Madame Maigret's Friend Page 2

  Between the workshop and the umbrella shop there is an arched carriage entrance with a concierge’s lodge and, at the far end of the courtyard, a former town-house, now swarming with offices and apartments.

  A corpse in the stove?

  What the public did not know, and the police had taken care not to tell the press, was that the case had come to light by pure chance. One morning, a dirty scrap of wrapping paper had been found in the letterbox of the Police Judiciaire on Quai des Orfèvres. It bore the words:

  The bookbinder in Rue de Turenne has been burning a body in his stove.

  It wasn’t signed, of course. The paper had ended up on Maigret’s desk. Treating it with scepticism, he hadn’t disturbed any of his older inspectors with it, but had sent young Lapointe, who was dying to make a name for himself.

  Lapointe had discovered that there was indeed a bookbinder in Rue de Turenne. His name was Frans Steuvels, and he was a Belgian from Flanders who had been living in France for more than twenty-five years. Passing himself off as an employee of the sanitary department, Lapointe had inspected the premises and had come back with a detailed floor plan.

  ‘Basically, sir, Steuvels works in the window. The workshop goes back a long way, and gets darker the further you get from the street. It’s divided by a wooden partition, and Steuvels and his wife have their bedroom behind that.

  ‘There’s a staircase leading down to the basement. That’s where the kitchen is, then a little room where the light has to be kept on all day long and which they use as a dining room, and finally a cellar.’

  ‘With a stove?’

  ‘Yes. An old model, which doesn’t seem to be in a particularly good state.’

  ‘In working order?’

  ‘It wasn’t on this morning.’

  It was Sergeant Lucas who had gone back to Rue de Turenne for an official search at about five that afternoon. Fortunately, he had taken the precaution of taking a warrant with him, because the bookbinder had refused at first to let him search.

  Lucas had come close to leaving empty-handed. Now that the case had become a nightmare for the Police Judiciaire, he was almost resented for having eventually found something after all.

  Sifting through the ashes at the very bottom of the stove, he had come across two teeth, two human teeth, which he had immediately taken to the laboratory.

  ‘What kind of man is this bookbinder?’ Maigret had asked: at that moment he was still only dealing with the case from a distance.

  ‘He must be about forty-five. He has red hair, pockmarked skin and blue eyes. He’s very mild-mannered. His wife, who’s much younger than him, watches over him like a child.’

  By now it was known that Fernande, who had become famous in her own right, had arrived in Paris as a domestic and had then spent several years as a streetwalker in the Boulevard de Sébastopol area.

  She was thirty-six and had been living with Steuvels for ten years. Three years earlier, for no apparent reason, they had got married at the town hall of the 3rd arrondissement.

  The laboratory had sent its report. The teeth were those of a man of about thirty, probably quite well-built, who must still have been alive a few days earlier.

  Steuvels had been brought to Maigret’s office, and the ‘singing session’ had begun. He had sat in the armchair with the green velvet upholstery, facing the window that looked out on the Seine. It had been raining heavily that evening. For the ten or twelve hours that the interrogation had lasted, rain could be heard beating against the windowpanes, and water gurgled in the gutter. Steuvels wore steel-rimmed glasses with thick lenses. His long hair was dishevelled and his tie was askew.

  He was a cultivated, well-read man. He was calm, thought everything over carefully, and his fine gingery skin became easily inflamed.

  ‘How do you explain the fact that human teeth were found in your stove?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You haven’t lost any teeth lately? Or your wife?’

  ‘Neither of us. Mine are false.’

  He had removed his dentures from his mouth, then put them back with a casual gesture.

  ‘Can you tell me how you spent your time on the evenings of 16th, 17th and 18th February?’

  The interrogation had taken place on the evening of the 21st, after the visits of Lapointe and Lucas to Rue de Turenne.

  ‘Is one of those days a Friday?’

  ‘The 16th.’

  ‘In that case, I went to the Saint-Paul cinema in Rue Saint-Antoine. I go there every Friday.’

  ‘With your wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the other two days?’

  ‘Fernande left on Saturday morning.’

  ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘To Concarneau.’

  ‘Had the trip been planned for a long time?’

  ‘Her mother, who’s disabled, lives with her daughter and son-in-law in Concarneau. On Saturday morning, we got a telegram from the sister, Louise, saying that their mother was seriously ill, and Fernande caught the first train.’

  ‘Without phoning first?’

  ‘They don’t have a phone.’

  ‘Was the mother very ill?’

  ‘She wasn’t ill at all. The telegram wasn’t from Louise.’

  ‘Who was it from, then?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Have you ever been a victim of that kind of hoax before?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘When did your wife get back?’

  ‘On Tuesday. She took advantage of being there to spend a couple of days with her family.’

  ‘What did you do during that time?’

  ‘I worked.’

  ‘A neighbour claims that thick smoke was coming out of your chimney on Sunday.’

  ‘It’s possible. It was cold.’

  That was true. Sunday and Monday had been very cold, and there had even been severe frost reported in the suburbs.

  ‘What clothes were you wearing on Saturday evening?’

  ‘The same ones I’m wearing now.’

  ‘Nobody came to see you after you closed up?’

  ‘Nobody, except for a customer who came to collect a book. Do you want his name and address?’

  He was a well-known man, a member of the Cent Bibliophiles. Thanks to Liotard, they were going to hear a lot about this association, most of whose members were important figures.

  ‘Your concierge, Madame Salazar, heard someone knocking at your door at about nine o’clock that evening. Several people were having an animated conversation.’

  ‘People talking on the pavement outside maybe, not inside. Though if they were as animated as Madame Salazar claims, they may well have knocked against the shopfront.’

  ‘How many suits do you own?’

  ‘Just as I only have one body and one head, I only own one suit and one hat, apart from the old trousers and jumper I wear for work.’

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

  ‘What about this?’

  ‘It’s not mine.’

  ‘Then how come this suit was found in your wardrobe?’

  ‘I’ve never seen it before. Anybody could have put it there in my absence. I’ve been here for six hours now.’

  ‘Would you mind putting on the jacket?’

  It fitted him.

  ‘Do you see these stains, which look like rust stains? It’s blood, human blood, according to the experts. Someo
ne tried to rub them off, but couldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know this jacket.’

  ‘Madame Rancé, who owns the umbrella shop, says she’s often seen you in blue, especially on Fridays, when you go to the cinema.’

  ‘I used to have another suit, which was blue, but I got rid of it more than two months ago.’

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

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

  ‘The experts agree, don’t they? The rest is up to you, Maigret. Go ahead. We can’t release this fellow.’

  The very next day Maître Liotard had emerged from the shadows, and ever since he’d been snapping at Maigret’s heels like a vicious little dog.

  Among the headlines in the newspapers, there was one that had caught on:

  The Phantom Suitcase

  Young Lapointe claimed that when he had visited the premises, pretending to be an employee of the sanitary department, he had seen a reddish-brown suitcase under a table in the workshop.

  ‘It was an ordinary, cheap suitcase. I knocked into it by accident. I was surprised that it hurt so much, and I understood why when I tried to move it, because it was unusually heavy.’

  But by five that afternoon, when Lucas did his search, the suitcase was gone. More precisely, there was still a suitcase there, also brown, also cheap, but Lapointe asserted that it wasn’t the same one.

  ‘It’s the suitcase I took with me to Concarneau,’ Fernande had said. ‘We’ve never owned another. We almost never travel.’

  Lapointe insisted it wasn’t the same suitcase: the first one had been lighter in colour, and its handle had been repaired with string.

  ‘If I’d had a suitcase to repair,’ Steuvels had retorted, ‘I would never have used string. Don’t forget I’m a bookbinder. I work with leather all the time.’

  At this point, Philippe Liotard had sought testimonials from bibliophiles, and it had emerged that Steuvels was one of the best bookbinders in Paris, perhaps the best, to whom collectors entrusted their most delicate tasks, particularly the refurbishment of old bindings.

  Everyone agreed that he was a quiet man who spent almost all his time in his workshop, and although the police searched in his past for something dubious, they failed to find anything.

  Of course, there was the business of Fernande. He had met her when she was still on the streets, and it was he who had taken her away from that life. But that was all a long time ago, and there had been nothing against Fernande since then either.

  Torrence had been in Concarneau for four days. At the post office, they had found the original of the telegram, written by hand in capital letters. The postmistress thought she remembered that it was a woman who had handed it in, and Torrence was still searching, drawing up a list of travellers who had recently arrived from Paris, questioning two hundred people a day.

  ‘We’ve had enough of Detective Chief Inspector Maigret’s so-called infallibility!’ Maître Liotard had declared to a reporter.

  And he brought up the fact that there were by-elections coming up in the 3rd arrondissement, which might well have led certain people to start a scandal in the neighbourhood for political ends.

  Judge Dossin was also hauled over the coals, and these attacks, which weren’t always subtle, upset him a great deal.

  ‘So you don’t have the slightest new lead?’

  ‘I’m still looking. There are ten of us looking, sometimes more. We’ve questioned some people twenty times by now. Lucas is hoping to track down the tailor who made the blue suit.’

  As always when the public becomes fascinated by a case, they were receiving hundreds of letters daily. Almost all of them led nowhere and proved to be a waste of time. But everything was scrupulously checked, and they even listened to people who were clearly mad but who claimed to know something.

  At ten to one, Maigret got off the bus at the corner of Boulevard Voltaire, glanced up at the windows of his apartment as he usually did, and was slightly surprised to see that, in spite of the bright sun hitting it full on, the dining room window was closed.

  He climbed the staircase laboriously and turned the handle of the door, which didn’t open. Madame Maigret did sometimes lock the door when she was getting dressed or undressed. He opened it with his own key, found himself surrounded by a cloud of blue smoke and rushed to the kitchen to turn off the gas. In the saucepan, the chicken, the carrot and the onion were nothing but a black crust.

  He opened all the windows, and when Madame Maigret opened the door half an hour later, out of breath, she found him sitting in front of 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 knocked sideways, her lips trembling.

  ‘Please don’t laugh.’

  ‘I’m not laughing.’

  ‘And don’t tell me off. It was the only thing I could do, and I’d have liked to see you in my place. When I think you’re eating a piece of cheese for lunch!’

  ‘Was it the dentist?’

  ‘I didn’t see the dentist. I’ve been stuck in Square d’Anvers since a quarter to eleven, unable to move.’

  ‘Were you taken ill?’

  ‘Have I ever been ill in my life? No. It’s because of the boy. By the time he started crying and stamping his feet, I was looking at people as if I was a thief.’

  ‘What boy?’

  ‘I told you about the woman in blue and her child, but you never listen to me. The one I met on the bench while I was waiting to see the dentist. This morning, she got up in a hurry, asked me to keep an eye on the boy for a moment and left.’

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

  ‘She did come back in the end, just a quarter of an hour ago. I had to take a taxi here.’

  ‘What did she tell you when she got back?’

  ‘The amazing thing is she didn’t tell me anything. I was in the middle of the park, stuck there like a weathervane, with the boy screaming loudly enough to alert passers-by.

  ‘At last I saw a taxi stop at the corner of Avenue Trudaine and I recognized the white hat. She didn’t even take the trouble to get out. She half opened the door and signalled to me. The boy ran ahead of me, and I was afraid he’d get run over. He got to the taxi first, and the door was already closing by the time I reached it.

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

  ‘She didn’t say thank you. The taxi was already moving off in the direction of Boulevard Rochechouart, and it turned left towards Pigalle.’

  She fell silent, still out of breath. She took off her hat with such a brusque gesture that it messed up her hair.

  ‘Are you laughing?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Admit it, it makes you laugh. The fact remains, she left her child with a stranger for more than two hours. She doesn’t even know my name.’

  ‘What about 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 cheese at the end of the table like a … like a …’

  Then, not finding the word, she started crying and headed for the bedroom to change her clothes.
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  2.

  The Problems of the Grand Turenne

  Maigret had his very own way of climbing the two floors of the Quai des Orfèvres: at the bottom of the staircase, where the light came in from outside in an almost pure state, he still seemed relatively nonchalant, but the more he penetrated the greyness of the old building, the more anxious he appeared, as if the worries of the office impregnated him the closer he got to them.

  By the time he passed the clerk, he was already the chief. Lately, whether it was morning or afternoon, he had got into the habit, before opening his own door, of dropping into the inspectors’ office and, still in his hat and coat, entering the ‘Grand Turenne’.

  This was the new refrain at the Quai, and revealed the significance the Steuvels case had assumed. Lucas, who had been entrusted with the task of centralizing information, collating it and keeping it up to date, had soon been overwhelmed, because he was also the one who answered telephone calls, looked through mail concerning the case and received informers.

  Unable to work in the inspectors’ office, where there were constant comings and goings, he had taken refuge in an adjacent room, on the door of which a mischievous hand had lost no time in writing: The Grand Turenne.

  As soon as an inspector had finished with some other case, or as soon as anyone came back from an assignment, a colleague would ask him, ‘Are you free?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then go and see the Grand Turenne! He’s hiring!’

  It was true. Poor Lucas never had enough people to check things for him, and there was probably nobody left in the department who hadn’t taken at least one turn in Rue de Turenne.

  They all knew the crossroads near the bookbinder’s, with its three cafés: first of all the café-restaurant on the corner of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, then the Grand Turenne, opposite, and finally, thirty metres away, on the corner of Place des Vosges, the Tabac des Vosges, which the reporters had adopted as their headquarters, because they were also on the case.