Cécile is Dead by Georges Simenon Page A

his
     neighbour’s coat he had thought she was young. She wasn’t moving. Her face,
     pale like the man’s hand and the part
of
     her thigh that it was exposing, remained turned to the screen.
    â€˜Ahem!’ the inspector coughed,
     feeling uneasy. ‘Ahem!’
    The lovers paid him no attention. She must
     be much the same age as Nouchi.
    In fact, when Nouchi had seen Gérard
     entering the Bourg-la-Reine apartment building at seven in the evening – or had she
     really seen him? – she too had been with a lover, in the dark, no doubt up against a
     wall.
    He heard the whisper of a kiss close to him.
     He had a taste like someone else’s saliva in his mouth. He hunched even further
     down into his overcoat.
    Nouchi had been enticing him in the most
     brazen way a little while ago. If he had wanted … Were there many girls of that age who
     threw themselves at mature men who could lay claim to some kind of celebrity, or merely
     some social standing?
    I wouldn’t be surprised if her
     companion is a good deal older than her, he thought, meaning the lover of the girl in
     the seat beside him.
    This was his way of thinking without really
     thinking, in snatches of ideas that he didn’t try to connect with each other.
    Had the Hungarian girl been lying about
     Monsieur Charles? Probably not. Dandurand was exactly the kind of man to leave his door
     ajar, watching out for a young girl and offering to show her pornographic photographs.
     Nouchi, for her part, was capable of doing everything in her power to keep him in
     suspense, ready to call for help when …
    What was disturbing was the fact that she
     claimed to
have seen Gérard Pardon at seven in
     the evening, exactly the time when Madame With-All-Due-Respect, on her way up to the
     Deséglise apartment, was not keeping an eye on the stairs.
    When her statement was official …
    Well, then a perverse girl’s statement
     would be enough to send a man to prison, and who knew …
    He felt very ill at ease. It wasn’t
     just the idea of Gérard coming out of the Boulevard Arago gate of La Santé prison first
     thing in the morning … He was still looking at the screen, and he frowned. For a few
     moments he felt that something wasn’t natural, and then he realized what it was;
     the lips of the characters in the film were moving, but not quite in time with their
     words. In fact the people on screen were speaking English, but you heard French; it was
     a dubbed soundtrack, and wasn’t perfectly synchronized.
    The behaviour of the couple beside him was
     getting worse and worse, but the inspector’s mind was elsewhere. What exactly was
     it that had been throwing him off the track for the last three days? He hadn’t
     worked it out, but now he understood. Something basic was wrong. What was it? He
     didn’t know yet.
    With his eyes half-closed he saw, more
     clearly than if he had been there in front of it, the building like a slice of
     Neapolitan ice cream on Route d’Orléans, the bicycle shop, the widow
     Piéchaud’s grocery store. As he had known since the day before, she was not really
     a widow; her husband had run off with a woman of ill repute, as she put it, and she was
     so ashamed of it that she claimed to have been widowed.
    But then there was
     Madame With-All-Due-Respect, in her stuffy lodge, her head askew, her neck wrapped in
     thermal wadding to keep it warm …
    Because she hadn’t pulled the cord to
     let any stranger into the building, he had concluded over-hastily that no such person
     had come in or gone out of it on the night in question.
    However, he now knew that it was possible to
     get in at seven in the evening without being seen by the concierge. What proof was there
     that there weren’t other such fixed moments during the day?
    Up at the top of the building, that old
     obsessive Juliette Boynet surrounded herself with mystery to