The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien (5 page)

‘He became
more and more strange?'

‘It isn't his fault,
I'm sure of that! I think he was ill, he worried so … We were often
in the kitchen, and whenever we'd been happy for a little while, I used to see
him change suddenly: he'd stop speaking, look at things – and me – with a
nasty smile, and go and throw himself down on his bed without saying goodnight to
me.'

‘He had no friends?'

‘No! No one ever came to see
him.'

‘He never travelled, received any
letters?'

‘No. And he didn't like
having people in our home. Once in a while, a neighbour who had no sewing machine
would come over to use mine, and that was guaranteed to enrage Louis. But he
didn't become angry like everyone else, it was something shut up
inside … and he was the one who seemed to suffer!

‘When I told him we were going to
have a child, he stared at me like a madman …

‘That was when he started to
drink, fits of it, binges, especially after the baby was born. And yet I know that
he loved that child! Sometimes he used to gaze at him in adoration, the way he did
with me at first …

‘The next day, he'd come
home drunk, lie down, lock the bedroom door and spend hours in there, whole
days.

‘The first few times, he'd
cry and beg me to forgive him. Maybe if Mama hadn't interfered I might have
managed to keep him, but my mother tried to lecture him, and there were awful
arguments. Especially when Louis went two or three days without going to work!

‘Towards the end, we were
desperately unhappy. You know what it's like, don't you? His temper got
worse and
worse. My mother threw him out
twice, to remind him that he wasn't the lord and master there.

‘But I just know that it
wasn't his fault! Something was pushing him, driving him! He would still look
at me, or our son, in that old way I told you about …

‘Only now not so often, and it
didn't last long. The final quarrel was dreadful. Mama was there. Louis had
helped himself to some money from the shop, and she called him a thief. He went so
pale, his eyes all red, as on his bad days, and a crazed look in those
eyes …

‘I can still see him coming closer
as if to strangle me! I was terrified and screamed, “Louis!”

‘He left, slamming the door so
hard the glass shattered.

‘That was two years ago. Some
neighbourhood women saw him around now and again … I went to that factory
in Belleville, but they told me he didn't work there any more.

‘Someone saw him, though, in a
small workshop in Rue de la Roquette where they make beer pumps.

‘Me, I saw him once more, maybe
six months ago now, through the shop window. Mama is living with me and the child
again, and she was in the shop … she kept me from running to the door.

‘You swear to me that he
didn't suffer? That he died instantly? He was an unhappy, unfortunate man,
don't you see? You must have understood that by now …'

She had relived her story with such
intensity, and her husband had had such a strong hold on her, that, without
realizing it, she had been reflecting all the feelings she was describing on her own
face.

As in his first impression, Maigret was
struck by an
unnerving resemblance between
this woman and the man in Bremen who had snapped his fingers before shooting a
bullet into his mouth.

What's more, that raging fever she
had just evoked seemed to have infected her. She fell silent, but all her nerves
remained on edge, and she almost gasped for breath. She was waiting for something,
she didn't know what.

‘He never spoke to you about his
past, his childhood?'

‘No. He didn't talk much. I
only know that he was born in Aubervilliers. And I've always thought he was
educated beyond his station in life; he had lovely handwriting, and he knew the
Latin names of all the plants. When the woman from the haberdashery next door had a
difficult letter to write, he was the one she came to.'

‘And you never saw his
family?'

‘Before we were married, he told
me he was an orphan. Chief inspector, there's one more thing I'd like to
ask you. Will he be brought back to France?'

When Maigret hesitated to reply, she
turned her face away to hide her embarrassment.

‘Now the shop belongs to my
mother. And the money, too. I know she won't want to pay anything to bring the
body home – or give me enough to go and see him! Would it be possible, in this
case …'

The words died in her throat, and she
quickly bent down to retrieve her handkerchief, which had fallen to the floor.

‘I will see to it that your
husband is brought home, madame.'

She gave him a touching smile, then
wiped a tear from her cheek.

‘You've understood, I can
tell! You feel the same way
I do, chief
inspector! It wasn't his fault … He was an unhappy
man …'

‘Did he ever have any large sums
of money?'

‘Only his wages. In the beginning,
he gave everything to me. Later on, when he began drinking …'

Another faint smile, very sad, and yet
full of pity.

She left somewhat calmer, gathering the
skimpy fur collar tightly round her neck with her right hand, still clutching the
handbag and the tightly folded newspaper in the other.

Maigret found a seedy-looking hotel at
18, Rue de la Roquette, right where it joins Rue de Lappe, with its accordion-band
dance halls and squalid housing. That stretch of Roquette is a good fifty metres
from Place de la Bastille. Every ground floor hosts a bistro, every house a hotel
frequented by drifters, immigrants, tarts and the chronically unemployed.

Tucked away within these vaguely
sinister haunts of the underclass, however, are a few workshops, their doors wide
open to the street, where men wield hammers and blowtorches amid a constant traffic
of heavy trucks.

The contrast is striking: these steady
workers, busy employees with waybills in hand, and the sordid or insolent creatures
who hang around everywhere.

‘Jeunet!' rumbled the
inspector, pushing open the door of the hotel office on the ground floor.

‘Not here!'

‘He's still got his
room?'

He'd been spotted for a policeman,
and got a reluctant reply.

‘Yes, room 19!'

‘By the
week? The month?'

‘The month!'

‘You have any mail for
him?'

The manager turned evasive, but in the
end handed over to Maigret the package Jeunet had sent himself from Brussels.

‘Did he receive many like
this?'

‘A few times …'

‘Never any letters?'

‘No! Maybe he got three packages,
in all. A quiet man. I don't see why the police should want to come bothering
him.'

‘He worked?'

‘At number 65, down the
street.'

‘Regularly?'

‘Depended. Some weeks yes, others,
no.'

Maigret demanded the key to the room. He
found nothing there, however, except a ruined pair of shoes with flapping soles, an
empty tube of aspirin and some mechanic's overalls tossed into a corner.

Back downstairs, he questioned the
manager again, learning that Louis Jeunet saw no one, did not go out with women and
basically led a humdrum life, aside from a few trips lasting three or four days.

But no one stays in one of these hotels,
in this neighbourhood, unless there's something wrong somewhere, and the
manager knew that as well as Maigret.

‘It's not what you
think,' he admitted grudgingly. ‘With him, it's the bottle! And
how – in binges. Novenas, my wife and I call them. Buckle down for three weeks, go
off to work every day, then … for a while he'd drink until he passed
out on his bed.'

‘You never
saw anything suspicious about his behaviour?'

But the man shrugged, as if to say that
in his hotel everyone who walked through the door looked suspicious.

At number 65, in a huge workshop open to
the street, they made machines to draw off beer. Maigret was met by a foreman, who
had already seen Jeunet's picture in the paper.

‘I was just going to write to the
police!' he exclaimed. ‘He was still working here last week. A fellow
who earned eight francs fifty an hour!'

‘When he was working.'

‘Ah, you already know? When he was
working, true! There are lots of them like that, but in general those others
regularly take one drink too many, or they splurge on a champion hangover every
Saturday. Him, it was sudden-like, no warning: he'd drink for a solid week.
Once, when we had a rush job, I went to his hotel room. Well! There he was, all
alone, drinking right out of a bottle set on the floor by his bed. A sorry sight, I
swear.'

In Aubervilliers, nothing. The registry
office held a single record of one Louis Jeunet, son of Gaston Jeunet, day labourer,
and Berthe Marie Dufoin, domestic servant. Gaston Jeunet had died ten years earlier;
his wife had moved away.

As for Louis Jeunet, no one knew
anything about him, except that six years before he had written from Paris to
request a copy of his birth certificate.

But the passport was still a forgery,
which meant that the man who had killed himself in Bremen – after
marrying the herbalist woman in Rue Picpus and having a
son – was not the real Jeunet.

The criminal records in the Préfecture
were another dead end: nothing indexed under the name of Jeunet, no fingerprints
matching the ones of the dead man, taken in Germany. Evidently this desperate soul
had never run afoul of the law in France or abroad, because headquarters kept tabs
on the police records of most European nations.

The records went back only six years. At
which point, there was a Louis Jeunet, a drilling machine operator, who had a job
and lived the life of a decent working man.

He married. He already owned clothing B,
which had provoked the first scene with his wife and years later would prove the
cause of his death.

He had no friends, received no mail. He
appeared to know Latin and therefore to have received an above-average
education.

Back in his office, Maigret drew up a
request for the German police to release the body, disposed of a few current matters
and, with a sullen, sour face, once again opened the yellow suitcase, the contents
of which had been so carefully labelled by the technician in Bremen.

To this he added the package of thirty
Belgian thousand-franc notes – but abruptly decided to snap the string and copy down
the serial numbers on the bills, a list he sent off to the police in Brussels,
asking that they be traced.

He did all this with studied
concentration, as if he were trying to convince himself that he was doing something
useful.

From time to time, however, he would
glance with a kind of bitterness at the crime-scene photos spread out
on his desk, and his pen would hover in
mid-air as he chewed on the stem of his pipe.

Regretfully, he was about to set the
investigation aside and leave for home when he learned that he had a telephone call
from Rheims.

It was about the picture published in
the papers. The proprietor of the Café de Paris, in Rue Carnot, claimed to have seen
the man in question in his establishment six days earlier – and had remembered this
because the man got so drunk that he had finally stopped serving him.

Maigret hesitated. The dead man's
shoes had come from Rheims – which had now cropped up again.

Moreover, these worn-out shoes had been
bought months earlier, so Louis Jeunet had not just happened to be in Rheims by
accident.

One hour later, the inspector took his
seat on the Rheims express, arriving there at ten o'clock. A fashionable
establishment favoured by the bourgeoisie, the Café de Paris was crowded that
evening; three games of billiards were in full swing, and people at a few tables
were playing cards.

It was a traditional café of the French
provinces, where customers shake hands with the cashier and waiters know all the
regulars by name: local notables, commercial travellers and so forth. It even had
the traditional round nickel-plated receptacles for the café dishcloths.

‘I am the inspector whom you
telephoned earlier this evening.'

Standing by the counter, the proprietor
was keeping an eye on his staff while he dispensed advice to the billiard
players.

‘Ah, yes! Well, I've already
told you all I know.'

Somewhat
embarrassed, he spoke in a low voice.

‘Let me think … He was
sitting over in that corner, near the third billiard table, and he ordered a brandy,
then another, and a third … It was at about this same time of night.
People were giving him funny looks because – how shall I put this? – he wasn't
exactly our usual class of customer.'

‘Did he have any
luggage?'

‘An old suitcase with a broken
lock. I remember that when he left, the suitcase fell open and some old clothes
spilled out. He even asked me for some string to tie it closed.'

‘Did he speak to
anyone?'

The proprietor glanced over at one of
the billiard players, a tall, thin young man, a snappy dresser, the very picture of
a sharp player whose every bank shot would be studied with respect.

‘Not
exactly … Won't you have something, inspector? We could sit over
here, look!'

He chose a table with trays stacked on
it, off to one side.

‘By about midnight, he was as
white as this marble tabletop. He'd had maybe eight or nine brandies. And I
didn't like that stare he had – it takes some people that way, the alcohol.
They don't get agitated or start rambling on, but at some point they simply
pass out cold. Everyone had noticed him. I went over to tell him that I
couldn't serve him any more, and he didn't protest in any
way.'