Maigret and the Killer by Simenon Georges & Moir Lyn

Author:Simenon, Georges & Moir, Lyn [Simenon, Georges & Moir, Lyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Mystery, Fiction, Crime, General
ISBN: 9781117492186
Google: wiNWPwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0151551278
Goodreads: 3820829
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Published: 1969-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

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5

JUST TO MAKE SURE, Maigret had young Lapointe go with him. They both stood in the crowd, on the embankment side of the street, not opposite the house of the dead boy but opposite the house next door, for there were so many onlookers that they had not been able to get a better place.

There were cars, among them many chauffeur-driven limousines, all along the embankments from the Pont Louis-Philippe to the Pont-Sully, and others were parked on the other side of the island on the Quai de Béthune and the Quai d’Orléans.

It was a cold morning, the weather what is called crisp, very clear, very bright, pastel-colored.

They saw the cars stop in front of the black-draped front door, people go upstairs, where they bowed toward the coffin before reappearing and waiting outside for the procession to form.

A red-haired photographer, bareheaded, walked about pointing his lens at the rows of spectators. He was not always well received, and some of them did not hesitate to tell him what they thought of him.

He still went on with his work, unmoved. The people, especially those who grumbled, would have been very surprised to learn that he did not belong to a newspaper, a photo agency, or a magazine, but that he was there on Maigret’s orders.

Maigret had gone up to the Criminal Identity laboratory very early and, with Moers’s help, had chosen Van Hamme, the best and, more important, the most resourceful of the available photographers.

“I want photographs of all the onlookers, first outside the house, then outside the church, when the coffin is taken in and again when it comes out, and finally at the cemetery.

“When the pictures are developed, look at them carefully with a magnifying glass. It’s possible that one or more people will be at all three places. Those are the ones I’m interested in. You’ll need to enlarge them for me, without the surrounding figures.”

In spite of himself, Maigret was looking for a light-colored, belted raincoat and a dark hat. There was not much chance that the murderer had kept those clothes, for the morning papers had described them. For the present the two cases, the Rue Popincourt case and the burglary, were definitively intertwined.

In one of the papers, under the picture of Demarle-the-Sailor, in his raincoat and brown hat, was printed:

IS THIS THE MURDERER?

The crowd was a mixture of types. First of all, near the house, were those who had been to pay their last respects to the dead boy and who were waiting to take their place in the procession. On the edge of the sidewalk it was mostly those who lived on the island, the concierges and the shopkeepers of the Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile.

“Such a nice boy!… And so shy!… When he came into the shop he always tipped his hat…”

“If only he had had his hair cut a little shorter… His parents should have told him… Elegant people like them!… It made him look like the wrong kind…”

From time to time Maigret and Lapointe exchanged a look, and an absurd idea came into Maigret’s head.

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