The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien Read online

  Maigret was in a tetchy mood. He entered the stable and from there went to the café or the shop any number of times.

  He was seen walking as far as the stone bridge looking as though he was counting his steps or looking for something in the mud. Grimly, dripping with water, he watched as ten vessels were raised or lowered.

  People wondered what he had in mind. The answer was: nothing. He didn’t even try to find what might be called clues, but rather to absorb the atmosphere, to capture the essence of canal life, which was so different from the world he knew.

  He had made sure that someone would lend him a bicycle if he should need to catch up with any of the boats.

  The lock-keeper had let him have a copy of the Official Handbook of Inland Waterways, in which out-of-the-way places like Dizy take on an unsuspected importance for topographical reasons or for some particular feature: a junction, an intersection, or because there is a port or a crane or even an office.

  He tried to follow in his mind’s eye the progress of the barges and carters:

  Ay – Port – Lock 13.

  Mareuil-sur-Ay – Shipyard – Port – Turning dock – Lock 12 – Gradient 74, 36 …

  Then Bisseuil, Tours-sur-Marne, Condé, Aigny …

  Right at the far end of the canal, beyond the Langres plateau, which the boats reached by going up through a series of locks and then were lowered down the other side, lay the Sâone, Chalon, Mâcon, Lyons …

  ‘What was the woman doing here?’

  In a stable, wearing pearl earrings, her stylish bracelet and white buckskin shoes!

  She must have been alive when she got there because the crime had been committed after ten in the evening.

  But how? And why? And no one had heard a thing! She had not screamed. The two carters had not woken up.

  If the whip had not been mislaid, it was likely the body might not have been discovered for a couple of weeks or a month, by chance when someone turned over the straw.

  And other carters passing through would have snored the night away next to a woman’s corpse!

  Despite the cold rain, there was still a sense of something heavy, something forbidding in the atmosphere. And the rhythm of life here was slow.

  Feet shod with boots or clogs shuffled over the stones of the lock or along the towpath. Tow-horses streaming with water waited while barges were held at the lock before setting off again, taking the strain, thrusting hard with their hind legs.

  Soon evening would swoop down as it had the previous day. Already, barges travelling upstream had come to a stop and were tying up for the night, while their stiff-limbed crews made for the café in groups.

  Maigret followed them in to take a look at the room which had been prepared for him. It was next door to the landlord’s. He remained there for about ten minutes, changed his shoes and cleaned his pipe.

  At the same time he was going back downstairs, a yacht steered by a man in oilskins close to the bank slowed, went into reverse and slipped neatly into a slot between two bollards.

  The man carried out all these manoeuvres himself. A little later, two men emerged from the cabin, looked wearily all round them and eventually made their way to the Café de la Marine.

  They too had donned oilskins. But when they took them off, they were seen to be wearing open-necked flannel shirts and white trousers.

  The watermen stared, but the newcomers gave no sign that they felt out of place. The very opposite. Their surroundings seemed to be all too familiar to them.

  One was tall, fleshy, turning grey, with a brick-red face and prominent, greenish-blue eyes, which he ran over people and things as if he weren’t seeing them at all.

  He keened back in his straw-bottomed chair, pulled another to him for his feet and summoned the landlord with a snap of his fingers.

  His companion, who was probably twenty-five or so, spoke to him in English with a tone of snobbish indifference.

  It was the younger man who asked, with no trace of an accent:

  ‘You have still champagne? I mean without bubbles?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Bring us a bottle.’

  They were both smoking imported cork-tipped Turkish cigarettes.’

  The watermen’s talk, momentarily suspended, slowly started up again.

  Not long after the landlord had brought the wine, the man who had handled the yacht arrived, also in white trousers and wearing a blue-striped sailor’s jersey.

  ‘Over here, Vladimir.

  The bigger man yawned, exuding pure, distilled boredom. He emptied his glass with a scowl, indicating that his thirst was only half satisfied.

  ‘Another bottle!’ he breathed at the young man.

  The young man repeated the word more loudly, as if he was accustomed to passing on orders in this way.

  ‘Another bottle! Of the same!’

  Maigret emerged from his corner table, where he had been nursing a bottle of beer.

  ‘Excuse me, gentlemen, would you mind if I asked you a question?

  The older man indicated his companion with a gesture which meant:

  ‘Talk to him.’

  He showed neither surprise nor interest. The sailor poured himself a drink and cut the end off a cigar.

  ‘Did you get here along the Marne?’

  ‘Yes, of course, along the Marne.’

  ‘Did you tie up last night far from here?’

  The big man turned his head and said in English:

  ‘Tell him it’s none of his business.’

  Maigret pretended he had not understood and, without saying any more, produced a photograph of the corpse from his wallet and laid it on the brown oilcloth on the table.

  The bargees, sitting at their tables or standing at the bar, followed the scene with their eyes.

  The yacht’s owner, hardly moving his head, looked at the photo. Then he stared at Maigret and murmured:

  ‘Police?’

  He spoke with strong English accent in a voice that sounded hoarse.

  ‘Police Judiciaire. There was a murder here last night. The victim has not yet been identified.’

  ‘Where is she now?’ the other man asked, getting up and pointing to the photo.

  ‘In the morgue at Épernay. Do you know her?’

  The Englishman’s expression was impenetrable. But Maigret registered that his huge, apoplectic neck had turned reddish blue.

  The man picked up his white yachting cap, jammed it on his balding head, then muttered something in English as he turned to his companion

  ‘More complications!’

  Then, ignoring the gawping watermen, he took a strong pull on his cigarette and said:

  ‘It’s my wife!’

  The words were less audible that the patter of the rain against the window panes or even the creaking of the windlass that opened the lock gates. The ensuing silence, which lasted a few seconds, was absolute, as if all life had been suspended.

  ‘Pay the man, Willy.’

  The Englishman threw his oilskin over his shoulders, without putting his arms in the sleeves, and growled in Maigret’s direction.

  ‘Come to the boat.’

  The sailor he had called Vladimir polished off the bottle of champagne and then left as he had come, accompanied by Willy.

  The first thing the inspector saw when he arrived on board was a woman in a dressing gown dozing on a dark-red velvet bunk. Her feet were bare and her hair uncombed.

  The Englishman touched her on the shoulder and with the same poker face he had worn earlier he said in a voice entirely lacking in courtesy:

  ‘Out!’

  Then he waited, his eye straying to a folding table, where there was a bottle of whisky and half a dozen dirty glasses plus an ash-tray overflowing with cigarette ends.

  In the end, he poured himself a drink mechanically and pushed the bottle in Maigret’s direction with a gesture which meant:

  ‘If you want one …’

  A barge passed on a level with the porthole
s, and fifty yards further on the carter brought his horses to a halt. There was the sound of bells on their harness jangling.

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  First published in French as Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien by Fayard 1931

  This translation first published 2014

  Copyright 1931 by Georges Simenon Limited

  Translation © Linda Coverdale, 2014

  GEORGES SIMENON ® Simenon.tm

  MAIGRET ® Georges Simenon Limited

  Cover photograph (detail) © Harry Gruyaert /Magnum Photos

  Front cover design by Alceu Chiesorin Nunes

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted

  ISBN: 978-0-698-15096-6 (eBook)

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