The Evidence Of The Altar-Boy

1

A fine cold rain was falling. The night was very dark; only at the far end of the street, near the barracks from which, at half-past five, there had come the sound of bugle calls and the noise of horses being taken to be watered, was there a faint light shining in someone’s window — an early riser, or an invalid who had lain awake all night.

The rest of the street was asleep. It was a broad, quiet, newish street, with almost identical one- or two-storied houses such as are to be seen in the suburbs of most big provincial towns.

The whole district was new, devoid of mystery, inhabited by quiet unassuming people, clerks and commercial travellers, retired men and peaceful widows.

Maigret, with his overcoat collar turned up, was huddling in the angle of a carriage gateway, that of the boys’ school; he was waiting, watch in hand, and smoking his pipe.

At a quarter to six exactly, bells rang out from the parish church behind him, and he knew that, as the boy had said, it was the ‘first stroke’ for six o’clock Mass.

The sound of the bells was still vibrating in the damp air when he heard, or rather guessed at, the shrill clamour of an alarm clock. This lasted only a few seconds. The boy must already have stretched a hand out of his warm bed and groped in the darkness for the safety-catch that would silence the clock. A few minutes later, the attic window on the second floor lit up.

It all happened exactly as the boy had said. He must have risen noiselessly, before anyone else, in the sleeping house. Now he must be picking up his clothes, his socks, washing his face and hands and combing his hair. As for his shoes, he had declared:

‘I carry them downstairs and put them on when I get to the last step, so as not to wake up my parents.’

This had happened every day, winter and summer, for nearly two years, ever since Justin had first begun to serve at Mass at the hospital.

He had asserted, furthermore:

‘The hospital clock always strikes three or four minutes later than the parish church clock.’

And this had proved to be the case. The inspectors of the Flying Squad to which Maigret had been seconded for the past few months had shrugged their shoulders over these tiresome details about first bells and second bells.

Was it because Maigret had been an altar-boy himself for a long time that he had not dismissed the story with a smile?

The bells of the parish church rang first, at a quarter to six. Then Justin’s alarm clock went off, in the attic where the boy slept. Then a few moments later came the shriller, more silvery sound of the hospital chapel bells, like those of a convent.

He still had his watch in his hand. The boy took barely more than four minutes to dress. Then the light went out. He must be groping his way down the stairs, anxious not to waken his parents, then sitting down on the bottom step to put on his shoes, and taking down his coat and cap from the bamboo coat-rack on the right in the passage.

The door opened. The boy closed it again without making a sound, looked up and down the street anxiously and then saw the Superintendent’s burly figure coming up to him.

‘I was afraid you might not be there.’

And he started walking fast. He was a thin, fair-haired little twelve-year-old with an obstinate look about him.

‘You want me to do just what I usually do, don’t you? I always walk fast, for one thing because I’ve worked out to the minute how long it takes, and for another, because in winter, when it’s dark, I’m frightened. In a month it’ll be getting light by this time in the morning.’

He took the first turning on the right into another quiet, somewhat shorter street, which led on to an open square planted with elms and crossed diagonally by tramlines.

And Maigret noted tiny details that reminded him of his own childhood. He noticed, for one thing, that the boy did not walk close to the houses, probably because he was afraid of seeing someone suddenly emerge from a dark doorway. Then, that when he crossed the square he avoided the trees in the same way, because a man might have been hiding behind them.

He was a brave boy, really, since for two whole winters, in all weathers, sometimes in thick fog or in the almost total darkness of a moonless night, he had made the same journey every morning all alone.

‘When we get to the middle of the Rue Sainte-Catherine you’ll hear the second bell for Mass from the parish church…’

‘At what time does the first tram pass?’

‘At six o’clock. I’ve only seen it two or three times, when I was late… once because my alarm clock hadn’t rung, another time because I’d fallen asleep again. That’s why I jump out of bed as soon as it rings.’

A pale little face in the rainy night, with eyes that still retained something of the fixed stare of a sleepwalker, and a thoughtful expression with just a slight tinge of anxiety.

‘I shan’t go on serving at Mass. It’s because you insisted that I’ve come today…’

They turned left down the Rue Sainte-Catherine, where, as in all the streets in this district, there was a lamp every fifty metres, each of them shedding a pool of light; and the child unconsciously quickened his pace each time he left the reassuring zone of brightness.

The noises from the barracks could still be heard in the distance. A few windows lit up. Footsteps sounded in a side street; probably a workman going to his job.

‘When you got to the corner of the street, did you see nothing?’

This was the trickiest point, for the Rue Sainte-Catherine was very straight and empty, with its rectilinear pavements and its street lamps at regular intervals, leaving so little shadow between them that one could not have failed to see a couple of men quarrelling even at a hundred metres’ distance.

‘Perhaps I wasn’t looking in front of me… I was talking to myself, I remember… I often do talk to myself in a whisper, when I’m going along there in the morning… I wanted to ask mother something when I got home and I was repeating to myself what I was going to say to her…’

‘What did you want to say to her?’

‘I’ve wanted a bike for ever such a long time… I’ve already saved up three hundred francs out of my church money.’

Was it just an impression? It seemed to Maigret that the boy was keeping further away from the houses. He even stepped off the pavement, and returned to it a little further on.

‘It was here… Look… There’s the second bell ringing for Mass at the parish church.’

And Maigret endeavoured, in all seriousness, to enter into the world which was the child’s world every morning.

‘I must have looked up suddenly… You know, like when you’re running without looking where you’re going and find yourself in front of a wall… It was just here.’

He pointed to the line on the pavement dividing the darkness from the lamplight, where the drizzle formed a luminous haze.

‘First I saw that there was a man lying down and he looked so big that I could have sworn he took up the whole width of the pavement.’

That was impossible, for the pavement was at least two and a half metres across.

‘I don’t know what I did exactly… I must have jumped aside… I didn’t run away immediately, for I saw the knife stuck in his chest, with a big handle made of brown horn. I noticed it because my uncle Henri has a knife just like it and he told me it was made out of a stag’s horn. I’m certain the man was dead…’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know… He looked like a corpse.’

‘Were his eyes shut?’

‘I didn’t notice his eyes… I don’t know… But I had the feeling he was dead… It all happened very quickly, as I told you yesterday in your office… They made me repeat the same thing so many times yesterday that I’m all muddled… Specially when I feel people don’t believe me…’

‘And the other man?’

‘When I looked up I saw that there was somebody a little further on, five metres away maybe, a man with very pale eyes who looked at me for a moment and then started running. It was the murderer…’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because he ran off as fast as he could.’

‘In which direction?’

‘Right over there…’

‘Towards the barracks?’

‘Yes…’

It was a fact that Justin had been interrogated at least ten times the previous day. Before Maigret appeared in the office the detectives had even made a sort of game of it. His story had never varied in a single detail.

‘And what did you do?’

‘I started running too… It’s hard to explain… I think it was when I saw the man running away that I got frightened… And then I ran as hard as I could…’

‘In the opposite direction?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you not think of calling for help?’

‘No… I was too frightened… I was specially afraid my legs might give way, for I could scarcely feel them… I turned rightabout as far as the Place du Congrès… I took the other street, that leads to the hospital too after making a bend.’

‘Let’s go on.’

More bells, the shrill-toned bells of the chapel. After walking some fifty metres they reached a crossroads, on the left of which were the walls of the barracks, pierced with loopholes, and on the right a huge gateway dimly lit and surmounted by a clock-face of greenish glass.

It was three minutes to six.

‘I’m a minute late… Yesterday I was on time in spite of it all, because I ran…’

There was a heavy knocker on the solid oak door; the child lifted it, and the noise reverberated through the porch. A porter in slippers opened the door, let Justin go in but barred the way to Maigret, looking at him suspiciously.

‘What is it?’

‘Police.’

‘Let’s see your card?’

Hospital smells were perceptible as soon as they entered the porch. They went on through a second door into a huge courtyard surrounded by various hospital buildings. In the distance could be glimpsed the white head-dresses of nuns on their way to the chapel.

‘Why didn’t you say anything to the porter yesterday?’

‘I don’t know… I was in a hurry to get there…’

Maigret could understand that. The haven was not the official entrance with its crabbed, mistrustful porter, nor the unwelcoming courtyard through which stretchers were being carried in silence; it was the warm vestry near the chapel, where a nun was lighting candles on the altar.

‘Are you coming in with me?’

‘Yes.’

Justin looked vexed, or rather shocked, probably at the thought that this policeman, who might be an unbeliever, was going to enter into his hallowed world. And this, too, explained to Maigret why every morning the child had the courage to get up so early and overcome his fears.

The chapel had a warm and intimate atmosphere. Patients in the blue-grey hospital uniform, some with bandaged heads, some with crutches or with their arms in slings, were already sitting in the pews of the nave. Up in the gallery the nuns formed a flock of identical figures, and all their white cornets bowed simultaneously in pious worship.

‘Follow me.’

They went up a few steps, passing close to the altar where candles were already burning. To the right was a vestry panelled in dark wood, where a tall gaunt priest was putting on his vestments, while a surplice edged with fine lace lay ready for the altar-boy. A nun was busy filling the holy vessels.

It was here that, on the previous day, Justin had come to a halt at last, panting and weak-kneed. It was here that he had shouted:

‘A man’s been killed in the Rue Sainte-Catherine!’

A small clock set in the wainscot pointed to six o’clock exactly. Bells were ringing again, sounding fainter here than outside. Justin told the nun who was helping him on with his surplice:

‘This is the Police Superintendent…’

And Maigret stood waiting while the child went in, ahead of the chaplain, the skirts of his red cassock flapping as he hurried towards the altar steps.

The vestry nun had said:

‘Justin is a good little boy, who’s very devout and who’s never lied to us… Occasionally he’s failed to come and serve at Mass… He might have pretended he’d been ill… Well, he never did; he always admitted frankly that he’d not had the courage to get up because it was too cold, or because he’d had a nightmare during the night and was feeling too tired…’

And the chaplain, after saying Mass, had gazed at the Superintendent with the clear eyes of a saint in a stained glass window:

‘Why should the child have invented such a tale?’

Maigret knew, now, what had gone on in the hospital chapel on the previous morning. Justin, his teeth chattering, at the end of his tether, had been in a state of hysterics. The service could not be delayed; the vestry nun had informed the Sister Superior and had herself served at Mass in place of the child, who was meanwhile being attended to in the vestry.

Ten minutes later, the Sister Superior had thought of informing the police. She had gone out through the chapel, and everyone had realized that something was happening.

At the local police station the sergeant on duty had failed to understand.

‘What’s that?…The Sister Superior?…Superior to what?’

And she had told him, in the hushed tone they use in convents, that there had been a crime in the Rue Sainte-Catherine; and the police had found nothing, no victim, and, needless to say, no murderer…

Justin had gone to school at half-past eight, just as usual, as though nothing had happened; and it was in his classroom that Inspector Besson, a strapping little fellow who looked like a boxer and who liked to act tough, had picked him up at half-past nine as soon as the Flying Squad had got the report.

Poor kid! For two whole hours, in a dreary office that reeked of tobacco fumes and the smoke from a stove that wouldn’t draw, he had been interrogated not as a witness but as a suspect.

Three inspectors in turn, Besson, Thiberge and Vallin, had tried to catch him out, to make him contradict himself.

To make matters worse his mother had come too. She sat in the waiting-room, weeping and snivelling and telling everybody:

‘We’re decent people and we’ve never had anything to do with the police.’

Maigret, who had worked late the previous evening on a case of drug-smuggling, had not reached his office until eleven o’clock.

‘What’s happening?’ he had asked when he saw the child standing there, dry-eyed but as stiffly defiant as a little fighting-cock.

‘A kid who’s been having us on… He claims to have seen a dead body in the street and a murderer who ran away when he got near. But a tram passed along the same street four minutes later and the driver saw nothing… It’s a quiet street, and nobody heard anything… And finally when the police were called, a quarter of an hour later, by some nun or other, there was absolutely nothing to be seen on the pavement, not the slightest trace of a bloodstain…’

‘Come along into my office, boy.’

And Maigret was the first of them, that day, not to address Justin by the familiar tu, the first to treat him not as a fanciful or malicious urchin but as a small man.

He had listened to the boy’s story simply and quietly, without interrupting or taking any notes.

‘Shall you go on serving at Mass in the hospital?’

‘No. I don’t want to go back. I’m too frightened.’

And yet it meant a great sacrifice for him. Not only was he a devout child, deeply responsive to the poetry of that early Mass in the warm and somewhat mysterious atmosphere of the chapel; but in addition, he was paid for his services – not much, but enough to enable him to get together a little nest-egg. And he so badly wanted a bicycle which his parents could not afford to buy for him!

‘I should like you to go just once more, tomorrow morning.’

‘I shan’t dare.’

‘I’ll go along with you… I’ll wait for you in front of your home. You must behave exactly as you always do.’

This was what had been happening, and Maigret, at seven in the morning, was now standing alone outside the door of the hospital, in a district which, on the previous day, he had known only from having been through it by car or in a tram.

An icy drizzle was still falling from the sky which was now paler, and it clung to the Superintendent’s shoulders; he sneezed twice. A few pedestrians hurried past, their coat collars turned up and their hands in their pockets; butchers and grocers had begun taking down the shutters of their shops.

It was the quietest, most ordinary district imaginable. At a pinch one might picture a quarrel between two men, two drunks for instance, at five minutes to six on the pavement of the Rue Sainte-Catherine. One might even conceive of an assault by some ruffian on an early passer-by.

But the sequel was puzzling. According to the boy, the murderer had run off when he came near, and it was then five minutes to six. At six o’clock, however, the first tram had passed, and the driver had declared that he had seen nothing.

He might, of course, have been inattentive, or looking in the other direction. But at five minutes past six two policemen on their beat had walked along that very pavement. And they had seen nothing!

At seven or eight minutes past six a cavalry officer who lived three houses away from the spot indicated by Justin had left home, as he did every morning, to go to the barracks.

And he had seen nothing either!

Finally, at twenty-past six, the police cyclists dispatched from the local station had found no trace of the victim.

Had someone come in the meantime to remove the body in a car or van? Maigret had deliberately and calmly sought to consider every hypothesis, and this one had proved as unreliable as all the rest. At No. 42 in the same street, there was a sick woman whose husband had sat up with her all night. He had asserted categorically:

‘We hear all the noises outside. I notice them all the more because my wife is in great pain, and the least noise makes her wince. The tram woke her when she’d only just dropped off… I can give you my word no car came past before seven o’clock. The dustcart was the earliest.’

‘And you heard nothing else?’

‘Somebody running, at one point…’

‘Before the tram?’

‘Yes, because my wife was asleep… I was making myself some coffee on the hot plate.’

‘One person running?’

‘More like two.’

‘You don’t know in which direction?’

‘The blind was down… As it creaks when you lift it I didn’t try to look out.’

This was the only piece of evidence in Justin’s favour. There was a bridge two hundred metres further on. And the policeman on duty there had seen no car pass.

Could one assume that barely a few minutes after he’d run away the murderer had come back, picked up his victim’s body and carried it off somewhere or other, without attracting attention?

Worse still, there was one piece of evidence which made people shrug their shoulders when they talked about the boy’s story. The place he had indicated was just opposite No. 61. Inspector Thiberge had called at this house the day before, and Maigret, who left nothing to chance, now visited it himself.

It was a new house of pinkish brick; three steps led up to a shiny pitchpine door with a letter-box of gleaming brass.

Although it was only 7.30 in the morning, the Superintendent had been given to understand that he might call at that early hour.

A gaunt old woman with a moustache peered through a spy-hole and argued before letting him into the hall, where there was a pleasant smell of fresh coffee.

‘I’ll go and see if the Judge will see you.’

For the house belonged to a retired magistrate, who was reputed to have private means and who lived there alone with a housekeeper.

Some whispering went on in the front room, which should by rights have been a drawing-room. Then the old woman returned and said sourly:

‘Come in…Wipe your feet, please… You’re not in a stable.’

The room was no drawing-room; it bore no resemblance to what one usually thinks of as such. It was very large, and it was part bedroom, part study, part library and part junk-room, being cluttered with the most unexpected objects.

‘Have you come to look for the corpse?’ said a sneering voice that made the Superintendent jump.

Since there was a bed, he had naturally looked towards it, but it was empty. The voice came from the chimney corner, where a lean old man was huddled in the depths of an armchair, with a plaid over his legs.

‘Take off your overcoat, for I adore heat and you’ll not be able to stand it here.’

It was quite true. The old man, holding a pair of tongs, was doing his best to encourage the biggest possible blaze from a log fire.

‘I had thought that the police had made some progress since my time and had learnt to mistrust evidence given by children. Children and girls are the most unreliable of witnesses, and when I was on the Bench…’

He was wearing a thick dressing-gown, and in spite of the heat of the room, he had a scarf as broad as a shawl round his neck.

‘So the crime is supposed to have been committed in front of my house? And if I’m not mistaken, you are the famous Superintendent Maigret, whom they have graciously sent to our town to reorganize our Flying Squad?’

His voice grated. It was that of a spiteful, aggressive, savagely sarcastic old man.

‘Well, my dear Superintendent, unless you’re going to accuse me of being in league with the murderer, I am sorry to tell you, as I told your young inspector yesterday, that you’re on the wrong track.

‘You’ve probably heard that old people need very little sleep. Moreover there are people who, all their life long, sleep very little. Erasmus was one such, for instance, as was also a gentleman known as Voltaire…’

He glanced smugly at the bookshelves where volumes were piled ceiling-high.

‘This has been the case with many other people whom you’re not likely to know either… It’s the case with me, and I pride myself on not having slept more than three hours a night during the last fifteen years… Since for the past ten my legs have refused to carry me, and since furthermore I’ve no desire to visit any of the places to which they might take me, I spend my days and nights in this room which, as you can see for yourself, gives directly on to the street.

‘By four in the morning I am sitting in this armchair, with all my wits about me, believe me… I could show you the book in which I was deep yesterday morning, only it was by a Greek philosopher and I can’t imagine you’d be interested.

‘The fact remains that if an incident of the sort described by your over-imaginative young friend had taken place under my window, I can promise you I should have noticed it… My legs are weak, as I’ve said, but my hearing is still good.

‘Moreover, I have retained enough natural curiosity to take an interest in all that happens in the street, and if it amuses you I could tell you at what time every housewife in the neighbourhood goes past my window to do her shopping.’

He was looking at Maigret with a smile of triumph.

‘So you usually hear young Justin passing in front of the house?’ the Superintendent asked in the meekest and gentlest of tones.

‘Naturally.’

‘You both hear him and see him?’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘For most of the year, for almost two-thirds of the year, it’s broad daylight at six in the morning… Now the child served at six o’clock Mass both summer and winter.’

‘I used to see him go past.’

‘Considering that this happened every day with as much regularity as the passing of the first tram, you must have been attentively aware of it…’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that, for instance, when a factory siren sounds every day at the same time in a certain district, when somebody passes your window with clockwork regularity, you naturally say to yourself: Hello, it must be such and such a time.

‘And if one day the siren doesn’t sound, you think: Why, it’s Sunday. And if the person doesn’t come past you wonder: What can have happened to him? Perhaps he’s ill?’

The judge was looking at Maigret with sharp, sly little eyes. He seemed to resent being taught a lesson.

‘I know all that…’ he grumbled, cracking his bony finger-joints.‘ I was a magistrate before you were a policeman.’

‘When the altar-boy went past…’

‘I used to hear him, if that’s what you’re trying to make me admit.’

‘And if he didn’t go past?’

‘I might have happened to notice it. But I might have happened not to notice it. As in the case of the factory siren you mentioned. One isn’t struck every Sunday by the silence of the siren…’

‘What about yesterday?’

Could Maigret be mistaken? He had the impression that the old magistrate was scowling, that there was something sullen and savagely secretive about his expression. Old people sometimes sulk, like children; they often display the same puerile stubbornness.

‘Yesterday?’

‘Yes…’

Why did he repeat the question, unless to give himself time to make a decision?

‘I noticed nothing.’

‘Not that he had passed?’

‘No…’

‘Nor that he hadn’t passed?’

‘No…’

One or the other answer was untrue, Maigret was convinced. He was anxious to continue the test, and he went on with his questions:

‘Nobody ran past your windows?’

‘No.’

This time the no was spoken frankly and the old man must have been telling the truth.

‘You heard no unusual sound?’

‘No’ again, uttered with the same downrightness and almost with a note of triumph.

‘No sound of trampling, of groaning, no sound of a body falling?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘I’m much obliged to you.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

‘Seeing that you’ve been a magistrate I need not of course ask you if you are willing to repeat your statement under oath?’

‘Whenever you like.’

And the old man said that with a kind of delighted impatience.

‘I apologize for disturbing you, Judge.’

‘I wish you all success in your enquiry, Superintendent.’

The old housekeeper must have been hiding behind the door, for she was waiting on the threshold to show out the Superintendent and shut the front door behind him.

Maigret experienced a curious sensation as he re-emerged into everyday life in that quiet suburban street where housewives were beginning their shopping and children were on their way to school.

It seemed to him that he had been hoaxed, and yet he could have sworn that the judge had not withheld the truth except on one point. He had the impression, furthermore, that at a certain moment he had been about to discover something very odd, very elusive, very unexpected; that he would only have had to make a tiny effort but that he had been unable to do so.

Once again he pictured the boy, he pictured the old man; he tried to find a link between them.

Slowly he filled his pipe, standing on the curb. Then, since he had had no breakfast, not even a cup of coffee on rising, and since his wet overcoat was clinging to his shoulders, he went to wait at the corner of the Place du Congrès for the tram that would take him home.

2

Out of the heaving mass of sheets and blankets an arm emerged, and a red face glistening with sweat appeared on the pillow; finally a sulky voice growled:

‘Pass me the thermometer.’

And Madame Maigret, who was sewing by the window – she had drawn aside the net curtain so as to see in the gathering dusk – rose with a sigh and switched on the electric light.

‘I thought you were asleep. It’s not half an hour since you last took your temperature.’

Resignedly, for she knew from long marital experience that it was useless to cross the big fellow, she shook the thermometer to bring down the mercury and slipped the tip of it between his lips.

He asked, meanwhile:

‘Has anybody come?’

‘You’d know if they had, since you’ve not been asleep.’

He must have dozed off though, if only for a few minutes. But he was continually being roused from his torpor by that blasted jingle from down below.

They were not in their own home. Since his mission in this provincial town was to last for six months at least, and since Madame Maigret could not bear the thought of letting her husband eat in restaurants for so long a period, she had followed him, and they had rented a furnished flat in the upper part of the town.

It was too bright, with flowery wallpaper, gimcrack furniture and a bed that groaned under the Superintendent’s weight. They had, at any rate, chosen a quiet street, where, as the landlady Madame Danse had told them, not a soul passed.

What she had failed to add was that, the ground floor of the house being occupied by a dairy, the whole place was pervaded by a sickly smell of cheese. Another fact which she had not revealed but which Maigret had just discovered for himself, since this was the first time he had stayed in bed in the daytime, was that the door of the dairy was equipped not with a bell but with a strange contraption of metal tubes which, whenever a customer came in, clashed together with a prolonged jingling sound.

‘How high?’

‘38.5…’

‘A little while ago it was 38.8.’

‘And by tonight it’ll be over 39.’

He was furious. He was always bad-tempered when he was ill, and he glowered resentfully at Madame Maigret, who obstinately refused to go out when he was longing to fill himself a pipe.

It was still pouring with rain, the same fine rain that clung to the windows and fell in mournful silence, giving one the impression of living in an aquarium. A crude glare shone down from the electric light bulb which swung, unshaded, at the end of its cord. And one could imagine an endless succession of streets equally deserted, windows lighting up one after the other, people caged in their rooms, moving about like fishes in a bowl.

‘You must have another cup of tisane.’

It was probably the tenth since twelve o’clock, and then all that lukewarm water had to be sweated away into his sheets, which ended up as damp as compresses.

He must have caught flu or tonsillitis while waiting for the boy in the cold early morning rain outside the school, or else afterwards while he was roaming the streets. By ten o’clock, when he was back in his room in the Flying Squad’s offices, and while he was poking the stove with what had become almost a ritual gesture, he had been seized with the shivers. Then he had felt too hot. His eyelids were smarting and when he looked at himself in the bit of mirror in the cloakroom, he had seen round staring eyes that were glistening with fever.

Moreover his pipe no longer tasted the same, and that was a sure sign.

‘Look here, Besson: if by any chance I shouldn’t come back this afternoon, will you carry on investigating the altar-boy problem?’

And Besson, who always thought himself cleverer than anybody else:

‘Do you really think, Chief, that there is such a problem, and that a good spanking wouldn’t put an end to it?’

‘All the same, you must get one of your colleagues, Vallin for instance, to keep an eye on the Rue Sainte-Catherine.’

‘In case the corpse comes back to lie down in front of the judge’s house?’

Maigret was too dazed by his incipient fever to follow Besson on to that ground. He had just gone on deliberately giving instructions.

‘Draw up a list of all the residents in the street. It won’t be a big job, because it’s a short street.’

‘Shall I question the kid again?’

‘No…’

And since then he had felt too hot; he was conscious of drops of sweat beading on his skin, he had a sour taste in his mouth, he kept hoping to sink into oblivion but was constantly disturbed by the ridiculous jingle of the brass tubes from the dairy.

He loathed being ill because it was humiliating and also because Madame Maigret kept a fierce watch to prevent him from smoking his pipe. If only she’d had to go out and buy something at the pharmacist’s! But she was always careful to take a well-stocked medicine chest about with her.

He loathed being ill, and yet there were moments when he almost enjoyed it, moments when, closing his eyes, he felt ageless because he experienced once again the sensations of his childhood.

Then he remembered the boy Justin, whose pale face already showed such strength of character. All that morning’s scenes recurred to his mind, not with the precision of everyday reality nor with the sharp outline of things seen, but with the peculiar intensity of things felt.

For instance he could have described almost in detail the attic room that he had never seen, the iron bedstead, the alarm clock on the bedside table, the boy stretching out his arm, dressing silently, the same gestures invariably repeated…

Invariably the same gestures! It seemed to him an important and obvious truth. When you’ve been serving at Mass for two years at a regular time, your gestures become almost completely automatic …

The first bell at a quarter to six… The alarm clock… The shriller sound of the chapel bells… Then the child would put on his shoes at the foot of the stairs, open the front door and meet the cold breath of early morning.

‘You know, Madame Maigret, he’s never read any detective stories.’ For as long back as they could remember, possibly because it had begun as a joke, they had called one another Maigret and Madame Maigret, and they had almost forgotten that they had Christian names like other people…

‘He doesn’t read the papers either…’

‘You’d better try to sleep.’

He closed his eyes, after a longing glance at his pipe, which lay on the black marble mantelpiece.

‘I questioned his mother at great length; she’s a decent woman, but she’s mightily in awe of the police…’

‘Go to sleep!’

He kept silence for a while. His breathing became deeper; it sounded as if he was really dozing off.

‘She declares he’s never seen a dead body… It’s the sort of thing you try to keep from children.’

‘Why is it important?’

‘He told me the body was so big that it seemed to take up the whole pavement… Now that’s the impression that a dead body lying on the ground makes on one… A dead person always looks bigger than a living one… D’you understand?’

‘I can’t think why you’re worrying, since Besson’s looking after the case.’

‘Besson doesn’t believe in it.’

‘In what?’

‘In the dead body.’

‘Shall I put out the light?’

In spite of his protests, she climbed on to a chair and fastened a band of waxed paper round the bulb so as to dim its light.

‘Now try to get an hour’s sleep, then I’ll make you another cup of tisane. You haven’t been sweating enough…’

‘Don’t you think if I were to have just a tiny puff at my pipe…’

‘Are you mad?’

She went into the kitchen to keep an eye on the vegetable broth, and he heard her tiptoeing back and forth. He kept picturing the same section of the Rue Sainte-Catherine, with street lamps every fifty metres.

‘The judge declares he heard nothing…’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I bet they hate one another…’

And her voice reached him from the far end of the kitchen:

‘Who are you talking about? You see I’m busy…’

‘The judge and the altar-boy. They’ve never spoken to one another, but I’ll take my oath they hate each other. You know, very old people, particularly old people who live by themselves, end up by becoming like children… Justin went past every morning, and every morning the old judge was behind his window… He looks like an owl.’

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say…’

She stood framed in the doorway, a steaming ladle in her hand.

‘Try to follow me. The judge declares that he heard nothing, and it’s too serious a matter for me to suspect him of lying.’

‘You see! Try to stop thinking about it.’

‘Only he dared not assert that he had or had not heard Justin go past yesterday morning.’

‘Perhaps he went back to sleep.’

‘No… He daren’t tell a lie, and so he’s deliberately vague. And the husband at No. 42 who was sitting up with his sick wife heard somebody running in the street.’

He kept reverting to that. His thoughts, sharpened by fever, went round in a circle.

‘What would have become of the corpse?’ objected Madame Maigret with her womanly common sense. ‘Don’t think any more about it! Besson knows his job, you’ve often said so yourself…’

He slumped back under the blankets, discouraged, and tried hard to go to sleep, but was inevitably haunted before long by the image of the altar-boy’s face, and his pallid legs above black socks.

‘There’s something wrong…’

‘What did you say? Something wrong? Are you feeling worse? Shall I ring the doctor?’

Not that. He started again from scratch, obstinately; he went back to the threshold of the boys’ school and crossed the Place du Congrès.

‘And this is where there’s something amiss.’

For one thing, because the judge had heard nothing. Unless one was going to accuse him of perjury it was hard to believe that a fight could have gone on under his window, just a few metres away, that a man had started running off towards the barracks while the boy had rushed off in the opposite direction.

‘Listen, Madame Maigret…’

‘What is it now?’

‘Suppose they had both started running in the same direction?’

With a sigh, Madame Maigret picked up her needlework and listened, dutifully, to her husband’s monologue interspersed with wheezy gasps.

‘For one thing, it’s more logical…’

‘What’s more logical?’

‘That they should both have run in the same direction… Only in that case it wouldn’t have been towards the barracks.’

‘Could the boy have been running after the murderer?’

‘No. The murderer would have run after the boy…’

‘What for, since he didn’t kill him?’

‘To make him hold his tongue, for instance.’

‘He didn’t succeed, since the child spoke…’

‘Or to prevent him from telling something, from giving some particular detail… Look here, Madame Maigret.’

‘What is it you want?’

‘I know you’ll start by saying no, but it’s absolutely necessary… Pass me my pipe and my tobacco… Just a few puffs…I’ve got the feeling that I’m going to understand the whole thing in a few minutes – if I don’t lose the thread.’

She went to fetch his pipe from the mantelpiece and handed it to him resignedly, sighing:

‘I knew you’d think of some good excuse… In any case tonight I’m going to make you a poultice whether you like it or not.’

Luckily there was no telephone in the flat and one had to go down into the shop to ring up from behind the counter.

‘Will you go downstairs, Madame Maigret, and call Besson for me? It’s seven o’clock. He may still be at the office. Otherwise call the Café du Centre, where he’ll be playing billiards with Thiberge.’

‘Shall I ask him to come here?’

‘To bring me as soon as possible a list, not of all the residents in the street but of the tenants of the houses on the left side of it, between the Place du Congrès and the Judge’s house.’

‘Do try to keep covered up…’

Barely had she set foot on the staircase when he thrust both legs out of bed and rushed, barefooted, to fetch his tobacco pouch and fill himself a fresh pipe; then he lay back innocently between the sheets.

Through the flimsy floorboards he could hear a hum of voices and Madame Maigret’s, speaking on the telephone. He smoked his pipe in greedy little puffs, although his throat was very sore. He could see raindrops slowly sliding down the dark panes, and this again reminded him of his childhood, of childish illnesses when his mother used to bring him caramel custard in bed.

Madame Maigret returned, panting a little, glanced round the room as if to take note of anything unusual, but did not think of the pipe.

‘He’ll be here in about an hour.’

‘I’m going to ask you one more favour, Madame Maigret… Will you put on your coat…’

She cast a suspicious glance at him.

‘Will you go to young Justin’s home and ask his parents to let you bring him to me… Be very kind to him… If I were to send a policeman he’d undoubtedly take fright, and he’s liable enough to be prickly as it is…Just tell him I’d like a few minutes ’ chat with him.’

‘And suppose his mother wants to come with him?’

‘Work out your own plan, but I don’t want the mother.’

Left to himself, he sank back into the hot, humid depths of the bed, the tip of his pipe emerging from the sheets and emitting a slight cloud of smoke. He closed his eyes, and he could keep picturing the corner of the Rue Sainte-Catherine; he was no longer Superintendent Maigret, he had become the altar-boy who hurried along, covering the same ground every morning at the same time and talking to himself to keep up his courage.

As he turned into the Rue Sainte-Catherine:

‘Maman, I wish you’d buy me a bike…’

For the kid had been rehearsing the scene he would play for his mother when he got back from the hospital. It would have to be more complicated; he must have thought up subtler approaches.

‘You know, maman, if I had a bike, I could…’ Or else, ‘I’ve saved three hundred francs already… If you’d lend me the rest, which I promise to pay back with what I earn from the chapel, I could…’

The corner of the Rue Sainte-Catherine… a few seconds before the bells of the parish church rang out for the second time. And there were only a hundred and fifty metres of dark empty street to go through before reaching the safe haven of the hospital…A few jumps between the pools of brightness shed by the street lamps…

Later the child was to declare:

‘I looked up and I saw…’

That was the whole problem. The judge lived practically in the middle of the street, halfway between the Place du Congrès and the corner of the barracks, and he had seen nothing and heard nothing.

The husband of the sick woman, the man from No. 42, lived closer to the Place du Congrès, on the right side of the street, and he had heard the sound of running footsteps.

Yet, five minutes later, there had been no dead or injured body on the pavement. And no car or van had passed. The policeman on duty on the bridge, the others on the beat at various spots in the neighbourhood, had seen nothing unusual such as, for instance, a man carrying another man on his back.

Maigret’s temperature was certainly going up but he no longer thought of consulting the thermometer. Things were fine as they were; words evoked images, and images assumed unexpected sharpness.

It was just like when he was a sick child and his mother, bending over him, seemed to have grown so big that she took up the whole house.

There was that body lying across the pavement, looking so long because it was a dead body, with a brown-handled knife sticking out of its chest.

And a few metres away a man, a pale-eyed man who had begun running… Running towards the barracks, whereas Justin ran for all he was worth in the opposite direction.

‘That’s it!’

That’s what? Maigret had made the remark out loud, as though it contained the solution of the problem, as though it had actually been the solution of the problem, and he smiled contentedly as he drew on his pipe with ecstatic little puffs.

Drunks are like that. Things suddenly appear to them self-evidently true, which they are nevertheless incapable of explaining, and which dissolve into vagueness as soon as they are examined coolly.

Something was untrue, that was it! And Maigret, in his feverish imagining, felt sure that he had put his finger on the weak point in the story.

Justin had not made it up… His terror, his panic on arriving at the hospital had been genuine. Neither had he made up the picture of the long body sprawling across the pavement. Moreover there was at least one person in the street who had heard running footsteps.

What had the judge with the sneering smile remarked? ‘You haven’t yet learned to mistrust the evidence of children?’… or something of the sort.

However the judge was wrong. Children are incapable of inventing, because one cannot construct truths out of nothing. One needs materials. Children transpose maybe, they don’t invent.

And that was that! At each stage, Maigret repeated that self-congratulatory voilà!

There had been a body on the pavement… And no doubt there had been a man close by. Had he had pale eyes? Quite possibly. And somebody had run.

And the old judge, Maigret could have sworn, was not the sort of man to tell a deliberate lie.

He felt hot. He was bathed in sweat, but nonetheless he left his bed to go and fill one last pipe before Madame Maigret’s return. While he was up, he took the opportunity to open the cupboard and drink a big mouthful of rum from the bottle. What did it matter if his temperature was up that night? Everything would be finished by then!

And it would be quite an achievement; a difficult case solved from a sick-bed! Madame Maigret was not likely to appreciate that, however.

The judge had not lied, and yet he must have tried to play a trick on the boy whom he hated as two children of the same age can hate one another.

Customers seemed to be getting fewer down below, for the ridiculous chimes over the door sounded less frequently. Probably the dairyman and his wife, with their daughter whose cheeks were as pink as ham, were dining together in the room at the back of the shop.

There were steps on the pavement; there were steps on the stair. Small feet were stumbling. Madame Maigret opened the door and ushered in young Justin, whose navy-blue duffel coat was glistening with rain. He smelt like a wet dog.

‘Here, my boy, let me take off your coat.’

‘I can take it off myself.’

Another mistrustful glance from Madame Maigret. Obviously, she could not believe he was still smoking the same pipe. Who knows, perhaps she even suspected the shot of rum?

‘Sit down, Justin, ’ said the Superintendent, pointing to a chair.

‘Thanks, I’m not tired.’

‘I asked you to come so that we could have a friendly chat together for a few minutes. What were you busy with?’

‘My arithmetic homework.’

‘Because in spite of all you’ve been through you’ve gone back to school?’

‘Why shouldn’t I have gone?’

The boy was proud. He was on his high horse again. Did Maigret seem to him bigger and longer than usual, now that he was lying down?

‘Madame Maigret, be an angel and go and look after the vegetable broth in the kitchen, and close the door.’

When that was done he gave the boy a knowing wink.

‘Pass me my tobacco pouch, which is on the mantelpiece… And the pipe, which must be in my overcoat pocket… Yes, the one that’s hanging behind the door… Thanks, my boy… Were you frightened when my wife came to fetch you?’

‘No.’ He said that with some pride.

‘Were you annoyed?’

‘Because everyone keeps saying that I’ve made it up.’

‘And you haven’t, have you?’

‘There was a dead man on the pavement and another who…’

‘Hush!’

‘What?’

‘Not so quick… Sit down…’

‘I’m not tired.’

‘So you’ve said, but I get tired of seeing you standing up…’

He sat down on the very edge of the chair, and his feet didn’t touch the ground; his legs were dangling, his bare knobbly knees protruding between the short pants and the socks.

‘What sort of trick did you play on the judge?’

A swift, instinctive reaction:

‘I never did anything to him.’

‘You know what judge I mean?’

‘The one who’s always peering out of his window and who looks like an owl?’

‘Just how I’d describe him… What happened between you?’

‘In winter I didn’t see him because his curtains were drawn when I went past.’

‘But in summer?’

‘I put out my tongue at him.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he kept looking at me as if he was making fun of me; he sniggered to himself as he looked at me.’

‘Did you often put out your tongue at him?’

‘Every time I saw him…’

‘And what did he do?’

‘He laughed in a spiteful sort of way… I thought it was because I served at Mass and he’s an unbeliever…’

‘Has he told a lie, then?’

‘What did he say?’

‘That nothing happened yesterday morning in front of his house, because he would have noticed.’

The boy stared intently at Maigret, then lowered his head.

‘He was lying, wasn’t he?’

‘There was a body on the pavement with a knife stuck in its chest.’

‘I know…’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know because it’s the truth…’ repeated Maigret gently. ‘Pass me the matches… I’ve let my pipe go out.’

‘Are you too hot?’

‘It’s nothing…just the flu…’

‘Did you catch it this morning?’

‘Maybe…Sit down.’

He listened attentively and then called:

‘Madame Maigret! Will you run downstairs? I think I heard Besson arriving and I don’t want him to come up before I’m ready… Will you keep him company downstairs? My friend Justin will call you…’

Once more, he said to his young companion:

‘Sit down… It’s true, too, that you both ran…’

‘I told you it was true…’

‘And I believe you… Go and make sure there’s nobody behind the door and that it’s properly shut.’

The child obeyed without understanding, impressed by the importance that his actions had suddenly acquired.

‘Listen, Justin, you’re a brave little chap.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It was true about the corpse. It was true about the man running.’

The child raised his head once again, and Maigret saw his lip quivering.

‘And the judge, who didn’t lie, because a judge would not dare to lie, didn’t tell the whole truth…’

The room smelt of flu and rum and tobacco. A whiff of vegetable broth came in under the kitchen door, and raindrops were still falling like silver tears on the black window pane beyond which lay the empty street. Were the two now facing one another still a man and a small boy? Or two men, or two small boys?

Maigret’s head felt heavy; his eyes were glistening. His pipe had a curious medical flavour that was not unpleasant, and he remembered the smells of the hospital, its chapel and its vestry.

‘The judge didn’t tell the whole truth because he wanted to rile you. And you didn’t tell the whole truth either… Now I forbid you to cry. We don’t want everyone to know what we’ve been saying to each other…You understand,Justin?’

The boy nodded.

‘If what you described hadn’t happened at all, the man in No. 42 wouldn’t have heard running footsteps.’

‘I didn’t make it up.’

‘Of course not! But if it had happened just as you said, thejudge would not have been able to say that he had heard nothing… And if the murderer had run away towards the barracks, the old man would not have sworn that nobody had run past his house.’

The child sat motionless, staring down at the tips of his dangling feet.

‘The judge was being honest, on the whole, in not daring to assert that you had gone past his house yesterday morning. But he might perhaps have asserted that you had not gone past. That’s the truth, since you ran off in the opposite direction… He was telling the truth, too, when he declared that no man had run past on the pavement under his window… For the man did not go in that direction.’

‘How do you know?’

He had stiffened, and was staring wide-eyed at Maigret as he must have stared on the previous night at the murderer or his victim.

‘Because the man inevitably rushed off in the same direction as yourself, which explains why the husband in No. 42 heard him go past … Because, knowing that you had seen him, that you had seen the body, that you could get him caught, he ran after you…’

‘If you tell my mother, I…’

‘Hush!… I don’t wish to tell your mother or anyone else anything at all… You see, Justin my boy, I’m going to talk to you like a man… A murderer clever and cool enough to make a corpse disappear without trace in a few minutes would not have been foolish enough to let you escape after seeing what you had seen.’

‘I don’t know…’

‘But I do… It’s my job to know… The most difficult thing is not to kill a man, it’s to make the body disappear afterwards, and this one disappeared magnificently… It disappeared, even though you had seen it and seen the murderer… In other words, the murderer’s a really smart guy… And a really smart guy, with his life at stake, would never have let you get away like that.’

‘I didn’t know…’

‘What didn’t you know?’

‘I didn’t know it mattered so much…“

‘It doesn’t matter at all now, since everything has been put right.’

‘Have you arrested him?’

There was immense hope in the tone in which these words were uttered.

‘He’ll be arrested before long… Sit still; stop swinging your legs…’

‘I won’t move.’

‘For one thing, if it had all happened in front of the judge’s house, that’s to say in the middle of the street, you’d have been aware of it from further off, and you’d have had time to run away… That was the only mistake the murderer made, for all his cleverness…’

‘How did you guess?’

‘I didn’t guess. But I was once an altar-boy myself, and I served at six o’clock Mass like you… You wouldn’t have gone a hundred metres along the street without looking in front of you… So the corpse must have been closer, much closer, just round the corner of the street.’

‘Five houses past the corner.’

‘You were thinking of something else, of your bike, and you may have gone twenty metres without seeing anything.’

‘How can you possibly know?’

‘And when you saw, you ran towards the Place du Congrès to get to the hospital by the other street. The man ran after you…’

‘I thought I should die of fright.’

‘Did he grab you by the shoulder?’

‘He grabbed my shoulders with both hands. I thought he was going to strangle me…’

‘He asked you to say…’

The child was crying, quietly. He was pale and the tears were rolling slowly down his cheeks.

‘If you tell my mother she’ll blame me all my life long. She’s always nagging at me.’

‘He ordered you to say that it had happened further on…’

‘Yes.’

‘In front of the judge’s house?’

‘It was me that thought of the judge’s house, because of putting out my tongue at him… The man only said the other end of the street, and that he’d run off towards the barracks.’

‘And so we very nearly had a perfect crime, because nobody believed you, since there was no murderer and no body, no traces of any sort, and it all seemed impossible…’

‘But what about you?’

‘I don’t count. It just so happens that I was once an altar-boy, and that today I’m in bed with flu… What did he promise you?’

‘He told me that if I didn’t say what he wanted me to, he would always be after me, wherever I went, in spite of the police, and that he would wring my neck like a chicken’s.’

‘And then?’

‘He asked me what I wanted to have…’

‘And you said a bike…?’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve told you, I was once an altar-boy too.’

‘And you wanted a bike?’

‘That, and a great many other things that I’ve never had… Why did you say he had pale eyes?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t see his eyes. He was wearing thick glasses. But I didn’t want him to be caught…’

‘Because of the bike?’

‘Maybe…You’re going to tell my mother, aren’t you?’

‘Not your mother nor anyone else… Aren’t we pals now?… Look, you hand me my tobacco pouch and don’t tell Madame Maigret that I’ve smoked three pipes since we’ve been here together… You see, grown-ups don’t always tell the whole truth either… Which door was it in front of, Justin?’

‘The yellow house next door to the delicatessen.’

‘Go and fetch my wife.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Downstairs… She’s with Inspector Besson, the one who was so beastly to you.’

‘And who’s going to arrest me?’

‘Open the wardrobe…’

‘Right…’

‘There’s a pair of trousers hanging there…’

‘What am I to do with it?’

‘In the left hand pocket you’ll find a wallet.’

‘Here it is.’

‘In the wallet there are some visiting-cards.’

‘Do you want them?’

‘Hand me one…And also the pen that’s on the table…’ With which, Maigret wrote on one of the cards that bore his name: Supply bearer with one bicycle.

3

‘Come in, Besson.’

Madame Maigret glanced up at the dense cloud of smoke that hung round the lamp in its waxed-paper shade; then she hurried into the kitchen, because she could smell something burning there.

As for Besson, taking the chair just vacated by the boy, for whom he had only a disdainful glance, he announced:

‘I’ve got the list you asked me to draw up. I must tell you right away…’

‘That it’s useless… Who lives in No. 14?’

‘One moment…’ He consulted his notes.‘ Let’s see…No. 14… There’s only a single tenant there.’

‘I suspected as much.’

‘Oh?’ An uneasy glance at the boy. ‘It’s a foreigner, name of Frankelstein, a dealer in jewellery.’

Maigret had slipped back among his pillows; he muttered, with an air of indifference:

‘A fence.’

‘What did you say, Chief?’

‘A fence… Possibly the boss of a gang.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘That doesn’t matter… Be a good fellow, Besson, pass me the bottle of rum that’s in the cupboard. Quickly, before Madame Maigret comes back… I bet my temperature’s soaring and I’ll need to have my sheets changed a couple of times tonight… Frankelstein… Get a search warrant from the examining magistrate… No… At this time of night, it’ll take too long, for he’s sure to be out playing bridge somewhere… Have you had dinner?… Me, I’m waiting for my vegetable broth… There are some blank warrants in my desk – left hand drawer. Fill one in. Search the house. You’re sure to find the body, even if it means knocking down a cellar wall.’

Poor Besson stared at his Chief in some anxiety, then glanced at the boy, who was sitting waiting quietly in a corner.

‘Act quickly, old man… If he knows that the kid’s been here tonight, you won’t find him in his lair… He’s a tough guy, as you’ll find out.’

He was indeed. When the police rang at his door, he tried to escape through backyards and over walls; it took them all night to catch him, which they finally did among the roof-tops. Meanwhile other policemen searched the house for hours before discovering the corpse, decomposing in a bath of quicklime.

It had obviously been a settling of accounts. A disgruntled and frustrated member of the gang had called on the boss in the small hours; Frankelstein had done him in on the doorstep, unaware that an altar-boy was at that very instant coming round the street corner.

‘What does it say?’ Maigret no longer had the heart to look at the thermometer himself.

‘39.3…’

‘Aren’t you cheating?’

He knew that she was cheating, that his temperature was higher than that, but he didn’t care; it was good, it was delicious to sink into unconsciousness, to let himself glide at a dizzy speed into a misty, yet terribly real world where an altar-boy bearing a strong resemblance to Maigret as he had once been was tearing wildly down the street, sure that he was either going to be strangled or to win a shiny new bicycle.

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Madame Maigret, whose plump fingers held a scalding hot poultice which she was proposing to apply to her husband’s throat.

He was muttering nonsense like a feverish child, talking about the first bell and the second bell.

‘I’m going to be late…’

‘Late for what?’

‘For Mass… Sister… Sister…’

He meant the vestry-nun, the sacristine, but he could not find the word.

He fell asleep at last, with a huge compress round his neck, dreaming of Mass in his own village and of Marie Titin’s inn, past which he used to run because he was afraid.

Afraid of what?…

‘I got him, all the same…’

‘Who?’

‘The judge.’

‘What judge?’

It was too complicated to explain. The judge reminded him of somebody in his village at whom he used to put out his tongue. The blacksmith? No… It was the baker’s wife’s stepfather… It didn’t matter. Somebody he disliked. And it was the judge who had misled him the whole way through, in order to be revenged on the altar-boy and to annoy people… He had said he had heard no footsteps in front of his house…

But he had not said that he had heard two people running off in the opposite direction…

Old people become childish. And they quarrel with children, Like children.

Maigret was satisfied, in spite of everything. He had cheated by three whole pipes, even four… He had a good taste of tobacco in his mouth and he could let himself drift away…

And tomorrow, since he had flu, Madame Maigret would make him some caramel custard.

[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

[collected in Maigret’s Christmas: Nine Stories]

[for a complete bibliography of all 103 episodes of The Maigret Saga, check out Steve Trussel’s amazing fan site at http://www.trussel.com/f_maig.htm ]

[April 04, 2007—v1 html proofed and formatted]