Maigret and the Spinster by Georges Simenon

arouses comment. But the Chief Superintendent had no doubt been clumsy, because the girl turned around and stared at him in amazement, as if to say: You, too…!
    He felt a little foolish.
    Her brother had preceded them into the apartment, which had been stripped only a few minutes before of its funereal draperies. They had encountered the deputy undertaker’s men with their gear in the hall on their way up.
    Maigret was just about to follow the others inside when a voice with a slight foreign accent murmured in his ear:
    “Could I have a word with you, Chief Superintendent?”
    He recognized Nouchi, dressed for the funeral in a black suit several sizes too small and too tight for her. No doubt it had been made two or three years before her figure had reached maturity, and it accentuated her precocity.
    “Later,” he said irritably. He had no patience with this impudent chit.
    “It’s very urgent, really it is!”
    Maigret went into the late Juliette Boynet’s apartment and said grumpily, as he shut the door:
    “Urgent or not, it will have to wait.”
    Having got Gérard where he wanted him, he intended to straighten things out with him once and for all. That Berthe was there as well was all to the good, he felt. The old woman’s apartment was a more suitable setting for this particular confrontation than his office at the Quai des Orfèvres. The atmosphere of the place was already having its effect on Gerard’s nerves. He was gazing with a kind of anguish at the walls, so recently stripped of their black draperies, and breathing in the smell of candles and flowers, like the stale smell of death itself.
    As for Berthe Pardon, she was as much at home here as behind her counter at the Galeries Lafayette or in the little fixed-price restaurant where she usually had her meals.
    Her round face, still childlike, exuded serenity and that inner contentment which some believe to be the expression of an easy conscience. She seemed the very quintessence of girlhood, untouched not by sin only but by the very notion of sin.
    “Sitdown, my dears,” said Maigret, taking his pipe out of his pocket.
    Gérard was far too tense to settle in one of the sitting-room armchairs. In marked contrast to his sister, he was on edge the whole time, his mind in a turmoil, his eyes never still.
    “Why don’t you say straight out that you suspect me of having murdered my aunt and sister?” he asked, his lips trembling. “Just because I’m poor, and because I’ve always been dogged by ill-luck…What do you care about upsetting my wife, who is expecting a child any moment now and who, anyway, has never been strong?…You take advantage of my absence to go ferreting about in our lodgings. You made quite sure first that I would be out, didn’t you?”
    “That’s right,” said Maigret, gazing at the pictures on the walls as he lit his pipe.
    “Because you had no search warrant…because you knew I would never have permitted it.”
    “No! Of course not!”
    Berthe took off the fur piece she was wearing around her neck. It was a strip of pine marten, too long and too narrow. The Chief Superintendent was impressed by the whiteness and smoothness of her throat.
    “Have you so much as asked that phony Monfils where he was on the night of the murder? I’m quite sure you haven’t, because he is…”
    “I intend to put that very question to him this afternoon…”
    “In that case, you can also ask him if it isn’t true that my sisters and I have been cheated of our rights from start to finish.”
    He pointed to a somewhat faded enlargement of a photograph of a woman.
    “That’s my mother,” he declaimed. “Cécile was very like her…Not only in looks, but in character. You wouldn’t understand their sort of humility, their dread of stepping out of line, of taking more than their due…their unwholesome craving for self-sacrifice. That was what my poor sister was like, and she was a slave all her life. That’s true, Berthe, isn’t