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her features. She had a very gentle expression and a self-effacing manner.
    How strange that she should be called Léone, the more so as she had a broad pug-nose, such as one might see on an aged lion slumbering in a cage.
    â€œWhat can I do for you, monsieur?”
    She was dressed in black. Her face and hands were colourless, ethereal. Comforting gusts of warmth blew into the shop from the big black stove in the back room, and everywhere, on the shelves and on the counter, there were fragile knitted garments, bootees threaded through with pink or blue ribbons, bonnets, christening robes.
    â€œI am Chief Superintendent Maigret of the Police Judiciaire.”
    â€œOh?”
    â€œI have to inform you that Louis Thouret, a former colleague of yours, I believe, was murdered yesterday.”
    No one else had taken the news to heart as she did. And yet, she didn’t cry, or fumble for a handkerchief, or screw up her face. The shock of it froze her where she stood and, for a moment, he could have sworn, arrested the beating of her heart. And he saw her lips, which were pale anyway, turn as white as the baby clothes all around her.
    â€œPlease forgive me. I ought not to have put it so bluntly.”
    She shook her head, wishing him to understand that she did not hold it against him. The old lady in the back room stirred.
    â€œIf I am to find his murderer, I need to learn everything there is to be known about him.”
    She nodded, but still did not speak.
    â€œI believe you knew him well?”
    For an instant, her face lit up.
    â€œHow did it happen?” she finally asked, with a lump in her throat.
    She must have been ugly even as a little girl, and, no doubt, she had always been conscious of the fact. Glancing toward the other room, she murmured:
    â€œI’m sure you’d be more comfortable sitting down.”
    â€œI don’t think your mother…”
    â€œWe can talk freely in front of Mother. She’s stone deaf. But she does like company.”
    He could not possibly have admitted to her that he felt suffocated in this airless room, where the two women spent the greater part of their cramped existence.
    Léone was ageless. In all probability she was over fifty, perhaps a lot older than that. Her mother looked all of eighty, as she darted a glance at the chief superintendent with her bright little birdlike eyes. It was not from her that Léone had inherited her broad pug-nose, but from her father, if the enlarged photograph on the wall was anything to go by.
    â€œI’ve just come from seeing the concierge in the Rue de Bondy.”
    â€œIt must have been a great shock to her.”
    â€œYes. She was very fond of him.”
    â€œEveryone was.”
    She colored a little as she spoke.
    â€œHe was such a good man!” she hastened to add.
    â€œYou saw quite a lot of him, isn’t that so?”
    â€œHe came to see me several times. You couldn’t say I saw him often. He was a very busy man, and he lived a long way out of town.”
    â€œDo you happen to know how he spent his time latterly?”
    â€œI never asked him. He seemed to be doing well. I presumed he was self-employed, as he didn’t have to keep office hours.”
    â€œDid he never talk to you about the people he met?”
    â€œWe mostly reminisced about the Rue de Bondy, and Kaplan’s, and Monsieur Max, and stocktaking. What an upheaval that used to be every year, with more than a thousand different lines in stock.”
    She hesitated.
    â€œI presume you’ve seen his wife?”
    â€œYesterday evening, yes.”
    â€œHow did she take it?”
    â€œShe couldn’t understand how her husband came to be wearing light brown shoes when he was killed. She claims that the murderer must have put them on him.”
    She, like the concierge, had noticed the shoes.
    â€œNo. He often wore them.”
    â€œEven when he was working in the Rue de Bondy?”
    â€œNo, only