A Man's Head by Georges Simenon Page B

he’d find all the answers when he was least expecting to?
    He started to run. A door slammed on the floor above. The intruder was running away, charging through one room then opening and closing the door of the next.
    But Maigret was gaining on him. As on the ground floor, these rooms, which had been used by guests, had been left to fester. They were cluttered with furniture and all kinds of jumble.
    A vase was knocked to the floor with a crash. Maigret was afraid of only one thing: that he would come up against a door which the intruder had had time to bolt shut.
    â€˜Stop! Police!’ he shouted. It was worth a try.
    But the man kept on running. He had now covered half the length of the second floor. At one point, Maigret was actually holding a door knob while the intruder’s hand was trying to turn the key in the lock on the other side of the door.
    â€˜Open up or …!’
    The key turned. The bolt was pushed home. Without even stopping a moment to think, Maigret took several steps back and hurled himself forward, putting his shoulder to the panel of the door.
    It shook but did not give. From the room on the other side came the sound of a window opening.
    â€˜Stop! Police!’
    He was not thinking that his presence here, in this house which now belonged to William Crosby, was illegal, since he did not have a search warrant.
    Two, three times he launched himself against the door. One of the panels started to split.
    As he was about to gather his forces for one last attempt, there was a shot followed by a silence so absolute that Maigret stood where he was with his mouth half open as if frozen to the spot.
    â€˜Who’s in there? Open this door!’
    Nothing! No dying groan! Not even the tell-tale sound of a gun being cocked to be fired again.
    Overcome by a rush of anger, Maigret battered the door with his shoulder and the whole of his side, and suddenly it gave, so suddenly that his momentum carried him into the room, where he almost went sprawling on the floor.
    Cold, damp air was blowing in to the room through the open window, through which the illuminated windows of a restaurant and the yellow bulk of a tram were visible.
    On the floor a man was sitting, with his back to the wall and leaning slightly to his left.
    The patch of grey which was made by his clothes and the outline of his body were enough for Maigret to recognize William Crosby. It would have been difficult to identify him by his face.
    For the American had fired a bullet into his mouth, at point-blank range. Half his head was missing.
    As he went back slowly through all the rooms he had come through, Maigret switched on the lights. Some lamps had no bulbs, but against all expectations most were still working.
    He continued until half the house was lit from top to bottom, with a few black gaps here and there.
    When he reached Mrs Henderson’s room, he noticed that there was a phone on a bedside table. He lifted the receiver, on the off chance, but a click informed him that the line had not been cut off.
    He had never before felt so strongly that he was in a house of death.
    Was he not sitting on the edge of the very bed in which an elderly American widow had been murdered? Straight ahead of him he could see the door behind which the body of her maid had been found.
    And upstairs, in a mouldering room, there was a new corpse lying under a window which let in the rain-laden evening air.
    â€˜Operator? Préfecture, please.’
    He spoke in a whisper, though he was not aware of doing so.
    â€˜Hello? … Give me the head of the Police Judiciaire … It’s Maigret … Ah, is that you, sir? … William Crosby has just killed himself in the villa out at Saint-Cloud … Yes, I’m still
here … I’m at the scene … Will you do the necessary? I was there! … Less than four metres from him … There was a locked door between