The Carter of ’La Providence’ Page 7

  The next moment he was walking the short distance between the Café de la Marine and the Southern Cross.

  He made no attempt to go inside the cabin. Vladimir was on the bridge. He gave him his orders and took the wheel.

  Then, to the amazement of the canal men and the bargees, they saw the Russian in the striped jersey disappear into the engine room, start the motor and then, from the deck, with a neat flick of the wrist, yank the mooring ropes free of the bollards.

  Within moments, a small, gesticulating group began moving off towards the main road, where their cars were waiting. It was the public prosecutor’s team.

  Maigret was left standing on the canal bank. He had finally managed to fill his pipe and now thrust both hands into his pockets with a gesture that was distinctly proletarian, even more proletarian than usual, and muttered:

  ‘Well, that’s that!’

  It was back to square one!

  The investigation of the prosecutor’s office had come up with only a few points. It was too early to tell if they were significant.

  First: the body of Willy Marco, in addition to the marks of strangulation, also had bruises to the wrists and torso. The police surgeon ruled out an ambush but thought that a struggle with an exceptionally strong attacker was more likely.

  Second: Sir Walter had stated that he had met his wife in Nice, where, although she had divorced her Italian husband, she was still using her married name of Ceccaldi.

  The colonel’s account had not been clear. His wilfully ambiguous statement let it be supposed that Marie Dupin, or Ceccaldi, was at that time virtually destitute and living on the generosity of a few friends, though without ever actually selling her body.

  He had married her during a trip to London, and it was then that she had obtained from France a copy of her birth certificate in the name of Marie Dupin.

  ‘She was a most enchanting woman.’

  In his mind’s eye Maigret saw the colonel’s fleshy, dignified, ruddy face as he said these words, without affectation and with a sober simplicity which had seemed to impress the magistrate favourably.

  He stepped back to allow the stretcher carrying Willy’s body to pass.

  Suddenly he shrugged his shoulders and went into the café, sat down heavily on a bench and called:

  ‘Bring me a beer!’

  It was the girl who served him. Her eyes were still red, and her nose shone. He looked up at her with interest and, before he could question her, she looked this way and that to make sure no one was listening, then murmured:

  ‘Did he suffer much?’

  She had a lumpish, unintelligent face, thick ankles and red beefy arms. Yet she was the only one who had given a second thought to the suave Willy, who perhaps had squeezed her waist as a joke the evening before – if, indeed, he had.

  Maigret was reminded of the conversation he had had with the young man when he had been half stretched out on the unmade bed in his room, chain-smoking.

  The girl was wanted elsewhere. One of the watermen called to her:

  ‘Seems like you’re all upset, Emma!’

  She tried to smile and gave Maigret a conspiratorial look.

  The canal traffic had been held up all morning. There were now seven vessels, three with engines, tied up outside the Café de la Marine. The bargees’ wives came to the shop, and each one made the door bell jangle.

  ‘When you’re ready for lunch …’ the landlord said to Maigret.

  ‘In a while.’

  And from the doorway, he looked at the spot where the Southern Cross had been moored only that morning.

  The previous evening, two men, two healthy men, had stepped off it. They had walked off towards the stone bridge. If the colonel was to be believed, they’d separated after an argument, and Sir Walter had gone on his way along the three kilometres of empty, dead-straight road which led to the first houses of Épernay.

  No one had ever seen Willy alive again. When the colonel had returned in a cab, he had not noticed anything unusual.

  No witnesses! No one had heard anything! The butcher at Dizy, who lived 600 metres from the bridge, said his dog had barked, but he hadn’t investigated and could not say what time it had been.

  The towpath, awash with puddles and pools, had been used by too many men and horses for there to be any hope of finding any useful tracks.

  The previous Thursday, Mary Lampson, also fit and well to all appearances, had left the Southern Cross, where she had been alone.

  Earlier – according to Willy – she had given him a pearl necklace, the only valuable item of jewellery she owned.

  After this there was no trace of her. She had not been seen alive again. Two days had gone by when no one had reported seeing her.

  On Sunday evening, she lay strangled under a pile of straw in a stable at Dizy, a hundred kilometres from her point of departure, with two carters snoring just feet from her corpse.

  That was all! The Épernay magistrate had ordered both bodies to be transferred to cold storage in the Forensic Institute.

  The Southern Cross had just left, heading south, for Porquerolles, for the Petit Langoustier, which was no stranger to orgies.

  Maigret, head down, walked all round the building of the Café de la Marine. He beat off a bad-tempered goose which bore down on him, its beak open and shrieking with rage.

  There was no lock on the stable door, only a simple wooden latch. The hunting dog with an overfed paunch, which prowled round the yard, turned joyful circles and greeted him deliriously, as it did all visitors.

  When he opened the door, the inspector was confronted by the landlord’s grey horse, which was no more tethered now than on the other days, and made the most of the opportunity to go for a walk outside.

  The broken-winded mare was still lying in its box, looking miserable.

  Maigret moved the straw with his foot, as though hoping to find something he had missed on his first examination of the place.

  Two or three times he repeated to himself crossly:

  ‘Back to square one!’

  He had more or less made up his mind to return to Meaux, even Paris, and retrace step by step the route followed by the Southern Cross.

  There were all kinds of odds and ends lying around: old halters, bits of harness, the end of a candle, a broken pipe …

  From a distance he noticed something white poking out of a pile of hay. He went over not expecting anything much. The next moment he was holding an American sailor’s forage cap just like the one worn by Vladimir.

  The material was spattered with mud and horse droppings and misshapen as though it had been stretched in all directions.

  Maigret searched all around but failed to come up with anything else.

  Fresh straw had been put down over the spot where the body had been found to make it seem less sinister.

  ‘Am I under arrest?’

  As he walked towards the stable door, he could not have said why the colonel’s question should suddenly surface in his memory. He also saw Sir Walter, as boorish as he was aristocratic, his eyes permanently watering, the drunkenness always just beneath the surface and his amazing composure.

  He thought back to the brief talk he had had with the supercilious magistrate in the bar of the café, with its tables covered in brown oilcloth, which, through a sprinkling of polite voices and refined manners, had been magically transformed for a short time into a sophisticated drawing room.

  He kept turning the cap round and round in his hands, suspicious, with a calculating look in his eye.

  ‘Tread carefully,’ Monsieur de Clairfontaine de Lagny had told him as he took Maigret’s hand lightly.

  The goose, still furious, followed the horse, screeching abuse at it.

  The horse, letting its large head hang down, snuffled among the rubbish
littering the yard.

  On each side of the door was an old milestone. The inspector sat down on one of them, still holding the cap and his pipe, which had gone out.

  Directly ahead of him was a large dung heap, then a hedge with occasional gaps in it, and beyond were fields in which nothing was yet growing and hills streaked with black and white on which a cloud with a dark centre seemed to have rested its full weight.

  From behind one edge of it sprang an oblique shaft of sunlight which created sparkles of light on the dung heap.

  ‘An enchanting woman,’ the colonel had said of Mary Lampson.

  ‘Nothing if not a gentleman!’ Willy had said of the colonel.

  Only Vladimir had said nothing. He had just kept busy, buying supplies, petrol, filling up the tanks of drinking water, baling out the dinghy and helping his employer to dress.

  A group of Flemings passed along the road, talking in loud voices. Suddenly, Maigret bent down. The yard was paved with irregular flagstones. Two metres in front of him, in the crack between two of them, something had just been caught by the sun and glinted.

  It was a cufflink, gold with a platinum hatching. Maigret had seen a pair just like it the day before, on Willy’s wrists, when he was lying on his bed blowing cigarette smoke at the ceiling and talking so unconcernedly.

  He took no more interest in the horse or the goose or any of his surroundings. Moments later, he was turning the handle that cranked the phone.

  ‘Épernay … Yes, the mortuary! … This is the police!’

  One of the Flemings was just coming out of the café. He stopped and stared at the inspector, who was extraordinarily agitated.

  ‘Hello? … Inspector Maigret here, Police Judiciaire … You’ve just had a body brought in … No, not the car accident, this is about the man drowned at Dizy … That’s right … Find the custody officer … Go through his effects, you’ll find a cufflink … I want you to describe it to me … Yes, I’ll hang on.’

  Three minutes later, he replaced the receiver. He had the information. He was still holding the forage cap and the cufflink.

  ‘Your lunch is ready.’

  He didn’t bother to answer the girl with red hair, though she had spoken as politely as she could. He went out feeling that perhaps he was now holding one end of the thread but also fearing he would drop it.

  ‘The cap in the stables … The cufflink in the yard … And the YCF badge near the stone bridge …’

  It was that way he now started walking, very fast. Ideas formed and faded in turns in his mind.

  He had not gone a kilometre when he was astonished by what he saw dead ahead.

  The Southern Cross, which had set off in a great haste a good hour before, was now moored on the right-hand side of the bridge, among the reeds. He couldn’t see anyone on board.

  But when the inspector was less than a hundred metres short of it, a car coming from the direction of Épernay pulled up on the opposite bank. It stopped near the yacht. Vladimir, still wearing sailor’s clothes, was sitting next to the driver. He got out and ran to the boat. Before he reached it, the hatch opened, and the colonel came out on deck, holding his hand out to someone inside.

  Maigret made no attempt to hide. He couldn’t tell whether the colonel had seen him or not.

  Then things happened fast. The inspector could not hear what was said, but the way the people were behaving gave him a clear enough idea of what was happening.

  It was Madame Negretti who was being handed out of the cabin by Sir Walter. Maigret noted that this was the first time he had seen her wearing town clothes. Even from a distance it was obvious that she was very angry.

  Vladimir picked up the two suitcases which stood ready and carried them to the car.

  The colonel held out one hand to help her negotiate the gangplank, but she refused it and stepped forward so suddenly that she almost fell head first into the reeds.

  She walked on without waiting for him. He followed several paces behind, showing no reaction. She jumped into the car still in the same furious temper, thrust her head angrily out of the window and shouted something which must have been either an insult or a threat.

  However, just as the car was setting off, Sir Walter bowed courteously, watched her drive off and then went back to his boat with Vladimir.

  Maigret had not moved. He had a very strong feeling that a change had come over the Englishman.

  He did not smile. He remained his usual imperturbable self. But, for example, just as he reached the wheelhouse in the middle of saying something, he put one friendly, even affectionate, hand on Vladimir’s shoulder.

  Their cast-off was brilliantly executed. There were just the two men on board now. The Russian pulled in the gangplank and with one smooth action yanked the mooring ring free.

  The prow of the Southern Cross was fast in the reeds. A barge coming up astern hooted.

  Lampson turned round. There was no way now he could not have seen Maigret but he gave no sign of it. With one hand, he let in the clutch. With the other, he gave the brass wheel two full turns, and the yacht reversed just far enough to free herself, avoided the bow of the barge, stopped just in time and then moved forward, leaving a wake of churning foam.

  It had not gone a hundred metres when it sounded its hooter three times to let the lock at Ay know that its arrival was imminent.

  ‘Don’t waste time … Just drive … Catch up with that car if you can.’

  Maigret had flagged down a baker’s van, which was heading in the direction of Épernay. About a kilometre ahead they could see the car carrying Madame Negretti. It was moving slowly: the road was wet and greasy.

  When the inspector had stated his rank, the van driver had looked at him with amused curiosity.

  ‘Hop in. It won’t take me five minutes to catch them up.’

  ‘No, not too fast.’

  Then it was Maigret’s turn to smile when he saw that his driver was crouching over the steering wheel just like American cops do in car chases in Hollywood crime films.

  There was no need to risk life and limb, nor any kind of complication. The car stopped briefly in the first street it came to, probably to allow the passenger to confer with the driver. Then it drove off again and halted three minutes later outside what clearly was a rather expensive hotel.

  Maigret got out of the van a hundred metres behind it, thanked the baker, who refused a tip and, having decided he wanted to see more, parked a little nearer the hotel.

  A porter carried both bags in. Gloria Negretti walked briskly across the pavement.

  Ten minutes later, Maigret was talking to the manager.

  ‘The lady who has just checked in?’

  ‘Room 9. I thought there was something not quite right about her. I never saw anybody more on edge. She talked fast and used lots of foreign words. As far as I could tell, she didn’t want to be disturbed and asked for cigarettes and a bottle of kümmel to be taken up to her room. I hope at least there’s not going to be any scandal …?’

  ‘None at all!’ said Maigret. ‘Just some questions I need to ask her.’

  He could not help smiling as he neared the door with the number 9 on it, for there was lots of noise coming from inside. The young woman’s high heels clacked on the wooden floor in a haphazard way.

  She was walking to and fro, up and down, in all directions. She could be heard closing a window, tipping out a suitcase, running a tap, throwing herself on to the bed, getting up and kicking off a shoe to the other end of the room.

  Maigret knocked.

  ‘Come in!’

  Her voice was shaking with anger and impatience. Madame Negretti had not been there ten minutes and yet she had found time to change her clothes, to muss up her hair and, in a word, to revert to the way she had looked on board the Southern Cross, but to an even messier
degree.

  When she saw who it was, a flash of rage appeared in her brown eyes.

  ‘What do you want with me? What are you doing here? This is my room! I’m paying for it and …’

  She continued in a foreign language, probably Spanish, unscrewed the top off a bottle of eau de Cologne and poured most of the contents over her hands before dabbing her fevered brow with it.

  ‘May I ask you a question?’

  ‘I told them I didn’t want to see anybody. Get out! Do you hear?’

  She was walking around in her silk stockings. She was most likely not wearing garters, for they began to slide down her legs. One had already uncovered a podgy, very white knee.

  ‘Why don’t you go and put your questions to people who can give you the answers? But you don’t dare, do you? Because he’s a colonel. Because he’s Sir Walter! Don’t you just love the Sir! Ha ha! If I told you only half of what I know …

  ‘Look at this!’

  She rummaged feverishly in her handbag and produced five crumpled 1,000-franc notes.

  ‘This is what he just gave me! For what? For two years, for the two years that I’ve been living with him! That …’

  She threw the notes on the carpet then, changing her mind, picked them up again and put them back in her bag.

  ‘Of course, he promised he’d send me a cheque. But everybody knows what his promises are worth. A cheque! He won’t even have enough money to get him to Porquerolles … though that won’t stop him getting drunk on whisky every day!’

  She wasn’t crying, but there were tears in her voice. There was something unnerving about the distress exhibited by this woman who, when Maigret had seen her previously, had always seemed steeped in blissful sloth, supine in a hothouse atmosphere.

  ‘And his precious Vladimir’s just the same! He tried to kiss my hand and had the cheek to say: “It’s adieu, madame, not au revoir.”

  ‘By God, they’ve got a nerve … But when the colonel wasn’t around, Vladimir …

  ‘But it’s none of your business! Why are you still here? What are you waiting for? Are you hoping I’m going to tell you something?’

  ‘Not at all!’