The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien Read online

  ‘We took up the weirdest ideas here and talked for nights on end, so we inevitably came around to the enigma of life and death …

  ‘It was almost Christmas; it had been snowing. A short item in a newspaper started us off. We always had to challenge the status quo, right? So we went all out on this idea: mankind is just a patch of mould on the earth’s crust. So human life and death don’t matter, pity is only a sickness, big animals eat the little ones, and we eat the big ones.

  ‘Lombard told you about the pocket knife: stabbing himself to prove that pain didn’t exist!

  ‘Well, that night, shortly before Christmas, with three or four empty bottles lying around on the floor, we seriously debated the idea of killing someone. After all, weren’t we off in the realm of pure theory, where anything goes? All bright-eyed, we kept quizzing one another with shivers of guilty excitement.

  ‘“Would you be brave enough?”

  ‘“Why not? If life is nothing, just some accident, a blemish on the face of the earth … ”

  ‘“A stranger, passing in the street?”

  ‘And Klein – so pale, with those dark rings under his eyes – he’d drunk the most. And he yelled, “Yes!”

  ‘We were afraid to take another step: it felt like being at the edge of a cliff. We were dicing with danger, joking around with this murder we’d conjured up, and now that murder seemed to be stalking us …

  ‘Someone who’d been an altar boy – I think it was Van Damme – started singing the Libera nos, which the priest chants over a coffin, and we all took up the chorus, playing this ghoulish game with real relish.

  ‘But we didn’t kill anyone that night! At four a.m. I went over the garden wall to sneak home. By eight I was having coffee with my family. The whole thing was only a memory, you understand? Like remembering being scared watching a play in a theatre.

  ‘But Klein stayed here, at Rue du Pot-au-Noir, where all those ideas kept seething in his sickly, swollen head. They were eating him alive. We could tell what was worrying him from the questions he kept popping at us over the next few days.

  ‘“Do you really think it’s hard to kill someone?”

  ‘We weren’t drunk any more but we didn’t want to back down, so we blustered, we said, “Of course it isn’t!”

  ‘Maybe we were even getting a thrill out of his childish excitement, but get this straight: we had no intention of causing a tragedy! We were still seeing how far we could go …

  ‘When there’s a fire, onlookers can’t help wanting it to last, to be a spectacular fire, and when the river is rising, newspaper readers hope for major flooding they can talk about for the next twenty years. They want something interesting, and it doesn’t matter what!

  ‘Christmas Eve arrived. Everybody brought some bottles. We drank, we sang, and Klein, already half-soused, kept pulling one after another of us aside.

  ‘“Do you think I’d be able to kill someone?”

  ‘We weren’t worried about it. By midnight no one was sober. We talked about going out for more bottles.

  ‘That’s when Willy Mortier showed up, in a dinner jacket, with a broad white shirt front that seemed to soak up all the light. His face was rosy, he was wearing scent, and he announced that he’d just come from a fancy society reception.

  ‘“Go and get some booze!” Klein yelled at him.

  ‘“You’re drunk, chum! I just came along to pay my respects.”

  ‘“No, to look down your nose at us!”

  ‘There still wasn’t any reason to suspect that something might happen, although Klein’s face was more frightening than it had ever been during his other drunken spells. He was so small, so thin next to the other man … His hair was a mess, his forehead was all sweaty, and he’d yanked his tie off.

  ‘“Klein,” said Willy, “you’re stinking drunk!”

  ‘“So what! This stinking drunk’s telling you to go and get some booze!”

  ‘I think that scared Willy. He’d begun to sense that this was no laughing matter, but he still tried to bluff his way out … His black hair had been curled and perfumed …

  ‘“You fellows don’t seem to be having much fun here,” he told us. “It was livelier back with the stuffed shirts I just left!”

  ‘“Go and get some booze …”

  ‘Now Klein was circling him, staring at him, all wound up. A few of us were off in a corner, talking about some Kantian theory or other. Someone else was weeping and swearing that he wasn’t fit to live.

  ‘Not one of us had all his wits about him, and no one saw the whole thing: Klein darting forward abruptly, a furious little bundle of nerves, and striking Mortier …

  ‘It looked as if he’d butted him in the chest with his head, but we saw blood spurting out! Willy opened his mouth so wide …’

  ‘No!’ Lombard begged suddenly, now standing and staring at Belloir as if in a daze.

  Van Damme had retreated back to the wall, his shoulders slumping. But nothing could have stopped Belloir, not even if he had wanted to himself. It was growing dark. Everyone’s face looked grey.

  ‘We were all frantic!’ the voice went on. ‘And Klein huddled there with a knife in his hand, stunned, gaping at Willy, who just stood swaying, tottering … These things don’t happen the way people imagine – I can’t explain …

  ‘Mortier was still on his feet in spite of the blood streaming from the hole in his shirt front. He said – and I’m sure of this – “Bastards!” And he kept standing in the same place, his legs slightly apart, as if to keep his balance. If he hadn’t been bleeding, you’d have thought he was the drunk.

  ‘He had big eyes, and now they seemed even bigger … His left hand was clutching the button of his dinner jacket, while his right was fumbling around the back of his trousers.

  ‘Someone – I think it was Jef – shouted in terror, and we saw Mortier’s right hand pull a revolver slowly from a pocket, a small black thing, made of steel, that looked so hard …

  ‘Klein was rolling on the floor in a fit. A bottle fell, smashing into pieces.

  ‘And Willy was still alive! Just barely swaying, he looked at us, one after the other! Although he couldn’t have been seeing clearly … He raised the revolver …

  ‘Then someone stepped forwards to grab the gun from him, slipped in the blood, and the two of them fell to the floor.

  ‘Mortier must have gone into convulsions – because he still wasn’t dead, you hear me? His eyes, those big eyes, were wide open! He kept trying to shoot, and he said it again: “Bastards!”

  ‘The other man’s hand was able to grip his throat … He hadn’t much longer to live, anyway …

  ‘I got completely soaked … while the dinner jacket just lay there on the floor.’

  Van Damme and Lombard were now looking at their companion in horror. And Belloir finished what he had to say.

  ‘That hand around his neck, it was mine! I was the man who slipped in that pool of blood …’

  He was standing in the same place as he had then. Now, though, he was dapper and soigné, his shoes polished, his suit impeccable. He wore a large gold signet ring on his white, well-cared-for hand with its manicured nails.

  ‘We were in a state of shock. We made Klein go to bed, even though he wanted to go and give himself up. No one spoke. Again, I can’t explain … And yet I was quite lucid! I’ll say it again: people don’t understand what such tragedies are really like. I dragged Van Damme out on to the landing, where we talked quietly, while Klein kept howling and struggling.

  ‘The church bells rang the hour while three of us were going down the alley carrying the body, but I don’t remember what time it was. The Meuse was in spate – Quai Sainte-Barbe was under half a metre of water – and the current was running fast. Both upstream and down, the barrage gates were open. We just caught a glimpse of a dark mass being swept past the nearest lamp post by the rushing water.

  ‘My suit was stained and torn; I left it at the studio after Van Damme went home to get me
some of his clothes. The next day, I concocted a story for my parents …’

  ‘Did you all get together again?’ Maigret asked slowly.

  ‘No. Most of us bolted from Rue du Pot-au-Noir. Lecocq d’Arneville stayed on with Klein. And ever since then, we’ve all avoided one another, as if by mutual agreement. Whenever any of us met up by accident in town, we looked the other way.

  ‘It turned out that Willy’s body was never found, thanks to the flood. Since he hadn’t been proud of knowing us, he’d always been careful never to mention us at home. People thought he’d simply run off for a few days. Later, they did look for him in the seedy parts of town, where they thought he might have finished up that evening.

  ‘I was the first to leave Liège, three weeks later. I suddenly broke off my studies and announced to my family that I wanted to pursue my career in France. I found work in a bank in Paris.

  ‘I learned from the newspapers that Klein had hanged himself that February at the door of Saint-Pholien.

  ‘One day I ran into Janin, in Paris. We didn’t talk about the tragedy, but he told me that he, too, had moved to France.’

  ‘I stayed on in Liège, alone,’ muttered Lombard resentfully, his head hanging.

  ‘You drew hanged men and church steeples,’ Maigret said. ‘Then you did sketches for the newspapers. Then …’

  And he recalled the house in Rue Hors-Château, the windows with the small, green-tinged panes, the fountain in the courtyard, the portrait of the young woman, the photoengraving workshop, where posters and magazine illustrations were gradually invading the walls of hanged men …

  And the kids! The newest one born only yesterday …

  Hadn’t ten years gone by? And little by little, more or less clumsily, hadn’t life returned to normal everywhere?

  Van Damme had roamed around Paris, like the other two. By chance, he’d wound up in Germany. His parents had left him an inheritance. He had become an important businessman in Bremen.

  Maurice Belloir had made a fine marriage. Moving up the ladder, he was now a bank deputy director! Then there was the lovely new house in Rue de Vesle, where a little boy was studying the violin.

  In the evening he played billiards with other town luminaries in the comfortable ambience of the Café de Paris.

  Janin got by with a series of mistresses, earned his living by making shop-window mannequins and relaxed by working on portrait busts of his lady friends.

  And hadn’t even Lecocq d’Arneville got married? Didn’t his wife and child live in the back of the herbalist’s shop in Rue Picpus?

  Willy Mortier’s father was still buying, cleaning and selling whole truckloads of pig’s entrails, bribing city councilmen and growing ever richer.

  His daughter had married a cavalry officer, who hadn’t wanted to join the family business, whereupon Mortier had refused to hand over the agreed-upon dowry.

  The couple lived off somewhere in a small garrison town.

  11. The Candle End

  It was nearly dark. Their faces were receding into the shadows, but their features seemed all the more sharply etched.

  Lombard was the one who burst out, as if alarmed by the gathering dusk, ‘We need some light!’

  There was still a candle end, left in the lantern that had hung from the same nail for ten years, kept along with the broken-down divan, the length of calico, the battered skeleton, the sketches of the girl with naked breasts and everything else saved as security by the landlord still waiting for his rent.

  When Maigret lit the stump, shadows danced on the walls, which shone red, yellow and blue in light glowing through the tinted glass panes, as if from a magic lantern.

  ‘When did Lecocq d’Arneville come to see you for the first time?’ the inspector asked, turning towards Belloir.

  ‘It must be about three years ago. I hadn’t been expecting it … The house you saw had just been finished. My boy was barely walking yet.

  ‘I was struck by how much he’d grown to resemble Klein: not so much physically as in his nature. That same feverish intensity, the same morbid uneasiness. He came as an enemy. He was furious and embittered, or desperate – I can’t find exactly the right word. He sniggered at me, spoke aggressively, he was on edge; he pretended to admire my home, my position, my life and character, and yet … I had the feeling he might burst into tears, like Klein when he was drunk!

  ‘He thought that I’d forgotten. Not true! I simply wanted to live, you understand me? And that’s why I worked like a dog: to live …

  ‘But he hadn’t been able to get on with his life. He had lived with Klein for two months after that Christmas Eve, it’s true … We left, they stayed behind: the two of them, here in this room, in …

  ‘I can’t explain what I felt in his presence. So many years had passed, but I had the feeling Lecocq d’Arneville had remained exactly the same. It was as if life had moved on for some, and stopped short for others.

  ‘He told me that he’d changed his name because he didn’t want to keep anything that reminded him of that awful night. He’d even changed his life! He’d never opened another book. He’d got it into his head to build a new life by becoming a manual labourer.

  ‘I had to glean all this information on my own, weeding it out from all his reproaches, caustic remarks and truly monstrous accusations.

  ‘He’d failed! Been a disaster at everything! And part of him was still rooted right here. It was the same for the rest of us, I think, but in our case it was less intense, not as painful, as unhealthy. I believe Klein’s face haunted him even more than Willy’s did.

  ‘Married, with a kid, he’d been through some tough times and had turned to drink. He was unable, not only to be happy, but even to be at any kind of peace. He screamed at me that he adored his wife and had left her because when he was near her, he felt like a thief! A thief stealing happiness! Happiness stolen from Klein … And the other man.

  ‘You see, I’ve thought a lot about this since then. And I think I understand. We were fooling around with dangerous ideas, with mysticism and morbid thoughts. It was only a game, and we were just kids, playing, but at least two of us let themselves fall into the trap. The most excitable, fanatical ones.

  ‘Klein and Lecocq d’Arneville. We’d all talked about killing someone? Klein went on to do it! And then he killed himself! And Lecocq, appalled, a broken man, was chained to this nightmare for the rest of his life.

  ‘The others and I tried to escape, to find our way back to a normal life, whereas Lecocq d’Arneville threw himself recklessly into his remorse, in a rage of despair. He destroyed his own life! Along with those of his wife and son …

  ‘So he turned on us. Because that’s why he’d come looking for me. I hadn’t understood that at first. He looked around at my house, my family, my bank. And I really did feel that he considered it his duty to destroy all that.

  ‘To avenge Klein! To avenge himself.

  ‘He threatened me. He had kept the suit, with the rips, the bloodstains, and it was the only physical proof of what happened that Christmas Eve. He asked me for money. Lots of it! And asked for more later on.

  ‘Because wasn’t that where we were vulnerable? Van Damme, Lombard, myself, even Janin: everything we had achieved depended on money.

  ‘It was the beginning of a new nightmare! Lecocq had known what he was doing, and he went from one to another of us, lugging along that sinister ruined suit. With diabolical cunning, he calculated precisely how much to ask us for, to make us feel the pinch.

  ‘You saw my house, inspector. It’s mortgaged! My wife thinks her dowry is sitting untouched at the bank, but there’s not a centime of it left. And I’ve done other things like that.

  ‘He went twice to Bremen, to see Van Damme. He came to Liège. Still consumed with fury, bent on destroying every last scrap of happiness.

  ‘There were six of us around Willy’s corpse. Klein was dead; Lecocq was trapped in a living nightmare. So we all had to be equally miserable. And he didn�
��t even spend the money! He lived as wretchedly as before, when he was sharing a bit of cheap sausage with Klein. He burned all the money! And every banknote he burned meant unbelievable hardship for us all.

  ‘For three years we’ve been struggling, each off in his own corner: Van Damme in Bremen, Jef in Liège, Janin in Paris, myself in Rheims. For three years we’ve hardly dared write to one another, while Lecocq d’Arneville was forcing us back into the madness of the Companions of the Apocalypse.

  ‘I have a wife. So does Lombard. We’ve got kids. So we’re trying to hang on, for them.

  ‘The other day Van Damme sent us telegrams saying Lecocq had killed himself, and he told us to meet.

  ‘We were all together when you turned up. After you left, we learned that you were the one who now had the bloodstained suit, and that you were determined to track down the truth.’

  ‘Who stole one of my suitcases at Gare du Nord?’ Maigret asked, and it was Van Damme who answered.

  ‘Janin. I’d arrived before you and was hiding on one of the station platforms.’

  Everyone was exhausted. The candle end would probably last about another ten minutes, if that. The inspector accidentally knocked over the skull, which fell to the floor and seemed to be trying to bite it.

  ‘Who wrote to me at the Hôtel du Chemin de Fer?’

  ‘I did,’ Lombard replied without looking up. ‘Because of my little girl. My little daughter I haven’t seen yet … But Van Damme suspected as much. Belloir, too. Both of them were waiting at the Café de la Bourse.’

  ‘And it was you who fired the shot?’

  ‘Yes … I couldn’t take it any more. I wanted to live! Live! With my wife, my kids … So I was waiting for you outside. I’ve debts of 50,000 francs at the moment. Fifty thousand francs that Lecocq d’Arneville burned to ashes! But that’s nothing – I’ll pay the debts, I’ll do whatever it takes, but to know that you were out there, hunting us …’

  Maigret looked at Van Damme.

  ‘And you were racing on ahead of me, trying to destroy the clues?’

  No one spoke. The candle flame wavered … Lombard was the only one still illuminated, by a fading red gleam from the lantern.