Friend of Madame Maigret Page 2

  The bookbinder in the rue de Turenne has burned a body in his furnace.

  It wasn’t signed, of course. The paper had finished up on the desk of Maigret, who, skeptical, hadn’t bothered one of his veteran inspectors with it, but had sent little Lapointe, a young man who was itching to distinguish himself.

  Lapointe had discovered that there was indeed a bookbinder in the rue de Turenne, a Fleming resident in France for more than twenty-five years, Frans Steuvels. Posing as a sanitary inspector, the detective had been through his premises and returned with a detailed plan.

  “Steuvels works in the shop window, so to speak, chief inspector. The rear of the workshop, which gets darker as you move farther away from the street, is cut off by a wooden partition behind which the Steuvelses have fixed up their bedroom.

  “A staircase leads to the basement, where there is a kitchen, then a small room, where they have to keep the light on all day, which serves as a dining room, and lastly a cellar.”

  “With a furnace?”

  “Yes. An old model that doesn’t seem to be in very good shape.”

  “Does it work?”

  “It wasn’t going this morning.”

  It was Lucas who had gone to the rue de Turenne at about five o’clock in the afternoon for an official investigation. Fortunately he had taken the precaution of bringing along a warrant, because the bookbinder claimed the inviolability of his home.

  Detective Sergeant Lucas had been on the point of going away empty handed, and there were those who almost resented his partial success now that the case had turned into a nightmare for Police Headquarters.

  Sifting the ashes at the very back of the furnace, he had come upon two teeth, two human teeth, which he had immediately taken to the laboratory.

  “What kind of man is he, this bookbinder?” asked Maigret, who at this point was only remotely connected with the case.

  “He must be about forty-five. He’s red-haired, pock-marked, with blue eyes and a very gentle expression. His wife, although she’s younger than he is, never takes her eyes off him as if he were a child.”

  It was now known that Fernande, who had become famous in her turn, had come to Paris as a domestic servant and later had walked the pavement for several years along the boulevard de Sébastopol.

  She was thirty-six, had been living with Steuvels for ten years, and three years ago, for no apparent reason, they had been married at the Mairie of the Third Arrondissement.

  The laboratory had sent in its report. The teeth were those of a man of about thirty, probably fairly fat, who must still have been alive until a few days before.

  Steuvels had been brought into Maigret’s office, amicably, and the grilling had begun. He had sat in the green plush armchair facing the window that overlooked the Seine, and that evening it was pouring with rain. Throughout the ten or twelve hours the interrogation had lasted, they had heard the rain beating against the window panes and the gurgling of water in the gutter. The bookbinder wore spectacles with thick lenses and steel rims. His abundant, rather long hair was shaggy, and his tie was crooked.

  He was a cultured man, who had read a lot. He remained calm and deliberate; his delicate ruddy skin flushed easily.

  “How do you explain the fact that human teeth have been found in your furnace?”

  “I don’t explain it.”

  “You haven’t lost any teeth recently? Nor your wife?”

  “Neither of us. Mine are false.”

  He had taken his plate out of his mouth, then put it back with a practiced movement.

  “Can you give me an account of how you spent the evenings of February 16, 17, and 18?”

  The interrogation had taken place on the evening of the twenty-first, after the visits of Lapointe and Lucas to the rue de Turenne.

  “Do those dates include a Friday?”

  “The sixteenth.”

  “In that case I went to the Saint-Paul Cinema in the rue Saint-Antoine, as I do every Friday.”

  “With your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the other two days?”

  “It was at noon on the Saturday that Fernande left.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “To Concarneau.”

  “Had the journey been planned long beforehand?”

  “Her mother, who’s a cripple, lives with her daughter and son-in-law at Concarneau. On Saturday morning we received a telegram from my wife’s sister, Louise, saying that their mother was seriously ill, and Fernande took the first train.”

  “Without telephoning?”

  “They have no telephone.”

  “Was the mother very bad?”

  “She wasn’t ill at all. The telegram didn’t come from Louise.”

  “Who did it come from then?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Have tricks of this kind ever been played on you before?”

  “Never.”

  “When did your wife get back?”

  “On the Tuesday. She took advantage of being down there to spend a couple of days with her people.”

  “What did you do all that time?”

  “I worked.”

  “One of the tenants states that dense smoke was coming out of your chimney all day on the Sunday.”

  “That’s possible. It was cold.”

  This was true. The Sunday and Monday had been very cold days, and severe frost had been reported in the suburbs.

  “What clothes were you wearing on Saturday evening?”

  “The same as I’m wearing today.”

  “Did anyone come to see you after you closed?”

  “Nobody, except a customer who called for a book. Do you want his name and address?”

  It was a well-known man, a member of the “Hundred Bibliophiles.” Thanks to Liotard, more was to be heard of these men, who were nearly all important personalities.

  “Your concierge, Madame Salazar, heard someone knock at your door that evening about nine o’clock. Several people were talking excitedly.”

  “People talking on the pavement perhaps, but not inside my place. It’s perfectly possible, if they were excited, as Madame Salazar claims, that they banged against the front.”

  “How many suits do you own?”

  “As I have only one body and one head, I own only one suit and one hat, apart from the old trousers and sweaters I wear for work.”

  He had then been shown a navy blue suit found in the wardrobe in his bedroom.

  “What about this one?”

  “That doesn’t belong to me.”

  “How does this suit happen to have been found in your house?”

  “I’ve never seen it. Anybody might have put it there in my absence. I’ve been here six hours already.”

  “Will you try on the jacket, please?”

  It fitted him.

  “Do you see these stains that look like rust? It’s blood, human blood, according to the experts. Unsuccessful attempts have been made to get rid of them.”

  “I don’t recognize those clothes.”

  “Madame Rancé, the umbrella seller, states that she has often seen you wearing blue, especially on Fridays when you go to the pictures.”

  “I did have another suit, which was blue, but I got rid of it more than two months ago.”

  After this first interrogation Maigret was gloomy. He had had a long conversation with Judge Dossin, after which both of them had gone to see the public prosecutor.

  It was the latter who had assumed responsibility for the arrest.

  “The experts are in agreement, aren’t they? The rest, Maigret, is up to you. Go ahead. We can’t release that customer.”

  By the next day, Maître Liotard had emerged from the shadows, and, ever since, Maigret had had him at his heels like a snapping mongrel.

  Among the newspaper subheadings there had been one that had had quite a success:

  THE PHANTOM SUITCASE

  Young Lapointe declared, in fact, that when he had looked a
round the premises, posing as a sanitary inspector, he had seen a reddish-brown suitcase under a table in the workshop.

  “It was an ordinary cheap suitcase, and I knocked against it by mistake. I was surprised it hurt so much and I realized why when I tried to lift it, because it was unusually heavy.”

  Yet at five in the afternoon, the time of the search by Lucas, the suitcase was no longer there. To be more precise, there was still a suitcase, also brown, also cheap, but Lapointe maintained that it was not the same one.

  “That’s the suitcase I took to Concarneau,” Fernande had said. “We’ve never owned another one. We hardly travel at all.”

  Lapointe was unshakeable, swore it was not the same suitcase, that the first one was lighter in color, with its handle tied up with string.

  “If I had had a suitcase to mend,” retorted Steuvels, “I wouldn’t have used string. Don’t forget that I’m a bookbinder and a skilled leather-worker.”

  Then Philippe Liotard had set off to collect testimonials from bibliophiles, and it had turned out that Steuvels was one of the best bookbinders in Paris, possibly the best, and that collectors entrusted their delicate work to him, especially the restoration of antique bindings.

  Everybody agreed that he was an even-tempered man who spent practically his whole life in his workshop and the police were raking through his past to no avail in search of the slightest equivocal detail.

  True, there was that episode in Fernande’s career. He had known her when she was on the streets, and it was he who had taken her away from it all. But there was absolutely nothing against Fernande either, since that already long-distant period.

  Torrence had been at Concarneau for four days. At the post office the original of the telegram had been found, printed by hand in block letters. The postmistress thought she remembered that it was a woman who had handed it across the counter, and Torrence was still searching, compiling a list of recent arrivals from Paris, questioning two hundred people a day.

  “We are fed up with the so-called infallibility of Chief Inspector Maigret!” Maître Liotard had declared to a journalist.

  And he made reference to some trouble in a by-election in the Third Arrondissement, which might well have induced certain people to precipitate a scandal in the district for political ends.

  Judge Dossin, too, was getting it in the neck, and these attacks, not always discreet, made him blush.

  “You haven’t a single new clue?”

  “I’m still looking. There are ten of us looking, sometimes more, and we’re interrogating some people for the twentieth time. Lucas is hoping to find the tailor who made the blue suit.”

  As always happens when a case arouses popular opinion, they were receiving hundreds of letters a day, almost all of which sent them off on false trails, causing them to waste a great deal of time. Nevertheless, everything was scrupulously checked, and even lunatics who claimed to know something were given a hearing.

  At ten minutes to one Maigret got out of the bus on the corner of the boulevard Voltaire and glancing up at his windows, as he always did, was a little surprised to see that the one in the dining room was closed, in spite of the bright sun shining directly on it.

  He walked heavily upstairs and turned the doorknob, which didn’t yield. Occasionally, when Madame Maigret was dressing or undressing, she would lock the door. He opened it with his own key, found himself in a cloud of blue smoke, and dashed into the kitchen to turn off the gas. In the casserole all that was left of the chicken, carrot and onion was a blackened crust.

  He opened all the windows, and when Madame Maigret, all out of breath, pushed open the door half an hour later she found him sitting there with a hunk of bread and a piece of cheese.

  “What time is it?”

  “Half past one,” he said calmly.

  He had never seen her in such a state, her hat crooked, her lip quivering tremulously.

  “Whatever you do, don’t laugh.”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  “Don’t scold me either. I couldn’t help it and I’d like to have seen you in my position. And to think that you’re reduced to eating a piece of cheese for lunch!”

  “The dentist?”

  “I haven’t seen the dentist. Since a quarter to eleven I’ve been in the middle of the place d’Anvers, without being able to move.”

  “Were you taken ill?”

  “Have I ever been taken ill in my life? No. It was on account of the baby. And in the end, when he began to cry and create a scene, there I was looking like a kidnapper.”

  “What baby? A baby what?”

  “I told you about the lady in blue and her child, but you never do listen to me. The one I met on the bench while I was waiting my turn at the dentist’s. This morning she suddenly got up and went off, asking me to watch the child for a moment.”

  “And she didn’t come back? What did you do with the boy?”

  “She finally did come back, just a quarter of an hour ago. I came home in a taxi.”

  “What did she say when she came back?”

  “To crown it all she didn’t even speak to me. I was in the middle of the square, stuck there like a scarecrow, with the little boy yelling fit to draw a crowd.

  “I finally saw a taxi stopping on the corner of the avenue Trudaine and I recognized the white hat. She didn’t even bother to get out. She half-opened the door, beckoned to me. The child was running ahead of me, and I was afraid he’d get run over. He reached the taxi first, and the door was closing again by the time I got there.

  “‘Tomorrow,” she called. “I’ll explain tomorrow. Forgive me . . .”

  “She didn’t thank me. The taxi was already going off in the direction of the boulevard Rochechouart and it turned left towards Pigalle.”

  She stopped, breathless, took off her hat with such a brusque movement that she rumpled her hair.

  “Are you laughing?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You may as well admit that it makes you laugh. All the same she did leave her child in the charge of a stranger for more than two hours. She doesn’t even know my name.”

  “And you? Do you know hers?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where she lives?”

  “I don’t know anything at all except that I missed my appointment, my lovely chicken is burnt, and you’re eating a piece of cheese off a corner of the table like a . . . like a . . .”

  Then, not able to find the word, she began to cry, making for the bedroom door in order to go and change her dress.

  2

  Maigret had a manner all his own of climbing the two flights of stairs at the Quai des Orfèvres, his expression remaining pretty indifferent at first, at the foot of the staircase, where the light from outside struck it almost full strength, then growing more and more preoccupied the deeper he penetrated into the gray shadows of the old building, as though official worries thrust themselves more heavily upon him as he drew nearer to them.

  By the time he passed the porter he was already the chief. Recently he had got into the habit, both morning and afternoon, before pushing open his own door, of dropping into the inspectors’ office and, his hat on his head, his overcoat on his back, going in to see the Grand Turenne.

  This was the latest catchphrase at Headquarters, and it was indicative of the stature the Steuvels case had attained. Lucas, who had found himself left in charge of centralizing information, collating it, and keeping it up to date, had quickly been swamped, for it was also his job to answer telephone calls, open all mail concerning the case, and interview informants.

  Incapable of working in the inspectors’ office, where there was constant coming and going, he had taken refuge in an adjoining room on the door of which a facetious hand had before long written: The Grand Turenne.

  As soon as a detective had finished an assignment, as soon as anyone came back from a job, a colleague would ask him:

  “Are you free?”

  “Yes.”

/>   “Go in and see the Grand Turenne. He’s recruiting!”

  It was true. Little Lucas never had enough staff for all the checks he had to make, and there was probably nobody left in the department who hadn’t been sent out at least once to the rue de Turenne.

  They all knew the crossroads, near the bookbinder’s, with the three cafés: first the café-restaurant on the corner of the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, then the Grand Turenne opposite, and lastly, thirty yards off, at the corner of the place des Vosges, the Tabac des Vosges, which the newspapermen had adopted as their headquarters.

  For they were in on the case too. The detectives, for their part, took their drinks at the Grand Turenne from the windows of which you could see the Flemish bookbinder’s workshop. This was their headquarters, and Lucas’s office had turned into a sort of local branch.

  The most amazing thing was that good old Lucas, chained down by his classification work, was probably the only one who still hadn’t set foot on the scene of action since his visit there the first day.

  Nevertheless it was he who knew that corner better than any of them. He knew that after the Grand Turenne (the café!) came a high-class wine merchant’s, Les Caves de Bourgogne, and he was acquainted with its proprietors; he only needed to consult a card to find out what they had told every interrogator.

  No. They hadn’t seen anything. But on Saturday evenings they left for the Chevreuse valley where they would spend the weekend in a cottage they had built themselves.

  After Les Caves de Bourgogne came the shop of a cobbler named Monsieur Bousquet.

  He, on the other hand, talked too much; only he had the defect of not telling everybody the same thing. It depended on what time of day he was questioned, how many aperitifs and brandies he had gone to drink at one of the three cafés, he didn’t care which.

  Then came Frère’s stationery shop, semi-wholesale, and at the rear, in the courtyard, there was a cardboard-making business.

  Above Frans Steuvels’s workshop, on the first floor of the former mansion, jewelry was mass produced. This was the firm of Sass & Lapinsky, which employed about twenty girls and four or five men, the latter all with outlandish names.

  Everybody had been questioned, some of them four or five times, by various inspectors, not to mention the numerous inquiries of the reporters. Two deal tables in Lucas’s office were covered with papers, plans, memoranda, and he was the only man who could find his way around in the muddle.