Friend of Madame Maigret Read online

  In the margin, in red pencil, he wrote: Is the third character Krynker?

  Sunday, February 18—The furnace, not in use for the last few days, has been going all night, and Frans Steuvels has to make at least five trips into the courtyard to carry the ashes to the dustbins.

  Mademoiselle Béguin, the tenant on the fourth floor, was inconvenienced by the smoke, “which had a funny smell.”

  Monday, February 19—The furnace is still going. The bookbinder is at home alone all day.

  Tuesday, February 20—Police Headquarters receives an anonymous note about a man having been burned in the bookbinder’s furnace. Fernande returns from Concarneau.

  Wednesday, February 21—Lapointe’s visit to the rue de Turenne. He sees the suitcase with the handle mended with string under a table in the workshop. Lapointe leaves the workshop about noon. Has lunch with his sister and talks to her about the case. Does Mademoiselle Lapointe meet her young man, Antoine Bizard, who lives in the same building as the briefless lawyer Liotard? Or does she telephone him?

  In the afternoon, before five, the lawyer calls at the rue de Turenne under the pretext of ordering an ex libris.

  When Lucas makes his search, at five o’clock, the suitcase has disappeared.

  Interrogation of Steuvels at Headquarters. Toward the end of the night he names Maître Liotard as his lawyer.

  Maigret stood up for a little stroll, a glance at the notes the inspectors were taking at the telephones. It wasn’t time yet to have beer sent up, and he simply filled another pipe instead.

  Thursday, February 22.

  Friday, February 23.

  Saturday . . .

  A whole column of dates with nothing opposite them, except that the inquiry was dragging, the papers were agitating, Liotard, snapping like a cur, was attacking the police in general and Maigret in particular. The right-hand column remained empty until:

  Sunday, March 10—A man named Levine rents a room at the Hôtel Beauséjour in the rue Lepic and moves in with a little boy of about two.

  Gloria Lotti, who passes for the nursemaid, looks after the child, whom she takes out every morning for an airing in the place d’Anvers while Levine is asleep.

  She does not sleep at the hotel, which she leaves very late when Levine comes home.

  Monday, March 11—Ditto.

  Tuesday, March 12—Half past nine: Gloria and the child leave the Hôtel Beauséjour as usual. Quarter past ten: Moss appears at the hotel and asks for Levine. The latter immediately packs and brings down his luggage while Moss remains alone in the room.

  Five minutes to eleven: Gloria sees Levine and instantly leaves the child who remains in the charge of Madame Maigret. A little after eleven she enters the Beauséjour with her companion. They join Moss and all three of them argue for more than an hour. Moss leaves first. At a quarter to one Gloria and Levine leave the hotel and Gloria gets into a taxi alone. She goes back to the Square d’Anvers and picks up the child. She takes the taxi as far as the Porte de Neuilly, then says she wants to go to the Gare Saint-Lazare and suddenly stops in the place Saint-Augustin, where she gets into another taxi. She leaves this one, still with the little boy, at the corner of the Faubourg Montmartre and the Grands Boulevards.

  The page was ornamental, for Maigret was decorating it with drawings like a child’s.

  On another sheet he noted the dates on which they had lost track of the various characters.

  Countess Panetti . . . February 16.

  The carman at Claridge’s had been the last to see her, when she had stepped into her son-in-law’s chocolate-colored Chrysler.

  Krynker?

  Maigret hesitated to write down the date Saturday, February 17, for they had no proof at all that he was the third person dropped by the taxi at the corner of the rue de Turenne.

  If that were not he, his tracks disappeared simultaneously with the old lady’s.

  Alfred Moss . . . Tuesday, March 12.

  He had been the first to leave the Hôtel Beauséjour, about noon.

  Levine . . . Tuesday, March 12.

  Half an hour after the preceding character, when he saw Gloria into a taxi.

  Gloria and the child . . . Same date.

  Two hours later, in the crowd, at the Carrefour Montmartre.

  Today was Sunday, March 17. Since the 12th there had been nothing new to report. Except for the investigation.

  Or rather there was one date to note, which he added to the column:

  Friday, March 15—Somebody in the métro tries (?) to pour some poison into the dinner prepared for Frans Steuvels.

  But that was still in doubt. The experts had found no trace of poison. In the state of nervous exhaustion Fernande had been in recently, she might well have mistaken a passenger’s clumsiness for a suspicious action.

  In any case it wasn’t Moss popping up again, for she would have recognized him.

  Levine?

  Suppose it was a message, and not poison, that someone had tried to slip into the casserole?

  Maigret, with a sunbeam catching him in the face, made a few more little drawings, screwing up his eyes, then he went to look at a string of barges going past on the Seine, at the Pont Saint-Michel, with families dressed in their Sunday clothes crossing it.

  Madame Maigret had probably gone back to bed, as she sometimes did on Sundays, simply to make it seem more like Sunday, for she was incapable of going back to sleep.

  “Janvier! What about ordering some beer?”

  Janvier rang the Brasserie Dauphine, where the patron asked as a matter of course:

  “And some sandwiches?”

  By means of a discreet telephone call, Maigret discovered that Judge Dossin, punctilious, was in his office; he too, no doubt, like the chief inspector, hoping to sort things out in peace.

  “Still no news of the car?”

  It was amusing to think that on this beautiful Sunday, which smelled of spring, in all the villages where people were emerging from Mass or from little cafés, hardworking policemen were keeping an eye on the cars and looking for the chocolate-colored Chrysler.

  “May I look, chief?” asked Lucas, who had come to stretch his legs in Maigret’s office between telephone calls.

  He examined the chief inspector’s work carefully, shook his head.

  “Why didn’t you ask me? I’ve drawn up the same diagram, in more detail.”

  “But without the little drawings!” Maigret joked. “What’s the leading item in the phone calls? Cars? Moss?”

  “Cars for the moment. Lots of chocolate-colored cars. Unfortunately, when I pin them down, they’re no longer exactly chocolate-colored, they turn reddish-brown, or else they’re Citroëns, Peugeots. We check anyhow. The suburbs are beginning to phone in now, and the radius is expanding to about sixty miles from Paris.”

  In a little while, thanks to the radio, all France would be in on it. There was nothing to do but wait, and that wasn’t so disagreeable. The waiter from the café brought a huge tray covered with glasses of beer, piles of sandwiches, and there was every chance that he would make similar trips up before the day was out.

  They were in the midst of eating and drinking and they had just opened the windows, for the sun was warm, when they saw Moers come in, blinking his eyes, as though he were emerging from a dark place.

  They hadn’t known he was in the building, where, theoretically, he had no business. Yet here he was coming from upstairs, where he must be the only person in the laboratories.

  “I’m sorry to bother you.”

  “A glass of beer? There’s one left.”

  “No thanks. As I was falling asleep, an idea kept bothering me. We were so sure that the blue suit unquestionably belonged to Steuvels that we examined it only for bloodstains. As the suit’s still up there, I came in this morning to do an analysis of the dust.”

  This was, in fact, a routine procedure, which no one had thought of in the present case. Moers had sealed each piece of clothing in a strong paper bag to which
he had given a good beating, so as to extract every trace of dust from the cloth.

  “You’ve found something?”

  “Sawdust, very fine, in remarkable quantities. It’s really more like wood powder.”

  “The kind you might get in a sawmill?”

  “No. That kind of sawdust would be less fine, less pervasive. This powder is produced by fine handiwork.”

  “Cabinet work, for instance?”

  “Possibly. I’m not sure. It’s even finer than that, in my opinion, but before I commit myself I’d like to have a word with the laboratory chief tomorrow.”

  Without waiting to hear the end, Janvier had picked up a volume of Bottin’s Directory and was busy studying all the addresses in the rue de Turenne.

  This yielded a list of all sorts of trades, some of them surprising, but by some chance nearly all connected with metals or cardboard.

  “I thought I’d just mention it to you. I don’t know whether it will help.”

  Neither did Maigret. In a case like this, one never knows what may help. At all events this tended to support the testimony of Frans Steuvels, who had always denied being the owner of the blue suit.

  But then why did he own a blue overcoat, that went so badly with a brown suit?

  Telephone! Sometimes six instruments would be in use at the same time, and the switchboard operator was going out of his mind, for there were not enough people to take all the calls.

  “What is it?”

  “Lagny.”

  Maigret had been there once. It’s a little town on the edge of the Marne, with a lot of men fishing and shiny canoes. He couldn’t remember the case he had been on down there, but it was in summer, and he had drunk a light white wine, the memory of which still lingered.

  Lucas was taking notes, indicating to the chief inspector that this seemed important.

  “Maybe we’ve got hold of something,” he sighed as he hung up. “That was the Lagny police station. For over a month they’ve been quite excited down there about a car that fell in the Marne.”

  “It fell into the Marne a month ago?”

  “As far as I could make out, yes. The sergeant I had on the phone was so anxious to explain and go into detail that in the end I couldn’t follow a thing. Besides, he kept dropping names of people I didn’t know, as if they were as famous as Jesus Christ or Pasteur, and continually going on about Old Mother Hébart or Hobart, who gets drunk every night, but who is apparently incapable of making anything up.

  “To cut it short, about a month ago . . .”

  “Did he tell you the exact date?”

  “February 15.”

  Maigret, very proud at finding a use for it, consulted the list he had just drawn up.

  February 15—Countess Panetti and Gloria leave Claridge’s at seven o’clock in the evening in Krynker’s car.

  “I thought of that. This looks important, you’ll see. Well, this old woman, who lives in an isolated house at the edge of the river and hires out canoes to fishermen in summer, went down to the inn for a drink, as she does every evening. When she was returning home she claims that she heard a terrific noise in the darkness and that she’s sure it was the noise of a car falling into the Marne.

  “The river was in spate at the time. A lane leading from the main road ends at the water’s edge, and the mud must have made it slippery.”

  “Did she report it to the police straight away?”

  “She talked about it in the café next day. It took some time to get around. It finally reached the ears of a policeman, who questioned her.

  “The policeman went down for a look, but the banks were partly submerged, and the current was so violent that navigation had to be suspended for a couple of weeks. Apparently the level is only just now getting back to normal.

  “I think the truth is that they didn’t take the whole matter very seriously.

  “Yesterday, after receiving our alert about the chocolate-colored car, they had a phone call from someone who lives at the corner of the main road and the lane in question and claims that last month he saw, in the darkness, a car of that color turning outside his house.

  “He’s a petrol station proprietor who was filling up a customer’s car, which explains why he was outside at that time.”

  “What time?”

  “Just after nine o’clock at night.”

  It doesn’t take two hours to get from the Champs-Élysées to Lagny, but of course there was nothing to prevent Krynker from making a detour.

  “And so?”

  “The police applied to the Ministry of Transport for a crane.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. There was a crowd watching it work. Anyhow in the evening they caught something, but the darkness prevented them from carrying on. They even told me the name of the hole, because all the river holes are well known to the fishermen and local people; there’s one that’s thirty feet deep.”

  “Did they fish the car out?”

  “This morning. It is in fact a Chrysler, chocolate-colored, with an Alpes-Maritimes registration number. That’s not all. There’s a body inside.”

  “Male?”

  “Female. It’s terribly decomposed. Most of the clothing’s been torn off by the current. It’s got long gray hair.”

  “The countess?”

  “I don’t know. They’ve only just discovered it. The corpse is still on the bank, under a tarpaulin, and they want to know what they’re to do with it. I said I’d ring them back.”

  Moers had left a few minutes too soon, for he was the man who would have been invaluable to the chief inspector, and there wasn’t much chance of finding him at home.

  “Would you call Dr. Paul?”

  The latter answered in person.

  “You’re not busy? You’ve no plans for the day? Would it be too inconvenient if I came over and picked you up to take you to Lagny? With your bag, yes. No. It won’t be a pretty sight. An old woman who’s spent a month in the Marne.”

  Maigret looked around and saw Lapointe glance away, blushing. The young man was obviously burning with the desire to accompany the chief.

  “You haven’t got a date with a girl for this afternoon?”

  “Oh no, chief inspector.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “I’ve had my licence for two years.”

  “Go and fetch the blue Peugeot and wait for me downstairs. Make sure there’s enough petrol.”

  And to Janvier, disappointed:

  “You take another car and drive down slowly, questioning the garage men, innkeepers, anyone you like. It’s possible that somebody else may have noticed the chocolate-colored car. I’ll see you at Lagny.”

  He drank the spare glass of beer, and a few minutes later Dr. Paul’s cheerful beard was settling itself in the car with Lapointe proudly at the wheel.

  “Shall I take the shortest way?”

  “Preferably, young man.”

  It was one of the first fine days, and there were a lot of cars on the road, with families and picnic baskets piled inside.

  Dr. Paul told stories of postmortems, which, from his lips, became as funny as Jewish stories or ones about lunatics.

  At Lagny they had to ask the way, drive out of the little town, make some long detours before arriving at a bend in the river where a crane was surrounded by at least a hundred people. The police were having as much trouble as on fair days. An officer was on the scene and seemed relieved to see the chief inspector.

  The chocolate-colored car, covered with mud, grass, and scarcely identifiable flotsam, was there, upside down on the bank, with water still dripping from all its cracks. It chassis was battered, one of the windows broken, both headlights smashed, but by an extraordinary chance one door was still functioning, through which they had removed the corpse.

  The latter, under the tarpaulin, formed a little heap, which no sightseer could approach without a feeling of nausea.

  “I’ll leave you to it, doctor.”

>   “Here?”

  Dr. Paul would have been willing to do it. With his eternal cigarette in his mouth, he had been known to carry out postmortems in the most unlikely places, and even to break off and remove his rubber gloves in order to eat a snack.

  “Can you take the body to the police station, officer?”

  “My men will see to it. Stand back, everybody. And the children! Who’s letting children come so close?”

  Maigret was examining the car when an old woman plucked him by the sleeve and said proudly:

  “It was me who found it.”

  “Are you Widow Hébart?”

  “Hubart, sir. That’s my house that you can see behind the ash trees.”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  “I didn’t see anything actually, but I heard. I was coming back along the tow-path. That’s the path we’re on.”

  “Had you had a lot to drink?”

  “Only two or three little glasses.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Fifty yards from here, farther on, toward my house. I heard a car coming in from the main road and I said to myself it must be poachers again. Because it was too cold for lovers, and it was raining into the bargain. All I saw, when I turned round, was the beam from the headlights.

  “I wasn’t to know that this was going to be important some day, was I? I kept on walking and I had the impression that the car had stopped.”

  “Because you couldn’t hear the engine anymore?”

  “Yes.”

  “You had your back to the lane?”

  “Yes. Then I heard the engine again and I thought the car was turning round. Not a bit of it! Immediately afterward there was a big splash, and when I looked round the car was gone.”

  “You didn’t hear any screams?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t retrace your steps?”

  “Should I have? What could I have done all by myself? It had upset me. I thought the poor people had been drowned and I hurried home to get a drink to revive me.”