Friend of Madame Maigret (2 page)

“What's your name?” she asked the child.

But he just looked at her out of his dark eyes without answering.

“Do you know where you live?”

He wasn't listening to her. It had already occurred to Madame Maigret that he might not understand French.

“Excuse me, monsieur. Could you tell me the time please?”

“Twenty-two minutes to twelve, madame.”

There was no sign of the mother. At noon, when whistles blew in the vicinity and a nearby bar was invaded by bricklayers, she still hadn't returned.

Dr. Floresco came out of the building and got behind the wheel of a small black car, yet she did not dare leave the child to go and apologize.

What was worrying her now was her chicken, still cooking on the stove. Maigret had told her that he would more than likely be home to lunch at about one.

Ought she to inform the police? In any case to do so she would have to leave the square. If she took the child with her and the mother came back in the meantime she would be out of her mind with anxiety. Goodness knows where she would run off to then or where they would finally catch up with each other! But she couldn't leave a two-year-old baby alone in the middle of a square either, just a step or two from the buses and cars that were passing in a steady stream.

“Excuse me, monsieur. Would you tell me what time it is?”

“Half past twelve.”

The chicken was certainly beginning to burn; Maigret would be coming in. It would be the first time in all these years of marriage that he wouldn't find her at home.

It was impossible to telephone him, either, because she would have to leave the square, go into a bar. If only she could see that policeman who had gone past, or any policeman, she would tell him who she was and ask him to be kind enough to ring up her husband. As if it had been deliberately arranged, there wasn't one in sight. She looked in all directions, sat down, stood up again, kept thinking she saw the white hat, but it was never the one she was waiting for.

She counted more than twenty white hats in half an hour, and four of them were worn by women in blue coats and skirts.

 

 

At eleven o'clock, while Madame Maigret was beginning to be worried, detained in the middle of the square by responsibility for a child whose name she didn't even know, Maigret was putting his hat on his head, leaving his office, addressing a few words to Lucas, and walking glumly toward the little door that connects the offices of Police Headquarters with the Palais de Justice.

It had become a routine, dating from about the same time that Madame Maigret first went to see her dentist in the Ninth Arrondissement. The chief inspector was entering the examining magistrates' corridor, where there were always some queer characters waiting on the benches, some of them between two policemen, and was knocking at the door that bore the name of Judge Dossin.

“Come in.”

In height Monsieur Dossin was the biggest magistrate in Paris and he always seemed to be embarrassed at being so tall, to be apologizing for having the aristocratic figure of a Russian wolfhound.

“Sit down, Maigret. Smoke your pipe. Have you read this morning's article?”

“I haven't seen the papers yet.”

The magistrate pushed one over to him with a big front page headline which read:

ME PHILIPPE LIOTARD APPEALS TO THE LEAGUE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

“I've had a long talk with the Public Prosecutor,” said Dossin. “He agrees with me. We can't release the bookbinder. Even if we wanted to, Liotard himself would make some virulent attempt to stop us.”

A few weeks ago this name had been practically unknown at the Palais. Philippe Liotard, who was not much over thirty, had never pleaded an important case. After having been one of the assistants to a famous barrister for five years, he was just setting up on his own and still lived in a totally ordinary bachelor's apartment, in the rue Bergère, next door to a house of ill fame.

Ever since the Steuvels case had broken, he was mentioned in the papers every day, gave sensational interviews, issued communiqués, even appeared on cinema screens in newsreels, his forelock belligerent and his smile sarcastic.

“Nothing new with you?”

“Nothing worth reporting, Monsieur le Juge.”

“Do you hope to find the man who handed in the telegram?”

“Torrence is at Concarneau. He's a resourceful chap.”

In the three weeks it had held public opinion in its grip, the Steuvels case had already run through a certain number of subtitles, like a newspaper serial.

It had begun with:

By chance it happened that the setting was a district that Maigret knew well, which he even had a hankering to live in, less than fifty yards from the place des Vosges.

Leaving the narrow rue des Francs-Bourgeois, at the corner of the square, and following the rue de Turenne toward the République, you come first, on the left, to a yellow-painted bistro, then to a dairy, the Crémerie Salmon. Right next door is a glass-fronted workshop with a low ceiling and a dusty display case on which is written in tarnished letters:
Art Binding.
In the shop beyond, Madame Veuve Rancé runs an umbrella business.

Between the workshop and the umbrella shop window is a large gate, under an archway, with the concierge's lodge to one side, and, at the end of the courtyard, an old town house, now riddled with offices and lodgings.

What the public didn't know, what had been carefully kept from the press, was that it was through sheer chance that the case had come to light. One morning, in the letter-box of Police Headquarters, had been found a dirty slip of wrapping paper on which was written:

It wasn't signed, of course. The paper had finished up on the desk of Maigret, who, skeptical, hadn't bothered one of his veteran inspectors with it, but had sent little Lapointe, a young man who was itching to distinguish himself.

Lapointe had discovered that there was indeed a bookbinder in the rue de Turenne, a Fleming resident in France for more than twenty-five years, Frans Steuvels. Posing as a sanitary inspector, the detective had been through his premises and returned with a detailed plan.

“Steuvels works in the shop window, so to speak, chief inspector. The rear of the workshop, which gets darker as you move farther away from the street, is cut off by a wooden partition behind which the Steuvelses have fixed up their bedroom.

“A staircase leads to the basement, where there is a kitchen, then a small room, where they have to keep the light on all day, which serves as a dining room, and lastly a cellar.”

“With a furnace?”

“Yes. An old model that doesn't seem to be in very good shape.”

“Does it work?”

“It wasn't going this morning.”

It was Lucas who had gone to the rue de Turenne at about five o'clock in the afternoon for an official investigation. Fortunately he had taken the precaution of bringing along a warrant, because the bookbinder claimed the inviolability of his home.

Detective Sergeant Lucas had been on the point of going away empty handed, and there were those who almost resented his partial success now that the case had turned into a nightmare for Police Headquarters.

Sifting the ashes at the very back of the furnace, he had come upon two teeth, two human teeth, which he had immediately taken to the laboratory.

“What kind of man is he, this bookbinder?” asked Maigret, who at this point was only remotely connected with the case.

“He must be about forty-five. He's red-haired, pock-marked, with blue eyes and a very gentle expression. His wife, although she's younger than he is, never takes her eyes off him as if he were a child.”

It was now known that Fernande, who had become famous in her turn, had come to Paris as a domestic servant and later had walked the pavement for several years along the boulevard de Sébastopol.

She was thirty-six, had been living with Steuvels for ten years, and three years ago, for no apparent reason, they had been married at the Mairie of the Third Arrondissement.

The laboratory had sent in its report. The teeth were those of a man of about thirty, probably fairly fat, who must still have been alive until a few days before.

Steuvels had been brought into Maigret's office, amicably, and the grilling had begun. He had sat in the green plush armchair facing the window that overlooked the Seine, and that evening it was pouring with rain. Throughout the ten or twelve hours the interrogation had lasted, they had heard the rain beating against the window panes and the gurgling of water in the gutter. The bookbinder wore spectacles with thick lenses and steel rims. His abundant, rather long hair was shaggy, and his tie was crooked.

He was a cultured man, who had read a lot. He remained calm and deliberate; his delicate ruddy skin flushed easily.

“How do you explain the fact that human teeth have been found in your furnace?”

“I don't explain it.”

“You haven't lost any teeth recently? Nor your wife?”

“Neither of us. Mine are false.”

He had taken his plate out of his mouth, then put it back with a practiced movement.

“Can you give me an account of how you spent the evenings of February 16, 17, and 18?”

The interrogation had taken place on the evening of the twenty-first, after the visits of Lapointe and Lucas to the rue de Turenne.

“Do those dates include a Friday?”

“The sixteenth.”

“In that case I went to the Saint-Paul Cinema in the rue Saint-Antoine, as I do every Friday.”

“With your wife?”

“Yes.”

“And the other two days?”

“It was at noon on the Saturday that Fernande left.”

“Where did she go?”

“To Concarneau.”

“Had the journey been planned long beforehand?”

“Her mother, who's a cripple, lives with her daughter and son-in-law at Concarneau. On Saturday morning we received a telegram from my wife's sister, Louise, saying that their mother was seriously ill, and Fernande took the first train.”

“Without telephoning?”

“They have no telephone.”

“Was the mother very bad?”

“She wasn't ill at all. The telegram didn't come from Louise.”

“Who did it come from then?”

“We don't know.”

“Have tricks of this kind ever been played on you before?”

“Never.”

“When did your wife get back?”

“On the Tuesday. She took advantage of being down there to spend a couple of days with her people.”

“What did you do all that time?”

“I worked.”

“One of the tenants states that dense smoke was coming out of your chimney all day on the Sunday.”

“That's possible. It was cold.”

This was true. The Sunday and Monday had been very cold days, and severe frost had been reported in the suburbs.

“What clothes were you wearing on Saturday evening?”

“The same as I'm wearing today.”

“Did anyone come to see you after you closed?”

“Nobody, except a customer who called for a book. Do you want his name and address?”

It was a well-known man, a member of the “Hundred Bibliophiles.” Thanks to Liotard, more was to be heard of these men, who were nearly all important personalities.

“Your concierge, Madame Salazar, heard someone knock at your door that evening about nine o'clock. Several people were talking excitedly.”

“People talking on the pavement perhaps, but not inside my place. It's perfectly possible, if they were excited, as Madame Salazar claims, that they banged against the front.”

“How many suits do you own?”

“As I have only one body and one head, I own only one suit and one hat, apart from the old trousers and sweaters I wear for work.”

He had then been shown a navy blue suit found in the wardrobe in his bedroom.

“What about this one?”

“That doesn't belong to me.”

“How does this suit happen to have been found in your house?”

“I've never seen it. Anybody might have put it there in my absence. I've been here six hours already.”

“Will you try on the jacket, please?”

It fitted him.

“Do you see these stains that look like rust? It's blood, human blood, according to the experts. Unsuccessful attempts have been made to get rid of them.”

“I don't recognize those clothes.”

“Madame Rancé, the umbrella seller, states that she has often seen you wearing blue, especially on Fridays when you go to the pictures.”

“I did have another suit, which was blue, but I got rid of it more than two months ago.”

After this first interrogation Maigret was gloomy. He had had a long conversation with Judge Dossin, after which both of them had gone to see the public prosecutor.

It was the latter who had assumed responsibility for the arrest.

“The experts are in agreement, aren't they? The rest, Maigret, is up to you. Go ahead. We can't release that customer.”

By the next day, Maître Liotard had emerged from the shadows, and, ever since, Maigret had had him at his heels like a snapping mongrel.

Among the newspaper subheadings there had been one that had had quite a success:

Young Lapointe declared, in fact, that when he had looked around the premises, posing as a sanitary inspector, he had seen a reddish-brown suitcase under a table in the workshop.