A Man's Head (6 page)

He did not need to say anything. He sat down beside them.

Maigret, who looked as though he was thinking about something quite different, stared vaguely up at the counter, behind which the landlord stood, looking meek and contrite, and called:

‘Rum!'

Again, his hand felt in his pockets for his pipe.

‘Give me a cigarette,' he breathed to Janvier.

Janvier wished he could have thought of something to say. But he felt so devastated when he saw his chief's sagging shoulders that all he could do was sniff and turn his head away.

In his apartment overlooking the Champ-de-Mars, Coméliau the magistrate was hosting a dinner for twenty guests which was scheduled to be followed by an informal gathering where there would be dancing.

Meanwhile, Dufour had been laid on a steel table, and one of the Grenelle doctors got into a white gown while he watched his instruments being sterilized.

‘Do you think the scar will be visible?' Dufour asked. The way he was lying meant that all he could see was the ceiling. ‘The skull's not cracked, is it?'

‘Of course not! It just needs a few stitches.'

‘And will the hair grow back? … Are you sure? …'

The doctor, his forceps gleaming in his hand, nodded to his assistant to hold the patient still.

The patient choked back a cry of pain.

Maigret did not flinch once, did not register the slightest trace of protest or impatience.

Solemn-faced, his features drawn, he listened to the end with deference and humility.

Perhaps his Adam's apple may have suddenly twitched at the moments when Monsieur Coméliau was at his most inflexible and vehement.

Thin, excitable and tense, the examining magistrate was pacing up and down in his office. He spoke so loudly that remand prisoners who were waiting in the corridor to be seen must have overheard snatches of what he was saying.

At times, he would pick up an object, which he briefly juggled in his hands before slamming it down again on his desk.

The clerk of the court was embarrassed and lowered his eyes, Maigret stood there and waited, a full head taller than the magistrate.

After a final reproving word, Coméliau scrutinized the face of the man before him but then looked away because, after all, Maigret was a man of forty-five who for twenty years had devoted himself to the most varied and delicate kinds of police
business.

And above all, he was a man!

‘But haven't you got anything to say for yourself?'

‘I have just informed my superiors that they will have my resignation within ten days if I have failed to deliver the guilty man to them.'

‘In other words, failed to get your hands on Joseph Heurtin.'

‘To deliver the guilty man to them,' repeated Maigret simply.

The magistrate jumped like a jack-in-the-box.

‘So you still think …?'

Maigret remained silent. Monsieur Coméliau snapped his fingers and said hurriedly:

‘I think we'll leave it there, if you don't mind. Go on like this and you'll drive me crazy … When you've got something, phone me.'

The inspector made his farewell and walked along the familiar corridors. But before going down to the street, he climbed up to the top floor, under the eaves of the Palais de Justice, and pushed open the door of the police forensic labs.

One of the specialists, seeing him suddenly standing in front of him, was struck by his appearance and, as he held out his hand, asked:

‘Things not so good?'

‘Everything's fine, thanks.'

He was staring, but at nothing in particular. He kept his dark overcoat on and his hands in its pockets. He looked like a man who, after a long journey, sees old, familiar places with new eyes.

It was with those eyes that he glanced through the photographs which had been taken the previous evening in a flat which had been burgled and read the record cards which one of his colleagues had sent for.

In one corner, a man, young, clean-shaven, tall and thin, with short-sighted eyes behind thick lenses, was watching him, looking surprised and apprehensive.

On his bench were magnifying glasses in all strengths, scraper-erasers, tweezers, bottles of ink, reagents plus a glass screen lit by a strong electric lamp.

The man was Moers, and he specialized in the study of paper, inks and handwriting.

He knew that it was him that Maigret had come to see.

Yet the inspector had not looked his way once, but instead had wandered around aimlessly.

Eventually, he took a pipe from his pocket, lit it and said in a voice that did not ring quite true:

‘Right, then. Let's get to work!'

Moers, who knew where the inspector had just come from, got the message but pretended not to have noticed that something seemed wrong.

Maigret took his top coat off, yawned and exercised the muscles of his face, as if he were trying to become himself again. He grabbed the back of a chair, dragged it close to the young man, straddled it and said affectionately:

‘So, Moers?'

It was over. He had finally shrugged off the weight he'd been carrying on his shoulders.

‘So what have you got?'

‘I spent all night on the note. It's a pity it has been fingered by so many people. There's no point looking for prints on it now …'

‘I wasn't counting on anything.'

‘I spent over an hour this morning at the Coupole … I tested all the inkwells. Do you know the place? There are several separate rooms: first, the main café area, part of which becomes a restaurant at meal times. Then there's
the room on the first floor, the terrace outside and finally a small American-type saloon bar on the left, where all the regulars go.'

‘I know it.'

‘It was the ink in the saloon bar that was used to write the note. The words were written with the left hand, not by a left-handed person, but by someone who knows that almost everything that is written with the left hand has a family
resemblance.'

The letter sent to
Le Sifflet
was still displayed on the glass screen in front of Moers.

‘One thing is certain. Whoever sent it is an educated man, and I'd swear that he speaks and writes fluently several languages. Now, if I try my hand at graphology … But we're straying from the realm of the exact
sciences.'

‘Stray away.'

‘Well, if I'm not very mistaken, we have here someone exceptional. Very obviously, intelligence way above average. But the most disturbing thing is a mixture of strong will and weakness, coldness and emotivity. It's a man's
handwriting. Yet I have noted features denoting a definitely feminine nature …'

Moers was now riding his hobby horse. He grew pink with pleasure. Unconsciously Maigret gave a little smile, and the young man looked embarrassed:

‘Of course, I know all this isn't very clear and that any examining magistrate wouldn't even listen to the end of what I have to say. Even so … Look, sir, I'd bet that the man who wrote this letter is suffering
from serious illness and knows it … If he'd used his right hand, I could tell you a lot more. Oh! I forgot, there's one more thing. There were stains on the paper, though they might have been left there in the print-room. But one of these stains is of café au lait. And
lastly, the top of the sheet was not cut off with a knife, but with a round object, like a spoon.'

‘So, the note was written yesterday morning, in the bar of the Coupole, by a customer who'd ordered a café au lait and speaks several languages …'

Maigret stood up, held out his hand and murmured:

‘Thanks for that. Now, if you'll let me have the note back …'

He left and growled a goodbye to the other people there. As the door closed behind him, someone said with a certain admiration:

‘See that? For someone who's taken a tough blow …!'

But Moers, whose worship of Maigret was well known, glared at him. The man said no more and went back to the analysis he was engaged on.

Paris was wearing the cheerless face it always has in the unlovely days of October. Harsh daylight fell from a sky which resembled a dirty ceiling. Traces of the previous night's rain still glistened on the pavements.

The pedestrians had the grim air of people who have not yet adapted to winter.

During the night, orders of the day had been typed up at the Préfecture, taken by messenger to various police stations and sent by telegraph to all gendarmerie headquarters, customs posts and the railway police.

As a result, while the crowds walked past, all police officers, as well as uniformed constables and inspectors in the Highways Department, the Vice Squad, the hotel and drugs agencies – had the same description clearly in their minds and stared at
passers-by, hoping to find the man who fitted it.

It was like this from one end of Paris to the other. It was the same in the suburbs. Gendarmes patrolling the main roads demanded to see the papers of every tramp and vagrant.

On trains, at frontiers, people were surprised at being questioned more closely than usual.

The hunt was on for Joseph Heurtin, sentenced to death by the Seine Assizes, who had escaped from the Santé prison after a scuffle with Inspector Dufour in the bar of the Citanguette.

When he made his escape, all he had left was twenty-two francs in his pocket
, said the service notes which Maigret had written.

The inspector left the Palais de Justice unaccompanied, without even calling in at his office on the Quai des Orfèvres, caught a bus to Bastille and rang the bell of a door on the third floor of a building in Rue du Chemin-Vert.

There was a smell of iodoform and boiled chicken. A woman who had not yet had time even to comb her hair said:

‘Ah! He'll be ever so pleased to see you …'

Inspector Dufour was in bed in his room. He looked dejected and tense.

‘How are you, son?'

‘Mustn't grumble. They say my hair won't grow on scar tissue and that I'll have to wear a wig.'

Just as he had done in the lab, Maigret paced around the room like a man who doesn't know where to put himself. Eventually, he muttered:

‘Do you blame me?'

Dufour's wife, who was still young and pretty, was standing in the frame of the door.

‘Him? Blame you? Since first thing this morning he's been telling me over and over how worried he is about how you're going to get out of the fix you're in … He wanted me to go down to the post-office and ring you
up!'

‘Oh, no need to worry. Right then … I'll be seeing you,' said the inspector. ‘I must be off.'

He did not go home, although he lived only 500 metres from there, in Boulevard Richard Lenoir. He began walking, because he needed to walk, needed to feel the indifferent crowd brush against him.

As he progressed through Paris in this frame of mind, the dejected air of earlier that morning, which made him look like a schoolboy who had been caught red-handed, began to fade. His features hardened. He smoked pipe after pipe, as he did on his
good days.

Monsieur Coméliau would have been very surprised, and doubtless indignant, if he had suspected that the least of the inspector's worries was to find Joseph Heurtin.

That, for Maigret, was a secondary issue. The condemned man had to be somewhere in the middle of several million people. But he was convinced that the day he needed him, he'd easily be able to get hold of him.

No, he was thinking of the letter written at the Coupole. And also, and maybe more, of one question he reproved himself for having failed to ask during his first investigation.

But back in July everyone had been so convinced of Heurtin's guilt! The examining magistrate had taken over the inquiry himself from the start, thus sidelining the police.

‘The crime was committed at Saint-Cloud at about two in the morning. Heurtin was back in Rue Monsieur-le-Prince before four. He didn't take a train or a tram or any other form of public transport. Nor did he take a taxi. His
three-wheeled carrier never left his employer's premises in Rue de Sèvres.

‘And he wouldn't have had time to come back on foot. If he had, he would have had to run all the way without stopping!'

The streets of Montparnasse were bustling with life. It was half past twelve. Though it was autumn, the terraces of the four large cafés which stood in a row just by Boulevard Raspail were heaving with customers, eighty per cent of whom were
foreigners.

Maigret walked to the Coupole, found the entrance to the American Bar and went in.

There were just five tables, all taken. Most of the customers were perched on high bar stools or stood at the counter.

The inspector heard someone ordering:

‘A Manhattan!'

And he added casually:

‘Same here.'

He belonged to the generation that was raised on brasseries and beer. The bartender pushed a dish of olives under his nose, which he ignored.