Maigret and the Pickpocket by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon [Simenon, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Georges Simenon
ISBN: 9780156551458
Google: 6ePxAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: 0156551454
Goodreads: 140725
Publisher: Mariner
Published: 1967-03-31T11:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER FIVE

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IT was a bad stretch to get through. In nearly all of his cases, Maigret came to this period of floating, during which, as his colleagues used to whisper, he appeared to be brooding.

In the first stage—that is to say, when he suddenly found himself face to face with a new world, with people he knew nothing about—it was as if he were breathing in the life around him, mechanically, and filling himself with it like a sponge.

He had done this the day before at the Old Wine Press, his memory registering, as it were subconsciously, the smallest details of the atmosphere, the gestures, the facial quirks of each person.

If he had not felt himself flagging, he would have gone on afterwards to the Zero Club, which some members of the circle frequented.

At the moment he had absorbed a quantity of impressions, a whole jumble of images, of phrases, of words of varying importance, of startled looks, but he did not yet know what to do with them all.

His close acquaintances knew that it was best not to ask him questions nor to question him by looks, as he would quickly become irritable.

As he expected, a note, on his desk, asked him to call Camus, the Magistrate.

“Hello!… This is Maigret.”

He had seldom worked with this magistrate, whom he classed neither among the outright meddlers nor among those who prudently leave the police time to get on with their work.

“I asked you to phone me because I had a call from the Public Prosecutor’s office… He is impatient to know where the inquiry has got to…”

The Chief Inspector almost growled:

“Nowhere.”

Which was true. A crime does not pose a mathematical problem. It involves human beings, unknown the day before, who were just passers-by among the rest. And now, all of a sudden, each one of their gestures, their words, takes on weight, and their entire life is gone over with a fine-tooth comb.

“The inquiry is going ahead,” he said instead. “It’s likely that we’ll have the murder weapon in our hands within an hour or two. The frogmen are scouring the bottom of the Seine for it.”

“What have you done with the husband?”

“He’s here, in the icebox.”

He corrected himself, as that was an expression which could mean something only to the detectives in his unit. When they did not know what to do with a witness, but still wanted to keep him on a string, or when they had a suspect who was not being co-operative, they put him in the “glacière.”

They would tell them, as they showed them into the long glass-partitioned waiting room which ran along one side of the corridor:

“Just wait in here a moment, please.”

It was always filled with people who were waiting: nervous women, some weeping and dabbing their eyes with their handkerchiefs, would-be tough customers trying to put on a bold front, some honest citizens who waited patiently, staring at the pale green walls, wondering whether their existence had been forgotten.

An hour or two in the glacière was often enough to make people talkative.

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