Cécile is Dead (14 page)

‘Never mind that.'

‘Well, I'm soaked … I
didn't dare go to the corner café to get a drink. I was there for hours. A few
minutes ago, quarter of an hour at the most, a young woman arrived in a taxi. I
recognized her by her red hat – Gérard Pardon's sister Berthe – you pointed her
out to me …'

‘And then?'

Little did Torrence know that, as he made
his report, the inspector was listening with only one ear, while he looked Monsieur
Charles up and down. As for the former lawyer himself, he kept both his hands flat on
the desk, maintaining a deliberately awkward position.

What had the man been doing upstairs? It was
the first
time since Juliette's death
that he had been in her apartment on his own.

‘Carry on, I'm
listening.'

‘I didn't have any instructions
… well, the girl went upstairs. After a few minutes, I thought she might have been
bringing bad news, so I went up myself. I knocked on the door, and the girl opened it.
There isn't a front hall, and Madame Pardon was in the kitchen, sobbing. She
looked at me, wild-eyed, asking, “Is he dead?”'

There must have been an expression of great
surprise on Maigret's face, because Monsieur Charles frowned.

‘Then what?'

‘I was terribly embarrassed, I can
tell you, sir. I asked the girl what she'd been doing, and she told me we were
brutes, and if anything bad happened to her brother it would be our responsibility … One
of them in floods of tears, the other calling me names, and I couldn't get any
sense out of them! Well, I waited patiently, and finally I found out that Gérard had
been to see his sister. He'd been carrying on like a madman, telling her he wanted
money at once. She tried to calm him down and find out what he wanted the money for. He
said, with a sarcastic laugh, that she'd find out from the newspapers tomorrow,
and for heaven's sake she must give him everything she had. So she gave him a
hundred and thirty francs exactly, keeping only ten francs for herself, and he rushed
out. She tried to follow him, but he jumped on a bus that was just moving away.

‘So I don't know what to do,
sir. I left the two girls to
come and phone
you. Should I go back to them? Gérard Pardon's wife says he'll kill himself.
If you ask me, I …'

‘That will do,' Maigret
interrupted him.

‘But … but what should I
do?'

However, the inspector had already hung up
and without any further remark he told Monsieur Charles, ‘Empty your
pockets!'

‘You want me to …?'

‘Empty your pockets!'

‘If you say so.'

He complied slowly, taking the items out one
by one and placing them on his desk: a well-worn wallet, a key, a penknife, a
handkerchief that was far from clean, papers, a small box containing cough sweets, a
tobacco pouch, a pipe and a box of matches.

‘Turn your pockets inside out … turn
your jacket inside out …'

‘Would you like me to take all my
clothes off?'

With some minor changes of wording, Madame
Maigret might have made the same remark that she had addressed to her husband: ‘I
do wonder why you haven't been slapped in the face.'

In fact, of the two of them Monsieur Charles
was more composed, colder, and his chilly manner was not without a touch of insolence.
Taking off his jacket, he revealed shirt-sleeves with worn and grubby cuffs. His
waistcoat matched them. His braces were in no better state than his shirt, and his
underpants showed above his trousers.

‘Shall I go on?'

If the inspector had
not restrained himself, it wasn't a slap in the face that he would have given him,
but a punch on the nose.

‘Do you want me to take my slippers
off?'

‘Yes.'

Although one of his socks had a hole in it,
his slippers did not contain so much as the smallest scrap of paper.

‘Let me point out, inspector, that it
is eleven o'clock at night, and at this hour even if you had a search warrant in
due form I would be within my rights to show you the door. I'm not doing that, I
say so only to point out that …'

‘Sit down.'

And he dialled a telephone number.

‘Be my guest,' said the former
lawyer sarcastically.

‘Hello … Put Lucas on the line, will
you? … Is that you? … Not yet? You'll have to carry on, old fellow … No, I
don't have the time. … Who else is there? Berger? … That's his bad luck!
Tell him to get into a taxi and come to Bourg-la-Reine … Yes, the fourth floor. Thanks,
and good luck!'

He hung up and stood motionless, staring at
the desk in front of him.

‘If you're thinking of staying
much longer, perhaps we could have that little drink.'

A single glance from Maigret silenced the
other man. Ten minutes passed, a quarter of an hour. Cars drove by on the main road. The
piano had fallen silent. The building was asleep.

At last the front door was heard closing
down below, and soon footsteps came up the stairs.

‘Come in,
Berger.'

It must be raining harder than ever, for
Inspector Berger's hat and his shoulders were wet, even though he had come by
taxi.

‘This is Monsieur Charles. He's
rather upset this evening, and I'm afraid he might do something stupid. I have
pointed out to him that it is not entirely within the letter of the law for us to occupy
his apartment tonight, but he doesn't mind that. I'll leave him in your
care. He can go to bed if he wants, and in that case I'd like you to watch over
him as if he were a sick member of your family. I shall certainly be back here tomorrow
morning. If I'm late, don't worry and don't let him go out, because he
might catch cold …'

He buttoned up his overcoat, filled his pipe
and tamped the tobacco down with his thumb.

‘And I wouldn't touch his cognac
if I were you … I don't think it's top quality.'

He took Dandurand's wallet off the
table, along with the papers that the lawyer had taken out of his pocket.

‘Did you tell the taxi to
wait?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Too bad. Well, good night.'

And he left the two men together. For a
moment he almost went up to the fifth floor, but what use would that be? Dandurand
wasn't someone to leave traces behind him.

In the ground-floor corridor, he found
Madame With-All-Due-Respect in her night-clothes, with her head tilted even further
towards her shoulder than ever.

‘What's
going on, inspector? Has another crime been committed in this building?'

He wasn't listening and hardly heard
the indistinct words. Automatically, he replied, ‘Possibly. Let me have the cord,
please.'

It was still raining in the morning, a soft,
dismal rain with the resignation of widowhood. You didn't see it falling; you
didn't feel it, yet it covered everything with a cold film, and the surface of the
Seine was pitted with thousands of lively little circles. At nine, you still felt as if
you were off to catch an early train, for day was reluctant to dawn, and the gas lamps
were still lit.

As Maigret climbed the stairs in the Police
Judiciaire building, he couldn't help casting a glance at the Aquarium, and he
still felt as if he would see Cécile sitting where he had last seen her, a humble figure
patiently waiting. Why did such a distressing thought cross his mind this morning? On
his way, not fully roused from sleep yet, brushing past dripping wet buildings, no doubt
he had vaguely thought of the girl beside him in the cinema, and then of Nouchi,
Monsieur Charles … And now, as he reached the corridor of the Police Judiciaire
building, he was wondering whether there had been anything between Cécile and Monsieur
Dandurand.

There was nothing to give rise to that
hypothesis. It bothered him. It sullied a memory, and yet from then on the inspector
often thought about it.

‘Don't go in … there's
someone here. The commissioner wants you to go and see him first.'

It was the clerk,
preventing Maigret from going into his office.

‘Someone here?' he repeated.

The next moment he was knocking at the
commissioner's door.

‘Come in, Maigret … feeling better?
Look, I let a visitor wait in your office. I didn't know where else to put him,
and it's you he wants to see anyway. Read this.'

Maigret, as if baffled, read the card, which
informed him:

Jean Tinchant

Principal private secretary at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs would like you to facilitate the work of Mr Spencer Oats
of the Institute of Criminology of Philadelphia, who has been warmly recommended to
us by his embassy.

‘What does he want?'

‘He wants to study your
methods.'

And the commissioner could not suppress a
smile as Maigret left, his shoulders hunched, his fists clenched, as if he were about to
crush the American criminologist.

‘Pleased to meet you,
inspector.'

‘Just a minute, Monsieur Spencer.
Hello? Get me the duty office. Maigret here. Hasn't he been found? Get Number 19
at Bourg-la-Reine on the line, please.'

The American looked all right. A tall young
man of the
university lecturer type, red
hair, thin face, correct and well-cut suit, a slight and quite attractive accent.

‘Is that you, Berger? Well?'

‘No news, sir. He slept on the sofa
fully clothed. Guess what? I was beginning to get hungry, and there isn't anything
to eat in the apartment. I don't like to go downstairs to buy croissants … Will
you be here soon? … No, he's behaved perfectly well … He even said he didn't
bear you a grudge, he'd have done the same in your place, and you'd soon
realize you had made a mistake.'

Maigret hung up and went to sit in front of
his stove. The sight of it had surprised the American.

‘And how can I help you, Monsieur
Spencer?' he asked.

He called the man by his first name because
he hadn't the faintest idea how to pronounce Oats.

‘First of all, detective chief
inspector, I'd like to hear your ideas on the psychology of criminals.'

Meanwhile Maigret was opening his post,
which he had found on his desk.

‘What criminals?' he asked as he
read.

‘Well … criminals in
general.'

‘
Before
or
after
?'

‘What do you mean?'

Maigret was smoking his pipe, reading his
letters, warming his back and did not seem to think much of this desultory
conversation.

‘I was asking whether you're
talking about criminals
before
they commit a crime or
after
they've committed it … because before, obviously, they aren't yet criminals.
For thirty, forty, fifty years,
sometimes more, they've been people like everyone else, don't you
agree?'

‘Yes, of course …'

Maigret finally looked up and said, with a
tiny spark of malice in his eyes, ‘Then why, Monsieur Spencer, do you expect their
mentality to change all of a sudden because they've just killed one of their
fellow men?'

He went over to the window to look at the
circular patterns made by rain falling on the river.

‘That would lead us to think,'
the American concluded, ‘that criminals are people just like everyone
else?'

There was a knock on the door. Lucas came in
with a file and, on seeing the visitor, looked as if he were about to leave again.

‘What is it, old fellow? Ah, yes …
take this file to the public prosecutor's office … I assume the Hôtel des Arcades
is still under surveillance?'

They exchanged a few remarks about the
Poles, but Maigret did not lose track of his train of thought.

‘Why does a man commit a crime,
Monsieur Spencer? Out of jealousy, greed, hatred, envy, more rarely out of necessity …
in short, when he is impelled by one of the human passions. We all have those passions
in us to a greater or lesser degree. Suppose I hate my neighbour, who always opens his
window on summer evenings to play the horn … It's not very likely that I'll
kill him. However, only about a month ago, a former colonial who had suffered from
fever, so he wasn't as patient as I am, fired a revolver at his neighbour upstairs
because the neighbour had a wooden leg, and walked up and down
in his apartment all night, with that leg pounding away on
the floor …'

‘Yes, I see what you're getting
at. But what about the mentality of a criminal
after
he has committed a
crime?'

‘That's nothing to do with me.
That's up to the jurors and the governors of prisons and penal colonies … my role
is to find out who committed crimes. For that, all I have to think about is their
mentality before they did it. To know whether such and such a man was capable of
committing such and such a crime, and when and how he committed it.'