Maigret Takes a Room by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon [Simenon, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Georges Simenon
Amazon: B001E3DOLE
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1959-12-31T11:00:00+00:00

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Chapter V

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She must have done it deliberately. It was her own way of waging a curious little warfare. Despite her surprising lightness for her size, there was still no need for her to climb up two flights, when she might just as well have called him from the bottom of the staircase.

Was it to rub in the fact that he was a heavy sleeper? Perhaps he was, in the mornings. Madame Maigret, too, teased him about it. But it was not true when he dozed off during the day. Anyway, after knocking on the door, she opened it at once, to find him fully dressed on his bed.

“Please forgive me. I thought you were busy working. You’re wanted on the telephone.”

She bore no ill-feeling. Far from it. She looked at him, her eyes sparkling with good-will, and even affection.

It was something that only concerned the two of them; others would not have understood. Maigret was cross with her. That was a fact. It had been going on for more than two days. A dozen times a day, at least, he would leave the house and then come back again. Each time she would contrive to be there, with an odd little look, as if to say:

“Are we friends again?”

Either he pretended not to see her, or he replied to her advances with a grunt.

For the past two days also, it had been raining, with an occasional gleam of sunshine piercing the clouds.

“Hallo. Yes it’s me…”

“Do you remember someone called Meyer, Chief?”

He was sure she was listening, from the living-room or the kitchen, and it was probably for her benefit that he answered, grumpily:

“There must be ten pages of Meyers in the telephone directory.”

“He’s the cashier from the Boulevard des Italiens; he’s cleared off. We’ve just had news of him. The Dutch police have picked him up in Amsterdam, with a red-haired girl. What do we do now?”

It was as if, too, he were deliberately keeping away from the Quai des Orfèvres. The house in the Rue Lhomond had become a kind of annex of Police Headquarters, and it even came to the point that the Commissioner of Police himself had to call the chief-inspector there.

“Is that you, Maigret? The examining magistrate has given me a ring about the Piercot case…”

And hardly had he hung up before Maigret seemed to sink back again voluptuously into the atmosphere of his little back-street.

The charwoman in men’s shoes was scared of him, heaven knows why, and hastily withdrew out of his way when she heard him coming. The others also regarded him with some embarrassment, one might say even some anxiety, as if they felt that for two pins suspicion might fall on them.

In fact it was only Mademoiselle Clément who refused to take him seriously, but smiled at him as if she were sure that sooner or later he would drop his mask.

Without making a show of it, she paid him numerous little attentions. In the morning, she took it upon herself to place a cup of coffee outside his door as soon as she heard him getting up.

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