The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (8 page)

‘You're to take us to the Police Judiciaire, Quai des
Orfèvres.'

He filled a pipe he could not smoke
because his matches were now wet. Van Damme's face was almost completely
turned away from him and further obscured in the dim light, but he could sense the
man's fury.

There was now a hard edge to the
atmosphere, something rancorous and intense.

Maigret himself had his chin thrust out
belligerently.

This tension led to a ridiculous
incident after the car pulled up in front of the Préfecture and the men got out, the
inspector first.

‘Come along!'

The driver was waiting to be paid, but
Van Damme was ignoring him. There was a moment of hesitation, indecision.

‘Well?' said Maigret, not
unaware of the absurdity of the situation. ‘You're the one who hired the
car.'

‘Pardon me: if I travelled as your
prisoner, it's up to you to pay.'

A small matter, but didn't it show
how much had happened since Rheims and, most importantly, how much the Belgian
businessman had changed?

Maigret paid and silently showed Van
Damme to his office. After closing the door behind him, the first thing he did was
to stir up the fire in the stove.

Next he took some clothing from a
cupboard and, without a glance at the other man, changed his trousers, shoes and
socks and placed his damp things near the stove to dry.

Van Damme had sat down without waiting
to be asked. In the bright light, the change in him was even more striking:
he'd left his bogus bonhomie, his open manner
and somewhat strained smile back at Luzancy and now, with
a grim and cunning look, he was waiting.

Pretending to pay him no attention,
Maigret kept busy for a little while around his office, organizing dossiers,
telephoning his boss for some information that had nothing to do with the current
case.

Finally, he went over to confront Van
Damme.

‘When, where and how did you first
meet the man who committed suicide in Bremen and who was travelling with a passport
in the name of Louis Jeunet?'

The other man flinched almost
imperceptibly but faced his challenger with bold composure.

‘Why am I here?'

‘You refuse to answer my
question?'

Van Damme laughed, but now his laughter
was cold and sarcastic.

‘I know the law as well as you do,
inspector. Either you charge me and must show me the arrest warrant, or you
don't charge me and I don't have to answer you. And in the first case,
the law allows me to wait for the assistance of a lawyer before speaking to
you.'

Maigret did not seem angry or even
annoyed by the man's attitude. On the contrary! He studied him with curiosity
and perhaps a certain satisfaction.

Thanks to the incident at Luzancy,
Joseph Van Damme had been forced to abandon his play-acting and the pretence he had
kept up not only with Maigret, but with everyone else and even, in the end, with
himself.

There was almost nothing left of the
jolly, shallow businessman from Bremen, constantly on the go between his modern
office and the finest taverns and restaurants. Gone was the happy-go-lucky operator
raking in money with
zestful energy and a
taste for the good life
.
All that remained was a haggard face drained of
colour, and it was uncanny how quickly dark, puffy circles seemed to have appeared
under his eyes.

Only an hour earlier, hadn't Van
Damme still been a free man who, although he did have something on his conscience,
yet enjoyed the self-assurance guaranteed by his broker's licence, his
reputation, his money and his shrewdness?

And he himself had emphasized this
change.

In Rheims, he was used to standing round
after round of drinks. He offered his guests the finest cigars. He had only to give
an order, and a café proprietor would hasten to curry favour, phoning a garage to
hire their most comfortable car.

He was somebody!

In Paris? He had refused to pay for the
trip. He invoked the law. He appeared ready to argue, to defend himself at every
turn, fiercely, like a man fighting for his life.

And he was furious with himself! His
angry exclamation after what had happened on the bank of the Marne was proof of
that. There had been no premeditation. He hadn't known the driver. Even when
they had stopped for the flat tyre, he hadn't immediately realized how that
might work to his advantage.

Only when they had reached the
water … The swirling current, the trees swept by as if they were simply
dead leaves … Like a fool, without thinking twice, he'd given that
push with his shoulder.

Now he was beside himself. He was sure
that the inspector had been waiting for that move! He probably even
realized that he was done for – and was all the more
determined to strike back with everything he had.

When he went to light a new cigar,
Maigret snatched it from his mouth, tossed it into the coal scuttle – and for good
measure removed the hat Van Damme hadn't bothered to take off.

‘For your information,'
said the Belgian, ‘I have business to attend to. If you do not mean to
officially arrest me in accordance with the regulations, I must ask you to be good
enough to release me. If you don't, I'll be forced to file a complaint
for false imprisonment.

‘With regard to your little dip in
the river, I might as well tell you that I'll deny everything: the towpath was
soggy and you slipped in the mud. The driver will confirm that I never tried to run
away, as I would have if I'd really tried to drown you.

‘As for the rest, I still
don't know what you might have against me. I came to Paris on business and I
can prove that. Then I went to Rheims to see an old friend, an upstanding citizen
like myself.

‘After meeting you in Bremen,
where we don't often see Frenchmen, I was trusting enough to consider you a
friend, taking you out for dinner and drinks and then offering you a ride back to
Paris.

‘You showed me and my friends the
photograph of a man we do not know. A man who killed himself! That's been
materially proved. No one has lodged a complaint, so you have no grounds for taking
action.

‘And that's all I have to
say to you.'

Maigret stuck a twist of paper into the
stove, lit his pipe
and remarked, almost
as an afterthought, ‘You're perfectly free to go.'

He could not help smiling to see Van
Damme so dumbfounded by his suspiciously easy victory.

‘What do you mean?'

‘That you're free,
that's all! May I add that I'm quite ready to return your hospitality
and invite you to dinner.'

Rarely had he felt so light-hearted. The
other man gaped at him in amazement, almost in fear, as if the inspector's
words had been heavy with hidden threats. Warily, Van Damme rose to his feet.

‘I'm free to return to
Bremen?'

‘Why not? You just said yourself
that you've committed no crime.'

For an instant, it seemed that Van Damme
might recover his confidence and bluster, might even accept that dinner invitation
and explain away the incident at Luzancy as clumsiness or a momentary
aberration …

But the smile on Maigret's face
snuffed out that flicker of optimism. Van Damme grabbed his hat and clapped it on to
his head.

‘How much do I owe you for the
car?'

‘Nothing at all. Only too happy to
have been of service.'

Van Damme was at such a loss for words
that his lips were trembling, and he had no idea how to leave gracefully. In the end
he shrugged and walked out, muttering, ‘Idiot!'

But it was impossible to tell what or
whom he meant by that.

Out on the staircase, as Maigret leaned
over the handrail to watch him go, he was still saying it over and over …

Sergeant Lucas
happened along with some files, on his way to his boss's office.

‘Quick! Get your hat and coat:
follow that man to the ends of the earth if you have to …'

And Maigret plucked the files from his
subordinate's hands.

The inspector had just finished filling
out various requests for information, each headed by a different name. Sent out to
the appropriate divisions, these forms would return to him with detailed reports on
these persons of interest: Maurice Belloir, a native of Liège, deputy director of a
bank, Rue de Vesle, Rheims; Jef Lombard, photoengraver in Liège; Gaston Janin,
sculptor, Rue Lepic, Paris; and Joseph Van Damme, import-export commission agent in
Bremen.

He was filling out the last form when
the office boy announced that a man wanted to see him regarding the suicide of Louis
Jeunet.

It was late. Headquarters was
practically deserted, although an inspector was typing a report in the neighbouring
office.

‘Come!'

Ushered in, his visitor stopped at the
door, looking awkward and ill at ease, as if he might already be sorry to have
come.

‘Sit down, why don't
you!'

Maigret had taken his measure: tall,
thin, with whitish-blond hair, poorly shaved, wearing shabby clothes rather like
Louis Jeunet's. His overcoat was missing a button, the collar was soiled, and
the lapels in need of a brushing.

From a few other tiny signs – a certain
attitude, a way
of sitting down and
looking around – the inspector recognized an ex-con, someone whose papers may all be
in order but who still cannot help being nervous around the police.

‘You're here because of the
photo? Why didn't you come in right away? That picture appeared in the papers
two days ago.'

‘I don't read them,'
the man explained. ‘But my wife happened to bring some shopping home wrapped
in a bit of newspaper.'

Maigret realized that he'd seen
this somewhere before, this constantly shifting expression, this nervous twitching
and most of all, the morbid anxiety in the man's eyes.

‘Did you know Louis
Jeunet?'

‘I'm not sure. It
isn't a good photo. But I think … I believe he's my
brother.'

Maigret couldn't help it: he
sighed with relief. He felt that this time the whole mystery would be cleared up at
last. And he went to stand with his back to the stove, as he often did when in a
good mood.

‘In which case, your name would be
Jeunet?'

‘No, but that's it,
that's why I hesitated to come here, and yet – he really is my brother!
I'm sure of that, now that I see a better photo on the desk … That
scar, for example! But I don't understand why he killed himself – or why in
the world he would change his name.'

‘And yours is …'

‘Armand Lecocq d'Arneville.
I brought my papers.'

And there again, that way he reached
into his pocket for a grimy passport betrayed his status on the margins of society,
someone used to attracting suspicion and proving his identity.

‘D'Arneville with a small
d
and an apostrophe?'

‘Yes.'

‘You were born in Liège,'
continued the inspector, consulting the passport. ‘You're thirty-five
years old. Your profession?'

‘At present, I'm an office
messenger in a factory at Issy-les-Moulineaux. We live in Grenelle, my wife and
I.'

‘It says here you're a
mechanic.'

‘I was one. I've done this
and that …'

‘Even some prison time!'
exclaimed Maigret, leafing through the passport. ‘You're a
deserter.'

‘There was an amnesty! Just let me
explain … My father had money, he ran a tyre business, but I was only six
when he abandoned my mother, who'd just given birth to my brother Jean.
That's where it all started!

‘We moved to a little place in Rue
de la Province, in Liège, and in the beginning my father sent us money to live on
fairly regularly. He liked to live it up, had mistresses; once, when he came by to
drop off our monthly envelope, there was a woman in the car waiting for him down in
the street. There were scenes, arguments, and my father stopped paying, or maybe he
began paying less and less. My mother worked as a cleaning woman and she gradually
went half-mad, not crazy enough to be shut away, but she'd go up to people and
pour out her troubles, and she used to roam the streets in tears …

‘I hardly ever saw my brother. I
was off running with the local kids. They must have hauled us in to the police
station ten times. Then I was sent to work in a hardware store. My mother was always
crying, so I stayed away from home as much as I could. She liked all the old
neighbour women to come over so she could wail her heart out with them.

‘I joined
the army when I was sixteen and asked to be sent to the Congo, but I only lasted a
month. For about a week I hid in Matadi, then I stowed away on a passenger steamer
bound for Europe. I got caught, served some time, escaped and made it to France,
where I worked at all sorts of jobs. I've gone starving hungry, slept in the
market here at Les Halles.

‘I haven't always been on
the up and up, but I swear to you, I've buckled down and been clean for four
years. I'm even married now! To a factory worker. She's had to keep her
job because I don't earn much and sometimes there's nothing for
me …

‘I've never tried to go back
to Belgium. Someone told me that my mother died in a lunatic asylum but that my
father's still alive. He never wanted to bother with us, though. He has a
second family.'

And the man gave a crooked smile, as if
to apologize.

‘What about your
brother?'

‘It was different with him: Jean
was serious. He won a scholarship as a boy and went on to secondary school. When I
left Belgium for the Congo he was only thirteen, and I haven't seen him since.
I heard news now and again, whenever I ran into anyone from Liège. Some people took
an interest in him, and he went on to study at the university there. That was ten
years ago … After that, any Belgians I saw told me they didn't know
anything about him, that he must have gone abroad, because he'd dropped out of
sight.