The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (3 page)

Carrying the dead man's suit,
still wrinkled from the suitcase, he went next door on tiptoe so as not to awaken
other guests, and perhaps because he felt burdened by this mystery.

The outline on the floor was contorted,
but accurately drawn.

When Maigret tried to fit the jacket,
waistcoat and trousers into the outline, his eyes lit up, and he bit down hard on
his pipe-stem. The clothing was at least three sizes too large: it did not belong to
the dead man.

What the tramp had been keeping so
protectively in his suitcase, a thing so precious to him that he'd killed
himself when it was lost, was someone else's suit!

The Bremen newspapers simply announced in
a few lines that a Frenchman named Louis Jeunet, a mechanic, had committed suicide
in a hotel in the city and that poverty seemed to have been the motive for his
act.

But by the time those lines appeared the
following morning, that information was no longer correct. In fact, while leafing
through Jeunet's passport, Maigret had noticed an interesting detail: on the
sixth page, in the column listing
age
,
height
,
hair
,
forehead
,
eyebrows
and so on for the bearer's
description, the word
forehead
appeared before
hair
instead of
after it.

It so happened that six months earlier,
the Paris Sûreté had discovered in Saint-Ouen a veritable factory for fake
passports, military records, foreign residence permits and other official documents,
a certain number of which they had seized. The counterfeiters themselves had
admitted, however, that hundreds of their forgeries had been in circulation for
several years and that, because they had kept no records, they could not provide a
list of their customers.

The passport proved that Louis Jeunet
had been one of them, which meant that his name was not Louis Jeunet.

And so, the single more or less solid
fact in this inquiry had melted away. The man who had killed himself that night was
now a complete unknown.

Having been
granted all the authorization he needed, at nine o'clock the next morning
Maigret arrived at the morgue, which the general public was free to visit after it
opened its doors for the day.

He searched in vain for a dark corner
from which to keep watch, although he really didn't expect much in the way of
results. The morgue was a modern building, like most of the city and all its public
buildings, and it was even more sinister than the ancient morgue in Quai de
l'Horloge, in Paris. More sinister precisely because of its sharp, clean lines
and perspectives, the uniform white of the walls, which reflected a harsh light, and
the refrigeration units as shiny as machines in a power station. The place looked
like a model factory: one where the raw material was human bodies.

The man who had called himself Louis
Jeunet was there, less disfigured than might have been expected, because specialists
had partially reconstructed his face. There were also a young woman and a drowned
fellow who'd been fished from the harbour.

Brimming with health and tightly
buttoned into his spotless uniform, the guard looked like a museum attendant.

In the space of an hour, surprisingly
enough, some thirty people passed through the viewing hall. When one woman asked to
see a body that was not on display, electric bells rang and numbers were barked into
a telephone.

In an area on the first floor, one of
the drawers in a vast cabinet filling an entire wall glided out into a freight lift,
and a few moments later a steel box emerged on the ground floor just as books in
some libraries are delivered to reading rooms.

It was the body that had been requested.
The woman
bent over it – and was led away,
sobbing, to an office at the far end of the hall, where a young clerk took down her
statement.

Few people took any interest in Louis
Jeunet. Shortly after ten o'clock, however, a smartly attired man arrived in a
private car, entered the hall, looked around for the suicide and examined him
carefully.

Maigret was not far away. He drew closer
and, after studying the visitor, decided that he didn't look German.

As soon as this visitor noticed Maigret
approaching, moreover, he started uneasily, and must have come to the same
conclusion as Maigret had about him.

‘Are you French?' he asked
bluntly.

‘Yes. You, too?'

‘Actually, I'm Belgian, but
I've been living in Bremen for a few years now.'

‘And you knew a man named
Jeunet?'

‘No! I … I read in this
morning's paper that a Frenchman had committed suicide in Bremen … I
lived in Paris for a long time … and I felt curious enough to come and
take a look.'

Maigret was completely calm, as he
always was in such moments, when his face would settle into an expression of such
stubborn density that he seemed even a touch bovine.

‘Are you with the
police?'

‘Yes! The Police
Judiciaire.'

‘So you've come up here
because of this case? Oh, wait: that's impossible, the suicide only happened
last night … Tell me, do you have any French acquaintances in Bremen? No?
In that case, if I can assist you in any way … May I offer you an
aperitif?'

Shortly
afterwards, Maigret followed the other man outside and joined him in his car, which
the Belgian drove himself.

And as he drove he chattered away, a
perfect example of the enthusiastic, energetic businessman. He seemed to know
everyone, greeted passers-by, pointed out buildings, provided a running
commentary.

‘Here you have Norddeutscher
Lloyd … Have you heard about the new liner they've launched?
They're clients of mine …'

He waved towards a building in which
almost every window displayed the name of a different firm.

‘On the fifth floor, to the left,
you can see my office.'

Porcelain sign letters on the window
spelled out:
Joseph Van Damme, Import-Export Commission Agent
.

‘Would you believe that sometimes
I go a month without having a chance to speak French? My employees and even my
secretary are German. That's business for you!'

It would have been hard to divine a
single one of Maigret's thoughts from his expression; he seemed a man devoid
of subtlety. He agreed; he approved. He admired what he was asked to admire,
including the car and its patented suspension system, proudly praised by Van
Damme.

The inspector followed his host into a
large brasserie teeming with businessmen talking loudly over the tireless efforts of
a Viennese orchestra and the clinking of beer mugs.

‘You'd never guess how much
this clientele is worth in millions!' crowed the Belgian. ‘Listen! You
don't understand German? Well, our neighbour here is busy selling a cargo of
wool currently on its way to Europe from
Australia; he has thirty or forty ships in his fleet, and
I could show you others like him. So, what'll you have? Personally, I
recommend the Pilsner. By the way …'

Maigret's face showed no trace of
a smile at the transition.

‘By the way, what do you think
about this suicide? A poor man down on his luck, as the papers here are
saying?'

‘It's possible.'

‘Are you looking into
it?'

‘No: that's a matter for the
German police. And as it's a clear case of suicide …'

‘Oh, obviously! Of course, the
thing that struck me was only that he was French, because we get so few of them up
in the North!'

He rose to go and shake the hand of a
man who was on his way out, then hurried back.

‘Please excuse me – he runs a big
insurance company, he's worth a hundred million … But listen,
inspector: it's almost noon, you must come and have lunch with me! I'm
not married, so I can only invite you to a restaurant, and you won't eat as
you would in Paris, but I'll do my best to see that you don't do too
badly. So, that's settled, right?'

He summoned the waiter, paid the bill.
And when he pulled his wallet from his pocket, he did something that Maigret had
often seen when businessmen like him had their aperitifs in bars around the Paris
stock exchange, for they had that inimitable way of leaning backwards, throwing out
their chests while tucking in their chins and opening with careless satisfaction
that sacred object: the leather
portefeuille
plump with money.

‘Let's go!'

Van Damme hung on
to the inspector until almost five o'clock, after sweeping him along to his
office – three clerks and a typist – but by then he'd made him promise that if
he did not leave Bremen that evening, they would spend it together at a well-known
cabaret.

Maigret found himself back in the crowd,
alone with his thoughts, although they were in considerable disarray. Strictly
speaking, were they even really thoughts?

His mind was comparing two figures, two
men, and trying to establish a relationship between them.

Because there was one! Van Damme
hadn't gone to the trouble of driving to the morgue simply to look at the dead
body of a stranger. And the pleasure of speaking French was not the only reason he
had invited Maigret to lunch. Besides, he had gradually revealed his true
personality only after becoming increasingly persuaded that his companion had no
interest in the case. And perhaps not much in the way of brains, either!

That morning, Van Damme had been
worried. His smile had seemed forced. By the end of the afternoon, on the other
hand, he had resurfaced as a sharp little operator, always on the go, busy, chatty,
enthusiastic, mixing with financial big shots, driving his car, on the phone,
rattling off instructions to his typist and hosting expensive dinners, proud and
happy to be what he was.

And the second man was an anaemic tramp
with grubby clothes and worn-out shoes, who had bought some sausages in rolls
without the faintest idea that he would never get to eat them!

Van Damme must have already found
himself another companion for the evening aperitif, in the same atmosphere of
Viennese music and beer.

At six
o'clock, a cover would close quietly on a metal bin, shutting away the naked
body of the false Louis Jeunet, and the lift would deliver it to the freezer to
spend the night in a numbered compartment.

Maigret went along to the
Polizeipräsidium. Some officers were exercising, stripped to the waist in spite of
the chill, in a courtyard with vivid red walls.

In the laboratory, a young man with a
faraway look in his eye was waiting for him near a table on which all the dead
man's possessions had been laid out and neatly labelled.

The man spoke perfect textbook French
and took pride in coming up with
le mot juste
.

Beginning with the nondescript grey suit
Jeunet had been wearing when he died, he explained that all the linings had been
unpicked, every seam examined, and that nothing had been found.

‘The suit comes from La Belle
Jardinière in Paris. The material is fifty per cent cotton, so it is a cheap
garment. We noticed some grease spots, including stains of mineral jelly, which
suggest that the man worked in or was often inside a factory, workshop or garage.
There are no labels or laundry marks in his linen. The shoes were purchased in
Rheims. Same as the clothing: mass-produced, of mediocre quality. The socks are of
cotton, the kind peddled in the street at four or five francs a pair. They have
holes in them but have never been mended.

‘All these clothes have been
placed in a strong paper bag and shaken, and the dust obtained was analysed.

‘We were thus able to confirm the
provenance of those grease stains. The clothes are in fact impregnated with a fine
metallic powder found only on the belongings of
fitters, metal-workers, and, in general, those who labour
in machine shops.

‘These elements are absent from
the items I will call clothing B, items which have not been worn for at least six
years.

‘One more difference: in the
pockets of suit A we found traces of French government-issue tobacco, what you call
shag tobacco. In the pockets of clothing B, however, there were particles of
yellowish imitation Egyptian tobacco.

‘But now I come to the most
important point. The spots found on clothing B are not grease spots. They are old
human bloodstains, probably from arterial blood.

‘The material has not been washed
for years. The man who wore this suit must have been literally drenched in blood.
And finally, certain tears suggest that there may have been a struggle, because in
various places, for example on the lapels, the weave of the cloth has been torn as
if it had been clawed by fingernails.