Cécile is Dead by Georges Simenon

have been
     greatly surprised to see Maigret, his hands in his pockets, pipe between his teeth,
     walking down Boulevard Montparnasse with a grumpy expression on his face, stopping
     outside a cinema with its foyer plastered with brightly coloured posters, and then
     finally going up to the ticket office, and holding out some cash.
    â€˜A balcony seat, please,’ he
     asked.
    He then followed the young girl in a black
     silk dress with a Peter Pan collar who went ahead of him, shining the narrow beam of her
     electric torch on the steps.
    â€˜Excuse me … excuse me … excuse
     me.’
    He made his way along a row of seats, aware
     that he was annoying everyone and treading on toes as he passed.
    He had no idea what film was being shown.
     Loud voices apparently coming from nowhere filled the auditorium,
while on screen a ship’s captain was throwing a girl
     down on the bunk in his cabin.
    â€˜So you came here to spy on
     me!’
    â€˜Have mercy, Captain Brown! If not on
     me, then at least on …’
    â€˜Excuse me,’ said a timid little
     voice on the inspector’s right, and his neighbour pulled away the skirt of her
     coat, on which Maigret was sitting.

7.
    Maigret was warm. Nice and warm, as he used
     to say when he was a child, and if the lights in the auditorium had suddenly come on,
     revealing him wrapped up in his overcoat, hands in his pockets, his body leaning
     slightly backwards and his eyes half-closed, he would have looked the very essence of
     bliss.
    In fact it was a little trick that he used
     on himself when he had been thinking of the same subject for too long and he felt his
     mind about to start running on empty. In summer he would have gone to sit on the terrace
     of a café in the sun, where he would have let himself muse quietly over a beer.
    When they had put in central heating at Quai
     des Orfèvres, and the inspector had asked and been granted permission to keep his old
     coal-burning stove, the younger inspectors had shrugged their shoulders. In fact it was
     for the sake of the same trick. When he was stuck, when he had been poring over a
     problem for so long that it seemed to be empty of all substance, no more than an web of
     incoherent, cold thoughts, Maigret added more fuel to the stove, warmed himself up
     sometimes facing it, sometimes with his back to it, poked the burning coals, allowed it
     to draw, and little by little he relaxed with a sense of well-being. His eyelids
     tingled, and everything round him
seemed
     blurred, an impression to which the smoke of his eternal pipe contributed.
    In this state of physical lethargy, his mind
     seized upon connections that sometimes seemed absurd, following paths along which pure
     reason would not have led him.
    Madame Maigret had never understood. When
     she touched his arm at the end of an evening spent like this in the cinema, she always
     sighed, ‘You’ve been asleep again, Maigret … I wonder why you pay twelve
     francs for a cinema seat when you have such a good bed at home.’
    The auditorium was dark, full of the warmth
     of humanity, alive with the hundreds of people sitting there side by side, but all the
     same knowing nothing of each other. The long triangle of pale light from the projection
     room passed above their heads, attracting tobacco smoke.
    If anyone had asked Maigret what the film
     was, he couldn’t have said. It didn’t matter. He watched the images without
     seeing any connection between them. Then his glance moved lower, having noticed a slight
     movement close to him.
    Though he was a powerful man who for nearly
     thirty years had been dealing, so to speak, with passion taken to the utmost, in other
     words to crime, Maigret was personally chaste, and he coughed, shocked by the behaviour
     of the woman next to him and her companion, although all he could actually see of the
     latter was a white hand. Just now, however, when he inadvertently sat on