Friend of Madame Maigret (15 page)

This yielded a list of all sorts of trades, some of them surprising, but by some chance nearly all connected with metals or cardboard.

“I thought I'd just mention it to you. I don't know whether it will help.”

Neither did Maigret. In a case like this, one never knows what may help. At all events this tended to support the testimony of Frans Steuvels, who had always denied being the owner of the blue suit.

But then why did he own a blue overcoat, that went so badly with a brown suit?

Telephone! Sometimes six instruments would be in use at the same time, and the switchboard operator was going out of his mind, for there were not enough people to take all the calls.

“What is it?”

“Lagny.”

Maigret had been there once. It's a little town on the edge of the Marne, with a lot of men fishing and shiny canoes. He couldn't remember the case he had been on down there, but it was in summer, and he had drunk a light white wine, the memory of which still lingered.

Lucas was taking notes, indicating to the chief inspector that this seemed important.

“Maybe we've got hold of something,” he sighed as he hung up. “That was the Lagny police station. For over a month they've been quite excited down there about a car that fell in the Marne.”

“It fell into the Marne a month ago?”

“As far as I could make out, yes. The sergeant I had on the phone was so anxious to explain and go into detail that in the end I couldn't follow a thing. Besides, he kept dropping names of people I didn't know, as if they were as famous as Jesus Christ or Pasteur, and continually going on about Old Mother Hébart or Hobart, who gets drunk every night, but who is apparently incapable of making anything up.

“To cut it short, about a month ago . . .”

“Did he tell you the exact date?”

“February 15.”

Maigret, very proud at finding a use for it, consulted the list he had just drawn up.

 

“I thought of that. This looks important, you'll see. Well, this old woman, who lives in an isolated house at the edge of the river and hires out canoes to fishermen in summer, went down to the inn for a drink, as she does every evening. When she was returning home she claims that she heard a terrific noise in the darkness and that she's sure it was the noise of a car falling into the Marne.

“The river was in spate at the time. A lane leading from the main road ends at the water's edge, and the mud must have made it slippery.”

“Did she report it to the police straight away?”

“She talked about it in the café next day. It took some time to get around. It finally reached the ears of a policeman, who questioned her.

“The policeman went down for a look, but the banks were partly submerged, and the current was so violent that navigation had to be suspended for a couple of weeks. Apparently the level is only just now getting back to normal.

“I think the truth is that they didn't take the whole matter very seriously.

“Yesterday, after receiving our alert about the chocolate-colored car, they had a phone call from someone who lives at the corner of the main road and the lane in question and claims that last month he saw, in the darkness, a car of that color turning outside his house.

“He's a petrol station proprietor who was filling up a customer's car, which explains why he was outside at that time.”

“What time?”

“Just after nine o'clock at night.”

It doesn't take two hours to get from the Champs-Élysées to Lagny, but of course there was nothing to prevent Krynker from making a detour.

“And so?”

“The police applied to the Ministry of Transport for a crane.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yesterday afternoon. There was a crowd watching it work. Anyhow in the evening they caught something, but the darkness prevented them from carrying on. They even told me the name of the hole, because all the river holes are well known to the fishermen and local people; there's one that's thirty feet deep.”

“Did they fish the car out?”

“This morning. It is in fact a Chrysler, chocolate-colored, with an Alpes-Maritimes registration number. That's not all. There's a body inside.”

“Male?”

“Female. It's terribly decomposed. Most of the clothing's been torn off by the current. It's got long gray hair.”

“The countess?”

“I don't know. They've only just discovered it. The corpse is still on the bank, under a tarpaulin, and they want to know what they're to do with it. I said I'd ring them back.”

Moers had left a few minutes too soon, for he was the man who would have been invaluable to the chief inspector, and there wasn't much chance of finding him at home.

“Would you call Dr. Paul?”

The latter answered in person.

“You're not busy? You've no plans for the day? Would it be too inconvenient if I came over and picked you up to take you to Lagny? With your bag, yes. No. It won't be a pretty sight. An old woman who's spent a month in the Marne.”

Maigret looked around and saw Lapointe glance away, blushing. The young man was obviously burning with the desire to accompany the chief.

“You haven't got a date with a girl for this afternoon?”

“Oh no, chief inspector.”

“Can you drive?”

“I've had my licence for two years.”

“Go and fetch the blue Peugeot and wait for me downstairs. Make sure there's enough petrol.”

And to Janvier, disappointed:

“You take another car and drive down slowly, questioning the garage men, innkeepers, anyone you like. It's possible that somebody else may have noticed the chocolate-colored car. I'll see you at Lagny.”

He drank the spare glass of beer, and a few minutes later Dr. Paul's cheerful beard was settling itself in the car with Lapointe proudly at the wheel.

“Shall I take the shortest way?”

“Preferably, young man.”

It was one of the first fine days, and there were a lot of cars on the road, with families and picnic baskets piled inside.

Dr. Paul told stories of postmortems, which, from his lips, became as funny as Jewish stories or ones about lunatics.

At Lagny they had to ask the way, drive out of the little town, make some long detours before arriving at a bend in the river where a crane was surrounded by at least a hundred people. The police were having as much trouble as on fair days. An officer was on the scene and seemed relieved to see the chief inspector.

The chocolate-colored car, covered with mud, grass, and scarcely identifiable flotsam, was there, upside down on the bank, with water still dripping from all its cracks. It chassis was battered, one of the windows broken, both headlights smashed, but by an extraordinary chance one door was still functioning, through which they had removed the corpse.

The latter, under the tarpaulin, formed a little heap, which no sightseer could approach without a feeling of nausea.

“I'll leave you to it, doctor.”

“Here?”

Dr. Paul would have been willing to do it. With his eternal cigarette in his mouth, he had been known to carry out postmortems in the most unlikely places, and even to break off and remove his rubber gloves in order to eat a snack.

“Can you take the body to the police station, officer?”

“My men will see to it. Stand back, everybody. And the children! Who's letting children come so close?”

Maigret was examining the car when an old woman plucked him by the sleeve and said proudly:

“It was me who found it.”

“Are you Widow Hébart?”

“Hubart, sir. That's my house that you can see behind the ash trees.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

“I didn't see anything actually, but I heard. I was coming back along the tow-path. That's the path we're on.”

“Had you had a lot to drink?”

“Only two or three little glasses.”

“Where were you?”

“Fifty yards from here, farther on, toward my house. I heard a car coming in from the main road and I said to myself it must be poachers again. Because it was too cold for lovers, and it was raining into the bargain. All I saw, when I turned round, was the beam from the headlights.

“I wasn't to know that this was going to be important some day, was I? I kept on walking and I had the impression that the car had stopped.”

“Because you couldn't hear the engine anymore?”

“Yes.”

“You had your back to the lane?”

“Yes. Then I heard the engine again and I thought the car was turning round. Not a bit of it! Immediately afterward there was a big splash, and when I looked round the car was gone.”

“You didn't hear any screams?”

“No.”

“You didn't retrace your steps?”

“Should I have? What could I have done all by myself? It had upset me. I thought the poor people had been drowned and I hurried home to get a drink to revive me.”

“You didn't stay by the water's edge?”

“No, sir.”

“You didn't hear anything after the splash?”

“I thought I heard something, like footsteps, but I decided it must be a rabbit frightened by the noise.”

“Is that all?”

“Don't you think it's enough? If they'd listened to me instead of treating me like a crazy old woman, the lady would have been out of the water long ago. Have you seen her?”

Not without a grimace of disgust, Maigret imagined this old woman contemplating the other decomposed old woman.

Did Widow Hubart realize that it was a miracle she was still alive and that if her curiosity had impelled her to turn back on that notable evening she would probably have followed the other woman into the Marne?

“Won't the reporters be coming?”

That's what she was waiting for, to have her picture in the papers.

Lapointe, covered with mud, was climbing out of the Chrysler, which he had examined.

“I didn't find a thing,” he said. “The tools are in their place in the boot, with the spare tire. There's no luggage, no handbag. There was only a woman's shoe caught in the back of the seat, and in the dashboard cupboard this pair of gloves and this electric torch.”

The pigskin gloves were a man's, so far as one could tell.

“Go over to the railway station. Someone must have taken a train that night. Unless there are any taxis in the town. Meet me at the police station.”

He preferred to wait in the courtyard, smoking his pipe, until Dr. Paul, installed in the garage, had finished his task.

“Are you disappointed, Monsieur Maigret?”

Young Lapointe was longing to say “Chief,” like Lucas, Torrence, and most of the rest of the team, but he felt too much of a newcomer for that; it seemed to him that this was a privilege he would have to earn, like winning one's spurs.

They had just driven Dr. Paul home and were on their way back to the Quai des Orfèvres, in a Paris that seemed to them more luminous after the hours spent floundering in the darkness of Lagny. From the Pont Saint-Michel, Maigret could see the light in his own office.

“I'm not disappointed. I wasn't expecting the railway employees to remember passengers whose tickets they punched a month ago.”

“I was wondering what you had in mind.”

He replied quite naturally:

“The suitcase.”

“I swear it was in the workshop the first time I went to the bookbinder's.”

“I don't doubt it.”

“I'm positive it wasn't the suitcase that Sergeant Lucas found that afternoon in the basement.”

“I don't doubt that either. Leave the car in the yard and come up.”

From the animation of the few men on duty it was clear that something had happened, and Lucas, hearing Maigret come back, hastily opened his office door.

“Some information on Moss, Chief. A girl and her father came in earlier. They wanted to speak to you personally, but after waiting almost two hours they decided to give me the message. She was a pretty girl of sixteen or seventeen, plump and pink-faced, who looks you frankly in the eye. The father's a sculptor who, if I got it straight, once won the Prix de Rome. There's another girl a bit older and a mother. They live on the boulevard Pasteur, where they manufacture toys. If I'm not mistaken, the young lady came along with her father to prevent him from having a drink on the way, which seems to be his besetting sin. He wears a big black hat and a cravat. Moss, under the name of Peeters, has been living in their house for the last few months.”

“Is he still there?”

“If he were, I'd already have sent some detectives over to arrest him, or rather I'd have gone myself. He left them on March 12.”

“In other words, the day Levine, Gloria, and the child disappeared from circulation after the scene in the place d'Anvers garden.”

“He didn't tell them he was leaving. He went out in the morning as usual and hasn't set foot in the flat again since. I thought you'd prefer to interrogate them yourself. Oh, and something else. Philippe Liotard has telephoned twice already.”

“What does he want?”

“To speak to you. He asked if you'd ring him at the Chope du Nègre if you came in before eleven tonight.”

A restaurant that Maigret knew, on the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle.