Read Online Cécile is Dead by Georges Simenon - Free Book Online Page A

dense. In particular, there was an uninterrupted line of vans
     coming back from Les Halles. It was clear weather, the sun shining, but not strongly,
     the air cold and biting; the mourners who had come were stamping their feet and digging
     their hands in their pockets to keep warm.
    Maigret had not slept the night before. He
     and Lucas had been watching his gang of Poles from the room in Rue de Birague. He had
     been feeling morose and irritable ever since the death of Cécile three days earlier. The
     Poles, who prevented him from devoting his mind entirely to the Bourg-la-Reine case,
     were really beginning to annoy him. At seven in the morning he made up his mind.
    â€˜You stay here,’ he told Lucas.
     ‘I’m going to nab the first of them to leave their quarters.’
    â€˜Be careful, sir,’ said Lucas.
     ‘They’re armed.’
    Maigret shrugged his
     shoulders, went into the Hôtel des Arcades and stationed himself near the staircase. A
     quarter of an hour later, the door of the Poles’ room opened. A giant of a man
     emerged and began coming downstairs. Maigret pounced on him from behind, and the two men
     rolled over and over until they reached the ground floor, where the inspector got to his
     feet after handcuffing his adversary. On hearing his whistle, Torrence came running.
    â€˜Take him to headquarters,’
     Maigret told him. ‘I’ll leave it to you to grill him … until he talks,
     understand? I want him squealing loud and long.’
    And after knocking the dust off his
     clothing, he went to eat croissants, washed down with coffee, at the bar of the nearby
     café.
    Everyone in the Police Judiciaire knew that
     it was better not to cross him at such times, when even Madame Maigret didn’t
     venture to ask when he would be home for lunch or dinner.
    Now he was there on the pavement outside the
     Bourg-la-Reine apartment building, leaning on the window of the grocery shop and smoking
     his pipe with angry little puffs. The case had been in the newspapers, and there were a
     good many curious onlookers, not to mention half a dozen journalists and some
     photographers. The two hearses stood outside the building, Juliette Boynet’s in
     front, Cécile’s behind it, and the tenants of the apartments, on the initiative of
     Madame With-All-Due-Respect, who claimed that it was the least they could do, had
     clubbed together to buy a wreath.
    In Memory Of Our
     Much-Lamented Landlady
.
    Outside stood the Monfils couple and their
     sons, representing the family of Juliette Boynet, née Cazenove, another group
     representing the family of her dead husband, the Boynets and the Machepieds, who lived
     in Paris.
    There was evidently no love lost between the
     two groups, who glared at one another. Boynet and Machepied both claimed that they had
     been robbed, saying that at the time of her husband’s death the old woman had
     promised that part of her fortune would return to his family some day. They had
     presented themselves at Police Judiciaire headquarters as a delegation the day before,
     and the commissioner had seen them, for they were persons of some importance in the
     city, one of them a municipal councillor.
    â€˜Those gentlemen say there’s a
     will, Maigret,’ the commissioner had said, ‘and when I tell them that the
     apartment has been searched, they won’t listen.’
    They bore Maigret a grudge, they bore
     Monfils a grudge, they bore Juliette a grudge. In short, all gathered together for the
     funeral considered that they had been robbed, first and foremost Gérard Pardon, who
     didn’t talk to anyone and seemed more nervous than ever.
    Poverty had prevented him from wearing full
     mourning, and he had no overcoat on, only an old khaki raincoat with a black armband on
     one sleeve.
    His sister Berthe stood beside him, worrying
     because he was so agitated. She was a plump girl, pretty and stylish, and