The Hotel Majestic Read Online Free

happening so fast that it was like seeing a film run off in fast motion.
    â€œExcuse me . . . Sorry . . .”
    People were constantly bumping into the superintendent, who continued his walk unperturbed, stopping and starting, asking a question now and then.
    How many people had he talked to? At least twenty, he reckoned. The head chef had explained to him how the kitchens were run. Jean Ramuel had told him what the different coloured slips of paper meant.
    And he had watched—still through the glass partitions—the guests’ servants having their lunch. Gertrud Borms, the Clarks’ nanny, had come down. A large, hard-faced woman.
    â€œDoes she speak French?”
    â€œNot a word . . .”
    She had eaten heartily, chatting to a liveried chauffeur who sat opposite her.
    But what amazed him most of all was the sight of Prosper Donge, all this while, in his still-room. He looked exactly like a large goldfish in its bowl. His hair was a fiery red. He had the almost brick-red complexion redheads sometimes have, and his lips were thick and fish-like.
    And he looked exactly like a fish when he came to press his face up against the glass, with his great, round, bewildered eyes, probably worried because the superintendent hadn’t spoken to him yet.
    Maigret had questioned everyone. But he had hardly seemed to notice Prosper Donge’s presence, although it was he who had discovered the body, and he was therefore the principal witness.
    Donge, too, had his lunch, on a little table in his still-room, while his three women bustled round him. A bell would ring about once a minute to indicate that the service-lift was coming down. It arrived at a sort of hatch. Donge seized the slip of paper on it, and replaced it with the order on a tray, and the lift went up again to one of the upper floors.
    All these seemingly complicated operations were in fact quite simple. The large dining-room of the Majestic, where two or three hundred people would then be having lunch, was immediately over the kitchens, so most of the service-lifts went there. Each time one of them came down again, the sound of music was wafted down with it.
    Some of the guests had their meals in their rooms, however, and there was a waiter on each floor. There was also a grill-room on the same floor as the basement, where there was dancing in the afternoons from about five o’clock.
    The men from the Forensic Laboratory had come for the body, and two specialists from the Criminal Records Office had spent half an hour working on locker 89 with cameras and powerful lights, looking for fingerprints.
    None of this seemed to interest Maigret. They would be sure to inform him of the result in due course.
    Looking at him, you would have thought he was making an amateurish study of how a grand hotel functions. He went up the narrow staircase, opened a door, then immediately closed it again, because it led to the large dining-room, which was filled with the sound of clinking cutlery, music and conversation.
    He went up to the next floor. A corridor, with doors numbered to infinity and a red carpet stretching into the distance.
    It was clear that any of the guests could open the door and make their way to the basement. It was the same as with the entrance in the Rue de Ponthieu. Two car attendants, a porter, and commissionaires guarded the revolving door leading from the Champs-Élysées, but any stray passer-by could get into the Majestic by using the staff entrance and no one would probably have noticed he was there.
    It is the same with most theatres. They are rigidly guarded at the front, but wide open on the stage-door side.
    From time to time people went into the cloakroom in their working clothes. Shortly afterwards they could be seen leaving, smartly dressed, in their hats and coats.
    They were going off duty. The head chef went to the back room for a nap, which he did every day between the lunch and dinner shifts.
    Soon after four there was a