The Night at the Crossroads (6 page)

‘And your sister?'

‘Precisely … I was about to bring this up: would it be too much to ask you to have someone look in on the house from time to time?'

Three dark, official-looking cars came up the hill from Arpajon and turned left towards Avrainville.

‘What's going on?'

‘They're from the public prosecutor's office. Madame Goldberg was killed last night as she was getting out of a car at the inn.'

Maigret watched his reaction. Across the street, Monsieur Oscar was strolling idly up and down in front of his garage.

‘Killed!' repeated Carl. Suddenly nervous, he said, ‘Listen, chief inspector: I must get to Paris! … I can't stay here without any money, especially on the day when I have to pay all my local bills, but as soon
as I get back I want to help find the murderer. You will allow me to do this, won't you? I don't know anything for certain, but I feel … I don't know how to put this … I'm beginning to see some kind of pattern here …'

He had to pull in closer to the pavement because a lorry driver coming back from Paris was honking his horn to get by.

‘Off you go, then!' exclaimed Maigret.

Carl tipped his hat and took a moment to light another
cigarette before letting in the clutch, whereupon the jalopy went down the hill and puttered up the next one.

People were moving around over by the three cars that were parked just outside Avrainville.

‘Sure you wouldn't like a little something?'

Maigret frowned at the smiling garage owner, who just wouldn't stop offering him a drink.

Filling a pipe, he walked off towards the Three Widows house, where the tall trees were alive with the fluttering and chirping of birds. The Michonnet villa was on his way.

The windows were open. Wearing a dust cap, Madame Michonnet was upstairs in the bedroom, shaking out a rug.

Unshaven, his hair uncombed, wearing no collar, her husband was downstairs smoking a meerschaum with a cherry-wood stem and looking out at the road with a glum, abstracted air. When he noticed the inspector, he avoided greeting him by making a
show of cleaning out his pipe.

A few minutes later Maigret was ringing the bell at the Andersens' front gate, where he waited in vain for ten minutes. All the shutters were closed. The only sound was the constant twittering of the birds, which transformed every tree into
a bustling little world.

In the end Maigret shrugged, examined the lock and let himself in with a passkey. As on the previous day, he walked around the house to the drawing room.

He knocked but, again, without success. Then, grumbling and obstinate, he went inside, where his eye fell
upon the open phonograph. There was a record on the turntable.

Why did he start the machine? He would have been at a loss to explain. The needle was scratchy. An Argentinean orchestra played a tango as the inspector started up the stairs.

The door to Carl Andersen's bedroom stood open. Near a wardrobe Maigret saw a pair of shoes that seemed to have recently been cleaned, for the brush and tin of polish sat beside them and the floor was dotted with crumbled, dried mud.

The inspector had made paper tracings of the footprints found in the field. He compared them with the shoes. A perfect match.

And yet he never so much as blinked. He didn't seem the least bit pleased. He went on smoking, as grumpy as he'd been all morning.

‘Is that you?' a woman's voice inquired.

Maigret hesitated … He could not see who was speaking: the voice had come from Else's room, but the door was closed.

‘It's me,' he finally replied, as indistinctly as he could.

Then, a long silence.

‘Who's there?' the voice asked abruptly.

It was too late to fool her.

‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret. I was here yesterday. I'd like to speak to you for a moment, mademoiselle.'

More silence. Maigret tried to guess what she could possibly be doing behind that door, beneath which gleamed a thin line of sunlight.

‘I'm listening,' she said at last.

‘If you'd be good enough to open the door … I can certainly wait, if you need time to dress.'

That annoying silence again.

A little laugh, and then, ‘What you ask of me is somewhat difficult, chief inspector!'

‘Why is that?'

‘Because I'm locked in. So you will have to speak without seeing me.'

‘Who locked you in?'

‘My brother Carl … I am the one who asks him to, whenever he goes out, because I'm so terribly afraid of prowlers.'

Without saying anything, Maigret pulled out his passkey and quietly inserted it in the lock. His throat felt tight; was he troubled by any untoward thoughts?

And when the bolt shifted, he decided not to open the door before announcing first, ‘I'm going to come in, mademoiselle …'

A strange sensation: he was in a dark, drab corridor – and stepped immediately into a setting alive with light.

Although the shutters were closed, the horizontal slats admitted great beams of sunshine.

The entire room was thus a jigsaw puzzle of darkness and light. The walls, objects, even Else's face were as if striped in luminous bands. Then there was the young woman's heavy perfume, plus such incidental details as the silk
underwear tossed on to a bergère, the Turkish cigarette smouldering in a china bowl on a lacquered pedestal table, and finally there was Else, lounging on the black velvet couch in a deep red peignoir.

Eyes wide open, she watched Maigret come towards her with amused astonishment and, just perhaps, a tiny tremor of fear.

‘What are you doing?'

‘I wanted to talk to you. Please forgive me if I'm disturbing you …'

She laughed like a little girl. When her peignoir slipped off one shoulder, she pulled it up again but remained lying on or, rather, nestled in the low couch striped with sunlight like the rest of the room.

‘You see? … I wasn't doing much of anything. I never do!'

‘Why didn't you go to Paris with your brother?'

‘He doesn't want me to. He says having a woman around gets in the way when men discuss business.'

‘You never leave the house?'

‘But I do! I take walks around the property.'

‘That's all?'

‘We have three hectares here, enough for me to stretch my legs, don't you think? … But do sit down, chief inspector. It's rather funny, having you here in secret …'

‘What do you mean?'

‘That my brother will have a fit when he gets back. He's worse than any mother. Worse than a jealous lover! He is the one who looks after me and he takes this responsibility seriously, as you can see.'

‘I thought you were the one who wanted to be locked in, because of your fear of burglars.'

‘There's that, too … I've grown so used to solitude that now I am afraid of people.'

Maigret had sat down in a large upholstered armchair and placed his bowler on the rug. And whenever Else looked at him he turned his face away, still unable to meet her gaze with his usual composure.

The previous day, she had simply seemed mysterious to him. In the dim light, a formal, almost regal figure, she'd had the presence of a film star, and their first meeting had taken on a theatrical air.

Now he was trying to discover her human side, but something else was bothering him: the very intimacy of their encounter.

Else relaxing in her peignoir, dangling a slipper from the tip of a bare foot in that perfumed bedchamber, while the middle-aged Maigret sat slightly flushed, his hat on the rug …

Wasn't that a perfect illustration for
La Vie Parisienne
?

Rather clumsily, the inspector put his pipe away in his pocket even though he hadn't cleaned it out.

‘So, you find it boring here?'

‘No … Yes … I don't know … Do you smoke cigarettes?'

She waved towards a pack of Turkish cigarettes, the price of which was marked on the band: 20 francs 65 centimes. Maigret recalled that the Andersens lived on 2,000 francs a month, and that Carl had been obliged to hurry and collect his wages so
as to pay the rent and local bills on time.

‘Do you smoke a lot?'

‘A pack or two a day …'

She held out a delicately engraved lighter, then heaved
a sigh that caused the neckline of her peignoir to open a little more revealingly.

The inspector did not immediately hold it against her, though. Among the clientele of luxury hotels he had seen showily dressed foreign women whom the average citizen would have taken for tarts.

‘Your brother went out, last night?'

‘You think so? … I have no idea …'

‘Didn't you spend the evening arguing with him?'

She showed her perfect teeth in a big smile.

‘Who told you that? Did he? We sometimes squabble, but nicely. As a matter of fact, I scolded him yesterday for not receiving you properly. He's so unsociable! And he was already like that as a boy …'

‘Did you live in Denmark?'

‘Yes. In a big castle beside the Baltic … A very dreary castle, all white amid dusty green foliage … Do you know the country? So gloomy! And yet, it is beautiful …'

As her gaze grew distant with nostalgia, she felt a shiver of pleasure.

‘We were rich, but our parents were quite strict, like most Protestants. Personally, I pay no attention to religion, but Carl is still a believer … Less so than his father, who lost all his fortune through clinging stubbornly to
his principles. We left Denmark, Carl and I …'

‘That was three years ago?'

‘Yes … Just imagine! My brother was destined to become an important dignitary of the Danish court – and here he is, forced to earn his living designing dreadful fabrics … In Paris, in the second- and third-class hotels
where we had to stay, he was horribly unhappy. He had the same tutor as our crown prince! But he preferred to bury himself out here.'

‘And bury you at the same time.'

‘Yes … I'm used to it. I was a prisoner in our parents' castle, too. I was kept away from all the girls who might have become my friends, supposedly because they weren't my social equals.'

Her expression changed with striking abruptness.

‘Do you think that Carl has become … I'm not sure how to put it … abnormal?'

And she leaned forwards, as if to hear the inspector's reply as quickly as possible.

‘You're afraid of …?' exclaimed Maigret in surprise.

‘I didn't say that! I didn't mean anything! Please excuse me … You've started me talking … I don't know why I trust you like this … So …'

‘Does he behave oddly at times?'

She shrugged wearily, crossed and uncrossed her legs, then stood up, uncovering for an instant a flash of skin between the folds of the peignoir.

‘What do you want me to say to you? I don't know any more. Ever since that business with the car … Why would he have killed a man he didn't know?'

‘You're sure you have never seen Isaac Goldberg?'

‘Yes … As far as I know …'

‘You and your brother never went to Antwerp?'

‘We stayed there one night, three years ago, when we arrived from Copenhagen … No, Carl could not do such a thing! If he has become somewhat strange, I'm sure that
his accident is
more to blame than our financial ruin. He was handsome! He still is, when he wears his monocle. But otherwise … Can you see him kissing a woman without that bit of black glass? That staring eye in its red-rimmed socket …'

She shuddered.

‘That has to be the main reason my brother hides himself away …'

‘But he's keeping you hidden along with him!'

‘What difference does that make?'

‘You're being sacrificed.'

‘That's the lot of every woman, especially a sister. It isn't quite the same thing here in France. In our country, as in England, only the eldest male counts in the family, the son who will carry on the name.'

She was growing agitated, puffing hard on her cigarette. She paced up and down through the patterns of sunshine and shadow in the shuttered room.

‘No! Carl could not have killed him. That was all a mistake. Wasn't it because you realized this that you let him go? … Unless …'

‘Unless?'

‘But you would never admit this! I know that when the police haven't enough proof, they sometimes release a suspect so that they can catch him for good later on … That would be despicable!'

She stubbed out her cigarette in the china bowl.

‘If only we hadn't chosen this awful crossroads … Poor Carl, who wanted to be left alone … But we're less on our own here, chief inspector, than in the most crowded
neighbourhood in Paris! Across the way are those impossible, ridiculous, narrow-minded people who spy on us, especially her – with that white dust cap every morning and her crooked chignon in the afternoon … Then that garage, a little farther
on … Three groups, three camps is more like it, and all at about the same distance from one another …'

‘Did you ever have any contact with the Michonnets?'

‘No! The man came once, peddling insurance. Carl showed him the door.'

‘And the garage owner?'

‘He has never set foot here.'

‘Was it your brother who wanted to make a run for it on Sunday morning?'

She was quiet for a moment, hanging her head, her cheeks pink.

‘No,' she sighed at last, almost inaudibly.

‘It was you?'

‘Yes, me … I hadn't thought things through. The idea that Carl could have committed a crime almost drove me crazy. I'd seen him in such distress the day before … So I dragged him along after
me …'

‘Didn't he swear to you he was innocent?'

‘Yes.'

‘You didn't believe him?'