Cécile is Dead Read Free Page A

Boynet …’
    â€˜I’m sure she’s in,’
     the young woman replied with a slight foreign accent. ‘Hasn’t anyone
     answered the door? That’s odd …’
    She rang the bell
     herself, revealing a little flesh as she raised her arm to reach the cord that worked
     it.
    â€˜Even if Cécile is out, her aunt
     should …’
    Maigret stood around on the landing for ten
     minutes and then had to walk nearly a kilometre to find a locksmith. Not only did the
     young woman come running again at the sound of the bell, so did her mother and her
     sister.
    â€˜Do you think there’s been an
     accident?’
    It proved possible to open the door without
     forcing the lock, which showed no traces of violence. Maigret was the first to enter the
     apartment. It was crowded with old furniture and knick-knacks; he didn’t notice
     the details. A sitting room. A dining room. An open door, and on a mahogany bedstead an
     old lady with tinted hair who …
    â€˜Please go away, do you hear?’
     he called, turning to the three neighbours. ‘If you find this kind of thing
     entertaining, I can only say I’m sorry for you.’
    A strange corpse: a plump little old woman,
     heavily made up, her hair light blonde, over-bleached – you could see white at the roots
     – wearing a red dressing gown and a stocking, just one stocking on the leg which was
     dangling over the edge of the bed.
    There could be no possible doubt about it;
     she had been strangled.
    He went out on the landing again and, his
     voice harsh and anxious, said,‘Someone find me a local police officer.’
    Five minutes later, he was phoning from the
     glazed telephone booth of a nearby bistro.
    â€˜Hello? Detective Chief Inspector
     Maigret, yes … Who’s
this on the phone?
     All right … Tell me, young man, has Cécile come back? … Then go to the public
     prosecutor’s office … Try to see the public prosecutor himself … Tell him … Are
     you listening?. … No, I’m staying here. Hello! And tell Criminal Records … If by
     some miracle Cécile does turn up there … What was that? No, young man, this is no time
     for silly jokes …’
    When he left the bistro, after drinking a
     quick glass of rum at the bar, fifty people were stationed outside the apartment
     building in a formation like a rectangular block of ice cream.
    In spite of himself, he looked around for
     Cécile.
    Not until five in the afternoon was he to
     learn that Cécile was dead.

2.
    Yet again, Madame Maigret would be waiting
     beside the round dining table, where she had laid two places. She was inured to it! And
     installing a telephone had been no use: Maigret forgot to let her know he’d be
     late. As for young Duchemin, Cassieux was going to teach him the traditional lesson.
    Slowly, with an anxious frown on his brow,
     the inspector had climbed those five floors again without noticing that there were
     tenants outside their apartments on all the landings. It was Cécile he was thinking of,
     that ungainly girl who had been the butt of so many of their jokes. Some of them in the
     Police Judiciaire called her Maigret’s lovebird.
    This was where she had lived, in this
     ordinary suburban apartment building; she used to climb up and down these gloomy stairs
     every day; this was the atmosphere that still clung to her clothes when she came, scared
     and patient, to sit in the waiting room at Quai des Orfèvres.
    And when Maigret did condescend to see her,
     he reflected, it was to ask, with a gravity that did a poor job of concealing his
     sarcasm, ‘So did any other items go for a walk in your apartment last night? Has
     the inkwell made it to the other end of the table? Did the paper-knife escape from its
     drawer?’
    Up on the fifth floor
     he told the policeman not to let anyone into the apartment. He was about to open the
     door