth floor and one of them might have chanced upon the murderer.

  Maigret was loath to cross the road and return to Le Clairon again. In the end, though, he decided to go in, and without thinking ordered:

  ‘A beer.’

  A few moments later, through the window, he saw Torrence come out. He’d had enough of watching his colleague from forensics working and had had the same idea as Maigret.

  ‘You here, chief?’

  ‘I questioned Dolores.’

  ‘Did you get anything out of her? Did she have her clothes on, at least?’

  Torrence was still feeling proud of himself, happy with his discovery. He didn’t seem to understand why Maigret appeared more preoccupied, more weighed down, than he had been that morning.

  ‘We’ve got a lead, haven’t we? You know there are fingerprints all over the place up there? Our colleague’s having a field day. And if the murderer’s got a criminal record …’

  ‘I’m almost certain he hasn’t,’ sighed Maigret, draining his glass.

  And indeed, two hours later, the Criminal Records clerk confirmed that the fingerprints found at Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs didn’t match anyone on file for being in trouble with the law.

  Meanwhile Lapointe had spent the afternoon showing the photograph of René Josselin to local traders, park keepers and bench regulars. Some recognized him, others didn’t.

  ‘We saw him go past every morning, always walking slowly …’

  ‘He used to watch the children playing …’

  ‘He’d put his newspapers down next to him then start reading them, sometimes smoking a cigar …’

  ‘He looked like a good man …’

  Of course!

  5.

  Had it rained much during the night? Maigret had no idea, but on waking he was very happy to find the pavements a blackish colour, still glistening in places and reflecting real clouds, not the fluffy little pink ones of recent days but heavy, dark-rimmed rainclouds.

  He was keen for the summer and the holiday season to be over, for everyone to be back in their place. He’d frown each time his eye lighted on a young woman in the street still sporting the tight trousers worn on the beach, feet bare and tanned, nonchalantly treading the Paris cobblestones in sandals.

  It was Saturday. On waking up, he had intended to pay another visit to Jouane, in Rue du Saint-Gothard, without knowing why exactly. He wanted to see them all again, not so much to ask them specific questions as to mingle with them and gain a better feel for René Josselin’s milieu.

  There must be something that was eluding him. It did indeed now seem that the murderer had come from the outside, which extended the field of possibilities. But by how much? The fact remained that the automatic had been taken from the drawer, the key from its nail in the kitchen, and the man had known which room on the sixth floor to go into.

  All the same, Maigret walked to his office, as he often did; today he did so deliberately, as if to give himself a break. The air was cooler. People looked less tanned and wore their habitual facial expressions.

  He reached Quai des Orfèvres just in time for the morning briefing and, with a file under his arm, he joined the other departmental chiefs in the commissioner’s office. They each brought the commissioner up to date with their latest cases. The head of the Vice Squad, for instance, suggested closing a nightclub about which he received complaints almost daily. Meanwhile Darrui, also from Vice, had organized a nocturnal raid on the Champs-Élysées and three or four ladies of easy virtue were waiting at police headquarters for their fate to be decided.

  ‘What about you, Maigret?’

  ‘Me, I’m bogged down in a case involving good people,’ he muttered with a smile.

  ‘No suspect?’

  ‘Not yet. Nothing but fingerprints that don’t match our records, in other words, the fingerprints of an honest man …’

  There had been a new murder during the night, a real one, almost a massacre. Lucas, barely back from his holiday, was handling it. For the time being, he was still shut away in his office with the murderer, trying to make sense of his explanations.

  It had happened among the Polish community, in a slum near Porte d’Italie. A labourer who spoke little French, a puny, sickly-looking man called Stefan and whose surname was unpronounceable, lived there with a woman and four young children, as far as Lucas could gather.

  Lucas had seen the woman before she’d been taken to hospital, and he claimed she was a splendid creature.

  She wasn’t the wife of the Stefan who had been arrested but of one of his compatriots, a certain Majewski, who had been working as an agricultural labourer for three years on farms in northern France.

  Two of the children, the eldest, were Majewski’s. What had happened exactly between these individuals three years earlier was hard to fathom.

  ‘He gave her to me,’ Stefan repeated obstinately.

  At one point, he’d stated:

  ‘He sold her to me.’

  Be that as it may, three years earlier, the puny Stefan had taken Majewski’s place in the slum dwelling and in the beautiful woman’s bed. Her real husband had left, of his own free will, so it seems. Two more children were born and they all lived in one room like Romanies in their caravan.

  But Majewski had taken it into his head to come back and, while Stefan was at work, had simply reclaimed his former place.

  What had the two men said to one another on Stefan’s return? That was what Lucas was trying to establish, and it was all the more difficult since his customer spoke French as badly as the Spanish or South American maid Maigret had questioned the previous day.

  Stefan had left. He’d prowled around the neighbourhood for nearly twenty-four hours, not sleeping but hanging around various bars. Somehow or other he’d got hold of a sharp meat cleaver. He claimed he hadn’t stolen it and was adamant about that, as if for him that was a point of honour.

  During the previous night,
he had entered the bedroom where they all slept and killed the husband with four or five blows from the cleaver. Then he’d thrown himself on the woman, who was screaming, her breasts bare, and attacked her two or three times, but some neighbours came rushing in before he was able to finish her off.

  He had allowed himself to be arrested without putting up any resistance. Maigret went into Lucas’ office and sat in on his interrogation for a while. Lucas was at his typewriter, painstakingly tapping out the questions and the replies.

  The man was seated on a chair, smoking a cigarette he’d just been given, and there was an empty coffee cup beside him. He’d been somewhat roughed up by the neighbours. His shirt collar was torn, his hair dishevelled and his face scratched.

  He was listening to Lucas speak, his eyebrows knitted, making a huge effort to understand, then he appeared to be thinking, his head swaying from left to right and from right to left.

  ‘He gave her to me …’ he repeated at length, as if that explained everything. ‘He had no right to take her back.’

  It seemed perfectly natural to him to have killed his former friend. He would have killed the woman too if the neighbours hadn’t stopped him in time. Would he have killed the children?

  He didn’t answer that question, perhaps because he himself didn’t know. He hadn’t thought of everything. He had decided to kill Majewski and his wife. As for the rest …

  Maigret went back to his office. He found a note informing him that the people from Rue de la Pompe who had been behind Madame Josselin and her daughter at the theatre remembered the two women very clearly. They hadn’t budged from their seats during the first interval, only during the second, after which they’d sat down again, well before the curtain had gone up, and they hadn’t left the auditorium during the performance.

  ‘What shall I do today, chief?’ Lapointe had just asked him.

  ‘The same as yesterday afternoon.’

  In other words, retrace the route René Josselin took each morning on his stroll and question people.

  ‘He must have spoken with someone. Try again, at the same time as him … Do you have a second photograph? Give it to me.’

  Maigret stuffed it in his pocket, on the off chance. Then he took a bus to Boulevard de Montparnasse and had to put out his pipe because it was a bus with no external platform.