TWO

Once again, with the dining table set for two, Madame Maigret was to be kept waiting. Not that she wasn’t used to it. The telephone, finally installed, had made no difference. Maigret invariably forgot to let her know. As to young Duchemin, it would be left to Cassieux to deliver the customary lecture.

Slowly, with knitted brows, the Chief Superintendent had once again climbed the five flights of stairs, oblivious of the life going on behind closed doors on every floor. He was thinking only of Cécile, unattractive Cécile, who had been the butt of so many jokes, and who was banteringly referred to by some of his colleagues as “Maigret’s call girl.”

This house in the suburbs had been her home. This dark staircase had been used by her every day. The smells of this place had still clung about her clothes as she sat, fearful yet uncomplaining, in the waiting room at the Quai des Orfèvres.

Whenever Maigret had condescended to grant her an interview, had there not always been more than a hint of ill-concealed irony under his mask of gravity as he asked, “Well, have the ornaments been on the move again? Did you find the inkwell at the wrong end of the table this morning? Has the paperknife escaped from its drawer?”

When he reached the fifth floor, he gave orders to the police officer to admit no one to the apartment, and pushed open the door. Then he turned back to take a good look at the doorbell. It was not an electric bell button, but a thick red-and-yellow rope. He pulled it. An old–fashioned metal bell tinkled in the sitting room.

“Will you see to it, officer, that no one touches this door.”

He did not think that any useful fingerprints might be found there, but one could never be sure. He was in a sour mood. He was still haunted by the memory of Cécile sitting in “the aquarium,” as the waiting room at police headquarters was familiarly called because one of its walls was entirely of glass.

It did not need a doctor to tell him that the old woman had been dead for some hours, well before the time of her niece’s arrival at the Quai des Orfèvres.

Had Cécile been a witness to the murder? If so, she had not cried out, or gone for help. She had spent the rest of the night in the apartment with the corpse and, in the morning, had washed and dressed as usual. The glimpse he had had of her on arrival at headquarters had been enough to show him that she was dressed as he had always seen her.

To make doubly sure, he decided to check, as he considered it a matter of some importance. He began looking for her room. At first, he could not find it. The front of the apartment consisted of three rooms, the sitting room, the dining room, and the aunt’s bedroom.

To the right of the corridor, there were a kitchen and pantry, with a door at the back. Beyond this door Maigret found a little cubbyhole, dimly lit by a skylight and furnished with an iron bedstead, a washbasin, and a wardrobe, which had been Cécile’s bedroom.

The bed was unmade. There was soapy water in the washbasin and a comb on the side, with a few dark hairs between the teeth. A salmon-pink flannel dressing gown was flung over a chair.

Had Cécile known already, by the time she started getting dressed? It must have been almost as dark as night when she went out into the street, or rather into the road, for the building fronted onto the highway. She must have waited in darkness at the streetcar stop barely a hundred yards away. The fog had been thick.

On arrival at police headquarters, she had filled in a slip and sat down in the waiting room facing the black-framed wallcase with the photographs of members of the force killed on active service.

At last Maigret’s head had emerged from the stairwell. She had sprung to her feet. He would grant her an interview. She would be able to unburden herself…

But more than an hour had passed, and she was still waiting. The corridors were coming to life. Inspectors hurried to and fro. Doors opened and shut. People were admitted to the waiting room, and then called out one after another by the guard. She, and only she, was left waiting.

What was it that had prompted her to leave?

Mechanically, Maigret filled his pipe. He could hear voices out on the landing, the neighbors airing their views and the police officer quietly advising them to return to their own apartments.

What had become of Cécile?

During the whole of the hour that he spent alone in the apartment, this was the question that obsessed him and gave him that absent, sluggish look so familiar to his colleagues.

All the same, in his own fashion, he was working. Already, he was steeped in the atmosphere of the apartment. As soon as he had set foot in the entrance hall, or rather the long, dark hallway that served as such, he had observed that everything around him was old and shoddy. There was enough furniture in this small apartment to furnish twice the number of rooms, nothing but old furniture of no particular style or date, and not a single piece of any value. It reminded him of a provincial auction of household effects, following the death or bankruptcy of the owner, a respectable, middle–class citizen, whose austere mode of life had been a well-kept secret until then.

In contrast, however, there was not a pin out of place, and everything was scrupulously clean. Every surface, however small, was highly polished, and every ornament, however tiny, in its appointed place.

The apartment could just as appropriately have been lit by candles or gas as by electricity, so little did it reflect contemporary life, and indeed the light fixtures hanging from the ceilings were converted gas lamps.

The sitting room was more like a junk shop than a room, its walls covered with family portraits, water colors, and worthless prints in black, gilt, and fake carved-wood frames. Near the window stood an enormous mahogany desk with movable panels, of the type still to be found in the offices of the managers of big country estates. Wrapping a handkerchief around his hand, Maigret opened all the drawers in turn. Some were full of oddments such as keys, bits of sealing wax, pillboxes, a lorgnette frame, diaries going back twenty years, and yellowing receipts. Four of the drawers were empty. None had been forced.

Armchairs with worn upholstery, a shelf with knick-knacks, a work table, two Louis Seize long-cased clocks. In the dining room Maigret found another such clock. There was also one in the entrance, and, he noted with surprise, indeed almost with amusement, two more in the dead woman’s bedroom.

Obviously she had had an obsession about clocks! And the odd thing was that they all worked. Maigret became aware of this fact at midday, when they all began striking one after the other.

The dining room too was overfurnished, so much so that there was barely room to move. Here, as in all the other rooms, there were heavy curtains over the windows, as if the inmates had dreaded the intrusion of daylight.

Why, when death had struck her down without warning in the middle of the night, had the woman been wearing one stocking? He looked around for the other, and found it on the bedside rug. Thick black woolen stockings. The legs were swollen and bluish in color, from which Maigret deduced that Cécile’s aunt had suffered from dropsy. A walking stick which he had picked up off the floor seemed to indicate that she was not completely bedridden, but able to get around in the apartment.

Finally, hanging above the bed, was a bell rope similar to the one on the landing. He pulled it, listened, and heard the front door click open. He went to shut it, and silently cursed the neighbors who were still out there.

Why had Cécile suddenly decided to leave the Quai des Orfèvres? What could possibly have persuaded her to do so, when she had such very grave news to impart to the Chief Superintendent?

She alone knew the answer. She alone could tell, and, as time went by, Maigret grew more and more uneasy.

What could those two women possibly have found to do all day? he wondered, in spite of himself, as he looked about him, and saw furniture and more furniture laden with fragile knickknacks of spun glass and brittle china, each one uglier than the next, glass globes enclosing models of the Grotto at Lourdes and the Bay of Naples, photographs hanging crooked in cheap brass frames, a paper-thin Japanese cup with a mended handle, a number of odd tulip glasses filled with artificial flowers.

Once again, he went into the aunt’s bedroom, where the body still lay on the mahogany bed, with one leg inexplicably clad in a stocking.

At about one o’clock there was a flurry of movement outside in the street, then on the stairs and on the landing. While all this was going on, the Chief Superintendent was slumped deep in an armchair in the sitting room, still wearing his coat and hat, in a haze of blue smoke from the pipe that he had been smoking continuously. The sound of voices made him start, like a man awakened from a dream.

“Well, Chief Superintendent? What’s this all about, my dear fellow?”

Bideau, the Deputy Public Prosecutor, smilingly shook him by the hand. He was followed by the diminutive Examining Magistrate, Mabille, the police doctor, and a clerk who was already looking about for a table on which to spread his papers.

“Anything of interest? Good Lord! What a miserable dump…”

A few seconds later, the van from the Forensic Laboratory drew up in front of the building, and the photographers swarmed in with their bulky equipment. Overawed, the police superintendent of the Bourg-la-Reine division picked his way among this impressive gathering of officials, hoping that, in due course, someone would notice him.

“Please go back to your apartments, ladies and gentlemen,” repeated the policeman at the door. “There is nothing to see here…Later, you will all be interviewed separately. Get out of the way, will you, please! Come along now, move!”

It was five o’clock in the afternoon. The fog had transformed itself into a fine drizzle, and the street lamps had been switched on earlier than usual. Maigret, his hat pulled down over his eyes, walked rapidly through the freezingly cold entrance hall of police headquarters and hastily went up the dimly lit staircase.

He gave a quick unthinking glance at the “aquarium,” more than ever resembling a real aquarium with the lights switched on. There were four or five people waiting, in frozen attitudes, like waxworks in the Musée Grévin, and the Chief Superintendent wondered why on earth that particular shade of green, which lent a deathly pallor to the human skin, had been chosen for the wallpaper, upholstery, and table covering.

“Someone was asking for you, sir, I believe,” said one of the inspectors, on his way elsewhere, with a bundle of files under his arm.

“The boss wants to see you,” the guard now informed him, pausing in his work of sticking stamps on envelopes.

Maigret, without even looking into his own office, went straight on to see the Chief Commissioner. Only the desk lamp was switched on.

“Well, Maigret?”

A silence.

“A wretched business, to say the least. Any new developments at the apartment?”

Maigret sensed that the Chief had bad news for him. He waited, his heavy brows knitted.

“I did try to reach you, but you had already left Bourg-la-Reine…It’s about that young woman…a short while ago, Victor…”

Victor, who was afflicted with a stammer, was one of the doormen in the Palais de Justice. He had a walrus mustache and a hoarse voice not unlike a sea lion’s.

Victor was accosted in the corridor by the Public Prosecutor, who was in a prickly mood:

“‘Listen; my friend, would you say this corridor had been properly swept today?’ ”

Now, as everyone knew, when the Public Prosecutor addressed anyone as friend…

Maigret’s thoughts were racing ahead of the Chief Commissioner’s words.

“To cut a long story short, Victor, in a panic, made a dive for the broom closet…Can you guess what he found there?”

“Cécile!” replied the Chief Superintendent, evincing no surprise. His head drooped.

He had had time, back there in the apartment, while what are known as the standard procedures were being carried out around him, to consider the problem of Cécile from every possible angle, but had not been able to come to a satisfactory conclusion. It always came down to the same question:

“What could possibly have persuaded her to leave the Quai des Orfèvres, considering the very grave news she had to impart to me?”

He was becoming more and more convinced that she had not gone of her own free will. Someone had sought her out there in the very nerve center of police activity, within a few feet of Maigret’s own door, and persuaded her to leave with him…

What inducement had he offered? Who carried sufficient weight with the young woman to…?

Now, in a flash, he understood.

“I should have known!” he groaned, striking his forehead with his clenched fist.

“What do you mean?”

“I should have known that she couldn’t have left the building, that nothing would have persuaded her to leave the building…”

He was furious with himself.

“She’s dead, of course,” he groaned, staring at the floor.

“Yes…If you’d like to come with me…”

The Chief Commissioner pressed a buzzer and told the guard:

“If anyone asks for me or telephones, say I’ll be back very shortly…”

Both men were equally troubled, but the Chief Superintendent carried the additional burden of a bad conscience. And the day had started so well! He recalled the aromatic gust of hot air, a blend of frothy coffee, croissants, and rum…the luminous morning fog…

“By the way…Janvier called a while ago. Apparently your Poles…”

With a sweep of his hand, he seemed to consign every Pole on earth to oblivion!

The Chief Commissioner led the way through a glass door. For the past ten years at least there had been talk of walling it up, but nothing had been done, because everyone found it so convenient. This was the door, in fact, which provided direct access between the Police Judiciaire headquarters and the Palais de Justice and the Archives. The building was rather like the backstage areas of a theater, full of narrow stairways and winding passages. When one was escorting a prisoner to see a judge in chambers…

On the right, a staircase leading to the attics which housed Police Records and the Forensic Laboratory…A little farther on, a door with frosted-glass panels, beyond which lay the hurly-burly of the Palais de Justice, lawyers scurrying to and fro, the press of spectators crowding into the various courtrooms.

Beyond was another, smaller door, cut, for God knows what reason, into the supporting wall of the building itself. In front of this door an inspector was posted. He was smoking a cigarette, which he extinguished as soon as he saw the two men.

Who knew of the existence of this door? Only the personnel of the department! It opened onto a fairly deep closet, a hole about six feet square, in which Victor, who liked to have his equipment within easy reach, kept his brooms and buckets.

The inspector made himself inconspicuous. The Chief Commissioner opened the closet and, as it was not fitted with a light, struck a match.

“Here she is…” he said.

As there was not quite enough room for a body to lie full-length on the floor of the closet, Cécile had fallen forward against the wall with her chin pressed down onto her chest.

Maigret, suddenly feeling hot, mopped his face with his handkerchief and crammed his pipe, still smoldering, into his pocket.

There was no need for words. The two of them stood looking down at her, the Chief Commissioner and the Chief Superintendent, who mechanically removed his hat.

“Do you know what I think, Chief? Someone must have gone into the waiting room and told her I was ready to see her, but not in my own office…Someone whom she took to be a member of my own staff.”

The Chief Commissioner merely nodded.

“Speed was of the essence, do you see?…I might be ready to see her at any moment…She knew who had murdered her aunt. All he had to do was to open this door, beyond which she could see nothing. Cécile had only to take one step into the dark…

First, she was stunned by a blow with a truncheon or some other blunt instrument…”

The foolish green hat, lying on the floor, confirmed this hypothesis. And besides, there were traces of clotted blood clinging to the young woman’s dark hair.

She must have staggered, or possibly fallen, before the aunt’s murderer, to avoid making any noise, strangled her.

“Are you sure of that, Chief?” Maigret countered.

“That’s what the pathologist thinks. I wanted you to be here before he started on the autopsy. You seem surprised? Why? The aunt was strangled too, wasn’t she?”

“Correct.”

“What are you getting at, Maigret?”

“I just don’t see how both murders could have been committed by the same man…When Cécile turned up here this morning, she knew who had killed her aunt.”

“Do you think so?”

“If not, she would have given the alarm earlier. According to the pathologist, her aunt was dead by two o’clock this morning. Either Cécile witnessed the murder…or…”

“What was to stop the murderer from killing her at the same time, there in the apartment at Bourg-la-Reine?”

“Maybe she was hiding somewhere…As I was saying…or else she found her aunt’s body when she got up about half-past six this morning. I know she woke about then, because her alarm was set for half-past six. She said nothing to anyone. Instead, she came straight here.”

“It does seem odd…”

“Not if we assume that she knew the murderer. She wanted to speak to me personally. She didn’t trust the local superintendent of police at Bourg-la-Reine. The fact that she was killed to prevent her from talking proves that she knew.”

“But supposing you had seen her as soon as you arrived?”

Maigret flushed, which was unusual for him.

“Yes, you’ve got a point there…There’s something I can’t quite make out…Maybe the murderer was tied up elsewhere before…Or else he didn’t yet know…”

With an abrupt, dismissive gesture, he grumbled:

“It doesn’t make sense!”

“What doesn’t make sense?”

“What I’ve just been saying…If last night’s murderer had shown his face in the aquarium…”

“The aquarium?”

“Sorry, Chief…that’s the inspectors’ name for the waiting room…Cécile would never have gone anywhere with him, so it must have been someone else. Either someone she didn’t know, or someone she knew and trusted.”

And Maigret, looking stubborn and determined, stood contemplating the sad little bundle lying crumpled against the wall among the brooms and buckets.

“It had to be someone she didn’t know!” he said, with sudden decisiveness.

“Why?”

“She might have gone off with someone she knew if she’d met him in the street…But not here! I confess, I was half expecting to hear that she’d been found in the Seine or on some patch of waste ground…But…”

Bending to avoid hitting his head on the low crosspiece of the door frame, he stepped into the cupboard and struck one match and then another, and gave the body a slight push.

“What are you looking for, Maigret?”

“Her bag.”

The bag was as much a part of her as the indescribable green hat. It was a capacious bag, like a small trunk, and, as she sat waiting in the aquarium, Cécile always kept it carefully cradled on her lap.

“It’s disappeared…”

“What do you conclude from that?”

Whereupon Maigret, forgetting the disparity of rank, gave way to a burst of irritability:

“Conclude! Conclude! Are you able to draw any conclusion?”

The fair-haired inspector, who was well within earshot, averted his head. Noticing this, Maigret pulled himself up short.

“I’m sorry, Chief. But you must admit that this place is about as secure as a barn…To think that someone should have been able to go into the waiting room and…”

He was at the end of his tether. Savagely, he bit the stem of his pipe.

“Not to mention that accursed door, which should have been boarded up years ago.”

“If you had interviewed the young woman when…”

Poor Maigret! He was a pathetic sight, tall and heavily built, looking as solid as a rock, with his head bowed, staring at that limp bundle of clothes at his feet, that lifeless lump, and once again mopping his face with his handkerchief.

“What are we going to do?” asked the Chief Commissioner, wanting to change the subject.

Acknowledge publicly that a murder had been committed within the very precincts of police headquarters, or, to be more precise, in this breach in the party wall between police headquarters and the Palais de Justice?

“There’s just one favor I’d like to ask you. Would you mind if I put Lucas in charge of that business of the Poles?”

Maybe it was just that Maigret was hungry. He had had nothing to eat since breakfast. On the other hand, he had had three little sips of brandy, which had sharpened his appetite.

“If that’s what you want…”

“Shut this door, dear fellow, and stay on guard. I’ll be back shortly.”

Maigret returned to his office and, still wearing his hat and coat, telephoned Madame Maigret.

“No…I’ve no idea when I’ll be home…It would take too long to explain…Of course not…I shan’t be leaving Paris.”

He considered ordering sandwiches, as he so often did, from the Brasserie Dauphine. But he felt he needed air. It was still drizzling outside. He decided to go to the little bar opposite the statue of Henri IV, in the middle of the Pont Neuf.

He ordered a ham sandwich.

“How are things, Chief Superintendent?”

The waiter knew Maigret. He recognized the significance of those drooping eyelids and that set face.

“Having trouble?”

A game of belote was in progress at a table near the bar. Other customers were playing the pinball machines.

Maigret bit into his sandwich, and thought: Cécile is dead. In spite of his heavy overcoat, it sent a shiver down his spine.