It was then, for the first time, that Belloir’s voice faltered.
‘Ten years ago, right after the … the thing … I would have accepted my fate. I’d bought a revolver, in case anyone came to arrest me. But after ten years of living, striving, struggling! And with a wife and child now, well – I think I could have shoved you into the Marne myself. Or taken a shot at you that night outside the Café de la Bourse.
‘Because in a month – not even that, in twenty-six days – the statute will be in force …’
Silence fell, and it was then that the candle suddenly flamed up and went out. They were left in utter darkness.
Maigret did not move. He knew that Lombard was standing at his left, Van Damme was leaning against the wall in front of him, with Belloir barely a step behind him.
He waited, without even bothering to slip his hand into the pocket holding his revolver. He definitely sensed that Belloir was trembling all over, even panting.
Maigret struck a match and said, ‘Let’s go, shall we?’
In the glimmer of the match, everyone’s eyes seemed to shine especially brightly. The four of them brushed against one another in the doorway, and again on the stairs. Van Damme fell, because he’d forgotten that there was no handrail after the eighth step.
The carpenter’s shop was closed. Through the curtains of one window, they could see an old woman knitting by the light of a small paraffin lamp.
‘Was it along there?’ asked Maigret, pointing to the roughly paved street leading to the embankment a hundred metres away, where a gas lamp was fixed to the corner of a wall.
‘The Meuse had reached the third house,’ Belloir replied. ‘I had to wade into the water up to my knees to … so that he would go off with the current.’
Turning round, they walked back, passing the new church looming in the middle of vacant ground that was still bare and uneven dirt.
Suddenly they found themselves amid the bustle of passers-by, red and yellow trams, cars, shop windows.
To get to the centre of town they had to cross the Pont des Arches and heard the rushing river crashing noisily into the piers.
Back in Rue Hors-Château, people would be waiting for Jef Lombard: his men downstairs, amid their acid baths, their photoengraved plates waiting to be picked up by bicycle messengers; the new mother upstairs, with the sweet old mother-in-law and, nestled in the white bed sheets, the tiny girl who hadn’t yet opened her eyes; the two older boys, trying not to make too much noise in the dining room decorated with hanged men.
And wasn’t there another mother, in Rheims, giving her son a violin lesson, while the maid was polishing all the brass stair-rods and dusting the china pot holding the big green plant?
In Bremen, the commercial building was closing up for the day. The typist and two clerks were leaving their modern office, and when they turned off the electricity, the porcelain letters spelling Joseph Van Damme, Import-Export Commission Agent would vanish into the night.
Perhaps, in the brasseries alive with Viennese music, some businessman with a shaved head would remark, ‘Huh! That Frenchman isn’t here …’
In Rue Picpus, Madame Jeunet was selling a toothbrush, or a hundred grams of dried chamomile, its pale flowers crackling in their packet.
The little boy was doing his homework in the back of the shop.
The four men were walking along in step. A breeze had come up and was driving so many clouds through the sky that the bright moon shone through for only a few seconds at a time.
Did they have any idea where they were going?
When they passed in front of a busy café, a drunk staggered out.
‘I’m due back in Paris!’ Maigret announced, stopping abruptly.
And while the other three stood staring at him, not daring to speak and uncertain whether to rejoice or despair, he shoved his hands into his coat pockets.
‘There are five kids at stake here …’
The men weren’t even sure they’d heard him correctly, because Maigret had been muttering to himself through clenched teeth.
And the last they saw of him was his broad back in his black overcoat with the velvet collar, walking away.
‘One in Rue Picpus, three in Rue Hors-Château, one in Rheims …’
In Rue Lepic, where he went after leaving the train station, the concierge told him, ‘There’s no point in going upstairs, Monsieur Janin isn’t there. They thought he had bronchitis, but now that it’s turned into pneumonia, they’ve taken him off to the hospital.’
So the inspector had himself driven to Quai des Orfèvres, where he found Sergeant Lucas phoning the owner of a bar that had racked up some violations.
‘Did you get my letter, vieux?’
‘It’s all over? You figured it out?’
‘Fat chance!’
It was one of Maigret’s favourite expressions.
‘They ran off? You know, that letter really had me worried … I almost dashed up to Liège. Well, what was it? Anarchists? Counterfeiters? An international gang?’
‘Kids,’ he sighed.
And he tossed into his cupboard the suitcase containing what a German technician had called, in a long and detailed report, clothing B.
‘Come along and have a beer, Lucas.’
‘You don’t look too happy …’
‘Says who? There’s nothing funnier than life, vieux! Well, are you coming?’
A few moments later, they were pushing through the revolving door of Brasserie Dauphine.
Lucas had seldom felt so anxious and bewildered. Skipping the beer, his companion put away six ersatz absinthes just about non-stop, which didn’t prevent him from announcing in a fairly steady voice, and with only a slightly blurry and most unfamiliar look in his eye, ‘You know, vieux, ten more cases like that one and I’ll hand in my resignation. Because it would prove that there’s a good old Good Lord up there who’s decided to take up police work.’
When he called over the waiter, though, he did add, ‘But don’t you worry! There won’t be ten like that one … So, what’s new around the shop?’
Read on for an exclusive extract from the next Inspector Maigret novel
The Carter of ‘La Providence’
by Georges Simenon
1. Lock 14
The facts of the case, though meticulously reconstructed, proved precisely nothing – except that the discovery made by the two carters from Dizy made, frankly, no sense at all.
On the Sunday – it was 4 April – it had begun to rain heavily at three in the afternoon.
At that moment, moored in the reach above Lock 14, which marks the junction of the river Marne and the canal, were two motor barges, both heading downstream, a canal boat which was being unloaded and another having its bilges washed out.
Shortly before seven, just as the light was beginning to fade, a tanker-barge, the Éco-III, had hooted to signal its arrival and had eased itself into the chamber of the lock.
The lock-keeper had not been best pleased, because he had relatives visiting at the time. He had then waved ‘no’ to a boat towed by two plodding draught horses which arrived in its wake only minutes later.
He had gone back into his house but had not been there long when the man driving the horse-drawn boat, who he knew, walked in.
‘Can I go through? The skipper wants to be at Juvigny for tomorrow night.’
‘If you like. But you’ll have to manage the gates by yourself.’
The rain was coming down harder and harder. Through his window, the lock-keeper made out the man’s stocky figure as he trudged wearily from one gate to the other, driving both horses on before making the mooring ropes fast to the bollards.
The boat rose slowly until it showed above the lock side. It wasn’t the barge master standing at the helm but his wife, a large woman from Brussels, with brash blonde hair and a piercing voice.
By 7.20, the Providence was tied up by the Café de la Marine, behind the Éco-III. The tow-horses were taken on board. The
carter and the skipper headed for the café where other boat men and two pilots from Dizy had already assembled.
At 8 o’clock, when it was completely dark, a tug arrived under the lock with four boats in tow.
Its arrival swelled the crowd in the Café de la Marine. Six tables were now occupied. The men from one table called out to the others. The newcomers left puddles of water behind them as they stamped the mud off their boots.
In the room next door, a store lit by an oil-lamp, the women were buying whatever they needed.
The air was heavy. Talk turned to an accident that had happened at Lock 8 and how much of a hold-up this would mean for boats travelling upstream.
At 9 o’clock, the wife of the skipper of the Providence came looking for her husband and their carter. All three of them then left after saying goodnight to all.
By 10 o’clock, the lights had been turned out on most of the boats. The lock-keeper accompanied his relations as far as the main road to Épernay, which crosses the canal two kilometres further on from the lock.
He did not notice anything out of the ordinary. On his way back, he walked past the front of the café. He looked in and was greeted by a pilot.
‘Come and have a drink! Man, you’re soaked to the skin …’
He ordered rum, but did not sit down. Two carters got up, heavy with red wine, eyes shining, and made their way out to the stable adjoining the café, where they slept on straw, next to their horses.
They weren’t exactly drunk. But they had had enough to ensure that they would sleep like logs.
There were five horses in the stable, which was lit by a single storm-lantern, turned down low.
At four in the morning, one of the carters woke his mate, and both began seeing to their animals. They heard the horses on the Providence being led out and harnessed.
At the same time, the landlord of the café got up and lit the lamp in his bedroom on the first floor. He also heard the Providence as it got under way.
At 4.30, the diesel engine of the tanker-barge spluttered into life, but the boat did not leave for another quarter of an hour, after its skipper had swallowed a bracing hot toddy in the café which had just opened for business.
He had scarcely left and his boat had not yet got as far as the bridge when the two carters made their discovery.
One of them was leading his horses out to the towpath. The other was ferreting through the straw looking for his whip when one hand encountered something cold.
Startled, because what he had touched felt like a human face, he fetched his lantern and cast its light on the corpse which was about to bring chaos to Dizy and disrupt life on the canal.
Detective Chief Inspector Maigret of the Flying Squad was running though these facts again, putting them in context.
It was Monday evening. That morning, magistrates from the Épernay prosecutor’s office had come out to make the routine inspection of the scene of the crime. The body, after being checked by the people from Criminal Records and examined by police surgeons, had been moved to the mortuary.
It was still raining, a fine, dense, cold rain which had gone on falling without stopping all night and all day.
Shadowy figures came and went around the lock gates, where a barge was rising imperceptibly.
The inspector had been there for an hour and had got no further than familiarizing himself with a world which he was suddenly discovering and about which, when he arrived, he had only mistaken, confused ideas.
The lock-keeper had told him:
‘There was hardly anything in the canal basin: just two motor barges going downstream, one motorized barge heading up, which had gone through the lock in the afternoon, one boat cleaning out its bilges and two panamas. Then the tin tub turned up with four vessels in tow …’
In this way did Maigret learn that a ‘tin tub’ is a tug and a ‘panama’ a boat without either an engine or its own horses on board, which employs a carter with his own animals for a specified distance, known in the trade as ‘hitching a lift’.
When he arrived at Dizy all he’d seen was a narrow canal, three miles from Épernay, and a small village near a stone bridge.
He had had to slog through the mud of the towpath to reach the lock, which was two kilometres from Dizy.
There he had found the lock-keeper’s house. It was made of grey stone, with a board that read: ‘Office’.
He had walked into the Café de la Marine, which was the only other building in the area.
On his left was a run-down café-bar with brown oilcloth-covered tables and walls painted half brown and half a dirty yellow.
But it was full of the characteristic odour which marked it out as different from the usual run of country cafés. It smelled of stables, harness, tar, groceries, oil and diesel.
There was a small bell just by the door on the right. Transparent advertisements had been stuck over the glass panels.
Inside was full of stock: oilskins, clogs, canvas clothes, sacks of potatoes, kegs of cooking oil and packing cases containing sugar, dried peas and beans cheek-by-jowl with fresh vegetables and crockery.
There were no customers in sight. The stable was empty except for the horse which the landlord only saddled up when he went to market, a big grey as friendly as a pet dog. It was not tethered and at intervals would walk around the yard among the chickens.
Everywhere was sodden with rainwater. It was the most striking thing about the place. And the people who passed by were black, gleaming figures who leaned into the rain.
A hundred metres away, a narrow-gauge train shunted backwards and forwards in a siding. The carter had rigged up an umbrella on the back of the miniature engine and he crouched under it, shivering, with shoulders hunched.
A barge hauled by boat hooks slid along the canal bank heading for the lock chamber, from which another was just emerging.
How had the woman got here? And why? That was what had baffled the police at Épernay, the prosecutor’s people, the medics and the specialists from Records. Maigret was now turning it over and over in his heavy head.
She had been strangled, that was the first sure fact. Death had occurred on the Sunday evening, probable around 10.30.
And the body had been found in the stable a little after four in the morning.
There was no road anywhere near the lock. There was nothing there to attract anyone not interested in barges and canals. The towpath was too narrow for a car. On the night in question anyone on foot would have had to wade knee deep through the puddles and mud.
It was obvious that the woman belonged to a class where people were more likely to ride in expensive motor-cars and travel by sleeper than walk.
She had been wearing only a beige silk dress and white buckskin shoes designed more for the beach than for city streets.
The dress was creased, but there was no trace of mud on it. Only the toe of the left shoe was wet when she was found.
‘Between thirty-eight or forty,’ the doctor had said after he’d examined the body.
Her earrings were real pearls worth about 15,000 francs. Her bracelet, a mixture of gold and platinum worked in the very latest style, was more artistic than costly even though it was inscribed the name of a jeweller in the Place Vendôme.
Her hair was brown, waved and cut very short at the nape of neck and temples.
The face, contorted by the effects of strangulation, must have been unusually pretty.
No doubt a bit of a tease.
Her manicured, varnished fingernails were dirty.
Her handbag had not been found near her. Police officers from Épernay, Rheims and Paris, armed with a photograph of the body, had been trying all day to establish her identity but without success.
Meanwhile the rain continued to fall with no let-up over the dreary landscape. To left and right, the horizon was bounded by chalk hills streaked with white and black, where at this time of year the vines looked like wooden crosses in a Great War cemetery.
The lock-keepe
r, recognizable only because he wore a silver braided cap, trudged wearily around the chamber of the lock, in which the water boiled every time he opened the sluices.
And every time a vessel was raised or lowered he told the tale to each new bargee.
Sometimes, after the official papers had been signed, the two of them would hurry off to the Café de la Marine and down a couple or three glasses of rum or a half litre of white wine.
And every time, the lock-keeper would point his chin in the direction of Maigret, who was prowling around with no particular purpose and thus probably made people think he did not know what he was doing.
Which was true. There was nothing normal about the case. There was not even a single witness who could be questioned.
For once the people from the prosecutor’s office had interviewed the lock-keeper and spoken to the Waterways Board’s civil engineer, they had decided that all the boats were free to go on their way.
The two carters had been the last to leave, around noon, each in charge of a ‘panama’.
Since there is a lock every three or four kilometres, and given that they are all connected by telephone, the location of any boat at any given time could be established and any vessel stopped.
Besides which, a police inspector from Épernay had questioned everyone, and Maigret had been given transcripts of their written statements, which told him nothing except that the facts did not add up.
Everyone who had been in the Café de la Marine the previous day was known either to the owner of the bar or the lock-keeper and in most cases to both.
The carters spent at least one night each week in the same stable and invariably in the same, semi-drunken state.
‘You know how it is! You take a drop at every lock … Nearly all the lock-keepers sell drink.’
The tanker-barge which had arrived on Sunday afternoon and moved on again on Monday morning was carrying petrol and was registered to a big company in Le Havre.
The Providence, which was owned by the skipper, passed this way twenty times a year with the same pair of horses and its old carter. And this was very much the case with all the others.
The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien Page 12
