The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (12 page)

Perhaps it was Maurice Belloir, so cold
and formal, the haughty provincial
grand bourgeois
, who had taken a shot
at him in the fog. Maybe he was the one
whose only hope was to polish off Maigret.

Or Gaston Janin, the little sculptor
with the goatee: he hadn't been at the Café de la Bourse, but he could have
been lying in ambush in the street …

And what connected all that to a hanged
man swinging from a church-steeple cross? Or to clusters of hanged men? Or to
forests of trees that bore no fruit but hanged men? Or to an old bloodstained suit
with lapels clawed by desperate fingernails?

Typists were going off to work. A
municipal street sweeper rolled slowly past, its double-nozzle sprayer and brush
roller pushing rubbish into the gutter. At street corners, the local police in their
white enamel helmets directed traffic with their shiny white gauntlets.

‘Police headquarters?'
Maigret inquired.

He followed the directions and arrived
while the cleaning ladies were still busy, but a cheerful clerk welcomed his French
colleague and, upon the inspector's request to examine some ten-year-old
police records, but only for the month of February, the man exclaimed in surprise:
‘You're the second person in twenty-four hours! You want to know if a
certain Joséphine Bollant was in fact arrested for domestic larceny back then,
right?'

‘Someone came here?'

‘Yesterday, towards five in the
afternoon. A citizen of Liège who's made it big abroad even though he's
still quite a young man! His father was a doctor, and him, he's got a fine
business going, in Germany.'

‘Joseph Van Damme?'

‘The very man! But no matter how
hard he looked, he couldn't find what he wanted.'

‘Would you
show me?'

It was a green index-book of daily
reports bound in numerical order. Five entries were listed for 15 February: two for
drunkenness and breach of the peace at night, one for shoplifting, one for assault
and battery and the last one for breach of close and stealing rabbits.

Maigret didn't bother to look at
them. He simply checked the numbers at the top of each form.

‘Did Monsieur Van Damme consult
the book himself?'

‘Yes. He took it into the office
next door.'

‘Thank you!'

The five reports were numbered 237, 238,
239, 241 and 242.

In other words, number 240 was missing
and had been torn out just as the archived newspapers had been ripped from their
bindings.

A few minutes later, Maigret was
standing in the square behind the town hall, where cars were pulling up to deliver a
wedding party. In spite of himself, he was straining to catch the faintest sound,
unable to shake a slight feeling of anxiety that he didn't like at all.

He had made it just in time: it was nine
o'clock. The employees of the town hall were arriving for work, crossing the
main courtyard there and pausing a moment to greet one another on the handsome stone
steps, at the top of which a doorkeeper with a braided cap and nicely groomed beard
was smoking his pipe.

It was a meerschaum. Maigret noticed
this detail, without knowing why; perhaps because it was glinting in the morning
sun, because it looked well seasoned and because for a moment the inspector envied
this man who was smoking in voluptuous little puffs, standing there as a symbol of
peace and joie de vivre.

For that morning the air was like a
tonic that grew more bracing as the sun rose higher into the sky. A delightful
cacophony reigned, of people shouting in a Walloon dialect, the shrill clanging of
the red and yellow streetcars, and the splashing of the four jets in the monumental
Perron Fountain doing its best to be heard over the hubbub of the surrounding Place
du Marché.

And when Maigret happened to see Joseph
Van Damme head up one side of the double staircase leading to the main lobby, he
hurried after him. Inside the building, the two staircases continued up on opposite
sides, reuniting on each floor. On one landing, the two men found themselves face to
face, panting from their exertion, struggling to appear
perfectly at ease before the usher with his silver chain
of office.

What happened next was short and swift.
A question of precision, of split-second timing.

While dashing up the stairs, Maigret had
realized that Van Damme had come only to make something disappear, as he had at
police headquarters and the newspaper archives.

One of the police reports for 15
February had already been torn out. But in most cities, didn't the police send
a copy of all daily reports to the mayor the next morning?

‘I would like to see the town
clerk,' announced Maigret, with Van Damme only two steps behind him.
‘It's urgent …'

Their eyes met. They hesitated. The
moment for shaking hands passed. When the usher turned expectantly to the
businessman from Bremen, he simply murmured, ‘It's nothing, I'll
come back later.'

He left. The sound of his footsteps died
away as he crossed the lobby downstairs.

Shortly afterwards, Maigret was shown
into an opulent office, where the town clerk – ramrod straight in his morning coat
and a
very
high collar – quickly began the search for the ten-year-old
daily police reports.

The room was warm, the carpets soft and
springy. A sunbeam lit up a bishop's crozier in a historical painting that
took up one whole section of wall.

After half an hour's hunting and a
few polite exchanges, Maigret found the reports about the stolen rabbits, the public
drunkenness, the shoplifting and then, between two minor incidents, the following
lines:

Officer
Lagasse, of Division No. 6, was proceeding this morning at six o'clock to
the Pont des Arches to take up his post there when, on passing the main door of
the Church of Saint-Pholien, he observed a body hanging from the door
knocker.

A doctor was immediately
summoned but could only confirm the death of the young man, one Émile Klein,
born in Angleur, twenty years old, a house painter living in Rue du
Pot-au-Noir.

Klein had hanged himself,
apparently around the middle of the night, with the aid of a window-blind cord.
His pockets held only a few items of no value and some small change.

The inquiry established that the
deceased had not been regularly employed for three months, and he seems to have
been driven to his action by destitution.

His mother, Madame Klein, a
widow who lives in Angleur on a modest pension, has been notified.

There followed hours of feverish
activity. Maigret vigorously pursued this new line of inquiry and yet, without being
really aware of it, he was less interested in finding out about Klein than he was in
finding Van Damme.

For only then, when he had the
businessman again in his sights, would he be closing in on the truth. Hadn't
it all started in Bremen? And from then on, whenever Maigret scored a point,
hadn't he come up against Van Damme?

Van Damme, who had seen him at the town
hall, now knew that he'd read the report, that he was tracking down Klein.

At Angleur, nothing! The inspector had
taken a taxi deep into an industrial area where small working-class houses, all cast
from the same mould in the same sooty
grey, lined up on dismal streets at the feet of factory
chimneys.

A woman was washing the doorstep of one
such house, where Madame Klein had lived.

‘It's at least five years
since she passed away.'

Van Damme would not be skulking around
that neighbourhood.

‘Didn't her son live with
her?'

‘No! And he made a bad end of it:
he did away with himself, at the door of a church.'

That was all. Maigret learned only that
Klein's father had been a foreman in a coalfield and that after his death his
wife lived off a small pension, occupying only a garret in the house, which she
sublet.

‘To Police Division No. 6,'
he told the taxi driver.

As for Officer Lagasse, he was still
alive, but he hardly remembered anything.

‘It had rained the whole night, he
was soaked, and his red hair was sticking to his face.'

‘He was tall? Short?'

‘Short, I'd say.'

Maigret went next to the gendarmerie,
spending almost an hour in offices that smelled of leather and horse sweat.

‘If he was twenty years old at the
time, he must have been seen by an army medical board … Did you say Klein,
with a K?'

They found Form 13, in the
‘registrant not acceptable' file, and Maigret copied down the
information:
height
1.55 metres,
chest
.80 metres, and a note
mentioning ‘weak lungs'.

But Van Damme had still not shown up.
Maigret had to look elsewhere. The only result of that morning's
inquiries was the certainty that clothing
B had never belonged to the hanged man of Saint-Pholien, who had been just a
shrimp.

Klein had killed himself. There had been
no struggle, not a drop of blood shed.

So what tied him to the Bremen
tramp's suitcase and the suicide of Lecocq d'Arneville, alias Louis
Jeunet?

‘Drop me off here … And
tell me how to find Rue Pot-au-Noir.'

‘Behind the church, the street
that runs down to Quai Sainte-Barbe.'

After paying off his taxi in front of
Saint-Pholien, Maigret took a good look at the new church standing alone in a vast
stretch of waste land.

To the right and left of it were
boulevards lined by apartment houses built at about the same time as the present
church, but behind it there still remained part of the old neighbourhood the city
had cut into to make room for Saint-Pholien.

In a stationery shop window, Maigret
found some postcards showing the old church, which had been lower, squatter and
completely black. One wing had been shored up with timbers. On three sides, dumpy,
mean little houses backed up against its walls and gave the whole place a medieval
look.

Nothing was left of this Court of
Miracles except a sprawl of old houses threaded with alleys and dead ends, all
giving off a nauseating odour of poverty.

A stream of soapy water was running down
the middle of Rue du Pot-au-Noir, which wasn't even two paces wide. Kids were
playing on the doorsteps of houses teeming with
life. And although the sun was shining brightly, its rays
could not reach down into the alley. A cooper busy hooping barrels had a brazier
burning right out in the street.

The house numbers had worn away, so the
inspector had to ask for directions to number 7, which turned out to be all the way
down a blind alley echoing with the whine of saws and planes, a workshop with a few
carpenter's benches at which three men were labouring away. All the shop doors
were open, and some glue was heating on a stove.

Looking up, one of the men put down his
dead cigarette butt and waited for the visitor to speak.

‘Is this the place where a man
named Klein used to live?'

The man glanced knowingly at his
companions, pointed to the open door of a dark staircase and grumbled,
‘Upstairs! Someone's already there.'

‘A new tenant?'

The man gave an odd little smile, which
Maigret would understand only later.

‘Go see for
yourself … On the first floor, you can't miss it: there's only
the one door …'

One of the other workmen shook with
silent laughter as he worked his long, heavy plane. Maigret started up the stairs,
but after a few steps there was no more banister, and the stairwell was completely
shrouded in darkness. He struck a match and saw up ahead a door with no lock or
doorknob, and only a string to secure it to a rusty nail.

With his hand in his revolver pocket,
Maigret nudged the door open with his knee – and was promptly dazzled by light
pouring in from a bay window missing a good third of its panes, a sight so
surprising that, when he looked around, it took him a few moments to actually focus
on anything.

Finally he
noticed, off in a corner, a man leaning against the wall and glowering at him with
savage fury: it was Joseph Van Damme.

‘We were bound to wind up here,
don't you think?' said the inspector, in a voice that resonated
strangely in the raw, vacant air of the room.

Saying nothing, staring at him
venomously, Van Damme never moved.

To understand the layout of the place,
one would have had to know what kind of building – convent, barracks, private house
– had once contained these walls, not one of which was smooth or square. And
although half the room had wooden flooring, the rest was paved with uneven
flagstones, as if it were an old chapel.

The walls were whitewashed, except for a
rectangular patch of brown bricks apparently blocking up what had once been a
window. The view from the bay window was of a gable, a gutter, and beyond them, some
crooked roofs off in the direction of the Meuse.