The Carter of ’La Providence’ Read online

  The man was spattered with mud to the waist.

  ‘Go and dry off for a moment and while you’re at it drink my health with a hot grog.’

  Maigret led Lucas out on to the towpath, opened the envelope and read out in a half-whisper:

  Summary of preliminary analyses relating to inquiries into the murder at Dizy:

  — victim’s hair shows numerous traces of resin and also the presence of horsehairs, dark brown in colour;

  — the stains on the dress are fuel oil;

  — stomach contents at time of death: red wine and tinned meat similar in type to what is commercially available as corned beef.

  ‘Eight out of ten horses have dark brown coats!’ sighed Maigret.

  In the café, Vladimir was asking what was the nearest place where he could buy the supplies he needed. There were three people who were telling him, including the cycling policeman from Épernay, who eventually set off with the Russian in the direction of the stone bridge.

  Maigret, with Lucas in tow, headed for the stable, where, in addition to the landlord’s grey, a broken-kneed mare possibly intended for slaughter had been kept since the night before.

  ‘It wasn’t here that she would have picked up traces of resin,’ said the inspector.

  He walked twice along the path that led round the buildings from the canal to the stable.

  ‘Do you sell resin?’ he asked when he saw the landlord pushing a wheelbarrow full of potatoes.

  ‘It’s not exactly proper resin … We call it Norwegian pitch. It’s used for coating the sides of wooden barges above the waterline. Below it they use coal-tar, which is twenty times cheaper.’

  ‘Have you got any?’

  ‘There are still about twenty cans in the shop … But in this sort of weather there’s no call for it. The bargees wait for the sun to come out before they start doing up their boats.’

  ‘Is the Éco-III made of wood?’

  ‘Iron, like most boats with motors.’

  ‘How about the Providence?’

  ‘Wood. Have you found out something?’

  Maigret did not reply.

  ‘You know what they’re saying?’ said the man, who had set down his wheelbarrow.

  ‘Who are “they”?’

  ‘Everybody on the canal, the bargees, pilots, lock-keepers. Goes without saying that a car would have a hard time driving along the towpath, but what about a motorbike? A motorbike could come from a long way off and leave no more trace than a pushbike.’

  The door of the Southern Cross’s cabin opened. But no one came out.

  For one brief moment, a patch of sky turned yellowish, as if the sun was at last about to break through. Maigret and Lucas walked up and down the canal bank without speaking.

  No more than five minutes had gone by before the wind was bending the reeds flat, and one minute later rain was coming down in earnest.

  Maigret held out one hand, an automatic reaction. With an equally mechanical gesture Lucas produced a packet of grey pipe tobacco from his pocket and handed it to his companion.

  They paused a moment by the lock. The chamber was empty but it was being made ready, for an invisible tug still some distance off had hooted three times, which meant that it was towing three boats.

  ‘Where do you reckon the Providence is now?’ Maigret asked the lock-keeper.

  ‘Half a mo’ … Mareuil, Condé … and just before Aigny there’s a string of about ten boats. That’ll hold her up … Only two sluices of the lock at Vraux are working … So I’d say she’s at Saint-Martin.’

  ‘Is that far?’

  ‘Exactly thirty-two kilometres.’

  ‘And the Éco-III?’

  ‘Should be at La Chaussée. But a barge coming downstream told us last night that she’d broken her propeller at Lock 12. Which means you’ll find her at Tours-sur-Marne, which is fifteen kilometres upstream. It’s their own fault … It’s clear. Regulations state no loads should exceed 280 tons, but they all go on doing it.’

  It was ten in the morning. As Maigret clambered on to the bicycle he had hired, he saw the colonel sitting in a rocking chair on the deck of the yacht. He was opening the Paris papers, which the postman had just delivered.

  ‘No special orders,’ he told Lucas. ‘Stay around here. Don’t let them out of your sight.’

  The showers became less frequent. The towpath was dead straight. When he reached the third lock, the sun came out, still rather watery, but making the droplets of water on the reeds sparkle.

  From time to time, Maigret had to get off his bike to get past horses towing a barge. Harnessed side by side, they took up the full width of the towpath and plodded forward, one step at a time, with an effort which made their muscles swell visibly.

  Two of these animals were being driven by a little girl of eight or ten. She wore a red dress and carried a doll which dangled at the end of one arm.

  The villages were, for the most part, some distance from the canal so that the long ribbon of flat water seemed to unfurl in an absolutely empty landscape.

  Here and there was an occasional field with men bent over the dark earth. But most of it was woods. Reeds a metre and a half or two metres high further added to the mood of calm.

  A barge taking on a cargo of chalk near a quarry sent up clouds of dust which whitened its hull and the toiling men.

  There was a boat in the Saint-Martin lock, but it wasn’t the Providence.

  ‘They’ll have stopped for their dinners in the reach above Châlons!’ the lock-keeper’s wife said as she went, with two young children clinging to her skirts, from one dock-gate to the other.

  Maigret was not a man who gave up easily. Around eleven o’clock he was surprised to find himself in springlike surroundings, where the air pulsed with sun and warmth.

  Ahead of him, the canal cut a straight line across a distance of six kilometres. It was bordered with woods of fir on both sides.

  At the far end the eye could just make out the light-coloured stonework of a lock. Through its gates spurted thin jets of water.

  Halfway along, a barge had halted, at a slight angle. Its two horses had been unharnessed and, their noses in a feedbag, were munching oats and snorting.

  The first impression was cheerful or at least restful. Not a house in sight. The reflections in the calm water were wide and slow.

  A few more turns of the pedals and the inspector saw a table set up under the awning over the tiller in the stern of the barge. On it was a blue and white checked waxed tablecloth. A woman with fair hair was setting a steaming dish in the middle of it.

  He got off his bike after reading, on the rounded bows in gleaming polished letters: Providence.

  One of the horses, taking its time, stared at him, then twitched its ears and let out a peculiar growl before starting to eat again.

  Between the barge and the side of the canal was a thin, narrow plank, which sagged under Maigret’s weight. Two men were eating, following him with their eyes, while the woman advanced towards him.

  ‘Yes, what do you want?’ she asked as she buttoned her blouse, which was part open over her ample bosom.

  She spoke with a singsong intonation almost as strong as a southern accent. But she wasn’t at all bothered. She waited. She seemed to be protecting the two men with the fullness of her brazen flesh.

  ‘Information,’ said the inspector. ‘I expect you know there was a murder at Dizy?’

  ‘The crew of the Castor et Pollux told us about it. They overtook us this morning. Is it true? It doesn’t hardly seem possible, does it? How could anybody have done such a thing? And on the canal too, where it’s always so peaceful.’

  Her cheeks were blotchy. The two men went on eating, never taking their eyes off Maigret, who glanced involuntarily down at the dish which
contained dark meat and gave off an aroma which startled his nostrils.

  ‘A kid goat. I bought it this morning at the lock at Aigny … You were looking for information? About us, I suppose? We’d gone long before any dead body was discovered. Speaking of which, anybody know who the poor woman was?’

  One of the men was short, dark-haired, with a drooping moustache and a soft, submissive air about him.

  He was the husband. He’d merely nodded vaguely at the intruder, leaving his wife to do the talking.

  The other man was around sixty years of age. His hair, thick and badly cut, was white. A beard three or four centimetres long covered his chin and most of his cheeks, and he had very thick eyebrows. He looked as hairy as an animal.

  In contrast, his eyes were bright but without expression.

  ‘It’s your carter I’d like to talk to.’

  The woman laughed.

  ‘Talk to Jean? I warn you, he don’t talk much to anyone. He’s our tame bear! Look at the way he’s eating! But he’s also the best carter you could hope to find.’

  The old man’s fork stopped moving. He looked at Maigret with eyes that were disturbingly clear.

  Village idiots sometimes have eyes like that. And also animals who are used to being treated with kindness and then without warning are beaten without pity.

  There was something vacant about them. But something else too, something beyond words, almost withdrawn.

  ‘What time did you get up to see to your horses?’

  ‘Same time as always …’

  Jean’s shoulders were unusually broad and looked even broader because his legs were short.

  ‘Jean gets up every day at half past two!’ the woman broke in. ‘Take a look at the horses. They are groomed every day like they’re thoroughbreds. And of an evening, you won’t get him to go near a drop of white wine until he’s rubbed them down.’

  ‘Do you sleep in the stable?’

  Jean did not seem to understand. So it was again the woman who pointed to a structure, taller than the rest, in the middle of the boat.

  ‘That’s the stable,’ she said. ‘He always sleeps there. Our cabin is in the stern. Would you like to see it?’

  The deck was spotlessly clean, the brasses more highly polished than those on the Southern Cross. And when the woman opened a double door made of pine with a skylight of coloured glass over it, Maigret saw a touching sight.

  Inside was a small parlour. It contained exactly the same oak Henri III-style furniture as is found in the most traditional of lower-middle-class front rooms. The table was covered with a cloth embroidered with silks of various colours, and on it were vases, framed photographs and a stand overflowing with green-leaved plants.

  There was more embroidery on a dresser. Over the armchairs were draped thin dust covers.

  ‘If Jean had wanted, we could have rigged up a bed for him near us … But he always says he can only sleep in the stable, though we’re afraid that he’ll get kicked one of these days. No good saying the horses know him, is it? When they’re sleeping …’

  She had started eating, like the housewife who makes other people’s dinners and gives herself the worst portion without a second thought …

  Jean had stood up and kept staring at his horses and then at the inspector while the skipper rolled a cigarette.

  ‘And you didn’t see anything, or hear anything?’ asked Maigret, looking the carter directly in the eye.

  The man turned to the skipper’s wife, who replied with her mouth full:

  ‘If he’d seen something, he’d have said, ’course he would.’

  ‘Here’s the Marie!’ said her husband anxiously.

  The chugging of an engine had become audible in the last few moments. Now the form of a barge could be made out astern of the Providence.

  Jean looked at the woman, who was looking uncertainly at Maigret.

  ‘Listen,’ she said finally, ‘if you’ve got to talk to Jean, would you mind doing it as we go? The Marie has got an engine, but she’s slower than us. If she gets in front of us before we get to the lock, she’ll hold us up for two days.’

  Jean had not waited to hear her last words. He had already taken the feedbags containing the horses’ oats from over their heads and was now driving them a hundred metres ahead of the barge.

  The bargee picked up a tin trumpet and blew a few quavering notes.

  ‘Are you staying on board? Listen, we’ll tell you what we know. Everybody on the canals knows who we are, from Liège to Lyons.’

  ‘I’ll meet up with you at the lock,’ said Maigret, whose bicycle was still on the bank.

  The gangplank was stowed on board. A distant figure had just appeared on the lock gates, and the sluices started to open. The horses set off with a jangle of tinkling bells, and the red pompons tied to the top of their heads bobbed and jounced.

  Jean walked by the side of them, unconcerned.

  Two hundred metres astern, the motor barge slowed as it realized it had come too late.

  Maigret followed, holding the handlebars of his bicycle with one hand. He could see the skipper’s wife rushing to finish eating and her husband, short, thin and frail, leaning, almost lying, on the long tiller, which was too heavy for him.

  4. The Lover

  ‘I’ve had lunch,’ said Maigret as he strode into the Café de la Marine, where Lucas was sitting at a table in the window.

  ‘At Aigny?’ asked the landlord. ‘My brother-in-law’s the inn-keeper at Aigny …’

  ‘Bring us two beers.’

  It had been a narrow escape. The inspector, pedalling hard, was barely in sight of Dizy when the weather had turned overcast again. And now thick rain was being drawn like curtains over the last rays of the sun.

  The Southern Cross was still in its berth. There was no one to be seen on deck. And no sound came from the lock so that, for the first time, Maigret was aware of being truly in the country. He could hear chickens clucking in the yard outside.

  ‘Got anything for me?’ he asked Lucas.

  ‘The Russian came back with supplies. The woman put in a brief appearance in a blue dressing gown. The colonel and Willy came for a drink before lunch. They gave me some odd looks, I think.’

  Maigret took the tobacco pouch which his companion was holding out for him, filled his pipe and waited until the landlord, who had served them, had vanished into his shop.

  ‘I didn’t get anything either,’ he muttered. ‘Of the two boats which could have brought Mary Lampson here, one has broken down about fifteen kilometres from here, and the other is ploughing along the canal at three kilometres an hour.’

  ‘The first one is iron-built, so no chance of the body coming into contact with pitch there.

  ‘The other one is made of wood … The master and his wife are called Canelle. A fat motherly sort, who tried her level best to get me to drink a glass of disgusting rum, with a pint-sized husband who runs round after her like a spaniel.

  ‘Which leaves just their carter.

  ‘Either he’s pretending to be stupid, in which case he does a brilliant turn, or else he’s a complete half-wit. He’s been with them for eight years. If the husband is a spaniel, he’s a bulldog.

  ‘He gets up at half past two every morning, sees to his horses, downs a bowl of coffee and then starts walking alongside his animals.

  ‘He does his daily thirty or forty kilometres like that, every day, at the same pace, with a swig of white wine at every lock.

  ‘Every evening he rubs the horses down, eats without speaking a word and then collapses on to a straw truss, most times still in his clothes.

  ‘I’ve checked his papers. An old army pay book with pages so stuck together with filth they can hardly be opened. The name in it is Jean Liberge, born in Lille in 1869.

 
‘And that’s it … no, just a moment. The Providence would have had to get Mary Lampson on board on Thursday evening at Meaux. So she was alive then. She was still alive when she got here on Sunday evening.

  ‘It would be physically impossible to hide a grown woman for two days against her will in the stable on the boat.

  ‘In which case all three of them would be guilty.’

  The scowl on Maigret’s face showed that he did not believe that was the case.

  ‘But let’s suppose the victim did get on the boat of her own free will. Do you know what you are going to do, Lucas? You’re going to ask Sir Walter what his wife’s maiden name was. Then get on the phone and find out what you can about her.’

  There were two or three patches of sky where the sunlight still lingered, but the rain was coming down more and more heavily. Lucas had hardly left the Café de la Marine and was heading towards the yacht, when Willy Marco stepped off it, wearing a suit and tie, loose-limbed and casual, looking at nothing in particular.

  It was definitely a trait shared by all the passengers on the Southern Cross that they always looked as though they hadn’t had enough sleep or as if large amounts of alcohol did not agree with them.

  The two men passed each other on the towpath. Willy appeared to hesitate when he saw Lucas go aboard. Then, lighting a fresh cigarette with the one he had just finished, he made straight for the café.

  He was looking for Maigret and did not pretend otherwise.

  He did not take off his soft felt hat but touched it absently with one finger as he murmured:

  ‘Hello, inspector. Sleep well? I wanted a quick word …’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Not here, if it’s all the same to you. Could we possibly go up to your room, do you think?’

  He had lost nothing of his relaxed, confident manner. His small eyes sparkled with something not far from gleeful elation, or perhaps it was malevolence.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Of course! You’re a pipe man.’

  Maigret decided to take him up to his room, though it hadn’t yet been cleaned. After a glance out at the yacht, Willy sat down at once on the edge of the bed and began: