The Hatter's Ghosts, page 16
That morning, she thought she heard an unusual noise. At half past eight, worried for no particular reason, she half opened the door and saw a man on the bed.
He was asleep. Mademoiselle Berthe was lying across the rug.
Geneviève didn’t think to go closer, or to phone. She ran out, hurtled down the stairs and alerted the concierge and the people passing in the street on their way to work. Nobody dared to go up before a policeman arrived. Everyone gathered downstairs, looking up at the windows in silence.
The policeman who came hesitated in the doorway of the bedroom and took his revolver from its holster. He was very young, and his face was covered in acne. He played for the football team. Behind him, the men were growing threatening, the women urging them on. They saw Monsieur Labbé sit up on the edge of the bed, pass his hand over his face and push his hair back.
For a moment, seized with fear in front of everyone, he stammered:
‘Don’t hit me.’
He had the presence of mind to add, pointing to the white-gloss telephone:
‘Phone the inspector.’
Nobody could know what he was thinking, what he was feeling. He looked at the rug with a melancholy expression on his face.
Things might have happened differently if Pigeac hadn’t passed through Place d’Armes on his way to his office. People were running in the sunlight. Gabriel had just opened the door of the Café des Colonnes.
They saw the inspector coldly push his way through the increasingly agitated crowd that cluttered the stairs. He stopped in the doorway, and the young policeman stood aside to let him pass.
He looked at Monsieur Labbé, who was still sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, with his shoes on, his tie unknotted, his jacket crumpled.
The two men looked at each other, and Monsieur Labbé made an effort to stand up. He opened his mouth and finally murmured:
‘It was me.’
Those who were on the landing and who heard him claimed that he had uttered these words as if relieved and that, as he held out both his hands for the inspector’s handcuffs, a shy smile had relaxed his features.
Later, on the stairs, when the crowd had finally moved aside, he had again blurted out:
‘Don’t push me. Don’t hit me. I’m coming …’
The Hanged Couple
The keeper of the lock at Le Coudray was a thin, sad-looking man in a corduroy suit, with droopy moustaches and a mistrustful expression, a type frequently encountered among estate managers. He didn’t distinguish between Maigret and the fifty people – gendarmes, reporters, police officers from Corbeil and members of the prosecutor’s office – to whom he had told his story over the past two days. And, while talking, he kept looking upstream and downstream at the murky surface of the Seine.
It was November. It was cold, and the white of the sky, a harsh white, was reflected in the water. ‘I’d got up at six in the morning to take care of my wife.’ (It struck Maigret that it was always these honest, sad-looking men who had sick wives to take care of.) ‘I was still lighting the fire when I had the feeling I heard something. But it was only later, when I was making the poultice, up on the first floor, that I finally realized someone was calling out. I went back downstairs. Once I was outside on the lock, I could just about make out a black shape against the barrier. “Who’s there?” I called out. “Help!” replied a hoarse voice. “What are you doing there?” I asked him. “Help!” he said again. So I took my skiff and rowed over there. I saw it was the Astrolabe. It was finally starting to get light, and at last I saw old Claessens on deck. I’d swear he was still drunk and had no more idea than I did what the barge was doing up against the barrier. The dog wasn’t on its chain, I even asked him to hold on to it. And that’s it.’
What mattered for him was that a barge had crashed into his barrier and might even have breached it if the current had been stronger. But the fact that the only things found on board, apart from the drunk old carter and a big sheepdog, were two hanging bodies, a man and a woman, was no longer any concern of his.
The Astrolabe had been pulled loose, but it was still there, 150 metres away, guarded by a gendarme who was keeping warm by walking up and down the towpath. It was an old, unmotorized barge, the kind known as a ‘stable’: the name given to boats that mainly ply the canals and have their horses on board. Passing cyclists turned to look at this greyish hull about which the newspapers had been talking for the last two days.
As usual, when Detective Chief Inspector Maigret had been assigned to a case, it was as good as saying there were no longer any new clues to be found. Everyone had got involved in the investigation, and the witnesses had already been questioned fifty times, first by the gendarmerie, then by the police in Corbeil, the magistrates and the reporters.
‘You’ll see, it was Emile Gradut who did it!’ he had been told.
And now Maigret, who had just interrogated Gradut for two hours, had come back to the scene, his hands in the pockets of his thick overcoat, his mood sullen, and was looking at the bleak landscape as if planning to buy a plot of land there.
The interest did not lie at Le Coudray, where the barge had ended up, but at the other end of the reach, eight kilometres upstream, at the La Citanguette lock.
The surroundings were the same as downstream, basically. The villages of Morsang and Seine-Port were on the other bank, some distance away. All that could be seen was the still water lined with thickets, with, occasionally, a dip where there had once been a sand quarry.
But at La Citanguette, there was a bistro, which meant that the people on the boats did everything they could to stay there overnight. A real bargemen’s bistro, where they sold bread, canned food, sausages, rigging and hay for the horses.
It was there, it might be said, that Maigret was really conducting his investigation, without seeming to, having a drink from time to time, sitting near the stove, going for a little walk outside, while the owner’s wife, almost as blonde as an albino, watched him with a respect tinged with irony.
This is what was known about Wednesday evening. Just as it was starting to get dark, the Aiglon VII, a small tug from the Upper Seine, had brought its six barges to the lock at Citanguette, like a line of chicks. At that point, drizzle was falling. Once the boats had been moored, the men, as always, had gathered in the bistro for an aperitif while the lock keeper made sure the lock was closed.
The Astrolabe only appeared round the bend half an hour later, when it was almost completely dark. Old Arthur Aerts, the bargee, was at the tiller, while on the towpath Claessens walked ahead of his horses, his whip over his shoulder.
The Astrolabe had moored behind the line of barges, and Claessens had put his horses back on board. At that moment, nobody, basically, had paid them any attention.
It was at least seven, and everyone had already had supper by the time Aerts and Claessens had come into the bistro and sat down by the stove. The master of the Aiglon VII chatted away, but the two old men had nothing to say. The owner’s wife, a baby in her arms, served them marc four or five times, without bothering too much about them.
This was how things went, Maigret now realized. Everyone knew everyone else, more or less. You came in, vaguely greeting everyone. You went and sat down without saying a word. Occasionally, a woman would come in, but only to do her shopping for the next day, after which she would say to her husband, who would be busy drinking:
‘Don’t come home too late.’
That had happened with Aerts’ wife, Emma, who had bought bread, eggs and a rabbit.
From that moment, every detail acquired a crucial importance, every testimony became extremely valuable. Thus, Maigret insisted:
‘Are you sure Arthur Aerts was drunk when he left about ten?’
‘Blind drunk, as usual,’ the owner’s wife replied. ‘He was a Belgian, a good man basically, who’d sit in his corner without saying a word and drink until he had just enough strength left to get back on board.’
‘What about Claessens, the carter?’
‘It took him a bit longer. He stayed about a quarter of an hour more, then left, then came back to look for his whip, which he’d left behind.’
Up until that point, everything had gone well. It was easy to imagine the banks of the Seine at night, below the lock, the tug in front, the six barges behind, then Aerts’ barge – with a stable lantern on each boat and a steady drizzle over everything.
At about nine thirty, Emma went back on board with her provisions. At ten, Aerts went back in his turn, dead drunk, as the owner’s wife said. And at ten fifteen, the carter at last headed for the Astrolabe.
‘I was only waiting for him to go before I closed, because the bargees go to bed early, and there was nobody left.’
That was all, as far as the solid, checkable things went. From that point, there was no precise information at all. At six in the morning, the skipper of the tug was surprised not to see the Astrolabe still there behind his barges. A little while later, he noticed that the mooring ropes had been cut.
Simultaneously, the lock-keeper at Le Coudray, who was tending to his wife, heard the old carter’s cries and soon afterwards discovered that the barge had crashed into his barrier.
The dog on deck had been let loose. The carter, who had just woken up because of the impact, knew nothing and claimed that he had slept all night in his stable, as usual.
But in the cabin in the stern, Aerts was found hanging, not from a rope, but from the dog’s chain. Then, behind a curtain drawn across the wash basin, his wife, Emma was also found hanging, from a sheet torn off the bed.
That was not yet all. Just as they were getting under way, the master of the tug Aiglon VII called in vain for his stoker, Emile Gradut, and realized that the latter had disappeared.
‘It was Gradut who did it.’
Everyone was positive about that. By evening, the newspapers carried headlines like: Gradut spotted prowling about near Seine-Port … Manhunt in the forest of Rougeau … Old Aerts’ hoard still nowhere to be found …
All the testimonies confirmed that old Aerts had had money stashed away, and everyone even agreed on the figure: a hundred thousand francs. Why? That was quite a story, though actually it was very simple. At the age of sixty, Aerts, who had two married sons, had taken a new wife: Emma, a formidable woman from Strasbourg, who was only forty.
It was not a happy marriage. At every lock, Emma would complain about the old man’s stinginess, saying he barely gave her enough to buy food.
‘I don’t even know where he puts his money!’ she would say. ‘He wants it all to go his sons when he dies. And I’m supposed to work myself to death looking after him, running the boat. Not to mention …’
She would cynically go into details, in front of Aerts if need be, while Aerts would stand his ground, merely shaking his head. It was only once she had gone that he would murmur:
‘She only married me for my hundred thousand francs, but she’ll be disappointed.’
Emma would also say:
‘As if his sons needed it to live on!’
Indeed, the elder son, Joseph, was the skipper of a tug in Antwerp, and Théodore, with the help of his father, had bought a fine motorized barge, the Marie-France, which had been alerted as it passed through Maestricht in Holland.
‘But I’ll find his hundred thousand francs.’
She would say that out of the blue, even to people she’d only known for five minutes, coming out with the most intimate details about her elderly husband and concluding cynically:
‘After all, he can’t think it was out of love that a woman as young as me …’
And she cheated on him. The testimonies were unquestionable. The master of the Aiglon VII himself knew about it.
‘I’m only saying what I know. But what’s for sure is that during the two weeks we were laid off at Alfortville and the Astrolabe was taking on cargo, Emile Gradut would often go to see her, even in broad daylight.’
And then?
Emile Gradut, who was twenty-three years old, was a lowlife, that much was obvious. He had been arrested after twenty-four hours, dying of hunger, in the forest of Rougeau, less than five kilometres from La Citanguette.
‘I didn’t do anything!’ he screamed at the gendarmes, trying to parry the blows.
An unpleasant, unwholesome little lowlife, whom Maigret had had in his office for two hours and who had kept stubbornly repeating:
‘I didn’t do anything.’
‘So why did you run away?’
‘That’s none of your business!’
The examining magistrate had been convinced that Gradut had hidden the hoard in the forest. He had ordered more searches to be carried out there, but nothing had been found.
There was something infinitely bleak about all this, like the river that reflected the same sky from morning to evening, like these strings of boats that announced themselves with blasts on the horn (one blast for each barge being towed) and that passedthrough the lock in an endless succession. Then, while the women on deck simultaneously looked after their brats and supervised the manoeuvre, the men would go up to the bistro, have a drink and plod back down.
‘Cut and dried!’ one of Maigret’s colleagues had said to him.
And yet Maigret, as sullen as the Seine itself, as sullen as a canal in the rain, had come back to his lock and couldn’t tear himself away from it.
It’s always the same: when a case appears too clear, nobody thinks of looking into the details. Everyone was sure Gradut had done it – he looked so much like the kind of person who would that it had been accepted as a fact.
But now they had the results of the two post-mortems, which yielded some curious conclusions. Thus, where Arthur Aerts was concerned, Dr Paul said:
… Slight trauma at the base of the chin … According to the state of rigor mortis and the stomach contents, it can be stated with precision that death by strangulation took place between ten o’clock and ten thirty …
Aerts had gone back on board at ten. According to the bistro owner’s wife, Claessens had followed him a quarter of an hour later and, according to his statement, had gone straight to his stable.
‘Was there any light in the Aerts’ cabin?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was the dog still on its chain?’
The poor old man had thought about this for a long time and finally made an impotent gesture. No, he didn’t know, he hadn’t paid attention. How could he have foreseen that his movements that particular night would subsequently be considered of crucial importance? He lived from one drink to the next. He slept fully dressed, on straw, wrapped in the warm smell of his horses …
‘Did you hear any noise?’
He didn’t know! He couldn’t know! He had fallen asleep and when he had woken up he had found himself in the middle of the river, jammed up against the barrier …
Here, though, another testimony came in. But could it be taken seriously? It had been given by Madame Couturier, the wife of the master of the Aiglon VII. The chief inspector in Corbeil had questioned her, like the others, before letting the line of barges continue on its way to the Loing Canal. Maigret had the transcript in his pocket.
Question: Did you hear anything during the night?
Answer: I couldn’t swear to it.
Q: Tell me what you did hear.
A: It’s all so vague. I woke up after a while and checked the time on the alarm clock. It was ten forty-five. I got the impression people were talking near the boat.
Q: Did you recognize their voices?
A: No, but I assumed it was Gradut meeting with Emma. I must have fallen asleep again right away.
Could they count on that? And, even if it was true, what did it prove?
Below the lock, a tug, its six boats and the Astrolabe had been sleeping that night and …
As far as Aerts was concerned, the report was clear: he had died by strangulation between ten and ten thirty.
But things got complicated with Dr Paul’s second report, the one concerning Emma.
… The left cheek bears bruises, produced by either a blunt instrument or a violent punch. As for death, due to asphyxia by hanging, it occurred at about one in the morning …
And Maigret plunged ever deeper into the slow, heavy life of La Citanguette as if it were the only place he could mull things over. A motorized barge flying a Belgian flag made him think of Théodore, Aerts’ son, who must have reached Paris by now.
At the same time, the Belgian flag made him think of Dutch gin. On the table in the cabin a bottle of Dutch gin had been found, more than half empty. The cabin itself had been thoroughly searched. The cloth of the mattress was found to have been torn, spreading feathers everywhere.
To find the hoard of a hundred thousand francs, obviously!
The first investigators stated:
‘It’s quite simple! Emile Gradut killed Aerts and Emma. Then he got drunk, looked for the hoard, found it and hid it in the forest.’
Except that Dr Paul, in performing the post-mortem on Emma, discovered in her stomach all the alcohol that was missing from the bottle!
Which meant that it was Emma who had drunk the Dutch gin, not Gradut!
‘Perfect!’ the investigators retorted. After killing Aerts, Gradut got Emma drunk in order to overcome her, because, don’t forget, she was a strong woman …
If they were to be believed, Gradut and his mistress had both remained on board from ten or ten thirty, the time of Arthur Aerts’ death, until midnight or one in the morning, the time of Emma’s death …
It was possible, obviously. Anything was possible … Only, Maigret wanted – how to put it? – he wanted to get to the point where he was thinking barge, in other words, thinking like these people.
He had been as tough as the others with Emile Gradut. For two hours, he had really grilled him. To start with, he had tried to make him ‘sing’, as they said at Quai des Orfèvres.
‘Listen, my friend. You’re implicated, that’s obvious. But to be honest, I don’t think you killed the two of them.’
