Maigret in Montmartre by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online Page A

flat, and probably had a key to it.”
    “What about the Countess?”
    “No news so far. Either she hasn’t been killed, or no one has found the body yet—it might be that. Did she ever say anything to you about a Countess?”
    “Never.”
    Lapointe stared down at the desk for a moment and then asked, in an altered voice:
    “Do you think she suffered much?”
    “Not for long. The murderer was very strong, and she didn’t even struggle.”
    “Is she still in her room?”
    “She’s just been taken to the mortuary.”
    “May I go and see her?”
    “When you’ve had something to eat.”
    “What shall I do after that?”
    “Go to her flat in the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette. Ask Janvier for the key. We’ve already been over the place, but you, who knew her, may find a meaning in some detail that escaped us.”
    “Thank you,” said the young man eagerly; he was convinced that Maigret was giving him this task solely as a favour.
    Maigret took care not to mention the photographs, whose corners were sticking out from under a file that lay on his desk.
    Someone came to tell him that five or six journalists were waiting in the corridor, clamouring for news. He had them brought in, told them only part of the story, but gave each of them one of the photographs—those which showed Arlette in her black silk dress.
    “And you might mention,” he added, “that we should be glad if a certain Jeanne Leleu, who must be going by another name now, would come forward. We promise her there’ll be no publicity, and we haven’t the slightest wish to make trouble for her.”
    He lunched late, at home, and had time to read through Fred Alfonsi’s file when he got back to the office. Paris still looked ghostly in the fine, misty drizzle, and the people in the streets seemed as though they were moving through a kind of aquarium, and hurrying to get out.
    The proprietor of Picratt’s had a bulky police file, but there was hardly any significant information in it. When he was twenty years old he had done his military service in the penal Bataillons d’Afrique —for at that time he was being kept by a prostitute who lived in the Boulevard Sébastapol, and had already been arrested twice for assault and battery.
    Then, after an interval of several years, he turned up in Marseilles, where he was recruiting girls for several brothels in the South of France. He was twenty-eight years old by that time. He was not yet a leading light in the underworld, but he was already too big a man to soil his hands in fights in the bars of the Vieux Port.
    He had no prison sentences during that period, though there was one narrow escape over a girl of only seventeen whom he had prematurely ‘placed’, with forged identity papers, in Le Paradis, an establishment at Béziers.
    Then came another gap. All that was known was that he had gone to Panama with a cargo of women, five or six of them, aboard an Italian boat, and had gained a certain notoriety over there.
    At the age of forty he was back in Paris, living with Rosalie Dumont, alias La Rose, a woman well into middle-age, who had a beauty parlour in the Rue des Martyrs. He was a keen race-goer and boxing enthusiast, and was thought to take bets as a sideline.
    After a time he had married Rose, and together they had opened Picratt’s, which was originally no more than a small bar with its own group of regular customers.
    Janvier had gone back after lunch to the Rue Notre-Dame de Loretta. He was not in Arlette’s flat, as he was still questioning the neighbours—not only the other tenants in the building, but the nearby shopkeepers and everyone else who might have any information.
    As for Lucas, he was left alone to clear up the Javel burglary, and was thoroughly disgruntled about it.
    It was ten minutes to five, and darkness had fallen long ago, when the telephone rang in Maigret’s office and he heard what he had been expecting all day.
    “This is the Emergency Centre.”
    “Is it about the