The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (17 page)

‘We were all together when you
turned up. After you left, we learned that you were the one who now had the
bloodstained suit, and that you were determined to track down the truth.'

‘Who stole one of my suitcases at
Gare du Nord?' Maigret asked, and it was Van Damme who answered.

‘Janin.
I'd arrived before you and was hiding on one of the station
platforms.'

Everyone was exhausted. The candle end
would probably last about another ten minutes, if that. The inspector accidentally
knocked over the skull, which fell to the floor and seemed to be trying to bite
it.

‘Who wrote to me at the Hôtel du
Chemin de Fer?'

‘I did,' Lombard replied
without looking up. ‘Because of my little girl. My little daughter I
haven't seen yet … But Van Damme suspected as much. Belloir, too.
Both of them were waiting at the Café de la Bourse.'

‘And it was you who fired the
shot?'

‘Yes … I couldn't
take it any more. I wanted to live! Live! With my wife, my kids … So I was
waiting for you outside. I've debts of 50,000 francs at the moment. Fifty
thousand francs that Lecocq d'Arneville burned to ashes! But that's
nothing – I'll pay the debts, I'll do whatever it takes, but to know
that you were out there, hunting us …'

Maigret looked at Van Damme.

‘And you were racing on ahead of
me, trying to destroy the clues?'

No one spoke. The candle flame
wavered … Lombard was the only one still illuminated, by a fading red
gleam from the lantern.

It was then, for the first time, that
Belloir's voice faltered.

‘Ten years ago, right after
the … the thing … I would have accepted my fate. I'd
bought a revolver, in case anyone came to arrest me. But after ten years of living,
striving, struggling! And with a wife and child now, well – I think I could have
shoved you into the Marne
myself. Or
taken a shot at you that night outside the Café de la Bourse.

‘Because in a month – not even
that, in twenty-six days – the statute will be in force …'

Silence fell, and it was then that the
candle suddenly flamed up and went out. They were left in utter darkness.

Maigret did not move. He knew that
Lombard was standing at his left, Van Damme was leaning against the wall in front of
him, with Belloir barely a step behind him.

He waited, without even bothering to
slip his hand into the pocket holding his revolver. He definitely sensed that
Belloir was trembling all over, even panting.

Maigret struck a match and said,
‘Let's go, shall we?'

In the glimmer of the match,
everyone's eyes seemed to shine especially brightly. The four of them brushed
against one another in the doorway, and again on the stairs. Van Damme fell, because
he'd forgotten that there was no handrail after the eighth step.

The carpenter's shop was closed.
Through the curtains of one window, they could see an old woman knitting by the
light of a small paraffin lamp.

‘Was it along there?' asked
Maigret, pointing to the roughly paved street leading to the embankment a hundred
metres away, where a gas lamp was fixed to the corner of a wall.

‘The Meuse had reached the third
house,' Belloir replied. ‘I had to wade into the water up to my knees
to … so that he would go off with the current.'

Turning round, they walked back, passing
the new church looming in the middle of vacant ground that was still bare and uneven
dirt.

Suddenly they
found themselves amid the bustle of passers-by, red and yellow trams, cars, shop
windows.

To get to the centre of town they had to
cross the Pont des Arches and heard the rushing river crashing noisily into the
piers.

Back in Rue Hors-Château, people would
be waiting for Jef Lombard: his men downstairs, amid their acid baths, their
photoengraved plates waiting to be picked up by bicycle messengers; the new mother
upstairs, with the sweet old mother-in-law and, nestled in the white bed sheets, the
tiny girl who hadn't yet opened her eyes; the two older boys, trying not to
make too much noise in the dining room decorated with hanged men.

And wasn't there another mother,
in Rheims, giving her son a violin lesson, while the maid was polishing all the
brass stair-rods and dusting the china pot holding the big green plant?

In Bremen, the commercial building was
closing up for the day. The typist and two clerks were leaving their modern office,
and when they turned off the electricity, the porcelain letters spelling
Joseph
Van Damme, Import-Export Commission Agent
would vanish into the night.

Perhaps, in the brasseries alive with
Viennese music, some businessman with a shaved head would remark, ‘Huh! That
Frenchman isn't here …'

In Rue Picpus, Madame Jeunet was selling
a toothbrush, or a hundred grams of dried chamomile, its pale flowers crackling in
their packet.

The little boy was doing his homework in
the back of the shop.

The four men were walking along in step.
A breeze had come up and was driving so many clouds through the sky
that the bright moon shone through for only a few
seconds at a time.

Did they have any idea where they were
going?

When they passed in front of a busy
café, a drunk staggered out.

‘I'm due back in
Paris!' Maigret announced, stopping abruptly.

And while the other three stood staring
at him, not daring to speak and uncertain whether to rejoice or despair, he shoved
his hands into his coat pockets.

‘There are five kids at stake
here …'

The men weren't even sure
they'd heard him correctly, because Maigret had been muttering to himself
through clenched teeth.

And the last they saw of him was his
broad back in his black overcoat with the velvet collar, walking away.

‘One in Rue Picpus, three in Rue
Hors-Château, one in Rheims …'

In Rue Lepic, where he went after
leaving the train station, the concierge told him, ‘There's no point in
going upstairs, Monsieur Janin isn't there. They thought he had bronchitis,
but now that it's turned into pneumonia, they've taken him off to the
hospital.'

So the inspector had himself driven to
Quai des Orfèvres, where he found Sergeant Lucas phoning the owner of a bar that had
racked up some violations.

‘Did you get my letter,
vieux
?'

‘It's all over? You figured
it out?'

‘Fat chance!'

It was one of Maigret's favourite
expressions.

‘They ran off? You know, that
letter really had me
worried … I almost dashed up to Liège. Well,
what was it? Anarchists? Counterfeiters? An international gang?'

‘Kids,' he sighed.

And he tossed into his cupboard the
suitcase containing what a German technician had called, in a long and detailed
report, clothing B.

‘Come along and have a beer,
Lucas.'

‘You don't look too
happy …'

‘Says who? There's nothing
funnier than life,
vieux
! Well, are you coming?'

A few moments later, they were pushing
through the revolving door of Brasserie Dauphine.

Lucas had seldom felt so anxious and
bewildered. Skipping the beer, his companion put away six ersatz absinthes just
about non-stop, which didn't prevent him from announcing in a fairly steady
voice, and with only a slightly blurry and most unfamiliar look in his eye,
‘You know,
vieux
, ten more cases like that one and I'll hand in
my resignation. Because it would prove that there's a good old Good Lord up
there who's decided to take up police work.'

When he called over the waiter, though,
he did add, ‘But don't you worry! There won't be ten like that
one … So, what's new around the shop?'

 

 

 

The facts of the case, though meticulously reconstructed, proved precisely nothing – except that the discovery made by the two carters from Dizy made, frankly, no sense at all.

On the Sunday – it was 4 April – it had begun to rain heavily at three in the afternoon.

At that moment, moored in the reach above Lock 14, which marks the junction of the river Marne and the canal, were two motor barges, both heading downstream, a canal boat which was being unloaded and another having its bilges washed out.

Shortly before seven, just as the light was beginning to fade, a tanker-barge, the
Éco-III
, had hooted to signal its arrival and had eased itself into the chamber of the lock.

The lock-keeper had not been best pleased, because he had relatives visiting at the time. He had then waved ‘no' to a boat towed by two plodding draught horses which arrived in its wake only minutes later.

He had gone back into his house but had not been there long when the man driving the horse-drawn boat, who he knew, walked in.

‘Can I go through? The skipper wants to be at Juvigny for tomorrow night.'

‘If you like. But you'll have to manage the gates by yourself.'

The rain was coming down harder and harder. Through his window, the lock-keeper made out the man's stocky figure as he trudged wearily from one gate to the other, driving both horses on before making the mooring ropes fast to the bollards.

The boat rose slowly until it showed above the lock side. It wasn't the barge master standing at the helm but his wife, a large woman from Brussels, with brash blonde hair and a piercing voice.

By 7.20, the
Providence
was tied up by the Café de la Marine, behind the
Éco-III
. The tow-horses were taken on board. The carter and the skipper headed for the café where other boat men and two pilots from Dizy had already assembled.

At 8 o'clock, when it was completely dark, a tug arrived under the lock with four boats in tow.

Its arrival swelled the crowd in the Café de la Marine. Six tables were now occupied. The men from one table called out to the others. The newcomers left puddles of water behind them as they stamped the mud off their boots.

In the room next door, a store lit by an oil-lamp, the women were buying whatever they needed.

The air was heavy. Talk turned to an accident that had happened at Lock 8 and how much of a hold-up this would mean for boats travelling upstream.

At 9 o'clock, the wife of the skipper of the
Providence
came looking for her husband and their carter. All three of them then left after saying goodnight to all.

By 10 o'clock, the lights had been turned out on most of the boats. The lock-keeper accompanied his relations as far as the main road to Épernay, which crosses the canal two kilometres further on from the lock.

He did not notice anything out of the ordinary. On his way back, he walked past the front of the café. He looked in and was greeted by a pilot.

‘Come and have a drink! Man, you're soaked to the skin …'

He ordered rum, but did not sit down. Two carters got up, heavy with red wine, eyes shining, and made their way out to the stable adjoining the café, where they slept on straw, next to their horses.

They weren't exactly drunk. But they had had enough to ensure that they would sleep like logs.

There were five horses in the stable, which was lit by a single storm-lantern, turned down low.

At four in the morning, one of the carters woke his mate, and both began seeing to their animals. They heard the horses on the
Providence
being led out and harnessed.

At the same time, the landlord of the café got up and lit the lamp in his bedroom on the first floor. He also heard the
Providence
as it got under way.

At 4.30, the diesel engine of the tanker-barge spluttered into life, but the boat did not leave for another quarter of an hour, after its skipper had swallowed a bracing hot toddy in the café which had just opened for business.

He had scarcely left and his boat had not yet got as far as the bridge when the two carters made their discovery.

One of them was leading his horses out to the towpath. The other was ferreting through the straw looking for his whip when one hand encountered something cold.

Startled, because what he had touched felt like a human face, he fetched his lantern and cast its light on the corpse which was about to bring chaos to Dizy and disrupt life on the canal.

Detective Chief Inspector Maigret of the Flying Squad was running though these facts again, putting them in context.

It was Monday evening. That morning, magistrates from the Épernay prosecutor's office had come out to make the routine inspection of the scene of the crime. The body, after being checked by the people from Criminal Records and examined by police surgeons, had been moved to the mortuary.