Friend of Madame Maigret (3 page)

“It was an ordinary cheap suitcase, and I knocked against it by mistake. I was surprised it hurt so much and I realized why when I tried to lift it, because it was unusually heavy.”

Yet at five in the afternoon, the time of the search by Lucas, the suitcase was no longer there. To be more precise, there was still a suitcase, also brown, also cheap, but Lapointe maintained that it was not the same one.

“That's the suitcase I took to Concarneau,” Fernande had said. “We've never owned another one. We hardly travel at all.”

Lapointe was unshakeable, swore it was not the same suitcase, that the first one was lighter in color, with its handle tied up with string.

“If I had had a suitcase to mend,” retorted Steuvels, “I wouldn't have used string. Don't forget that I'm a bookbinder and a skilled leather-worker.”

Then Philippe Liotard had set off to collect testimonials from bibliophiles, and it had turned out that Steuvels was one of the best bookbinders in Paris, possibly the best, and that collectors entrusted their delicate work to him, especially the restoration of antique bindings.

Everybody agreed that he was an even-tempered man who spent practically his whole life in his workshop and the police were raking through his past to no avail in search of the slightest equivocal detail.

True, there was that episode in Fernande's career. He had known her when she was on the streets, and it was he who had taken her away from it all. But there was absolutely nothing against Fernande either, since that already long-distant period.

Torrence had been at Concarneau for four days. At the post office the original of the telegram had been found, printed by hand in block letters. The postmistress thought she remembered that it was a woman who had handed it across the counter, and Torrence was still searching, compiling a list of recent arrivals from Paris, questioning two hundred people a day.

“We are fed up with the so-called infallibility of Chief Inspector Maigret!”
Maître Liotard had declared to a journalist.

And he made reference to some trouble in a by-election in the Third Arrondissement, which might well have induced certain people to precipitate a scandal in the district for political ends.

Judge Dossin, too, was getting it in the neck, and these attacks, not always discreet, made him blush.

“You haven't a single new clue?”

“I'm still looking. There are ten of us looking, sometimes more, and we're interrogating some people for the twentieth time. Lucas is hoping to find the tailor who made the blue suit.”

As always happens when a case arouses popular opinion, they were receiving hundreds of letters a day, almost all of which sent them off on false trails, causing them to waste a great deal of time. Nevertheless, everything was scrupulously checked, and even lunatics who claimed to know something were given a hearing.

At ten minutes to one Maigret got out of the bus on the corner of the boulevard Voltaire and glancing up at his windows, as he always did, was a little surprised to see that the one in the dining room was closed, in spite of the bright sun shining directly on it.

He walked heavily upstairs and turned the doorknob, which didn't yield. Occasionally, when Madame Maigret was dressing or undressing, she would lock the door. He opened it with his own key, found himself in a cloud of blue smoke, and dashed into the kitchen to turn off the gas. In the casserole all that was left of the chicken, carrot and onion was a blackened crust.

He opened all the windows, and when Madame Maigret, all out of breath, pushed open the door half an hour later she found him sitting there with a hunk of bread and a piece of cheese.

“What time is it?”

“Half past one,” he said calmly.

He had never seen her in such a state, her hat crooked, her lip quivering tremulously.

“Whatever you do, don't laugh.”

“I'm not laughing.”

“Don't scold me either. I couldn't help it and I'd like to have seen you in my position. And to think that you're reduced to eating a piece of cheese for lunch!”

“The dentist?”

“I haven't seen the dentist. Since a quarter to eleven I've been in the middle of the place d'Anvers, without being able to move.”

“Were you taken ill?”

“Have I ever been taken ill in my life? No. It was on account of the baby. And in the end, when he began to cry and create a scene, there I was looking like a kidnapper.”

“What baby? A baby what?”

“I told you about the lady in blue and her child, but you never do listen to me. The one I met on the bench while I was waiting my turn at the dentist's. This morning she suddenly got up and went off, asking me to watch the child for a moment.”

“And she didn't come back? What did you do with the boy?”

“She finally did come back, just a quarter of an hour ago. I came home in a taxi.”

“What did she say when she came back?”

“To crown it all she didn't even speak to me. I was in the middle of the square, stuck there like a scarecrow, with the little boy yelling fit to draw a crowd.

“I finally saw a taxi stopping on the corner of the avenue Trudaine and I recognized the white hat. She didn't even bother to get out. She half-opened the door, beckoned to me. The child was running ahead of me, and I was afraid he'd get run over. He reached the taxi first, and the door was closing again by the time I got there.

“‘Tomorrow,” she called. “I'll explain tomorrow. Forgive me . . .”

“She didn't thank me. The taxi was already going off in the direction of the boulevard Rochechouart and it turned left towards Pigalle.”

She stopped, breathless, took off her hat with such a brusque movement that she rumpled her hair.

“Are you laughing?”

“Of course not.”

“You may as well admit that it makes you laugh. All the same she did leave her child in the charge of a stranger for more than two hours. She doesn't even know my name.”

“And you? Do you know hers?”

“No.”

“Do you know where she lives?”

“I don't know anything at all except that I missed my appointment, my lovely chicken is burnt, and you're eating a piece of cheese off a corner of the table like a . . . like a . . .”

Then, not able to find the word, she began to cry, making for the bedroom door in order to go and change her dress.

Maigret had a manner all his own of climbing the two flights of stairs at the Quai des Orfèvres, his expression remaining pretty indifferent at first, at the foot of the staircase, where the light from outside struck it almost full strength, then growing more and more preoccupied the deeper he penetrated into the gray shadows of the old building, as though official worries thrust themselves more heavily upon him as he drew nearer to them.

By the time he passed the porter he was already the chief. Recently he had got into the habit, both morning and afternoon, before pushing open his own door, of dropping into the inspectors' office and, his hat on his head, his overcoat on his back, going in to see the Grand Turenne.

This was the latest catchphrase at Headquarters, and it was indicative of the stature the Steuvels case had attained. Lucas, who had found himself left in charge of centralizing information, collating it, and keeping it up to date, had quickly been swamped, for it was also his job to answer telephone calls, open all mail concerning the case, and interview informants.

Incapable of working in the inspectors' office, where there was constant coming and going, he had taken refuge in an adjoining room on the door of which a facetious hand had before long written:
The Grand Turenne.

As soon as a detective had finished an assignment, as soon as anyone came back from a job, a colleague would ask him:

“Are you free?”

“Yes.”

“Go in and see the Grand Turenne. He's recruiting!”

It was true. Little Lucas never had enough staff for all the checks he had to make, and there was probably nobody left in the department who hadn't been sent out at least once to the rue de Turenne.

They all knew the crossroads, near the bookbinder's, with the three cafés: first the café-restaurant on the corner of the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, then the Grand Turenne opposite, and lastly, thirty yards off, at the corner of the place des Vosges, the Tabac des Vosges, which the newspapermen had adopted as their headquarters.

For they were in on the case too. The detectives, for their part, took their drinks at the Grand Turenne from the windows of which you could see the Flemish bookbinder's workshop. This was
their
headquarters, and Lucas's office had turned into a sort of local branch.

The most amazing thing was that good old Lucas, chained down by his classification work, was probably the only one who still hadn't set foot on the scene of action since his visit there the first day.

Nevertheless it was he who knew that corner better than any of them. He knew that after the Grand Turenne (the café!) came a high-class wine merchant's, Les Caves de Bourgogne, and he was acquainted with its proprietors; he only needed to consult a card to find out what they had told every interrogator.

No. They hadn't seen anything. But on Saturday evenings they left for the Chevreuse valley where they would spend the weekend in a cottage they had built themselves.

After Les Caves de Bourgogne came the shop of a cobbler named Monsieur Bousquet.

He, on the other hand, talked too much; only he had the defect of not telling everybody the same thing. It depended on what time of day he was questioned, how many aperitifs and brandies he had gone to drink at one of the three cafés, he didn't care which.

Then came Frère's stationery shop, semi-wholesale, and at the rear, in the courtyard, there was a cardboard-making business.

Above Frans Steuvels's workshop, on the first floor of the former mansion, jewelry was mass produced. This was the firm of Sass & Lapinsky, which employed about twenty girls and four or five men, the latter all with outlandish names.

Everybody had been questioned, some of them four or five times, by various inspectors, not to mention the numerous inquiries of the reporters. Two deal tables in Lucas's office were covered with papers, plans, memoranda, and he was the only man who could find his way around in the muddle.

And indefatigably Lucas went on bringing his notes up to date. Once more this afternoon Maigret came back to take up his position behind his back, not saying anything, pulling gently on his pipe.

A page headed
Motives
was black with notes which had been crossed out one by one.

They had looked for a political angle. Not in the direction Maître Liotard had indicated because that wouldn't hold water. But Steuvels, who lived like a recluse, might have belonged to some subversive organization.

This hadn't led anywhere. The deeper they looked into his life, the more they realized that it was unexceptionable. The books in his library, examined one by one, were books selected from the works of the best writers of the whole world by an intelligent, unusually cultured man. Not only did he read and re-read them, but he made notes in the margins.

Jealousy? Fernande never went out without him except to do her shopping in the neighborhood, and from where he sat he could almost keep an eye on her in all the shops she patronized.

They had wondered if there might be a connection between the presumed murder and the proximity of Messrs Sass & Lapinsky. Nothing had been stolen from the jewelry manufacturers. Neither the owner nor the employees knew the bookbinder, except by sight behind his window.

Nothing from the Belgian angle either. Steuvels had left there at the age of eighteen and had never been back. He wasn't interested in politics, and there was no indication that he might belong to a Flemish extremist movement.

They had thought of everything. Lucas was accepting the craziest suggestions as a matter of duty; he would open the door of the inspectors' office and call one of them at random.

They knew what that meant. A new check to be made, in the rue de Turenne or somewhere else.

“I may have got hold of something,” he said to Maigret this time, pouncing on a sheet of paper among the scattered files. “I had a notice sent out to all taxi drivers. One's just left here, a naturalized Russian. I'll get it checked.”

This was the word in vogue.
Check!

“I wanted to find out whether any taxi had brought one person or more to the bookbinder's after dark on Saturday, February 17. The driver, by the name of Georges Peskine, was hailed by three people that Saturday at about quarter past eight near the Gare Saint-Lazare, and they told him to take them to the corner of the rue de Turenne and the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. So it was after half past eight when he dropped them off, which doesn't fit too badly with the concierge's testimony about the noise she heard. The driver doesn't know who his fares were. But according to him the one who seemed the most important of the three, the one who spoke to him, was a Levantine.”

“What language were they speaking to each other?”

“French. One of the others, a big, fair, rather heavy man of around thirty, blessed with a strong Hungarian accent, seemed to be worried, uneasy. The third, a middle-aged Frenchman, not so well dressed as his companions, didn't seem quite up to them socially.

“When they got out of the cab the Levantine paid, and all three of them walked back up the rue de Turenne toward the bookbinder's.”

If it hadn't been for this business of the taxi Maigret might never have thought of his wife's adventure.