“I’ll be able to tell you a bit more presently. You mentioned a 6.35 pistol, which surprises me—I would have been willing to bet the wound was made with a heavier weapon.”

  “How about the range?”

  “On first inspection, there was no burn, no powder marks. Death was instantaneous, or almost, as the woman lost very little blood. Who is she, by the way?”

  “The wife of a young journalist.”

  For everybody, Moers and the experts from Records, it was routine work carried out without personal feeling. They had all heard one of the men from the Health Department exclaiming, as he went into the room: “My, that dame stinks!”

  Some of the women had babies in their arms, others, strategically placed to see everything without having to move, were leaning on their elbows at their windows, and their comments were bandied from apartment to apartment.

  “Are you sure it isn’t the taller one?”

  “No, I don’t know the tall one…” They were referring to Lourtie. It was Maigret the two women were watching for. “There he is! The one smoking the pipe…”

  “Two of them are smoking pipes.”

  “Not the very young one, silly. The other one… He’s going up to the men from the Ministry.”

  Dreville, the Assistant Prosecutor, was asking the Chief Inspector:

  “Have you got any idea what it’s all about?”

  “The dead woman is a girl of twenty-two, Sophie Ricain, maiden name Le Gal, born in Concarneau, where her father is a watchmaker.”

  “Has he been notified?”

  “Not yet. I’ll see to that presently.”

  “Married?”

  “For three years, to François Ricain, a young journalist who dabbles in the movies and is trying to make his way in Paris…”

  “Where is he?”

  “In my office.”

  “Do you suspect him?”

  “Not so far. He’s in no condition to attend the Coroner’s investigation, and he’d only get in our way.”

  “Where was he when the crime was committed?”

  “Nobody knows the time of the crime.”

  “And you, Doctor, can’t you establish it approximately?”

  “Not for the moment. Perhaps after the autopsy, if you can tell me what time the victim had her last meal and what she ate.”

  “What about the neighbors?”

  “You can see some of them watching us. I haven’t questioned them yet, but I doubt whether they’ll have anything interesting to tell us. As you can see, you can get to these studios without passing the porter’s lodge, which is at the Boulevard de Grenelle entrance.”

  A thankless task. They hung about. They talked aimlessly, and Lapointe followed in his master’s steps, not opening his mouth, with the look and the demeanor of a faithful dog.

  Now the disinfectant people were bringing out of the studio a large flexible tube, painted gray, which they had taken in a quarter of an hour earlier. The foreman of the team, in a white smock, signaled that they could now go in.

  “Don’t stay inside the room too long,” he advised Maigret. “There’s still formol in the air.”

  Dr. Delaplanque knelt beside the body, which he examined with closer attention than he had done the first time.

  “As far as I’m concerned, they can take it away.”

  “What about you, Maigret?”

  Maigret had seen all he had to see, a huddled corpse in a flowered silk dressing gown. A red slipper still clung to one foot. It was impossible to tell from her position in the room what the woman had been doing, or even exactly where she was standing when she was hit by the bullet.

  As far as it was possible to judge, the face was fairly ordinary, moderately pretty. Her toenails were painted red but had not been attended to for quite a long time, because the varnish was cracked and the nails were not scrupulously clean.

  The clerk was writing away beside his boss, as was the Chief Inspector’s secretary.

  “Bring the stretcher in…”

  They trod on dead flies. One by one, the people who were crowded in the room pulled out their handkerchiefs and put them to their eyes, because of the formol.

  The body was taken away, while a respectful silence reigned for a few moments in the courtyard. The men from the Public Prosecutor’s office left first, then Delaplanque, while Moers and the experts waited to begin their work.

  “Do we look everywhere, Chief?”

  “It’s best. You never know.”

  Perhaps they were up against a mystery, and perhaps, on the other hand, it would turn out to be quite straightforward. It is always that way at the start of a case, or nearly always.

  His eyes stinging, Maigret pulled open a drawer which contained a wide assortment of objects: an old pair of binoculars, some buttons, a broken pen, pencils, photographs taken during the making of a film, sun glasses, bills…

  He would come back when the smell had had time to dissipate, but despite it he still noted the way the studio was decorated. The floor was varnished black, and walls and ceiling were painted a bright red. The furniture, on the other hand, was chalky white, which gave an air of unreality to the whole room. It was like a stage set. Nothing seemed solid.

  “What do you think of it, Lapointe? How would you like to live in a room like this?”

  “It’d give me nightmares.”

  They went out. There were still some people lingering in the courtyard, and the police had let them come a little nearer.

  “Didn’t I tell you it was him? I wonder if he’ll be back. They say he does it all himself, and as like as not he’ll be questioning all of us.”

  The speaker, a washed-out blonde with a baby in her arms, was gazing at Maigret with a smile on her face that a film star might have inspired.

  “I’m going to leave you Lourtie. Here is the key to the studio. When Moers’s men have finished, shut the door again and start questioning the neighbors. The crime, if it is a crime, wasn’t committed last night, but the night of Wednesday to Thursday…

  “Try to find out whether the neighbors heard any noises. Divide up the residents between Lourtie and yourself. Then question the local shopkeepers. There is a stack of bills in the drawer. You’ll find the addresses of the stores where they did their shopping…

  “One more thing… Will you make sure the telephone is still working?… I have a feeling that when I saw it at noon it was off the hook…”

  The telephone was working.

  “Don’t come back to the Quai, you two, without giving me a ring first. Keep your chins up…”

  Maigret went off in the direction of Boulevard de Grenelle and vanished into the Métro. Half an hour later he emerged into the fresh air and the sun, then went back to his office, where François Ricain was waiting patiently, while Torrence was reading a paper.

  “Aren’t you thirsty?” he asked Ricain, taking off his hat and opening the window a little wider. “Anything new, Torrence?”

  “A reporter just phoned.”

  “I was surprised not to see them over there. Their tip-off system must be badly organized in the XVth Arrondissement. It’s Lapointe who’ll have them around his neck…”

  His eyes turned to Ricain, to his hands, and he said to the Inspector:

  “Take him to the laboratory, just in case… Have a paraffin test done. It isn’t much use anyway, as it’s almost two days since the crime was committed, but it will avoid awkward questions…”

  They would know, within a quarter of an hour, whether Ricain had powder marks on his fingers. The absence of them would not be conclusive proof that he had not fired the gun, but it would be a point in his favor.

  “Hello!… Is that you?… I’m sorry… Of course. If it hadn’t been work, I would have been back for lunch… Yes, I ate something, beefsteak and chips, with an overexcited young man… I promised myself I’d ring you as we were going into the restaurant, then we got talking, and I must confess I simply forgot… You aren’t cross with me, are you?… No, I can’t tell… We’ll have to see…”

  That evening he might or might not be home for dinner, he couldn’t tell yet. Especially with a young man like François Ricain, who changed his mood within the space of a few seconds.

  Maigret would have been hard put to it to formulate an opinion of him. Intelligent, that he certainly was, even keenly so, as some of his answers revealed. At the same time there was a rather naïve, or childish, side to him.

  How should he judge him at that moment? He was in a lamentable physical and mental state, a nervous wreck, torn between conflicting emotions.

  If he had not killed his wife, and if he really had toyed with the idea of fleeing to Belgium or somewhere else, it revealed a state of total inner confusion which the claustrophobia he suffered from was not by itself enough to explain.

  Probably it was he who had thought up and done the decoration in the studio, the black flooring, the red walls and ceiling, the ghostly-pale furniture which stood out as though floating in space.

  It gave the impression that the ground under one’s feet was unstable, that the walls were going to advance or recede as in a movie set, that the chest of drawers, the couch, the table, the chairs, were fakes made of papier-mâché.

  Did he not himself seem rather a fake? Maigret imagined the faces of the Assistant Prosecutor, or the Magistrate Camus, if they were to read, from beginning to end, the words the young man had spoken, first in the café at La-Motte-Picquet, and later in the little restaurant.

  He would have been interested in Dr. Pardon’s impression of him.

  Ricain came back, followed by Torrence.

  “Well?”

  “Result negative…”

  “I’ve never fired a shot in my life, except at a fair. I’d have a hard time finding the safety catch…”

  “Sit down.”

  “Have you seen the Magistrate?”

  “The Magistrate and the Assistant Prosecutor.”

  “What have they decided to do? Am I going to be arrested?”

  “That’s at least the tenth time I’ve heard you utter that word… Up till now, I would have only one reason to make an arrest—the theft of my wallet—and I haven’t brought a charge against you.”

  “I returned it to you…”

  “Precisely. Now we’re going to try to clear up one or two things you have told me, and others which I don’t yet know about. You may go, Torrence. Tell Janvier to come in…”

  A few moments later Janvier was settling down at the far end of the desk and taking a pencil from his pocket.

  “Your name is François Ricain. You are twenty-five years old. Where were you born?”

  “In Paris, in Rue Caulaincourt.”

  A bourgeois, almost provincial street, behind the Sacré-Coeur.

  “Are your parents still alive?”

  “My father… He’s a railroad mechanic.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “A little over three and a half years. Four years ago this June… The seventeenth…”

  “So you were twenty-one and your wife was…”

  “Eighteen…”

  “Was your father already a widower?”

  “My mother died when I was fourteen…”

  “Did you go on living with your father?”

  “For a few years… At seventeen I left.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we didn’t get on…”

  “Was there any special reason?”

  “No. I was bored… He wanted me to go with the railroad, like him, and I refused. He thought I was wasting my time reading and studying…”

  “Did you pass your baccalauréat exam?”

  “I left two years before…”

  “What for?… Where did you live?… On what?…”

  “You’re rushing me,” complained Ricain.

  “I’m not rushing you. I’m asking you elementary questions.”

  “There were different periods. I sold newspapers in the street. Then I was an errand boy in a printing firm in Rue Montmartre. For a while I shared a room with a friend…”

  “His name and address…”

  “Bernard Fléchier. He had a room in Rue Coquillière… I lost track of him.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He drove a delivery truck.”

  “Next?”

  “I worked for six months in a stationer’s. I wrote short stories which I peddled to newspapers. One was accepted and I got a hundred francs… The man I dealt with was surprised to see how young I was.”

  “Did he accept any other stories?”

  “No. The others were rejected…”

  “What were you doing when you met your wife—I mean the girl who was to become your wife, Sophie Le Gal—that’s right, isn’t it?”

  “I was third assistant director on a movie which the censors have banned, a film about war made by some young people…”

  “Did Sophie have a job?”

  “Not regularly. She did walk-on parts. She sometimes did a bit of modeling…”

  “Was she living alone?”

  “In a hotel room, Saint-Germain-des-Prés.”

  “Love at first sight?”

  “No. We slept together, because after one wild party we wound up together in the street at three o’clock in the morning. She let me take her home. We stayed together for several months, then one fine day we had the idea of getting married…”

  “With her parents’ consent?”

  “They hadn’t much to say. She went to Concarneau and came back with a letter from her father authorizing the marriage.”

  “And you?”

  “I went to see my father, also.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He shrugged…”

  “Didn’t he go to the wedding?”

  “No. Just friends, three or four… In the evening we all ate together at the Central Market.”

  “Did Sophie have any affairs before meeting you?”

  “I wasn’t the first one, if that’s what you mean.”

  “She didn’t live for any length of time with a man who might have been enough in love with her to try to see her again?”

  He seemed to be searching in his memory.

  “No. We did meet some former friends of hers, but nothing serious. You know, in four years we had time to mix in various different circles. Some people were our friends for six months, then dropped out of sight. Others took their place, and we saw them every now and then. You ask questions as if it was all clear-cut. They’re writing down my answers. I’ve only got to make one mistake, or get muddled up or leave out some details, and you’ll jump to God knows what conclusion… You must admit it’s not very fair.”

  “Would you rather be questioned in the presence of a lawyer?”

  “Have I the right?”

  “If you consider yourself to be a suspect…”

  “And you—what do you consider me to be?”

  “The husband of a woman who has died, died a violent death. As a young man who panicked and stole my wallet and then returned it to me with its contents. As a very intelligent but not very stable character…”

  “If you’d just spent two nights as I have…”

  “We’ll come to that. So, you’ve held down different jobs, each one for a short time…”

  “It was only to earn my living while I was waiting…”

  “Waiting to do what?”

  “To start my career…”

  “What career?”

  He frowned and looked hard at Maigret, as if to make sure there was no trace of sarcasm in his voice.

  “I’m still of two minds… Perhaps I’ll do both. Anyhow, I want to write, but I don’t know if it will be in the form of movie scripts or novels. Directing tempts me, if I can do the whole film myself…”

  “Do you mix with movie people?”

  “At the Old Wine Press, yes. You can meet people there who are at the bottom rung like myself, but a producer like Monsieur Carus isn’t too grand to come and dine with us…”

  “Who is Monsieur Carus?”

  “A producer, I told you. He lives in the Raphael Hotel, and his office is at 18b Rue de Bassano, off the Champs-Elysées…”

  “Has he financed any movies?”

  “Three or four… In co-production with the Germans and Italians. He travels a lot…”

  “What sort of age is this gentleman?”

  “About forty.”

  “Married?”

  “He lives with a young girl, Nora, who has been a model.”

  “Did he know your wife?”

  “Of course. It’s a very informal circle…”

  “Has Monsieur Carus got plenty of money?”

  “He raises it for his movies.”

  “But he doesn’t have a private income?”

  “I told you he lives at the Raphael, where he has a suite… It’s pretty expensive. At night he goes to the smartest clubs.”

  “He wasn’t the one you were looking for on the night of Wednesday to Thursday?”

  Ricain blushed.

  “Yes. Him or someone else… Preferably him because he nearly always has wads of bank notes on him.”

  “Do you owe him money?”

  “Yes…”

  “A lot?”

  “Upwards of two thousand francs…”

  “Doesn’t he ask for it back?”

  “No…”

  A very slight change, hard to pinpoint, was taking place in the young man, and Maigret observed him more closely.

  But he had to remain cautious, for he was still prepared to retreat into his shell at any moment.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  « ^ »

  WHEN Maigret got up, Ricain began to tremble and looked at him apprehensively, still apparently expecting some blow of fate, or a trick. The Chief Inspector went and stood for a moment by the open window, as if to steep himself in reality by watching the passers-by and the cars on the Saint-Michel bridge, and a tug with a big clover-leaf marking on its funnel.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  From the Inspectors’ room, he asked for the Pathologists’ Laboratory.

  “This is Maigret. Would you please find out whether Dr. Delaplanque has finished the autopsy.”

  He had to wait quite a long time before he heard the pathologist’s voice on the other end of the line.

 

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