Maigret and the Spinster Read Free Page A

woman’s voice asked:
    “What do you want?”
    He turned around to see a shapely young woman wearing an extremely becoming pale-blue dressing gown.
    “Madame Boynet…”
    “That’s her apartment all right,” she replied, speaking with a slight foreign accent. “Is there no answer? That’s odd…”
    She tried the bell herself, revealing more bare flesh as she raised her arm.
    “Even if Cécile is out, her aunt…”
    Maigret hung about on the landing for another ten minutes, then set off to look for a locksmith. The nearest one was almost a mile away. This time the sound of his approach brought out not merely the girl but her mother and sister as well.
    “Has there been an accident, do you think?”
    The lock, which had not been tampered with, gave easily. Maigret led the way into the apartment, which was overcrowded with old furniture and ornaments. He spared them only a cursory glance. A sitting room…a dining room…an open door and, lying on a mahogany bed, an old woman with dyed hair who…
    “Would you please leave? Do you hear?” he shouted, turning on the three women. “If this is how you get your kicks, I’m sorry for you.”
    An odd sort of corpse, a fat little old woman with a painted face and stringy hair, heavily peroxided, showing white at the roots, in a red dressing gown and with one stocking, just one, on the leg that dangled over the side of the bed.
    There was no possible doubt about it, she had been strangled.
    Looking fierce and troubled, he returned to the landing.
    “Someone go and get a police officer.”
    Five minutes later, he was in a telephone booth in a bistro nearby.
    “Hello! This is Chief Superintendent Maigret. Who is that speaking?…Good! Listen, my boy, is Cécile around? I want you to slip across to the Public Prosecutor’s Office. See if you can have a word with the director in person…Tell him—got it?—I’m staying here. And you’d better let the forensic people know as well…If by any chance Cécile turns up…What’s the matter with you?…Listen, this is no laughing matter.”
    When he came out of the bistro, after having downed a glass of rum at the bar, a crowd of about fifty people had gathered outside the oddly shaped building.
    In spite of himself, he searched the crowd for Cécile.
    It was not until five o’clock that afternoon that he was to learn that Cécile was dead.

TWO
    O nce again, with the dining table set for two, Madame Maigret was to be kept waiting. Not that she wasn’t used to it. The telephone, finally installed, had made no difference. Maigret invariably forgot to let her know. As to young Duchemin, it would be left to Cassieux to deliver the customary lecture.
    Slowly, with knitted brows, the Chief Superintendent had once again climbed the five flights of stairs, oblivious of the life going on behind closed doors on every floor. He was thinking only of Cécile, unattractive Cécile, who had been the butt of so many jokes, and who was banteringly referred to by some of his colleagues as “Maigret’s call girl.”
    This house in the suburbs had been her home. This dark staircase had been used by her every day. The smells of this place had still clung about her clothes as she sat, fearful yet uncomplaining, in the waiting room at the Quai des Orfèvres.
    Whenever Maigret had condescended to grant her an interview, had there not always been more than a hint of ill-concealed irony under his mask of gravity as he asked, “Well, have the ornaments been on the move again? Did you find the inkwell at the wrong end of the table this morning? Has the paperknife escaped from its drawer?”
    When he reached the fifth floor, he gave orders to the police officer to admit no one to the apartment, and pushed open the door. Then he turned back to take a good look at the doorbell. It was not an electric bell button, but a thick red-and-yellow rope. He pulled it. An old–fashioned metal bell tinkled in the sitting room.
    “Will you see to it,