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

Countess?” he asked.
    “It’s a Countess, at any rate. I don’t know if she’s the one you’re after. We’ve just had a call from the Rue Victor Massé. A few minutes ago the concierge discovered that one of her tenants had been murdered, probably last night…”
    “A Countess?”
    “Countess von Farnheim.”
    “Shot?”
    “No, strangled. That’s all we know so far. The local police are on the spot.”
    A few moments later, Maigret jumped into a taxi, which took an endless time to get through the centre of Paris. Going along the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette, he caught sight of Janvier coming out of a greengrocer’s shop, so he stopped the cab and called to him:
    “Jump in, the Countess is dead!”
    “A real Countess?”
    “I don’t know. It’s quite near here. The whole business is happening in this district.”
    For Picratt’s, in the Rue Pigalle, was scarcely five hundred yards from Arlette’s flat, and about the same distance from the Rue Victor-Massé.
    On this new occasion the scene was different from that of the morning, for a score of inquisitive idlers were hanging round the door of the comfortable, respectable-looking house.
    “Is the Chief Inspector there?”
    “He wasn’t at the station. It’s Inspector Lognon who…”
    Poor Lognon! He was so eager to distinguish himself, and every time he started on a case he seemed fated to have it taken out of his hands by Maigret.
    The concierge was not in her quarters. The walls of the staircase were painted to imitate marble, and there was a dark red stair carpet held in place by brass rods. The atmosphere was rather stuffy, as though all the tenants were old people who never opened their windows; and the place was strangely silent—not one door so much as quivered while Maigret and Janvier were on their way up. On reaching the fourth floor, however, they heard sounds, and a door opened to reveal the long, lugubrious face of Lognon, who was talking to a very short, very fat woman with a tight bun of hair on the top of her head.
    They went into the room, which was dimly lit by a standard lamp with a parchment shade. The atmosphere here was more oppressive than in the rest of the house. They suddenly felt, without quite knowing why, as if they were far removed from Paris, from the outside world, from the damp streets with their crowded pavements, the screeching taxis, the hurtling buses with their abruptly grinding brakes.
    The place was so hot that Maigret took off his overcoat at once.
    “Where is she?”
    “In the bedroom.”
    The first room was a kind of drawing-room, or had been but in these surroundings the usual names didn’t seem to fit. The whole place looked, somehow, as though it had been put ready for an auction sale, with all the furniture in unaccustomed places.
    There were bottles lying round everywhere, and Maigret noticed that they had all contained red wine—the coarse red wine that navvies drink straight from the bottle, to wash down their lunch-time sausage as they sit by the roadside. There was sausage too—not on a plate, but on a piece of greasy paper, mixed up with scraps of chicken; and chicken bones were strewn on the carpet.
    The carpet itself was threadbare and incredibly dirty, and the rest of the furniture was no better—there was a chair with a broken leg, a sofa with tufts of horsehair escaping from it, and the parchment shade on the lamp was singed brown with long use, and quite shapeless.
    Next door, in the bedroom, on a bed which had no sheets and had not been made for several days, lay a half-naked body—exactly half-naked, for the upper part was more or less covered by a bodice, while from waist to feet the puffy, livid flesh was bare.
    Maigret’s first glance took in the little blue specks on the thighs, and told him that he would find a syringe somewhere at hand. He found two—one with a broken needle—on what served as a bedside table.
    The dead woman appeared to be at least sixty, but it was difficult to