Cécile is Dead (11 page)

His nose was running. Monfils just had time
to fish his handkerchief out of his pocket, wondering at the same time why the inspector
was rising to his feet and picking up his bowler hat, which he had left on a chair.

‘But I … where are you
going?'

‘I'll be happy to see Maître
Leloup at my office when he has a statement to make to me,' replied Maigret.
‘Good day to you, gentlemen.'

Henri Monfils couldn't get over it.
‘What was the matter with him? What on earth came over him?'

The lawyer, sitting back in his rattan chair
and warming the brandy glass in his podgy hand, murmured optimistically, ‘Take no
notice, the police are like that. They don't care for dealing with businessmen,
you see,
so it annoyed him to find me here.
You can rely on me to …'

He interrupted himself, putting his mind to
biting off the end of the cigar that his client had offered him. ‘Believe me, if
you …'

The first editions of the evening paper had
just come out and they contained photographs of the funeral. One of them had a good view
of Maigret beside Cécile's grave, next to the deacon with his aspergillum.

Jourdan, still kicking his heels outside the
building in Bourg-la-Reine, where lights were beginning to come on in the windows; the
head of the Sûreté Nationale, phoning from his office and not sure what to say to the
public prosecutor; and Madame Maigret, busy scouring her pans, would all have been
greatly surprised to see Maigret, his hands in his pockets, pipe between his teeth,
walking down Boulevard Montparnasse with a grumpy expression on his face, stopping
outside a cinema with its foyer plastered with brightly coloured posters, and then
finally going up to the ticket office, and holding out some cash.

‘A balcony seat, please,' he
asked.

He then followed the young girl in a black
silk dress with a Peter Pan collar who went ahead of him, shining the narrow beam of her
electric torch on the steps.

‘Excuse me … excuse me … excuse
me.'

He made his way along a row of seats, aware
that he was annoying everyone and treading on toes as he passed.

He had no idea what film was being shown.
Loud voices apparently coming from nowhere filled the auditorium,
while on screen a ship's captain was throwing a girl
down on the bunk in his cabin.

‘So you came here to spy on
me!'

‘Have mercy, Captain Brown! If not on
me, then at least on …'

‘Excuse me,' said a timid little
voice on the inspector's right, and his neighbour pulled away the skirt of her
coat, on which Maigret was sitting.

Maigret was warm. Nice and warm, as he used
to say when he was a child, and if the lights in the auditorium had suddenly come on,
revealing him wrapped up in his overcoat, hands in his pockets, his body leaning
slightly backwards and his eyes half-closed, he would have looked the very essence of
bliss.

In fact it was a little trick that he used
on himself when he had been thinking of the same subject for too long and he felt his
mind about to start running on empty. In summer he would have gone to sit on the terrace
of a café in the sun, where he would have let himself muse quietly over a beer.

When they had put in central heating at Quai
des Orfèvres, and the inspector had asked and been granted permission to keep his old
coal-burning stove, the younger inspectors had shrugged their shoulders. In fact it was
for the sake of the same trick. When he was stuck, when he had been poring over a
problem for so long that it seemed to be empty of all substance, no more than an web of
incoherent, cold thoughts, Maigret added more fuel to the stove, warmed himself up
sometimes facing it, sometimes with his back to it, poked the burning coals, allowed it
to draw, and little by little he relaxed with a sense of well-being. His eyelids
tingled, and everything round him
seemed
blurred, an impression to which the smoke of his eternal pipe contributed.

In this state of physical lethargy, his mind
seized upon connections that sometimes seemed absurd, following paths along which pure
reason would not have led him.

Madame Maigret had never understood. When
she touched his arm at the end of an evening spent like this in the cinema, she always
sighed, ‘You've been asleep again, Maigret … I wonder why you pay twelve
francs for a cinema seat when you have such a good bed at home.'

The auditorium was dark, full of the warmth
of humanity, alive with the hundreds of people sitting there side by side, but all the
same knowing nothing of each other. The long triangle of pale light from the projection
room passed above their heads, attracting tobacco smoke.

If anyone had asked Maigret what the film
was, he couldn't have said. It didn't matter. He watched the images without
seeing any connection between them. Then his glance moved lower, having noticed a slight
movement close to him.

Though he was a powerful man who for nearly
thirty years had been dealing, so to speak, with passion taken to the utmost, in other
words to crime, Maigret was personally chaste, and he coughed, shocked by the behaviour
of the woman next to him and her companion, although all he could actually see of the
latter was a white hand. Just now, however, when he inadvertently sat on his
neighbour's coat he had thought she was young. She wasn't moving. Her face,
pale like the man's hand and the part
of
her thigh that it was exposing, remained turned to the screen.

‘Ahem!' the inspector coughed,
feeling uneasy. ‘Ahem!'

The lovers paid him no attention. She must
be much the same age as Nouchi.

In fact, when Nouchi had seen Gérard
entering the Bourg-la-Reine apartment building at seven in the evening – or had she
really seen him? – she too had been with a lover, in the dark, no doubt up against a
wall.

He heard the whisper of a kiss close to him.
He had a taste like someone else's saliva in his mouth. He hunched even further
down into his overcoat.

Nouchi had been enticing him in the most
brazen way a little while ago. If he had wanted … Were there many girls of that age who
threw themselves at mature men who could lay claim to some kind of celebrity, or merely
some social standing?

I wouldn't be surprised if her
companion is a good deal older than her, he thought, meaning the lover of the girl in
the seat beside him.

This was his way of thinking without really
thinking, in snatches of ideas that he didn't try to connect with each other.

Had the Hungarian girl been lying about
Monsieur Charles? Probably not. Dandurand was exactly the kind of man to leave his door
ajar, watching out for a young girl and offering to show her pornographic photographs.
Nouchi, for her part, was capable of doing everything in her power to keep him in
suspense, ready to call for help when …

What was disturbing was the fact that she
claimed to
have seen Gérard Pardon at seven in
the evening, exactly the time when Madame With-All-Due-Respect, on her way up to the
Deséglise apartment, was not keeping an eye on the stairs.

When her statement was official …

Well, then a perverse girl's statement
would be enough to send a man to prison, and who knew …

He felt very ill at ease. It wasn't
just the idea of Gérard coming out of the Boulevard Arago gate of La Santé prison first
thing in the morning … He was still looking at the screen, and he frowned. For a few
moments he felt that something wasn't natural, and then he realized what it was;
the lips of the characters in the film were moving, but not quite in time with their
words. In fact the people on screen were speaking English, but you heard French; it was
a dubbed soundtrack, and wasn't perfectly synchronized.

The behaviour of the couple beside him was
getting worse and worse, but the inspector's mind was elsewhere. What exactly was
it that had been throwing him off the track for the last three days? He hadn't
worked it out, but now he understood. Something basic was wrong. What was it? He
didn't know yet.

With his eyes half-closed he saw, more
clearly than if he had been there in front of it, the building like a slice of
Neapolitan ice cream on Route d'Orléans, the bicycle shop, the widow
Piéchaud's grocery store. As he had known since the day before, she was not really
a widow; her husband had run off with a woman of ill repute, as she put it, and she was
so ashamed of it that she claimed to have been widowed.

But then there was
Madame With-All-Due-Respect, in her stuffy lodge, her head askew, her neck wrapped in
thermal wadding to keep it warm …

Because she hadn't pulled the cord to
let any stranger into the building, he had concluded over-hastily that no such person
had come in or gone out of it on the night in question.

However, he now knew that it was possible to
get in at seven in the evening without being seen by the concierge. What proof was there
that there weren't other such fixed moments during the day?

Up at the top of the building, that old
obsessive Juliette Boynet surrounded herself with mystery to receive Charles Dandurand
and discuss her investments in institutions that were, to say the least, unedifying. It
was improper, but it was human. In the course of his career, Maigret had encountered
other phenomena of that sort.

And other men like Dandurand.

So what was it that jarred? What was not
quite natural about the set-up?

The old woman had been strangled, no doubt
when, after Dandurand had left, she was about to go to bed. She was still wearing one
stocking.

Must he assume that there was a third key,
and it was in the hands of Monsieur Charles? Should he think that Monsieur Charles had
gone back up to the apartment to kill the old lady?

He had done well out of the association.
Juliette was worth more to him alive than dead.

What about his underworld friends? They
weren't
beginners, cowardly thugs ready
to try anything, but men who had made it, who were well established in life and were not
at all anxious to take risks. They were sincere when they said they were upset by the
murder and it did them harm.

Gérard Pardon?

Maigret almost exploded. ‘For
heaven's sake keep quiet!' His neighbours in the seats next to him were
really going too far; they were acting as if they were alone in the huge, dark
auditorium.

… Gérard, hidden in his sister's room
since seven in the evening … Gérard listening in, without revealing himself, on the
conversation between Juliette Boynet and Monsieur Charles, perhaps seeing the wads of
banknotes and deciding to grab them once his aunt was on her own.

If so, then he must assume that, having
committed the crime, Gérard had stayed in the apartment until morning, since the
concierge had not opened the front door of the building to anyone.

He must also assume that it was Gérard whom
Cécile had come to denounce, when she was waiting for Maigret in the Aquarium at Quai
des Orfèvres.

Finally, he must then suppose that it was
Gérard who had followed her to the broom cupboard.

How could Gérard Pardon, who had never had
anything to do with the police, have known not only about that cupboard, but about the
door giving access to the Palais de Justice from the Police Judiciaire?

A sudden movement beside him, a skirt being
pulled down, the words ‘The End' on the screen, and at the
same time all the lights coming on, and there was much
stamping of feet.

Standing up like everyone else, Maigret
followed the rest of the audience out and looked curiously at his neighbour. He saw a
calm little face, a fresh complexion, round cheeks and innocently smiling eyes. He had
been right about the man with her: he was about forty and wore a wedding ring.

Still dazed, the inspector found himself in
noisy, teeming Boulevard Montparnasse. It must be six o'clock. Night had fallen.
Dark shapes walked swiftly past brightly lit shop-window displays. He felt thirsty, went
into La Coupole, sat down by a window and ordered a beer.

A kind of weariness had come over him. He
delayed the moment of returning to the harsh light of reality. The right thing to do
would have been to make haste to Quai des Orfèvres, where Lucas was grappling with his
Poles.

Instead, he ordered a ham sandwich, and his
eyes went on wandering aimlessly over the busy crowd passing by. It had taken him a few
minutes just now – perhaps quarter of an hour – to work out what had shaken him in the
cinema: the lack of synchronization between the movements of the actors' lips and
the words on the soundtrack.

How much time would it take him to find out
what was wrong in the Bourg-la-Reine case? The sandwich was a good one. The beer was
good as well, and he ordered another.