Actually, who does this remind you of and how you want to see him in the near future?
Once, at the trial of a man he had arrested, someone who was following the court procedings with him had murmured:
‘I wonder what he’s thinking about.’
To which Maigret had replied:
‘He’s thinking about what the newspapers will say about him in their next edition.’
He always claimed that murderers, at least until they are sentenced, are less concerned with their crimes, let alone the memory of their victims, than with the effect they have on the public. Overnight, they have become stars. They are besieged by reporters and photographers. Sometimes the public queue for hours to be allowed in to look at them. Isn’t it only natural that they start to enjoy being in the spotlight?
–From Georges Simenon’s Maigret and the Dead Girl (1954)