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me…”
    “Don’t listen to her, Chief Superintendent.”
    “I swear it’s the truth. I told Potsi about it the very first chance I got, and she went and had a look at the photographs, too. And he propositioned her as well.”
    “What inducement did he offer?”
    “Same as he offered me…a wrist watch. He must keep a stock of them…And I’ll tell you something else, too. One night, when I couldn’t get to sleep, I heard a noise on his landing. I got up, and went down and looked in through his keyhole, and I saw him…”
    “Hold on,” interposed Maigret, “was the staircase light on?”
    She was momentarily disconcerted. He could sense her hesitation.
    “No,” she said at last. “But there was a moon.”
    “How could the moon light the stairs?”
    “Through the skylight. There’s a skylight just above the landing.”
    This was true. Maigret remembered seeing it. But, in that case, why had she hesitated when he had asked her about the staircase light?
    “Thank you, mademoiselle. You may go now. Your parents will be wondering.”
    “My parents and my sister have gone to the movies…”
    She looked crestfallen. Surely she hadn’t expected Maigret to go up with her to the apartment!
    “Don’t you have any other questions to ask me?”
    “No…Good evening.”
    “Is it true that Cécile is dead?”
    By way of reply, he shut the door on her.
    “It’s a disgrace, saving your presence,” sighed the concierge. “Another glass of wine, Chief Superintendent?…I wouldn’t put it past her to be taking men up to the apartment in the absence of her parents. Did you see the way she looked at you? It quite made me blush for my own sex…”
    Cars and trucks rumbled endlessly past. Maigret returned to the cane armchair, which creaked under his weight. The concierge got up to refill the stove and, when she sat down again, the cat jumped up onto her lap. It was hot. Everything seemed very remote. The cars and trucks belonged to a distant world, almost, as it were, to another planet. With the lodge as the center, the real world was confined within the walls of the building. Above the bed hung the rubber bulb which released the catch of the front door.
    “I take it no one could get into the house without your knowing it?”
    “I don’t see how, there are no keys…”
    “What about the shops?”
    “The doors leading into the building have been bricked up. Madame Boynet was scared of burglars.”
    “You say that, in the past few months, she never left the house?”
    “Mind you, she wasn’t absolutely helpless. She was able to move about the apartment using a cane. Sometimes, she even managed to get as far as the landing, to spy on the tenants or check on whether I’d cleaned the place properly…You never heard her coming…She crept about in felt slippers, and she’d had her cane fitted with a rubber tip.”
    “Did she have many visitors?”
    “None…except for her nephew, Monsieur Gérard, who would look in from time to time. Mademoiselle Berthe never came near her aunt…I believe, saving your presence, that she has a steady boy friend. I ran into her one Sunday, when I was visiting the cemetery, in company with a very respectable-looking gentleman of about thirty. I had the feeling that he was a married man, though I couldn’t see whether he was wearing a wedding ring.”
    “In other words, Madame Boynet lived quite alone with Cécile?”
    “That poor girl! So gentle, so devoted! Her aunt treated her like a servant, but she never complained! Now there’s one who couldn’t be accused of running after men! And besides, she wasn’t strong. Her health was far from good. She had stomach aches, but that didn’t keep her from carting the garbage can down five flights of stairs, and going back carrying a bucket of coal.”
    “I suppose it was Cécile who took the money to the bank?”
    “What bank?”
    “I presume that when Madame Boynet received her rent money…”
    “She wouldn’t have put