Maigret

A long pause. Then she had said, “I don’t remember.”

Yet Maigret remained. He lit his pipe, the familiar ritual of tamping and striking a match grounding him in the present. The smoke curled toward the ceiling, gray against the gray of the night. His heavy overcoat was still on, his scarf loosened. He looked less like a policeman and more like a weary burgher reluctant to face the wind and the walk back to Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. Maigret

He knocked the ash from his pipe into the tray, reached for his hat, and turned off the lamp. The stairs groaned under his weight. At the door, the night watchman nodded to him. A long pause

And if you stopped remembering—then what was left? Only the knife, the stairwell, the rain falling on the courtyard cobblestones. The smoke curled toward the ceiling, gray against

“Good night, Inspector.”

It was the widow. She had sat in that very chair—the hard one, not the comfortable one he reserved for witnesses he pitied—for four hours. She had not wept. Her hands, red and raw from scrubbing, had remained still in her lap. She had confessed to everything. Yes, she had known her husband was seeing the woman from the laundry. Yes, she had bought the knife at the quincaillerie on Rue des Martyrs. Yes, she had waited behind the stairwell door.