Cécile is Dead (9 page)

‘Is something the matter?' the
commissioner had asked him the day before.

His only reply had been a glance so heavy
with meaning that it signified more than any verbal response.

‘Don't worry, old friend,'
said his boss. ‘Once you begin to unravel the case …'

The stained glass windows showing the four
evangelists were set aflame by the sunlight, and Maigret, for no real reason, fixed his
gaze on St Luke in particular, whom the artist had shown with a brown, square-cut
beard.

‘Et ne nos inducas in tentationem
…'

Was another party of mourners waiting
outside, making the priest rattle off his absolution so fast? The horse that
wasn't used to funeral ceremonies kept whinnying, and the sound echoed under the
vaulted roof like a cheerful call to life.

Why, without telling her aunt, had Cécile
ordered a second key to the door of the apartment two weeks earlier? And had she given
that key to her brother? Because if so …

He could still see her, sitting motionless
in the waiting room, her handbag on her lap, capable of staying there for hours in the
same position.

Maigret remembered saying, ‘Either she
followed someone she knew, someone she trusted, or she was made to think that she was
being taken to see me …'

Her brother?

Troubled, the
inspector looked away from Gérard, who was staring at him, and whom Berthe was trying to
calm down with her hand on his arm.

‘This way, gentlemen. Hurry up,
please.'

There was a great commotion at the cemetery
too. The mourners had soon crossed the part of it full of family vaults and stone tombs.
They reached the new plots, clay rectangles with wooden crosses above them. The hearses
could get no further here. The two coffins were carried on biers, and had to go in
Indian file along the narrow paths.

‘When may I see you,
inspector?'

‘Where are you staying?'

‘At the Hôtel du Centre, on Boulevard
Montparnasse.'

It was Monfils, who had caught hold of
Maigret in passing.

‘I'm sure I can be there later
today.'

‘Wouldn't you rather I came to
your office?'

‘I don't know when I'll be
there.'

And Maigret went over to Berthe, who had
been briefly separated from her brother by the crowd.

‘I don't think you should leave
him alone,' he told her. ‘He's in a very agitated state of mind. Try
to get him to go home with you, and I'll see him there.'

She lowered her lashes to show her consent.
She was pretty, and her plump little figure dispelled any ideas of tragic drama.

‘Tell me, inspector …'

Maigret turned, to see one of the men who
had accompanied Dandurand.

‘Could we have a few words with you?
There's a quiet bistro at the way out of the cemetery.'

A deacon, followed by
a choirboy who looked as if he were galloping as fast as his little legs would carry him
and impeded by the black cassock, from which heavy, hobnailed shoes emerged, leaned over
the grave, moved his lips, turned the pages of his missal and threw the first spadeful
of earth into the pit that had been dug. Gérard and the Monfils cousin were both putting
out a hand, ready to throw in the next. Heads came between them and Maigret, preventing
him from seeing who won the day.

Suddenly the gathering broke up. Nouchi, in
passing, stared boldly at the inspector. She looked on the point of asking for his
autograph, as if he were a film star.

When Maigret opened the door of the bistro
that stood next to the depot where the tombstones were stored, Monsieur
Dandurand's friends, already sitting round a table, all rose together.

‘Forgive me for troubling you … what
will you drink, inspector? Waiter! The same for the inspector, please.'

Charles Dandurand was there, clean-shaven
and grey, as grey as the tombstones.

‘Sit down, inspector. We would have
gone to your office, but perhaps this is a better place.'

The whole group of big bosses who met in the
evenings at Albert's bar was there, as calm as if they were round the green baize
table of a board meeting.

‘To your good health! It's
hardly worth the trouble of giving you a sales talk, is it? Inspector Cassieux knows us,
and he knows we're on the level.'

The car with the twelve-cylinder engine was
standing
at the door, with little boys
admiring the chrome trim, which sparkled in the sun.

‘It's about poor Juliette, of
course. You'll be aware that the law, on the pretext of morality, ignores the
negotiations that take place in our line of business. We have to manage those for
ourselves. Now, old Juliette had a stake in ten or so houses at least, leaving aside
those in Béziers and Rue d'Antin, which belonged to her outright. Monsieur Charles
will tell you that we have held a meeting here to discuss the best thing to do
…'

The others gravely nodded. Monsieur
Charles's pale, hairy hands were flat on the table.

‘The same again, waiter! Do you know
what the interests concerned amount to, inspector? A little more than three thousand
grand, that's to say three million. Well, we don't want to take risks.
Apparently there's no will. Monsieur Charles isn't anxious to have any
trouble. So we wanted to ask you what ought to be done. Two people have already been
trying to find whatever there is to be found. First a man called Monfils; you saw him
with his boys today. Then the girl's brother, young Gérard. Both of them would
like to lay hands on some cash. We're not saying no, but we need to know who it
belongs to. Well, that's the situation. You can't close down a profitable
joint just because …'

The speaker suddenly got to his feet and
took the inspector by the sleeve. ‘Come this way for a moment, would you?'
And he led Maigret into another room.

‘I am what I am, of course. However,
there's one thing I can confirm, and my friends there will say so too:
Monsieur Charles has always been on the
level. The old lady's certificates have disappeared, but we're not the sort
to quibble about signatures. I said three million; it may be more. With or without
papers, no one's going to touch it without your say-so.'

‘I'll have to put this to my
superior officers,' remarked Maigret.

‘One moment … there's something
else I want to say, and this time my friends must hear it too.'

They returned to the other room.

‘Well, it's like this,
inspector. We have decided to make you an offer: we will offer twenty thousand to you
for finding whatever nasty piece of work did old Juliette in. Are you happy with that?
Is it enough? We've arranged everything, and Monsieur Charles will give you the
cash.'

The former lawyer thought that the moment
had come for him to take a wallet stuffed with banknotes out of his pocket.

‘Not now,' the inspector
interrupted. ‘As I said, I must put this to my superiors. Waiter, my bill, please
… Yes … excuse me, I insist!'

And he paid for his drinks, while the
spokesman for the group growled, ‘Just as you like, but we'd rather you
didn't!'

Maigret left the bistro with the warmth of
two aperitifs in his chest. He hadn't gone ten steps before he stopped in his
tracks.

Gérard, looking more strung up than ever,
was facing him, and his sister Berthe gave the inspector a look conveying that she had
done her best to take him away with her,
as he
could see for himself, but there was nothing to be done about it.

As for her brother, who had somehow got hold
of drink and whose breath smelled of alcohol, he said in a truculent tone, his lips
quivering, ‘Now then, inspector, I hope you're going to give me an
explanation.'

The grave-diggers had left; other graves
needed their attention, and there were still only a few spadefuls of yellowish clay on
top of Cécile's coffin.

‘In you go, my child!'

It was not like Maigret, but without
realizing it he felt the need to place his hand on the curve of Berthe Pardon's
shoulder. Many mature, middle-aged men habitually treated her like that, in a paternal
manner, it wasn't unusual. The inspector must have done it clumsily, for the girl
turned to him in surprise, and while he was slightly embarrassed, Berthe seemed to be
saying: You as well!

Her brother had been the first to enter the
apartment; the undertaker's staff who had prepared it as a chapel of rest for the
dead women had left only a little earlier, for Maigret and his companions had met them,
with their equipment, at the foot of the stairs.

It was Maigret's turn to go in, but he
heard a voice with a slight foreign accent, quite close to him, saying, ‘I'd
like a word with you, inspector.'

He saw that it was Nouchi, whose funeral
wear had been a black suit too small and too tight for her, no doubt bought a year or so
earlier, before she began her adolescent development, which made her look even more
ambivalent.

‘In a little while,' he said
crossly, because he did not feel indulgent towards her and her effrontery.

‘But it's very
important.'

Maigret, entering the
late Juliette Boynet's apartment and closing the door behind him, growled,
‘Important or not, it will have to wait.'

Since he had Gérard here, he was going to
finish talking to him first, and he was not put out by Berthe's presence. The old
woman's home was a better place for this conversation than his office at Quai des
Orfèvres. The atmosphere was already taking effect on Gérard's nerves. He was
looking, with a kind of anxiety, at the walls, from which the black draperies had just
been removed, and the lingering smell of the candles and flowers was like the musty
odour of death.

Berthe Pardon was as much at her ease as in
her department at the Galeries Lafayette, or in the restaurant with its set menu where
she ate her meals. Her round and still-childish face expressed serenity, contentment and
what some would have called the peace of a clear conscience. She represented exactly the
kind of young girl that people like to imagine, still untouched not only by sin but by
the mere idea of sin.

‘Sit down, children,' said
Maigret, taking his pipe out of his pocket.

Gérard was too tense to take one of the
sitting-room armchairs. Quite unlike his sister, he was constantly on the alert, a prey
to stormy thoughts, and his eyes never rested long on the same spot.

‘You might as well admit that you
suspect me of killing my aunt and my sister,' he said, his lips trembling.
‘Because I'm poor, because I've always had bad luck. It's
nothing to you to bother my wife, who's expecting a baby and isn't
very strong anyway. Taking advantage of my
absence to search our lodgings! You deliberately went there when I was out.'

‘Exactly,' said Maigret,
lighting his pipe and looking at the portrait photos hanging on the walls.

‘Because you didn't have a
search warrant! Because you knew I wouldn't have let you do it!'

‘No, no …'

Berthe took off the marten fur stole, too
long and too narrow, that she had been wearing round her neck, and the inspector noticed
how white and plump her throat was.

‘And did you think of asking that
two-faced Monfils where he was on the night of the crime? I'm sure you
didn't, because after all, he's a …'

‘I'm going to ask him that very
question this afternoon.'

‘In that case you can ask him whether
my sisters and I haven't been robbed all along.'

He pointed to the portrait of a woman, a
slightly faded enlargement.

‘That's my mother,' he
said. ‘She was like Cécile. Not just physically, her nature too. You
wouldn't understand. She was always humble, always afraid that she was in the way,
was taking more than her proper share. She had an almost pathological need for
self-sacrifice. My poor sister was the same, and she lived her whole life like a
domestic servant. Isn't that so, Berthe?'

‘Yes, it is,' the girl agreed.
‘Aunt Juliette treated her as a skivvy.'

‘What the inspector doesn't know
…'

Maigret almost smiled, because there was one
thing, in
any case, that the furious young man
before him couldn't suspect, which was that he himself suffered from an
inferiority complex. He sometimes wanted to shake off the sense of humility that
troubled him, and then he became aggressive, going too far in the opposite direction and
facing others defiantly.

‘My mother was the elder sister. She
was twenty-four when my aunt met Boynet, who was rich. They were orphaned, living in
Fontenay on a pension that their parents had left them. So this is what happened: if she
was going to marry Boynet, my aunt needed a dowry, and she persuaded my mother to give
up her part of their inheritance. Everyone in the family knows about it, and if Monfils
isn't a liar he'll confirm that. It meant that, thanks to my mother,
Juliette made a good marriage.