Georges Simenon - The Engagement (New York Review Books)

Georges Simenon

MR. HIRE'S ENGAGEMENT

(Les Fianailles de Mr. Hire) was first published in France in 1933 and in Great Britain in 1956 Translated from the French by Daphne Woodward

Contents

MR. HIRE'S ENGAGEMENT

I

T HE concierge gave a slight cough before she knocked, and then announced, looking at the Belle Jardiniere catalogue in her hand:

'A letter for you, Mr. Hire.'

And she gathered her shawl over her chest. Someone was moving on the other side of the brown door. Now to left, now to right, now footsteps, then a soft rustling of cloth or a rattle of crockery, and the grey eyes of the concierge seemed to be following the invisible trail of sound, through the partition. At last the sounds came closer. The key turned in the lock. A rectangle of light appeared, a strip of yellow-flowered wallpaper, the polished marble of a washbasin. A man held out his hand, but the concierge did not see him, or scarcely saw him, paid no attention to him, in any case, for her prying eyes were fixed on something else: a bloodstained towel, lying dark-red on the pale marble.

The closing door pushed her gently backwards. The key turned once more and the concierge went down the four flights of stairs, pausing in thought from time to time. She was thin. Her clothes hung around her as though from the crossed sticks of a scarecrow's frame-work, and her nose was damp, her eyelids red, her hands chapped with the cold.

Inside the lodge, which had a glass-panelled door, a little girl in a flannel petticoat was standing in front of a chair with a basin of water on it. Her brother, already dressed, was amusing himself by splashing her with water, and the table beside them was not yet cleared.

The door clicked as it opened. The little boy looked round. The little girl held up a tearful face.

'You just wait...'

A slap for the boy, whom his mother then pushed outside.

'You get along to school. As for you, if you don't stop crying'

She shook the little girl and bundled her into her frock, tugging at her arms as though she were a puppet. Then she hid the basin of soapy water in the cupboard, went across to the door, came back again.

'Are you going to stop snivelling?'

She was thinking. She was hesitating. She was frowning and her little eyes were uneasy. She nodded automatically to the second-floor tenant as he walked past the lodge, and suddenly, flinging a second shawl over her shoulders, she half-closed the front of the stove and darted out towards the street.

It was freezing. Along the main road to Fontainebleau, which runs through Villejuif, the cars were driving slowly because of the icy surface, and steam was rising from their radiators. A hundred yards to the left was the cross-roads, with its bistro on either side, its policeman in the middle, the bustling suburban streets leading straight to Paris, with their trams, buses and cars. But to the right, after two houses, immediately past the last garage, was the open road, the countryside with trees and hoar-frosted fields.

The concierge shivered, hesitated again. She made a slight sign to a man standing at the street corner, but he did not see her, and so she ran across, touched his arm. 'Come in for a minute.'

She went back to the house, taking no further notice of him, grabbed her daughter by one arm and hoisted her onto a chair in a corner of the room, to get her out of the way.

'Come in. Don't stay there, he might see you.' She was either out of breath or very agitated. She glanced to and fro from the outside corridor to the man, who looked about thirty years old and had not taken his hat off.

'Yesterday I still wasn't sure, but I've just seen something and now I'm dead certain it's Mr. Hire.'

'Which is he?'

'Short, rather stout, with a curly moustache, and always carries a black briefcase under his arm.'

'What's his job?'

'We don't know. He goes out every morning and comes back at night. I took him up a catalogue, and while the door was ajar I noticed a towel all covered with blood...'

For the last fortnight the inspector, with two colleagues, had been spending his days and sometimes his nights in the district, watching everybody, and he was beginning to know the local people by sight. 'And apart from this towel...' he began. The concierge was ill at ease.

'You remember. I thought of him the very first day, the Sunday. The woman had just been found on that waste ground. Your colleague questioned me along with all the other concierges. Well, Mr. Hire didn't go out that day! Which means he had nothing to eat, because on Sundays he goes to the delicatessen shop in the Rue Gambetta to get what he needs. In the afternoon he didn't stir. Careful...'

Steps were heard on the stairs. The passage outside the glass-panelled door was dark, but nevertheless a shortish man could be seen going past, with a briefcase under his left arm. The concierge and the inspector both bent forward, both frowned, then the policeman went out quickly, ran a few paces towards the pale daylight of the street, came back unhurriedly.

'He has a big strip of sticking-plaster on one cheek.'

'I noticed that.'

The concierge's stony eyes were gazing at something far off, something inward rather than exterior.

'So that's not it,' went on the man, making as if to leave.

But a feverish hand grasped his arm. The concierge was more and more ill at ease, perhaps through the effort of memory she was making.

'Wait! I want to be sure ... I looked chiefly at the towel, but...'

Her face contorted like that of a medium in a trance. Her voice grew slower and softer. The little girl slid off her chair.

'I could swear that when I gave him the catalogue he hadn't cut himself. I didn't look him full in the face, but all the same I could see him and I think it would have struck me...'

She was still frantically racking her brain. The inspector frowned.

'Aha! You mean he saw you looking at the towel and that gave him the idea of...'

In the lodge, standing beside the table with its brown oilcloth cover, they were each inflaming the other. They were less than two hundred yards from the waste ground where, one Sunday morning, a fortnight before, a woman's body had been found, so badly mutilated that identification was impossible.

'What time will he get home?'

'At ten past seven.'

To the right of the crossroads, near the tram terminus, was a row of barrows, and Mr. Hire, his briefcase under his arm, was moving with his waddling gait among the housewives, passing in turn a butcher's stall, then vegetables, then more meat, then a barrow with nothing but cauliflowers. The tram-conductor blew his whistle and Mr. Hire began to run, like a man unused to running, kicking his legs out sideways like a woman. As he ran he called:

'Hey!... Hey!...'

The tram-conductor hauled him aboard in the nick of time. Standing near the front of the tram was a second inspector, scrutinizing the passengers who got in, and slapping his hands on his thighs to warm himself. Seeing Mr. Hire's sticking-plaster, he first screwed up his eyes, then opened them very wide, turned for a second to stare down the street, and finally, just as the tram began to move, jumped onto the step.

Blood, and even traces of skin, had been found under the dead woman's finger-nails, and for lack of any other clue, the police report had contained the instruction: 'Keep a specially close watch on men with scratches on their face.'

Mr. Hire was sitting in his usual place at the end of the car and his briefcase lay on his knees; he was reading the newspaper. As usual, too, he had his ticket ready in his hand, and held it out to the conductor without even raising his head.

He was not big. He was fat. His bulk was no greater than an average man's, but he seemed to have neither bones nor flesh, nothing but some smooth, soft substance, so smooth and so soft that it made his movements somehow equivocal.