The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien Page 8

  Not too many customers were left. The red cloths and playing cards were vanishing from the pale marble tabletops. The waiter stepped outside to close the shutters, while the patronne sorted the chips into little piles, according to their value.

  ‘You’re staying?’ Belloir finally asked, in an almost unrecognizable voice.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m … not sure.’

  Then Van Damme tapped the table sharply with a coin and called to the waiter, ‘How much?’

  ‘For the round? Nine francs seventy-five.’

  The three of them were standing now, avoiding one another’s eyes, and the waiter helped each of them in turn into his overcoat.

  ‘Goodnight, gentlemen.’

  It was so foggy outside that the streetlamps were almost lost in the mist. All the shutters were closed. Somewhere in the distance, footsteps echoed along the pavement.

  There was a moment’s hesitation, for none of the men wanted to take responsibility for deciding in which direction they would go. Behind them, someone was locking the doors of the café and setting the security bars in place.

  Off to the left lay an alley of crookedly aligned old houses.

  ‘Well, gentlemen,’ announced Maigret at last, ‘the time has come to wish you goodnight.’

  He shook Belloir’s hand first; it was cold, trembling. The hand Van Damme grudgingly extended was clammy and soft.

  The inspector turned up the collar of his overcoat, cleared his throat and began walking alone down the deserted street. And all his senses were attuned to a single purpose: to perceive the faintest noise, the slightest ruffle in the air that might warn him of any danger.

  His right hand gripped the butt of the revolver in his pocket. He had the impression that in the network of alleys laid out on his left, enclosed within the centre of Liège like a small island of lepers, people were trying to hurry along without making a sound.

  He could just make out a low murmur of conversation but couldn’t tell whether it was very near or far away, because the fog was muffling his senses.

  Abruptly, he pitched to one side and flattened himself against a door just as a sharp report rang out – and someone, off in the night, took to his heels.

  Advancing a few steps, Maigret peered down the alley from which the shot had come but saw only some dark blotches that probably led into blind side alleys and, at the far end 200 metres away, the frosted-glass globe announcing a shop selling pommes frites.

  A few moments later, as he was walking past that shop, a girl emerged from it with a paper cone of golden frites. After propositioning him for form’s sake, she headed off to a brighter street.

  Grinding the pen-nib down on to the paper with his enormous index finger, Maigret was peacefully writing, pausing from time to time to tamp down the hot ashes in his pipe.

  He was ensconced in his room in the Hôtel du Chemin de Fer and according to the illuminated station clock, which he could see from his window, it was two in the morning.

  Dear old Lucas,

  As one never knows what may happen, I’m sending you the following information so that, if necessary, you will be able to carry on the inquiry I have begun.

  1. Last week, in Brussels, a shabbily dressed man who looks like a tramp wraps up thirty thousand-franc notes and sends the package to his own address, Rue de la Roquette, in Paris. The evidence will show that he often sent himself similar sums but that he did not make any use of the money himself. The proof is that charred remains of large amounts of banknotes burned on purpose have been found in his room.

  He goes by the name of Louis Jeunet and is more or less regularly employed by a workshop on his street.

  He is married (contact Mme Jeunet, herbalist, Rue Picpus) and has a child. After some acute episodes of alcoholism, however, he leaves his wife and child under mysterious and troubling circumstances.

  In Brussels, after posting the money, he buys a suitcase in which to transport some things he’s been keeping in a hotel room. While he is on his way to Bremen, I replace his suitcase with another.

  Then Jeunet, who does not appear to have been contemplating suicide and who has already bought something for his supper, kills himself upon realizing that the contents of his suitcase have been stolen.

  The stolen property is an old suit that does not belong to him and which, years earlier, had been torn as if in a struggle and drenched with blood. This suit was made in Liège.

  In Bremen, a man comes to view the corpse: Joseph Van Damme, an import-export commission agent, born in Liège.

  In Paris, I learn that Louis Jeunet is in reality Jean Lecocq d’Arneville, born in Liège, where he studied to graduate level. He disappeared from Liège about ten years ago and no one there has had any news of him, but he has no black marks against his name.

  2. In Rheims, before he leaves for Brussels, Jean Lecocq d’Arneville is observed one night entering the home of Maurice Belloir, deputy director of a local bank and born in Liège, who denies this allegation.

  But the thirty thousand francs sent from Brussels were supplied by this same Belloir.

  At Belloir’s house I encounter: Van Damme, who has flown in from Bremen; Jef Lombard, a photoengraver in Liège; and Gaston Janin, who was also born in that city.

  As I am travelling back to Paris with Van Damme, he tries to push me into the Marne.

  And I find him again in Liège, in the home of Jef Lombard, who was an active painter around ten years ago and has covered the walls of his home with works from that period depicting hanged men.

  When I consult the local newspaper archives, I find that all the papers of 15 February in the year of the hanged men have been stolen by Van Damme.

  That evening, an unsigned letter promises to tell me everything and gives me an appointment in a local café. There I find not one man, but three: Belloir (in from Rheims), Van Damme and Jef Lombard.

  They are not pleased to see me. I have the feeling that it’s one of these men who has decided to talk; the others seem to be there simply to prevent this.

  Lombard cracks under the strain and leaves abruptly. I stay with the other two men. Shortly past midnight, I take leave of them outside, in the fog, and a few moments later a shot is fired at me.

  I conclude both that one of the three tried to talk to me and that one of the same three tried to eliminate me.

  And clearly, given that this last action amounts to a confession, the person in question has no recourse but to try again and not miss me.

  But who is it? Belloir, Van Damme, Lombard?

  I’ll find out when he tries again. Since accidents do happen, I’m sending you these notes on the off chance, so that you will be familiar with the inquiry from the very beginning.

  To see the human side of this case, look in particular at Mme Jeunet and Armand Lecocq d’Arneville, the dead man’s brother.

  And now I’m going to bed. Give my best to everybody back there.

  Maigret

  The fog had faded away, leaving beads of pearly hoarfrost on the trees and every blade of grass in Square d’Avroy. A chilly sun gleamed in the pale-blue sky as Maigret crossed the square, and with each passing minute the melting frost fell in limpid drops to the gravel.

  It was eight in the morning when the inspector strode through the still-deserted Carré, where the folded sandwich boards of film posters stood propped against closed shutters.

  When Maigret stopped at a mailbox to post his letter to Sergeant Lucas, he took a moment to look around him and felt a pang at the thought that somewhere in the city, in those streets bathed in sunlight, a man was at that very moment thinking about him, a man whose salvation depended upon killing him. And the man had the home-ground advantage over the inspector, as he had proved the night before by vanishing into the maze of alleys.

  He knew Maigret, too, and was perhaps even watching him where he stood, whereas the inspector did not know who he was.

  Could he be Jef Lombard? Did the danger lie in the ramshackle
house in Rue Hors-Château, where a woman and her newborn lay sleeping upstairs, watched over by her loving old mother, while her husband’s employees worked nonchalantly among the acid baths, hustled along by bicycle messengers from the newspapers?

  Joseph Van Damme, a bold, moody and aggressive man, always scheming: was he not lying in wait for the inspector in a place where he knew Maigret would eventually appear?

  Because that fellow had foreseen everything ever since Bremen! Three lines in a German newspaper – and he showed up at the morgue! He had lunch with Maigret and then beat him to Rheims!

  And beat him again to Rue Hors-Château! Beat the investigator to the newspaper archives!

  He was even at the Café de la Bourse!

  True, there was nothing to prove that he was the one who had decided to talk to Maigret. But there was nothing to prove that he wasn’t!

  Perhaps it was Maurice Belloir, so cold and formal, the haughty provincial grand bourgeois, who had taken a shot at him in the fog. Maybe he was the one whose only hope was to polish off Maigret.

  Or Gaston Janin, the little sculptor with the goatee: he hadn’t been at the Café de la Bourse, but he could have been lying in ambush in the street …

  And what connected all that to a hanged man swinging from a church-steeple cross? Or to clusters of hanged men? Or to forests of trees that bore no fruit but hanged men? Or to an old bloodstained suit with lapels clawed by desperate fingernails?

  Typists were going off to work. A municipal street sweeper rolled slowly past, its double-nozzle sprayer and brush roller pushing rubbish into the gutter. At street corners, the local police in their white enamel helmets directed traffic with their shiny white gauntlets.

  ‘Police headquarters?’ Maigret inquired.

  He followed the directions and arrived while the cleaning ladies were still busy, but a cheerful clerk welcomed his French colleague and, upon the inspector’s request to examine some ten-year-old police records, but only for the month of February, the man exclaimed in surprise: ‘You’re the second person in twenty-four hours! You want to know if a certain Joséphine Bollant was in fact arrested for domestic larceny back then, right?’

  ‘Someone came here?’

  ‘Yesterday, towards five in the afternoon. A citizen of Liège who’s made it big abroad even though he’s still quite a young man! His father was a doctor, and him, he’s got a fine business going, in Germany.’

  ‘Joseph Van Damme?’

  ‘The very man! But no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find what he wanted.’

  ‘Would you show me?’

  It was a green index-book of daily reports bound in numerical order. Five entries were listed for 15 February: two for drunkenness and breach of the peace at night, one for shoplifting, one for assault and battery and the last one for breach of close and stealing rabbits.

  Maigret didn’t bother to look at them. He simply checked the numbers at the top of each form.

  ‘Did Monsieur Van Damme consult the book himself?’

  ‘Yes. He took it into the office next door.’

  ‘Thank you!’

  The five reports were numbered 237, 238, 239, 241 and 242.

  In other words, number 240 was missing and had been torn out just as the archived newspapers had been ripped from their bindings.

  A few minutes later, Maigret was standing in the square behind the town hall, where cars were pulling up to deliver a wedding party. In spite of himself, he was straining to catch the faintest sound, unable to shake a slight feeling of anxiety that he didn’t like at all.

  8. Little Klein

  He had made it just in time: it was nine o’clock. The employees of the town hall were arriving for work, crossing the main courtyard there and pausing a moment to greet one another on the handsome stone steps, at the top of which a doorkeeper with a braided cap and nicely groomed beard was smoking his pipe.

  It was a meerschaum. Maigret noticed this detail, without knowing why; perhaps because it was glinting in the morning sun, because it looked well seasoned and because for a moment the inspector envied this man who was smoking in voluptuous little puffs, standing there as a symbol of peace and joie de vivre.

  For that morning the air was like a tonic that grew more bracing as the sun rose higher into the sky. A delightful cacophony reigned, of people shouting in a Walloon dialect, the shrill clanging of the red and yellow streetcars, and the splashing of the four jets in the monumental Perron Fountain doing its best to be heard over the hubbub of the surrounding Place du Marché.

  And when Maigret happened to see Joseph Van Damme head up one side of the double staircase leading to the main lobby, he hurried after him. Inside the building, the two staircases continued up on opposite sides, reuniting on each floor. On one landing, the two men found themselves face to face, panting from their exertion, struggling to appear perfectly at ease before the usher with his silver chain of office.

  What happened next was short and swift. A question of precision, of split-second timing.

  While dashing up the stairs, Maigret had realized that Van Damme had come only to make something disappear, as he had at police headquarters and the newspaper archives.

  One of the police reports for 15 February had already been torn out. But in most cities, didn’t the police send a copy of all daily reports to the mayor the next morning?

  ‘I would like to see the town clerk,’ announced Maigret, with Van Damme only two steps behind him. ‘It’s urgent …’

  Their eyes met. They hesitated. The moment for shaking hands passed. When the usher turned expectantly to the businessman from Bremen, he simply murmured, ‘It’s nothing, I’ll come back later.’

  He left. The sound of his footsteps died away as he crossed the lobby downstairs.

  Shortly afterwards, Maigret was shown into an opulent office, where the town clerk – ramrod straight in his morning coat and a very high collar – quickly began the search for the ten-year-old daily police reports.

  The room was warm, the carpets soft and springy. A sunbeam lit up a bishop’s crozier in a historical painting that took up one whole section of wall.

  After half an hour’s hunting and a few polite exchanges, Maigret found the reports about the stolen rabbits, the public drunkenness, the shoplifting and then, between two minor incidents, the following lines:

  Officer Lagasse, of Division No. 6, was proceeding this morning at six o’clock to the Pont des Arches to take up his post there when, on passing the main door of the Church of Saint-Pholien, he observed a body hanging from the door knocker.

  A doctor was immediately summoned but could only confirm the death of the young man, one Émile Klein, born in Angleur, twenty years old, a house painter living in Rue du Pot-au-Noir.

  Klein had hanged himself, apparently around the middle of the night, with the aid of a window-blind cord. His pockets held only a few items of no value and some small change.

  The inquiry established that the deceased had not been regularly employed for three months, and he seems to have been driven to his action by destitution.

  His mother, Madame Klein, a widow who lives in Angleur on a modest pension, has been notified.

  There followed hours of feverish activity. Maigret vigorously pursued this new line of inquiry and yet, without being really aware of it, he was less interested in finding out about Klein than he was in finding Van Damme.

  For only then, when he had the businessman again in his sights, would he be closing in on the truth. Hadn’t it all started in Bremen? And from then on, whenever Maigret scored a point, hadn’t he come up against Van Damme?

  Van Damme, who had seen him at the town hall, now knew that he’d read the report, that he was tracking down Klein.

  At Angleur, nothing! The inspector had taken a taxi deep into an industrial area where small working-class houses, all cast from the same mould in the same sooty grey, lined up on dismal streets at the feet of factory chimneys.

  A woman was washing th
e doorstep of one such house, where Madame Klein had lived.

  ‘It’s at least five years since she passed away.’

  Van Damme would not be skulking around that neighbourhood.

  ‘Didn’t her son live with her?’

  ‘No! And he made a bad end of it: he did away with himself, at the door of a church.’

  That was all. Maigret learned only that Klein’s father had been a foreman in a coalfield and that after his death his wife lived off a small pension, occupying only a garret in the house, which she sublet.

  ‘To Police Division No. 6,’ he told the taxi driver.

  As for Officer Lagasse, he was still alive, but he hardly remembered anything.

  ‘It had rained the whole night, he was soaked, and his red hair was sticking to his face.’

  ‘He was tall? Short?’

  ‘Short, I’d say.’

  Maigret went next to the gendarmerie, spending almost an hour in offices that smelled of leather and horse sweat.

  ‘If he was twenty years old at the time, he must have been seen by an army medical board … Did you say Klein, with a K?’

  They found Form 13, in the ‘registrant not acceptable’ file, and Maigret copied down the information: height 1.55 metres, chest .80 metres, and a note mentioning ‘weak lungs’.

  But Van Damme had still not shown up. Maigret had to look elsewhere. The only result of that morning’s inquiries was the certainty that clothing B had never belonged to the hanged man of Saint-Pholien, who had been just a shrimp.

  Klein had killed himself. There had been no struggle, not a drop of blood shed.

  So what tied him to the Bremen tramp’s suitcase and the suicide of Lecocq d’Arneville, alias Louis Jeunet?

  ‘Drop me off here … And tell me how to find Rue Pot-au-Noir.’

  ‘Behind the church, the street that runs down to Quai Sainte-Barbe.’

  After paying off his taxi in front of Saint-Pholien, Maigret took a good look at the new church standing alone in a vast stretch of waste land.

  To the right and left of it were boulevards lined by apartment houses built at about the same time as the present church, but behind it there still remained part of the old neighbourhood the city had cut into to make room for Saint-Pholien.