Maigret and the Spinster Read Free Page B

officer, that no one touches this door.”
    He did not think that any useful fingerprints might be found there, but one could never be sure. He was in a sour mood. He was still haunted by the memory of Cécile sitting in “the aquarium,” as the waiting room at police headquarters was familiarly called because one of its walls was entirely of glass.
    It did not need a doctor to tell him that the old woman had been dead for some hours, well before the time of her niece’s arrival at the Quai des Orfèvres.
    Had Cécile been a witness to the murder? If so, she had not cried out, or gone for help. She had spent the rest of the night in the apartment with the corpse and, in the morning, had washed and dressed as usual. The glimpse he had had of her on arrival at headquarters had been enough to show him that she was dressed as he had always seen her.
    To make doubly sure, he decided to check, as he considered it a matter of some importance. He began looking for her room. At first, he could not find it. The front of the apartment consisted of three rooms, the sitting room, the dining room, and the aunt’s bedroom.
    To the right of the corridor, there were a kitchen and pantry, with a door at the back. Beyond this door Maigret found a little cubbyhole, dimly lit by a skylight and furnished with an iron bedstead, a washbasin, and a wardrobe, which had been Cécile’s bedroom.
    The bed was unmade. There was soapy water in the washbasin and a comb on the side, with a few dark hairs between the teeth. A salmon-pink flannel dressing gown was flung over a chair.
    Had Cécile known already, by the time she started getting dressed? It must have been almost as dark as night when she went out into the street, or rather into the road, for the building fronted onto the highway. She must have waited in darkness at the streetcar stop barely a hundred yards away. The fog had been thick.
    On arrival at police headquarters, she had filled in a slip and sat down in the waiting room facing the black-framed wallcase with the photographs of members of the force killed on active service.
    At last Maigret’s head had emerged from the stairwell. She had sprung to her feet. He would grant her an interview. She would be able to unburden herself…
    But more than an hour had passed, and she was still waiting. The corridors were coming to life. Inspectors hurried to and fro. Doors opened and shut. People were admitted to the waiting room, and then called out one after another by the guard. She, and only she, was left waiting.
    What was it that had prompted her to leave?
    Mechanically, Maigret filled his pipe. He could hear voices out on the landing, the neighbors airing their views and the police officer quietly advising them to return to their own apartments.
    What had become of Cécile?
    During the whole of the hour that he spent alone in the apartment, this was the question that obsessed him and gave him that absent, sluggish look so familiar to his colleagues.
    All the same, in his own fashion, he was working. Already, he was steeped in the atmosphere of the apartment. As soon as he had set foot in the entrance hall, or rather the long, dark hallway that served as such, he had observed that everything around him was old and shoddy. There was enough furniture in this small apartment to furnish twice the number of rooms, nothing but old furniture of no particular style or date, and not a single piece of any value. It reminded him of a provincial auction of household effects, following the death or bankruptcy of the owner, a respectable, middle–class citizen, whose austere mode of life had been a well-kept secret until then.
    In contrast, however, there was not a pin out of place, and everything was scrupulously clean. Every surface, however small, was highly polished, and every ornament, however tiny, in its appointed place.
    The apartment could just as appropriately have been lit by candles or gas as by electricity, so little did it reflect