Maigret's Pickpocket by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241304181
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

5.

It was a tough moment to get through. In almost all his investigations, Maigret experienced this more or less long period of uncertainty, in the course of which, his colleagues whispered, he seemed to be ruminating.

During the first phase of a case, that is when he was suddenly faced with a new milieu and people about whom he knew nothing, it was as if he was breathing in the life around him, absorbing it like a sponge.

That was what he had done the previous evening in the Vieux-Pressoir, his memory registering, without consciously doing so, the smallest details of the atmosphere, the gestures and facial expressions of everyone there.

If he hadn’t been feeling so tired, he would have gone on to Club Zéro, which was frequented by some members of the little gang.

And now, he had taken in a huge number of impressions, a jumble of images, of sentences spoken, of words that might or might not mean something, of surprised expressions, but he was still undecided what he would do with it all.

His close colleagues knew that it was best not to ask him any questions, or even to look at him inquiringly, since he would very likely turn crotchety.

As he had been expecting, a note on his desk asked him to call the examining magistrate Camus.

‘Hello. Maigret here.’

He had only occasionally worked with this magistrate, whom he regarded neither as a complete pain in the neck, nor among those who wisely allowed the police to get on with their job.

‘If I asked you to call me, it was because I’ve had a call myself from the public prosecutor. He’s impatient to know what stage the investigation has reached.’

Maigret almost muttered ‘Nowhere’.

Which was true. A crime isn’t like an algebra problem. It has to do with human beings about whom nothing was known yesterday, who were just passers-by like anyone else. Then suddenly, every one of their gestures, every word they speak, takes on significance and their whole life is examined with a fine-tooth comb.

‘The investigation is ongoing,’ he preferred to say. ‘Within an hour or so, we shall probably have the murder weapon. The police divers are looking for it in the Seine.’

‘What have you done with the husband?’

‘He’s here, in the icebox.’

He checked himself, since this was a term that could be understood only by the inspectors in his squad. When they did not know what to do with a witness but wanted to keep him in sight, or when they had a suspect not yet ready to be charged, they put him in ‘the icebox’.

They would say, as they took the individual concerned into the glass-panelled waiting room, looking on to the long corridor:

‘Wait here for a moment.’

There were people there permanently: anxious women, some crying and dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs, small-time crooks trying to brazen it out, and now and then solid citizens who remained patiently waiting, looking at the pale-green painted walls, and wondering if the authorities had forgotten their existence.

An hour or two in the icebox was generally enough to make people ready to talk.

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