The Carter of ’La Providence’ Read online

  From the outside, all that could be seen was the glow of eight portholes and the light of the white lantern fixed to the mast. Not ten metres away was the outline of the squat stern of a barge and, on the left, a large heap of coal.

  Perhaps it was an illusion but Maigret had the impression that the rain was coming down twice as hard and that the sky was the darkest and most threatening he’d ever seen.

  He made his way to the Café de la Marine, where everyone stopped talking the moment he walked in. All the watermen were there, huddled round the cast-iron stove. The lock-keeper was leaning against the bar, near the landlord’s daughter, a tall girl with red hair who wore clogs.

  The tables were covered with waxy cloths and were littered with wine bottles, tumblers and standing pools of drink.

  ‘So, was it his missus?’ the landlord finally asked, taking his courage in both hands.

  ‘Yes. Give me a beer. On second thoughts, no. Make it something hot. A grog.’

  The watermen’s talk started up again, very gradually. The girl brought Maigret the steaming glass and in doing so brushed against his shoulder with her apron.

  The inspector imagined those three characters getting dressed in that cramped space. Vladimir too.

  He imagined a number of other things, idly and without great relish.

  He was familiar with the lock at Meaux, which is bigger than most locks because, like the one at Dizy, it is situated at the junction of the Marne and the canal, where there is a crescent-shaped port which is always full of barges packed closely together.

  There, among the watermen, the Southern Cross would have been moored, all lit up, and on board the two women from Montparnasse, the curvaceous Gloria Negretti, Madame Lampson, Willy and the colonel dancing on the deck to the strains of the gramophone and drinking …

  In a corner of the Café de la Marine, two men in blue overalls were eating sausage and bread, cutting slices off each with their knives and drinking red wine.

  And someone was talking about an accident which had happened that morning in the ‘culvert’, that is a stretch of the canal which, as it crosses the high part of the Langres plateau, passes through a tunnel for eight kilometres.

  A barge hand had got one foot caught in the horses’ tow-line. He’d called out but hadn’t been able to make the carter hear. So when the animals set off again after a rest stop, he’d been yanked into the water.

  The tunnel was not lit. The barge carried only one lamp which reflected faintly in the water. The barge hand’s brother – the boat was called Les Deux Frères – had jumped into the canal.

  Only one of them had been fished out, and he was dead. They were still looking for the other.

  ‘They only had two more instalments on the boat to pay. But it looks like, going by the contract, that the wives won’t have to fork out another penny.’

  A taxi-driver wearing a leather cap came in and looked round.

  ‘Who was it ordered a car?’

  ‘Me!’ said Maigret.

  ‘I had to leave it at the bridge. I didn’t fancy finishing up in the canal.’

  ‘Will you be eating here?’ the landlord asked the inspector.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  He went out with the taxi-driver. Through the rain, the white-painted Southern Cross was a milky stain. Two boys from a nearby barge, out despite the downpour, were staring at it admiringly.

  ‘Joseph!’ came a woman’s voice. ‘Bring your brother here! … You’re going to get a walloping! …’

  ‘Southern Cross,’ the taxi-driver read on the bow. ‘English, are they?’

  Maigret walked across the gangplank and knocked. Willy opened the door. He was already dressed, looking elegant in a dark suit. Inside, Maigret saw the colonel, red-faced and jacketless, having his tie knotted by Gloria Negretti. The cabin smelled of eau de Cologne and brilliantine.

  ‘Has the car come?’ asked Willy. ‘Is it here?’

  ‘It’s at the bridge, a short distance from here.’

  Maigret stayed outside. He half heard the colonel and the young man arguing in English. Eventually Willy came out.

  ‘He won’t traipse through mud,’ he said. ‘Vladimir’s going to launch the dinghy. We’ll meet you there.’

  ‘Thought so,’ muttered the taxi-driver, who had heard.

  Ten minutes later, Maigret and he were walking to and fro on the stone bridge just by the parked taxi, which had its sidelights on. Nearly half an hour went by before they heard the putt-putt of a small two-stroke engine.

  Eventually Willy’s voice shouted:

  ‘Is this the place? … Inspector!’

  ‘Yes, over here!’

  The dinghy, powered by a removable motor, turned a half circle and pulled in to the bank. Vladimir helped the colonel out and made arrangements to pick them up when they got back.

  In the car, Sir Walter did not speak. Despite his bulk, he was remarkably elegant. Ruddy-faced, well turned-out and impassive, he was every inch the English gentleman as portrayed in nineteenth-century prints.

  Willy was chain-smoking.

  ‘Some jalopy!’ he muttered as they lurched over a drain.

  Maigret noticed he was wearing a platinum ring set with a large yellow diamond.

  When they got to the town, where the cobbled streets gleamed in the rain, the taxi-driver lifted the glass separating him and his fare and asked:

  ‘Where do you want me to …?’

  ‘The mortuary!’ replied the inspector.

  It didn’t take long. The colonel barely said a word. There was only one attendant in the building, where three bodies were laid out on stone slabs.

  All the doors were locked. The locks creaked as they were opened. The light had to be switched on.

  It was Maigret who lifted the sheet.

  ‘Yes!’

  Willy was the most upset, the most anxious to turn away from the sight.

  ‘Do you recognize her too?’

  ‘It’s her all right … She looks so …’

  He did not finish. The colour was visibly draining from his face. His lips were dry. If the inspector had not dragged him away, he would probably have passed out.

  ‘You don’t know who …?’ the colonel said distinctly.

  Was a barely noticeable hint of distress just detectable in his tone of voice? Or wasn’t it just the effect of all those glasses of whisky?

  Even so, Maigret made a mental note of this small shift.

  Then they were outside, on a pavement poorly lit by a single lamp-post near the car. The driver had not budged from his seat.

  ‘You’ll have dinner with us, won’t you?’ Sir Walter asked, again without turning to face Maigret.

  ‘Thank you, no. Since I’m here, I’ll make the most of it to sort out a few matters.’

  The colonel bowed and did not insist.

  ‘Come, Willy.’

  Maigret remained for a moment in the doorway of the mortuary while the young man, after conferring with the Englishman, turned to the taxi-driver.

  He was obviously asking which was the best restaurant in town. People walked past while brightly lit, rattling trams trundled by.

  A few kilometres from there, the canal stretched away, and all along it, near the locks, there were barges now asleep which would set off at four in the morning, wrapped in the smell of hot coffee and stables.

  3. Mary Lampson’s Necklace

  When Maigret got into bed, in his room, with its distinctive, slightly nauseating smell, he lay for some time aligning two distinct mental pictures.

  First, Épernay: seen through the large, brightly lit windows of La Bécasse, the best restaurant in town, the colonel and Willy elegantly seated at a table surrounded by high-class waiters …

  It was less than half an hour after their vis
it to the mortuary. Sir Walter Lampson was sitting ramrod straight, and the aloof expression on that ruddy face under its sparse thatch of silver hair was phenomenal.

  Beside his elegance, or more accurately his pedigree, Willy’s smartness, though he wore it casually enough, looked like a cheap imitation.

  Maigret had eaten elsewhere. He had phoned the Préfecture and then the police at Meaux.

  Then, alone and on foot, he had headed off into the rainy night along the long ribbon of road. He had seen the illuminated portholes of the Southern Cross opposite the Café de la Marine.

  He had been curious and called in, using a forgotten pipe as an excuse.

  It was there that he had acquired the second mental picture: in the mahogany cabin, Vladimir, still wearing his striped sailor’s jersey, a cigarette hanging from his lips, was sitting opposite Madame Negretti, whose glossy hair again hung down over her cheeks.

  They were playing cards – ‘sixty-six’, a game popular in central Europe.

  There had been a brief moment of utter stupefaction. But no shocked reaction! Both had just stopped breathing for a second.

  Then Vladimir had stood up and begun hunting for the pipe. Gloria Negretti had asked, in a faint lisp:

  ‘Aren’t they back yet? Was it Mary?’

  The inspector had thought for a moment of getting on his bicycle, riding along the canal and catching up with the barges which had passed through Dizy on Sunday night. The sight of the sodden towpath and the black sky had made him change his mind.

  When there was a knock on the door of his room, he was aware, even before he opened his eyes, that the bluey-grey light of dawn was percolating through the window of his room.

  He had spent a restless night full of the sound of horses’ hooves, confused voices, footsteps on the stairs, clinking glass in the bar underneath him and finally the smell of coffee and hot rum which had wafted up to him.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Lucas! Can I come in?’

  Inspector Lucas, who almost always worked with Maigret, pushed the door open and shook the clammy hand which his chief held out through a gap in the bedclothes.

  ‘Got something already? Not too worn out, I hope?’

  ‘I’ll survive, sir. After I got your phone call, I went straight to the hotel you talked about, on the corner of Rue de la Grande-Chaumière. The girls weren’t there, but at least I got their names. Suzanne Verdier, goes under the name of Suzy, born at Honfleur in 1906. Lia Lauwenstein, born in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in 1903. The first arrived in Paris four years ago, started as a housemaid, then worked for a while as a model. The Lauwenstein girl has been living mainly on the Côte d’Azur … Neither, I checked, appears in the Vice Squad’s register of prostitutes. But they might as well be on it.’

  ‘Lucas, would you pass me my pipe and order me coffee?’

  The sound of rushing water came from the chamber of the lock and over it the chug of a diesel engine idling. Maigret got out of bed and stood at a poor excuse for a washstand where he poured cold water into the bowl.

  ‘Don’t stop.’

  ‘I went to La Coupole, like you said. They weren’t there, but the waiters all knew them. They sent me to the Dingo, then La Cigogne. I ended up at a small American bar, I forget what it’s called, in Rue Vavin, and found them there, all alone, looking very sorry for themselves. Lia is quite a looker. She’s got style. Suzy is blonde, girl-next-door type, not a nasty bone in her body. If she’d stayed back in the sticks where she came from, she’d have got married and made a good wife and mother. She had got freckles all over her face and …’

  ‘See a towel anywhere?’ interrupted Maigret. His face was dripping with water, and his eyes were shut. ‘By the way, is it still raining?’

  ‘It wasn’t raining when I got here, but it looks like it could start up again at any moment. At six this morning there was a fog which almost froze your lungs … Anyway, I offered to buy the girls a drink. They immediately asked for sandwiches, which didn’t surprise me at first. But after a while I noticed the pearl necklace the Lauwenstein girl was wearing. As a joke I managed to get a bite on it. They were absolutely real! Not the necklace of an American millionairess, but even so it must have been worth all of 100,000 francs. Now when girls of that sort prefer sandwiches and hot chocolate to cocktails …’

  Maigret, who was smoking his first pipe of the day, answered the knock of the girl who had brought his coffee. Then he glanced out of the window and registered that there was as yet no sign of life outside. A barge was passing close to the Southern Cross. The man leaning his back against the tiller was staring at the yacht with reluctant admiration.

  ‘Right. Go on.’

  ‘I drove them to another place, a quiet café.

  ‘There, without warning, I flashed my badge, pointed to the necklace and asked straight out: “Those are Mary Lampson’s pearls, aren’t they?”

  ‘I don’t suppose they knew she was dead. But if they did, they played their parts to perfection.

  ‘It took them a few moments to admit everything. In the end it was Suzy who said to her friend: “Best tell him the truth, seeing as he knows so much about it already.”

  ‘And a pretty tale it was too … Need a hand, chief?’

  Maigret was flailing his arms wildly in his efforts to catch his braces, which were dangling down his thighs.

  ‘The main point first. They both swore that it was Mary Lampson herself who gave them the pearls last Friday, in Paris, where she’d come to meet them. You’ll probably understand this better than I do, because all I know about the case is what you told me over the phone.

  ‘I asked if Madame Lampson had come there with Willy Marco. They said no. They said they hadn’t seen Willy since last Thursday, when they left him at Meaux.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ Maigret broke in as he knotted his tie in a milky mirror which distorted his reflection. ‘The Southern Cross arrives at Meaux on Wednesday evening. Our two girls are on board. They spend a lively night with the colonel, Willy, Mary Lampson and Gloria.

  ‘It’s very late when Suzy and Lia are taken off to a hotel, and they leave by train on Thursday morning … Did anyone give them money?’

  ‘They said 500 francs.’

  ‘Had they got to know the colonel in Paris?’

  ‘A few days earlier.’

  ‘And what happened on the yacht?’

  Lucas gave a knowing smile.

  ‘Assorted antics, none very savoury. Apparently the Englishman lives only for whisky and women. Madame Negretti is his mistress.’

  ‘Did his wife know?’

  ‘Oh, she knew all right! She herself was Willy’s mistress. None of which stopped them bringing Suzy and Lia to join the party, if you follow me. And then there was Vladimir, who danced with all the women. In the early hours there was a row because Lia Lauwenstein said that 500 francs was charity. The colonel did not answer, leaving that to Willy. They were all drunk. The Negretti woman fell asleep on the roof, and Vladimir had to carry her into the cabin.’

  Standing at the window, Maigret let his eye wander along the black line of the canal. To his left, he could see the small-gauge railway, which was still used to transport earth and gravel.

  The sky was grey and streaked low down with shreds of blackish cloud. But it had stopped raining.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘That’s more or less it. On Friday, Mary Lampson supposedly travelled to Paris and met up with both girls at La Coupole, when she must have given them the necklace.’

  ‘My, my! A teeny-weeny little present …’

  ‘Not a present. She handed it over for them to sell on. They were to give her half of whatever cash they got for it. She told them her husband didn’t let her have much in the way of ready money.’

  The paper on
the walls of the room was patterned with small yellow flowers. On it the basin was a splash of dirty white.

  Maigret saw the lock-keeper hurrying his way along with a bargee and his carter, clearly intending to drink a tot of rum at the bar.

  ‘That’s all I could get out of them,’ said Lucas in conclusion. ‘I left them at two this morning. I sent Inspector Dufour to keep a discreet eye on their movements. Then I went back to the Préfecture to check the records as per your instructions. I found the file on Willy Marco, who was kicked out of Monaco four years ago after some murky business to do with gambling. The following year he was questioned after an American woman claimed he had relieved her of some items of jewellery. But the charge was dropped, I don’t know why, and Marco stayed out of jail. Do you think that he’s …’

  ‘I don’t think anything. And that’s the honest truth, I swear. Don’t forget the murder was committed on Sunday after ten at night, when the Southern Cross was moored at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre.’

  ‘What do you make of the colonel?’

  Maigret shrugged his shoulders and pointed to Vladimir, who had just popped out through the forward hatch and was making for the Café de la Marine. He was wearing white trousers, rope sandals and a sweater. An American sailor’s cap was pulled down over one ear.

  ‘Phone call for Monsieur Maigret,’ the red-haired serving girl called through the door.

  ‘Come down with me, Lucas.’

  The phone was in the corridor, next to a coat stand.

  ‘Hello? … Meaux? … What was that? … Yes, the Providence … At Meaux all day Thursday loading? … Left at three o’clock Friday morning … Did any others? … The Éco-III … That’s a tanker-barge, right? … Friday night at Meaux … Left Saturday morning … Thanks, inspector! … Yes, carry on with the questioning, you never know … Yes, I’ll still be at this address …’

  Lucas had listened to this conversation without understanding a word of it. Before Maigret could open his mouth to tell him, a uniformed officer on a bicycle appeared at the door.

  ‘Message from Records … It’s urgent!’