The Carter of ’La Providence’ Page 10

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘My colleagues and I will examine him tomorrow, if he’s still alive. We’ll have to go carefully. One wrong move would kill him.’

  ‘Has he regained consciousness?’

  ‘No idea. That’s perhaps the most surprising thing. A while back, as I was examining his cuts, I had the very clear impression that his eyes were half open and that he was watching me. But when I looked straight at him, he lowered his eyelids … He hasn’t been delirious. All he does is groan from time to time.’

  ‘His arm?’

  ‘Not serious. The double fracture has already been reduced. But you can’t put a whole chest back together the way you can a humerus. Where’s he from?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I ask because he has some very strange tattoos. I’ve seen African Battalion tattoos, but they aren’t like those. I’ll show you tomorrow after they’ve removed the strapping so we can examine him.’

  A porter came to say that there were visitors outside who were insisting on seeing the patient. Maigret himself went down to the porter’s lodge, where he found the skipper and his wife from the Providence. They were in their Sunday best.

  ‘We can see him, can’t we, inspector? It’s all your fault, you know. You upset him with all your questions. Is he better?’

  ‘He’s better. The doctors will tell us more tomorrow.’

  ‘Let me see him. Just a peep round the door. He was such a part of the boat.’

  She didn’t say ‘of the family’ but ‘of the boat’, and was that not perhaps even more touching?

  Her husband brought up the rear, keeping out of the way, ill at ease in a blue serge suit, his scrawny neck poking out of a detachable celluloid collar.

  ‘I advise you not to make any noise.’

  They both looked in at him, from the corridor. From there all they could see was a vague shape under a sheet, an ivory oval instead of a face, a lock of white hair.

  The skipper’s wife looked as if she was about to burst in at any moment.

  ‘Listen, if we offered to pay, would he get better treatment?’

  She didn’t dare open her handbag there and then but she kept fidgeting with it.

  ‘There are hospitals, aren’t there, where if you pay? … The other patients haven’t got anything catching, I hope?’

  ‘Are you staying at Vitry?’

  ‘We’re not going home without him that’s for sure! Blow the cargo! What time can we come tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Ten o’clock!’ broke in the doctor, who had been listening impatiently.

  ‘Is there anything we can bring for him? A bottle of champagne? Spanish grapes?’

  ‘We’ll see he gets everything he needs.’

  The doctor directed them towards the porter’s lodge. When she got there, the skipper’s wife, who had a good heart, reached furtively into her handbag and pulled out a ten-franc note and slipped it into the hand of the porter, who looked at her in astonishment.

  Maigret got to bed at midnight, after telegraphing Dizy with instructions to forward whatever communications might be sent to him there.

  At the last moment, he’d learned that the Southern Cross, by overtaking most of the barges, had reached Vitry-le-François and was moored at the end of the queue of waiting boats.

  The inspector had found a room at the Hotel de la Marne in town. It was a fair way from the canal. There he was free of the atmosphere he had lived in for the last few days.

  A number of guests, all commercial travellers, sat playing cards.

  One of them, who had arrived after the others, said:

  ‘Seems like someone got drowned in the lock.’

  ‘Want to make a fourth? Lamperrière’s losing hand over fist. The man’s dead, is he?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  And that was all. The landlady dozed by the till. The waiter scattered sawdust on the floor and, last thing, banked up the stove for the night.

  There was a bathroom, just one. The bath had lost areas of its enamel. Even so, next morning at eight, Maigret used it, and then sent the waiter out to buy him a new shirt and collar.

  But as the time wore on, he grew impatient. He was anxious to get back to the canal. Hearing a boat hooting, he asked:

  ‘Was that for the lock?’

  ‘No, the lift-bridge. There are three in town.’

  The sky was overcast. The wind had got up. He could not find the way back to the hospital and had to ask several people, because all roads invariably led him back to the market square.

  The hospital porter recognized him. As he walked out to meet him, he said:

  ‘Who’d have believed it? I ask you!’

  ‘What? Is he alive? Dead?’

  ‘What? You haven’t heard? The super’s just phoned your hotel …’

  ‘Out with it!’

  ‘Gone! Flown the coop! The doctor reckons it’s not possible, says he can’t have gone a hundred metres in the state he was in … Maybe, but the fact is he’s not here!’

  The inspector heard voices coming from the garden at the rear of the building and hurried off towards the sound.

  There he found an old man he had never seen before. It was the hospital superintendent, and he was speaking sternly to the doctor from the previous evening and a nurse with ginger hair.

  ‘I swear! …’ the doctor said several times. ‘You know as well as I do what it’s like … When I say ten broken ribs that’s very likely an underestimate … And that’s leaving aside the effects of submersion, concussion …’

  ‘How did he get out?’ asked Maigret.

  He was shown a window almost two metres above ground level. In the soil underneath it were the prints of two bare feet and a large scuff mark which suggested that the carter had fallen flat on the ground as he landed.

  ‘There! The nurse, Mademoiselle Berthe, spent all night on the duty desk, as usual. She didn’t hear anything. Around three o’clock she had to attend to a patient in Ward 8 and looked in on Ward 10. All the lights were out. It was all quiet. She can’t say whether the man was still in his bed.’

  ‘How about the other two patients?’

  ‘There’s one who’s got to be trepanned. It’s urgent. We’re waiting now for the surgeon. The other one slept through.’

  Maigret’s eyes followed the trail, which led to a flower-bed where a small rose bush had been flattened.

  ‘Do the front gates stay open at night?’

  ‘This isn’t a prison!’ snapped the superintendent. ‘How are we supposed to know if a patient is going to jump out of the window? Only the main door to the building was locked, as it always is.’

  There was no point in looking for footprints or any other tracks. For the area was paved. In the gap between two houses, the double row of trees lining the canal was visible.

  ‘To be perfectly frank,’ added the doctor, ‘I was pretty sure we’d find him dead this morning. Once it was clear there was nothing more we could try … that’s when I decided to put him in Ward 10.’

  He was belligerent now, for the criticisms the superintendent had directed at him still rankled.

  For a while, Maigret circled the garden, like a circus horse, then suddenly, signalling his departure by tugging the brim of his bowler, he strode away in the direction of the lock.

  The Southern Cross was just entering the chamber. Vladimir, with the skill of an experienced sailor, looped a mooring rope over a bollard with one throw and stopped the boat dead.

  Meanwhile, the colonel, wearing a long oilskin coat and his white cap, stood impassively at the small wheel.

  ‘Ready the gates!’ cried the lock-keeper.

  There were now no more than twenty boats to be got through.

  Maigret pointed to the yacht and asked: ‘Is it thei
r turn?’

  ‘It is and it isn’t. If you class her as a motorboat, then she has right of way over horse-drawn boats. But as she’s a pleasure boat … Truth is, so few of them pass this way that we don’t go much by the regulations. Still, since they saw the bargees right …’

  The bargees in question were now operating the sluices.

  ‘And the Providence?’

  ‘She was holding everything up. This morning she went and moored a hundred metres further along, at the bend this side of the second bridge. Any news of the old feller? This business could set me back a pretty penny. But I’d like to see you try it! Officially, I’m supposed to lock them all myself. If I did that, there’d be a hundred of them queuing up every day. Four gates! Sixteen sluices! And do you know how much I get paid?’

  He was called away briefly when Vladimir came to him with his papers and the tip.

  Maigret made the most of the interruption to set off along the canal bank. At the bend he saw the Providence, which by now he could have picked out from any distance among a hundred barges.

  A few curls of smoke rose from the chimney. There was no one about on deck. All hatches and doors were closed.

  He almost walked up the aft plank which gave access to the crew’s quarters.

  But he changed his mind and instead went on board by the wide gangway which was used for taking the horses on and off.

  One of the wooden panels over the stable had been slid open. The head of one of the horses showed above it, sniffing the wind.

  Maigret looked down through it and made out a dark shape lying on straw. And close by, the skipper’s wife was crouching with a bowl of coffee in one hand.

  Her manner was motherly and oddly gentle. She murmured:

  ‘Come on, Jean! Drink it up while it’s hot. It’ll do you good, silly old fool! Want me to raise your head up?’

  But the man lying by her side did not move. He was looking up at the sky.

  And against the sky Maigret’s head stood out. The man must have seen him.

  The inspector had the impression that on that face latticed with strips of sticking plaster there lurked a contented, ironic, even pugnacious smile.

  The old carter tried to raise one hand to push away the cup which the woman was holding close to his lips. But it fell back again weakly, gnarled, calloused, spotted with small blue dots which must have been the vestiges of old tattoos.

  9. The Doctor

  ‘See? He’s come back to his burrow. Dragged himself, like an injured dog.’

  Did the skipper’s wife realize how seriously ill the man was?

  Either way, she did not seem to be unduly concerned. She was as calm as if she were caring for a child with ’flu.

  ‘Coffee won’t do him any harm, will it? But he won’t take anything. It must have been four in the morning when me and my husband were woken up by a lot of noise on board … I got the revolver and told him to follow me with the lantern.

  ‘Believe it or not, it was Jean, more or less the way he is now … He must have fallen down in here from the deck … It’s almost two metres.

  ‘At first, we couldn’t see very well. For a moment, I thought he was dead.

  ‘My husband wanted to call the neighbours, to help us carry him and lie him down on a bed. But Jean twigged. He started gripping my hand, and did he squeeze! It was like he was hanging on to me for dear life!

  ‘And I saw he was starting to, well, whimper.

  ‘I knew what he was saying. Because he’s been with us for eight years, you know. He can’t speak. But I think he understands what I say to him. Isn’t that right, Jean? Does it hurt?’

  It was difficult to know whether the injured man’s eyes were bright with intelligence or fever.

  She removed a wisp of straw which was touching the man’s ear.

  ‘My life, you know, is my home, my pots and pans, my sticks of furniture. I think that if they gave me a palace to live in, I’d be as miserable as sin living in it.

  ‘Jean’s life is his stable … and his horses! Of course, there’s always days, you know, when we don’t move because we’re unloading. Jean don’t have any part in that. So he could go off to some bar.

  ‘But no! He comes back and lies down, just here. He makes sure that the sun can get in …’

  In his mind, Maigret imagined himself stretched out where the carter was lying, saw the pitch-covered wall on his right, the whip hanging from one twisted nail, the tin cup on another, a patch of sky through the hatch overhead and, to the right, the well-muscled hindquarters of the horses.

  The whole place exuded animal warmth, a dense, many-layered vitality which caught the throat like the sharp-tasting wines produced by certain slopes.

  ‘Will it be all right to leave him here, do you think?’

  She motioned the inspector to join her outside. The lock was working at the same rate as the evening before. All around were the streets of the town, which were filled with a bustle that was alien to the canal.

  ‘He’s going to die, though, isn’t he? What’s he done? You can tell me. I couldn’t say anything before, could I? For a start I don’t know anything. Once, just once, my husband saw him with his shirt off when he wasn’t looking. He saw the tattoos. They weren’t like the ones some sailors have done. We thought the same thing as you would have …

  ‘I think it made me even fonder of him for it. I told myself he couldn’t be what he seemed, that he was on the run …

  ‘I wouldn’t have asked him about it for all the money in the world. You surely don’t think it was him that killed that woman? If you do, listen: if he did do it, I’d say she asked for it!

  ‘Jean is …’

  She searched for the word that expressed her thought. It did not come.

  ‘Right! I can hear my husband getting up. I packed him off back to bed. He’s always had a weak chest. Do you think that if I made him some strong broth …’

  ‘The doctors will be on their way. Meanwhile, maybe it would be best to …’

  ‘Do they really have to come? They’ll hurt him and spoil his last moments, which …’

  ‘It cannot be avoided.’

  ‘But he’s so comfortable here with us! Can I leave you here for a minute? You won’t bother him again, will you?’

  Maigret gave a reassuring nod of his head, went back inside the stable and from his pocket took a small tin. It contained a pad impregnated with viscous black ink.

  He still could not tell if the carter was fully conscious. His eyes were half open. The look in them was blank, calm.

  But when the inspector lifted his right hand and pressed each finger one after the other against the pad, he had a split-second impression that the shadow of a smile flickered over his face.

  He took the fingerprints on a sheet of paper, watched the dying man for a moment, as though he were expecting something to happen, looked one last time at the wooden walls and the rumps of the horses which were growing restive and impatient, then went outside.

  Near the tiller, the bargee and his wife were drinking their morning café au lait fortified with dunked bread. They were looking his way. The Southern Cross was moored less than five metres from the Providence. There was no one on deck.

  The previous evening, Maigret had left his bicycle at the lock. It was still there. Ten minutes later he was at the police station. He despatched an officer on a motorcycle to Épernay with instructions to transmit the fingerprints to Paris by belinograph.

  When he was back on board the Providence, he had with him two doctors from the hospital with whom he had a difference of opinion.

  The medics wanted their patient back. The skipper’s wife was alarmed and looked pleadingly at Maigret.

  ‘Do you think you can pull him through?’

  ‘No. His chest has been crushed. One r
ib has pierced his right lung.’

  ‘How long will he live for?’

  ‘Most people would be dead already! An hour, maybe five …’

  ‘Then let him be!’

  The old man had not moved, had not even winced. As Maigret passed in front of the wife of the skipper, she touched his hand, shyly, her way of showing her gratitude.

  The doctors walked down the gangplank, looking very unhappy.

  ‘Leaving him to die in a stable!’ grumbled one.

  ‘Yes, but they also let him live in one …’

  Even so, the inspector posted a uniformed officer near the barge and the yacht, with orders to inform him if anything happened.

  From the lock he phoned the Café de la Marine at Dizy, where he was told that Inspector Lucas had just passed through and that he had hired a car at Épernay to drive him to Vitry-le-François.

  Then there was a good hour when nothing happened. The master of the Providence used the time to apply a coat of tar to the dinghy he towed behind the barge. Vladimir polished the brasses on the Southern Cross.

  Meanwhile the skipper’s wife was constantly on deck, toing and froing between the galley and the stable. Once, she was observed carrying a dazzlingly white pillow. Another time it was a bowl of steaming liquid, doubtless the broth which she had insisted on making.

  Around eleven, Lucas arrived at the Hotel de la Marne, where Maigret was waiting for him.

  ‘How’s things, Lucas?’

  ‘Good. You look tired, sir.’

  ‘What did you find out?’

  ‘Not a lot. At Meaux, I learned nothing except that the yacht caused a bit of a rumpus. The barge men couldn’t sleep for all the music and singing and they were talking of smashing the yacht up.’

  ‘Was the Providence there?’

  ‘It loaded not twenty metres from the Southern Cross. But nobody noticed anything unusual.’

  ‘And in Paris?’

  ‘I saw the two girls again. They admitted it wasn’t Mary Lampson who gave them the necklace but Willy Marco. I had it confirmed in the hotel, where they recognized his photo, but no one had seen Mary Lampson. I’m not sure but I think Lia Lauwenstein was closer to Willy than she’s letting on and that she’d already been helping him in Nice.’