Maigret and the Spinster (2 page)

How long ago was it that Cécile first put in an appearance at police headquarters? About six months. His diary was in his office, but he could check when he got back. She had lost no time in asking to see Chief Superintendent Maigret, but probably only because she had seen his name in the papers. She had seemed perfectly calm. Had she been aware that her story sounded like the product of an overfertile imagination?

By speaking, with a visible effort, in level tones, looking the Chief Superintendent straight in the eye and smiling, she had done her best to counteract the elements of fantasy in her narrative.

“I’m not an impressionable woman, Chief Superintendent, and I swear I’m telling you the literal truth. I know the exact position of every piece of furniture and ornament, as you would expect, since I do all the housework. My aunt has always been opposed to employing a maid…The first time it happened, I thought I must be mistaken. But after that, I paid particular attention. And yesterday, I marked the positions of various objects. I even went further. I fixed a length of thread across the front door.

Well, now, not only did I find that two chairs had been moved, but also that the thread had been broken…So obviously someone must have been in the apartment. Whoever it was spent some time in the sitting room and, what’s more, opened my aunt’s desk. I’d rigged up something there, too. It’s the third time in two months. My aunt has been almost wholly incapacitated for some months. No one has a key to the apartment, and yet the lock hasn’t been forced. I haven’t liked to mention it to Aunt Juliette, it would only worry her. All the same, I’m certain of one thing, nothing has been taken. If it had been, she would have mentioned it; she’s so suspicious of everyone.”

“In short,” Maigret had said, summing up, “what you’re saying is that some person unknown has broken into the apartment where you live with your aunt three times during the night in the past two months, and that, on each occasion, he went into the sitting room and moved the chairs around.”

“And the blotter!” she reminded him.

“He moved the chairs and the blotter and searched the desk, in spite of its being locked, and the lock’s remaining intact…”

“I should add that last night someone had been smoking in there!” she persisted. “Neither my aunt nor I smoke. No man came into the apartment yesterday. And yet, this morning, the sitting room smelled of tobacco.”

“I’ll come and have a look around.”

“That’s just what I wanted to avoid. My aunt isn’t an easy person. She’ll be angry with me, especially as I’ve said nothing about it to her…”

“In that case, what do you want us to do?”

“I don’t know.…I feel I can trust you…Perhaps, if you could keep watch for a couple of nights in the hallway…”

Poor, misguided creature! Did she really think that a Chief Superintendent of the Police Judiciaire had nothing better to do than to lurk about for nights on end in a stairwell, checking up on some garbled story brought to him by a foolish girl?

“I’ll send Lucas along tomorrow night.”

“Can’t you come yourself?”

No! Absolutely not! She was going too far! And her vexation—his colleagues were right there—was very like that of someone jilted in love.

“He may not come again tomorrow…Maybe three days from now, or five or ten…How should I know…? I’m scared, Chief Superintendent…The thought of a man…”

“Where do you live?”

“At Bourg-la-Reine, about a mile beyond the Porte d’Orléans, on the Route Nationale…Just opposite the fifth stop…It’s a big, five-story brick building with shops on the ground floor, a bicycle shop and a grocer’s…We live on the fifth floor.”

Lucas had gone there and questioned the neighbors.

On his return, he had sounded skeptical.

“An old woman, housebound for the past few months, and a niece pressed into service as part domestic, part nurse…”

The local police had been informed, and had kept watch for nearly a month. No unauthorized person had been seen to enter the building at night. All the same, Cécile had returned to the Quai des Orfèvres.

“He’s been in the apartment again, Chief Superintendent. This time I found traces of ink on the blotter, and I put in fresh paper only yesterday evening.”

“Did you find anything missing?”

“Nothing.”

Maigret had been misguided enough to tell the story to his colleagues, and soon the whole department was pulling his leg.

“Maigret has made a conquest.”

The young woman with the squint, visible behind the glass wall of the waiting room, became an object of quizzical scrutiny.

Colleagues were forever knocking on his door.

“Watch out! There’s someone waiting to see you!”

“Who?”

“Your lady friend.”

For eight nights in succession, Lucas had lurked on the staircase and had not seen or heard anything.

“Maybe he’ll come tomorrow night,” Cécile had suggested.

But there was no justification for incurring further expense.

“Cécile is here.”

Cécile was a celebrity. Everyone called her Cécile. Inspectors about to knock on Maigret’s door would be stopped with the warning:

“Careful! He’s got someone with him…”

“Who?”

“Cécile!”

Maigret changed streetcars at the Porte d’Orléans. At the fifth stop, he got off. On his right a building stood all by itself, flanked on either side by waste land. The effect was of a thin slice of layer cake sticking out into the road.

There seemed to be nothing amiss. Cars sped toward Arpajon and Orléans, and there were trucks returning from the central market. The door to the building was sandwiched between a bicycle shop and a grocer’s. The concierge was scraping carrots.

“Is Mademoiselle Pardon back yet?”

“Mademoiselle Cécile?…I don’t think so. But if you care to ring the bell, Madame Boynet will let you in.”

“I understood that she’s bedridden.”

“She is, more or less…But she’s had a remote-control system installed within reach of her chair. The same as I have in the lodge. And besides, if she really wants to…”

Five floors up. Maigret hated stairs. These were dark and carpeted in tobacco brown. The walls were dingy. Each floor had a different smell, according to what was cooking in the various kitchens. The sounds also varied. The tinkling of a piano, the squealing of children, the reverberation of voices raised in anger.

On the fifth floor, on the left, a dusty visiting card had been affixed above the bell:
Jean Siveschi
. So it must be the apartment on the right. He rang the bell. He could hear it ringing throughout the apartment, but there was no click of a latch being released, and no one came to the door. He rang again. Embarrassment was superseded by anxiety, anxiety by remorse.

Behind him, a woman’s voice asked:

“What do you want?”

He turned around to see a shapely young woman wearing an extremely becoming pale-blue dressing gown.

“Madame Boynet…”

“That’s her apartment all right,” she replied, speaking with a slight foreign accent. “Is there no answer? That’s odd…”

She tried the bell herself, revealing more bare flesh as she raised her arm.

“Even if Cécile is out, her aunt…”

Maigret hung about on the landing for another ten minutes, then set off to look for a locksmith. The nearest one was almost a mile away. This time the sound of his approach brought out not merely the girl but her mother and sister as well.

“Has there been an accident, do you think?”

The lock, which had not been tampered with, gave easily. Maigret led the way into the apartment, which was overcrowded with old furniture and ornaments. He spared them only a cursory glance. A sitting room…a dining room…an open door and, lying on a mahogany bed, an old woman with dyed hair who…

“Would you please leave? Do you hear?” he shouted, turning on the three women. “If this is how you get your kicks, I’m sorry for you.”

An odd sort of corpse, a fat little old woman with a painted face and stringy hair, heavily peroxided, showing white at the roots, in a red dressing gown and with one stocking, just one, on the leg that dangled over the side of the bed.

There was no possible doubt about it, she had been strangled.

Looking fierce and troubled, he returned to the landing.

“Someone go and get a police officer.”

Five minutes later, he was in a telephone booth in a bistro nearby.

“Hello! This is Chief Superintendent Maigret. Who is that speaking?…Good! Listen, my boy, is Cécile around? I want you to slip across to the Public Prosecutor’s Office. See if you can have a word with the director in person…Tell him—got it?—I’m staying here. And you’d better let the forensic people know as well…If by any chance Cécile turns up…What’s the matter with you?…Listen, this is no laughing matter.”

When he came out of the bistro, after having downed a glass of rum at the bar, a crowd of about fifty people had gathered outside the oddly shaped building.

In spite of himself, he searched the crowd for Cécile.

It was not until five o’clock that afternoon that he was to learn that Cécile was dead.

O
nce 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.