‘Is it for yourself that you’re afraid?’
He was just a kid! A thin face with still unformed features, pale skin. Slender shoulders under the tight-fitting uniform. The cadet’s cap was the finishing touch, making him look like a little boy dressed up as a sailor.
And distrust in his whole attitude, in the expression on his face. If Maigret had shouted at him, he would probably have raised his arms to fend off blows.
The black armband contributed a sombre and pitiful note to his appearance. It was only a month ago, wasn’t it, that this boy had learned that his mother had died in the East Indies, perhaps one night when he had been enjoying himself in Delfzijl, possibly even at the annual college ball?
He would be going home in two years, with the rank of third officer, and his father would show him a grave already overgrown, and maybe another woman installed in the family home.
And his life would begin on some great steamship: watches on deck, ports of call, Java–Rotterdam, Rotterdam–Java, two days here, five or six hours there.
‘Where were you when your teacher was shot?’
Now a terrible heart-wrenching sob. The boy seized Maigret’s lapels in his white-gloved hands, which were trembling convulsively.
‘No, not true! Not true,’ he repeated a dozen or more times. ‘Nee! You not understand. No, no. Not true!’
They had reached the patch of light beamed out by the lighthouse once more. The brightness dazzled them, outlining their shapes, making every detail stand out.
‘Where were you?’
‘Over there.’
Over there was the Popinga house, and the canal, which he must have been in the habit of crossing by jumping from log to log.
This was an important detail. Popinga had died at five to midnight. Cornelius had reported back to his ship at five past midnight. The usual route, through the town, would take at least thirty minutes.
But it would take only six or seven minutes crossing the canal this way, avoiding the long detour!
Maigret kept walking with his deliberate, heavy tread, beside the young man, who was trembling like a leaf, and when the donkey started braying again, Cornelius jumped, quivering from head to toe as if he were about to run away.
‘You’re in love with Beetje?’
A stubborn silence.
‘And you saw her come back, after your tutor had seen her home?’
‘That’s not true. Not true.’
Maigret was on the point of calming him down with a good shaking.
And yet he looked at him with an indulgent, perhaps affectionate air.
‘You see Beetje every day?’
Another silence.
‘What time are you supposed to be back on the college boat?’
‘Ten … If not permission. When I went my tutor, me can …’
‘Be back later? But not tonight?’
They were standing on the bank, near the place where Cornelius had crossed the canal. Maigret headed for the tree trunks, in the most natural way in the world, put his foot on the first and almost fell into the water, because he wasn’t used to it and the log rolled under his foot.
‘Come on. It’ll soon be ten o’clock.’
The boy looked astonished. He must have been expecting never to see his college boat again, and to be arrested and thrown into jail.
And now this terrible French inspector was escorting him back, and preparing, like him, to jump over the two-metre gap in the middle of the canal. They splashed each other. On the other bank, Maigret stopped to wipe his trouser leg.
‘Where is it?’
He hadn’t explored this bank yet. There was a large area of wasteland between the Amsterdiep and the new canal, which was wide, deep and navigable by sea-going vessels.
Looking behind him, the inspector could see a single window lit on the first floor of the Popinga house. A figure, Any’s, was moving behind the curtains. It must be Popinga’s study. But he couldn’t guess what the young lawyer was doing.
Cornelius had calmed down a little.
‘I swear …’ he began.
‘No!’
That took him aback.
He stared at the inspector with such a wild-eyed expression that Maigret tapped him on the shoulder, saying:
‘Never swear to anything. Especially in your situation. Would you have wanted to marry Beetje?’
‘Ja, oh ja!’
‘And would her father have agreed to that?’
Silence. Head down, Cornelius kept on walking, threading his way among the old boats hauled up on the shore.
The broad surface of the Ems canal came into sight. At the bend a large black-and-white vessel loomed up, with every porthole illuminated. A high prow. Mast and rigging.
It was a former Dutch navy vessel, a hundred years old, now no longer seaworthy but moored here as accommodation for the students at the Naval College.
Around it moved some dark silhouettes and the glow of cigarette ends. The sound of a piano came from the games room.
Suddenly the peal of a hand bell was heard, and all the silhouettes on the bank merged into a crowd around the gangway, while further down the path from the town, four stragglers were returning at a run.
It was like the sight at a school gate, except that all these young men aged between sixteen and twenty-two were in the uniform of naval officers, with white gloves and stiff peaked caps trimmed with gold braid.
A grizzled quartermaster, leaning on the guardrail, watched them filing in while he smoked his pipe.
A youthful scene, lively and full of fun. Jokes that Maigret couldn’t understand were exchanged. Cigarettes were flung down as the gangway was reached. And on board there were mock fights, chases.
The last arrivals, out of breath, were reaching the foot of the gangway. Cornelius, red-eyed, his features drawn and his expression anguished, turned to Maigret.
‘Go on, get along with you,’ grunted the inspector.
The boy understood his gesture better than his words, put his hand to his peaked cap, made a clumsy military salute and opened his mouth to say something.
‘That’ll do! Get going.’
Because the quartermaster was on the point of going inside, while a student was taking up his post as sentry. Through the portholes, the young men could be seen shaking out hammocks, throwing their clothes around with abandon.
Maigret stayed where he was until he had seen Cornelius go timidly into the dormitory, looking awkward, with hunched shoulders – and receive a pillow full in the face before he went over to a hammock at the back of the cabin.
Another scene was about to begin, a more picturesque one. The inspector had gone no more than a dozen paces towards the town when he saw Oosting who, like himself, had come to watch the cadets going back.
The two men were both middle-aged, heavily built and calm.
They surely looked ridiculous, both of them, observing the youngsters climbing into their hammocks and having pillow-fights.
They were for all the world like mother-hens, weren’t they, keeping watch over a wayward chick?
They glanced at each other. The Baes did not move, but touched the peak of his cap.
They knew that any conversation was impossible, since neither spoke the other’s language.
But, ‘Goedenavond,’ muttered the man from Workum.
‘Bonne nuit,’ said Maigret, as if echoing him.
They were going in the same direction, following a path which after about two hundred metres turned into a road, leading into town.
They were now walking along side by side. To separate, one of them would have had to slow his pace deliberately, and neither wanted to do so.
Oosting in his clogs, Maigret in his city clothes. Both men were smoking pipes, only Maigret’s was a briar, the Baes’s made of china clay.
The third building they came to was a café, and Oosting went in, after stamping his clogs and then leaving them on the doormat, as was the Dutch custom.
Maigret
thought for no more than a second before entering in turn.
A dozen or so seamen and bargees sat around the same table, smoking pipes and cigars, and drinking beer or genever.
Oosting shook a few hands, pulled up a chair on which he sat down heavily, and listened to the general conversation.
Maigret settled himself off to one side, well aware that in fact attention was focused on him. The proprietor, who was sitting with the group, waited a few moments before coming to ask him what he would have to drink.
The genever came from a porcelain and brass fountain. This was the predominant smell, peculiar to all Dutch cafés, making the atmosphere very different from a café in France.
Oosting’s small eyes were full of laughter every time he looked at the inspector.
Maigret stretched his legs, brought them back under his chair, stretched them again, and stuffed his pipe, all to give himself an impression of composure. The café owner got up to come and offer him a light in person.
‘Mooi weer!’
Maigret, having no idea what this meant, frowned, and had it repeated.
‘Mooi weer, ja … Oost wind.’
Everyone else waited, nudging each other. Someone pointed at the window, at the starry sky.
‘Mooi weer … Fair weather.’
And he tried to explain that the wind was in the east, which was a very good sign.
Oosting was selecting a cigar from a box. He fingered five or six placed in front of him. He conspicuously chose a Manila one, as black as coal, and spat the end on the floor before lighting up.
Then he showed his new cap to his companions.
‘Vier gulden.’
Four florins! Forty francs! His eyes were still laughing.
But someone came in, opening a newspaper and talking about the latest freight prices on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.
And in the animated conversation that followed, which sounded like a quarrel because of the deep voices and harsh syllables, they forgot about Maigret, who took some change from his pocket, then went off to bed in the Van Hasselt Hotel.
5. Jean Duclos’s Theories
From the hotel café, as he ate his breakfast next morning, Maigret witnessed the search, about which he had not been informed in advance. Admittedly, he hadn’t attempted more than a brief meeting with the Dutch police.
It was about eight o’clock. The mist had not quite cleared, but one sensed that the sun was about to break through, ushering in a fine day. A Finnish cargo ship was leaving port, pulled by a tug. In front of the little café on the corner of the quayside, a large conclave of men had gathered, in their clogs and seaman’s caps, talking in small groups.
This was the daily commodities exchange of the schippers, the owners of the sea-going barges of every size, crowded with wives and children, which filled one basin in the harbour.
Further along stood another handful of men: the Quayside Rats. And two uniformed gendarmes had just arrived. They had stepped on to the deck of Oosting’s boat, and he himself had emerged from the forward hatch, since when he was in Delfzijl he always slept on board.
A man in civilian clothes now arrived: Inspector Pijpekamp, officially in charge of the case. He took off his hat and spoke politely. The two gendarmes vanished inside.
The search was beginning. All the schippers had seen it. But there wasn’t the slightest movement from them, not even any show of curiosity.
Nor did the Quayside Rats budge an inch. Just a few glances, that was all.
It lasted a good half-hour. When they emerged, the gendarmes gave a military salute. Pijpekamp seemed to be apologizing.
Only, this particular morning, the Baes did not seem to want to come ashore. Instead of joining his friends on the quay, he sat down on a thwart, crossed one leg over the other, looked out to sea, where the Finnish vessel was moving heavily along, and remained there motionless, smoking his pipe.
When Maigret turned round, Jean Duclos was coming downstairs from his room, carrying a briefcase and an armful of books and folders, which he placed on the table he had reserved.
He merely looked questioningly at Maigret, without any greeting.
‘Well?’
‘Well, I think I should wish you good morning.’
The other man stared at him in some surprise and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say: not worth getting bothered about.
‘Have you discovered anything?’
‘Have you?’
‘You know that, in theory, I’m not supposed to leave here. Your Dutch colleague has fortunately understood that my knowledge might be helpful to him, so I have been kept informed of the results of the investigation. That’s a practice the French police might like to take as an example …’
‘Oh for goodness’ sake!’
The professor hurried towards Madame Van Hasselt as she entered the room with her hair in rollers, greeted her as he would have done in a polite drawing room and apparently enquired after her health.
Maigret looked at the papers spread out on the table and recognized a new set of plans and diagrams, not only of the Popinga house but of almost the whole town, with dotted lines drawn on them which must indicate the paths taken by certain persons.
The sun, shining through the multicoloured stained-glass windows, filled the glossy-panelled room with green, red and blue shafts of light. A brewer’s dray had pulled up at the door, and during the entire conversation that followed, two gigantic men were rolling barrels continuously across the floor under the eye of Madame Van Hasselt in her early-morning attire. Never had the mingled aromas of genever and beer been so overpowering. And never had Maigret been so aware of the smell of Holland.
‘You’ve identified the murderer, then?’ he asked with a sly smile, pointing to the papers.
A sharp glance from Duclos. And his reply:
‘I’m beginning to think the foreigners are right. A Frenchman is above all someone who cannot resist irony. Well, in this case, monsieur, it is out of place.’
Maigret looked at him, still smiling, and in no way put out of countenance. The other man went on:
‘No, I haven’t found the murderer. But I have perhaps done more. I’ve analysed the situation, I’ve dissected it. I have isolated each element of it … and now …’
‘Now …?’
‘Now, someone like you will no doubt profit from my deductions and wrap up the case.’
He had seated himself. He was determined to talk, in spite of the atmosphere which he himself had made unfriendly. Maigret sat down opposite him and ordered a Bols.
‘I’m listening.’
‘You will notice in the first place that I am not even asking you what you have done, or what you think. I’ll start with the first potential suspect: myself. I had, if I may say so, the best strategic position to shoot Popinga, and besides I was seen holding the murder weapon a few moments after the attack.
‘I’m not a rich man, and if my name is known throughout the whole world, or almost, it is only by a small number of intellectuals. I am a man of modest means and sometimes living in straitened circumstances. But there was no theft, and in no way could I have hoped to benefit from the death of a lecturer at the Naval College.
‘But wait! That doesn’t mean that charges against me can be dropped. And people will not fail to recall that in the course of the evening, since we were discussing forensic science, I defended the proposition that an intelligent man who wished to commit a crime in cold blood might, using all his faculties, outwit a poorly educated police force.
‘From which they might deduce that I had sought to illustrate my theory by example. Between ourselves, I can categorically state that if that were the case, the possibility of suspecting me would never have arisen.’
‘Your good health,’ said Maigret, who was watching the bull-necked brewers’ men come and go.
‘To continue. I postulate that if I did not commit the crime, and yet the crime was nevertheless committed, as everything seems to indicate, by someone
in the house, then the whole family is guilty.
‘Don’t look startled! Examine my plan of the house. And above all, try to understand the psychological considerations, which I am about to develop.
This time, Maigret could not suppress a smile at the professor’s scornful condescension.
‘You have no doubt heard that Madame Popinga, née Van Elst, belongs to the strictest sect in the Reformed Church. In Amsterdam, her father is known as the fiercest of conservatives. And her sister Any, already, at twenty-five, has similar ideas in politics.
‘You only arrived here yesterday, and there are many aspects of Dutch life with which you are not yet familiar. Did you know that a teacher at the Naval College would receive a severe reprimand from his superiors if he were seen entering a café like this one? One of them lost his job, merely because he persisted in subscribing to a newspaper suspected of advanced views.
‘I met Popinga only that one evening. But it was enough, especially after having heard what people said about him. A likely lad, you might call him. A rollicking likely lad! With his round cheeks and his bright eyes full of fun …
‘You need to understand he had been a sailor. And when he came back ashore, he had, in a sense, put on the uniform of austerity. But the uniform was bursting at the seams.
‘Do you see what I mean? It will make you smile. Because you’re French. A couple of weeks ago, the club he belongs to held one of its regular meetings. Since Dutchmen don’t go out to cafés at night, they get together in a hired room, under the pretext of club membership, to play billiards or skittles.
‘Well, two weeks ago, by eleven at night, Popinga was quite drunk. In the same week, his wife had been organizing collections to buy clothes for the native peoples in the East Indies. And there was Popinga, with his red cheeks and shiny eyes, saying: “Waste of time! They look much better with no clothes on! Instead of buying clothes for them, we should do as they do …”
‘Well, of course you’re smiling. A silly remark that means nothing at all. But the scandal is still raging, and if Popinga’s funeral is held in Delfzijl, some people will avoid going to it.
A Crime in Holland Page 5
