Inspector Maigret Deduces

Dimly through a deep sleep Maigret heard a ringing sound, but he was not aware that it was the telephone bell and that his wife was leaning over him to answer.

“It’s Paulie,” she said, shaking her husband. “He wants to speak to you.”

“You, Paulie?” Maigret growled, half awake.

“Is that you, Nunk?” came from the other end of the wire.

It was three in the morning. The bed was warm but the windowpanes were covered with frost flowers, for it was freezing outside. It was freezing even harder up at Jeumont, from where Paulie was telephoning.

“What’s that you say?… Wait—I’ll take the names… Otto… Yes, spell it, it’s safer.”

Madame Maigret, watching her husband, had only one question in her mind: whether he would have to get up or not. And, of course, he did, grumbling away. “Something very odd has happened,” he explained, “over at Jeumont, and Paulie has taken it upon himself to detain an entire railway car.”

Paulie was Maigret’s nephew, Paul Vinchon, and he was a police inspector at the Belgian frontier.

“Where are you going?” Madame Maigret asked.

“First to Headquarters to get some information. Then I’ll probably hop on the first train.”

When anything happens it is always on the 106—a train that leaves Berlin at 11:00 a.m. with one or two cars from Warsaw, reaches Liége at 11:44 p.m., when the station is empty—it closes as soon as the train leaves—and finally gets to Erquelinnes at 1:57 in the morning.

That evening the car steps had been white with frost, and slippery. At Erquelinnes the Belgian customs officials, who had virtually nothing to do as the train was on its way out, passed down the corridors, looking into a compartment here and there, before hurrying back to the warmth of the station stove.

By 2:14 the train got under way again to cross the frontier, and reached Jeumont at 2:17.

“Jeumont!” came the cry of a porter running along the platform with a lamp. “Fifty-one minutes’ wait!”

In most of the compartments the passengers were still asleep, the lights were dimmed and the curtains drawn.

“Second- and third-class passengers off the train for customs,” echoed down the train.

And Inspector Paul Vinchon stood frowning at the number of curtains that were drawn back and at the number of lights turned up. He went up to the conductor. “Why are there so many traveling first-class today?”

“Some international convention of dentists that starts in Paris tomorrow. We have at least twenty-five of them as well as the ordinary passengers.”

Vinchon walked into the car at the head of the train, opened the doors one after the other, growling out mechanically, “Have your passports ready, please.”

Wherever the passengers had not wakened and the light was still dimmed, he turned it up; faces rose out of the shadows, swollen with fatigue.

Five minutes later, on his way back up the corridor, he passed the customs men who were going through the first-class compartments, clearing the passengers into the corridor, while they examined the seats and searched every cranny.

“Passports, identity cards…”

He was in one of the red-upholstered German carriages. Usually these compartments held only four passengers, but because of the invasion of dentists this one had six.

Paulie threw an admiring glance at the pretty woman with the Austrian passport in the left corner seat by the corridor. The others he hardly looked at until he reached the far side of the compartment, where a man, covered with a thick rug, still had not moved.

“Passport,” he said, touching him on the shoulder.

The other passengers were beginning to open their suitcases for the customs officials, who were now arriving. Vinchon shook his sleeping traveler harder; the man slid over on his side. A moment later Vinchon had ascertained he was dead.

The scene was chaotic. The compartment was too narrow for all the people who crowded in, and when a stretcher was brought in, there was some difficulty in placing the extremely heavy body on it.

“Take him to the first-aid post,” Inspector Vinchon ordered. A little later he found a German doctor on the train.

At the same time he put a customs official on guard over the compartment. The young Austrian woman was the only one who wanted to leave the train to get some fresh air. When she was stopped, she gave a contemptuous shrug.

“Can you tell me what he died of?” Vinchon asked the doctor.

The doctor seemed puzzled; in the end, with Vinchon’s help, he undressed the dead man. Even then there was no immediate sign of a wound; it took a full minute before the German pointed out, on the fleshy chest, a mark that could hardly be seen. “Someone stuck a needle in his heart,” he said.

The train had still 12 or 13 minutes before leaving again. The special Inspector was absent. Vinchon, feverish with excitement, had to make a snap decision: he ran to the station-master and gave orders for the murder car to be uncoupled.

The passengers were not sure what was happening. Those in the adjoining compartments protested when they were told that the car was staying at Jeumont and that they would have to find seats elsewhere. Those who had been traveling with the dead man protested even more when Vinchon told them he was obliged to keep them there till the next day.

However, there was nothing else for it, seeing that there was a murderer among them. All the same, once the train had left, one car and six passengers short, Vinchon began to feel weak at the knees, and rang up his uncle, the famous Inspector Maigret.

At a quarter to four in the morning Maigret was at the Quai des Orfèvres; only a few lights were burning and he asked a sergeant on duty to make him some coffee. By four o’clock, with his office already clouded with pipe smoke, he had Berlin on the line, and was dictating to a German colleague the names and addresses his nephew had given him.

Afterward he asked for Vienna, as one of the passengers in the compartment came from there, and then he wrote out a telegram for Warsaw, for there had also been a lady from Vilna by the name of Irvitch.

Meanwhile, in his office at the station at Jeumont, Paul Vinchon was taking a firm line with his five suspects, whose reactions varied according to their temperaments. At least there was a good fire on—one of those large station stoves that swallows up bucket after bucket of coal. Vinchon had chairs brought in from the neighboring offices, and good old administrative seats they were, too, with turned legs and shabby velvet upholstery.

“I assure you I am doing everything possible to speed things up, but in the circumstances I have no choice but to detain you here.”

He had not a minute to lose if he wanted to draw up anything like a suitable report for the morning. The passports were on his desk. The body of Otto Braun—the victim’s name, according to the passport found in his pocket—was still at the first-aid post.

“I can, if you like, get you something to drink. But you will have to make up your minds quickly—the buffet is about to close.”

At ten past four Vinchon was disturbed by a ring on the telephone. “Hello? Aulnoye? What’s that? Of course. There’s probably some connection, yes. Well, send him over by the first train. And the packet, too, of course.”

Vinchon went into an adjoining office to put through another call to Maigret unheard.

“Is that you, Nunk? Something else, this time. A few minutes ago, as the train was drawing into the station at Aulnoye, a man was seen getting out from under a car. There was a bit of a chase, but they managed to get him in the end. He was carrying a waxed-paper packet of bearer bonds, mostly oil securities, for quite an amount. The man gave his name as Jef Bebelmans, native of Antwerp, and his profession as an acrobat… Yes… They’re bringing him over on the first train. You’ll be on that one, too?… No?… At 10:20? Thanks, Nunk.”

And he returned to his flock of sheep and goats, which is the way he thought of them…

When day broke, the frosty light made it seem even colder than the night before. Passengers for a local train started to arrive, and Vinchon worked on, deaf to the protests of the detained passengers, who eventually subsided, overwhelmed with fatigue.

No time was lost. This was essential, for it was the kind of business that could bring diplomatic complications. One could not go on indefinitely holding five travelers of different nationalities, all with their papers in order, just because a man had been killed in their railway compartment.

Maigret arrived at 10:20, as he had said he would. At 11:00, on a siding where the death car had been shunted, the reconstruction of the crime took place.

It was a little ghostly, with the gray light, the cold, and the general weariness. Twice a nervous laugh rang out, indicating that one of the lady passengers had helped herself too freely to the drinks to warm herself.

“First of all, put the dead man back in his seat,” Maigret ordered. “I suppose the curtains on the outside window were drawn?”

“Nothing’s been touched,” said his nephew.

Of course, it would have been better to wait until night, until the exact time of the affair. But as that was impossible—

Otto Braun, according to his passport, was 58, born at Bremen, and formerly a banker at Stuttgart. He certainly looked the part, neatly dressed, with his comfortable, heavy build and close-cropped hair.

The information that had just arrived from Berlin stated: Had to stop his financial activities after the National Socialist revolution, but gave an undertaking of loyalty to the Government, and has never been disturbed. Said to be very rich. Contributed one million marks to party funds.

In one of his pockets Maigret found a hotel bill from the Kaiserhof, in Berlin, where Otto Braun had stayed three days on his way from Stuttgart.

Meanwhile, the five passengers were standing in the corridor, watching, some dismally and others angrily, the comings and goings of Inspector Maigret. Pointing to the luggage rack above Braun, Maigret asked, “Are those his suitcases?”

“They’re mine,” came the sharp voice of Lena Leinbach, the Austrian.

“Will you please take the seat you had last night?”

She did so reluctantly, and her unsteady movements betrayed the effects of the drinks. She was beautifully dressed, and wore a mink coat, and a ring on every finger.

The report on her that was telegraphed from Vienna said: Courtesan of the luxury class, who has had numerous affairs in the capitals of Central Europe, but has never come to the attention of the police. Was for a long time the mistress of a German prince.

“Which of you got on at Berlin?” Maigret asked, turning to the others.

“If you will allow me,” someone said in excellent French. And, in fact, it turned out to be a Frenchman, Adolphe Bonvoisin, from Lille.

“I can perhaps be of some help to you as I was on the train from Warsaw. There were two of us. I myself came from Lvov, where my firm—a textile concern—has a Polish subsidiary. Madame boarded the train at Warsaw at the same time as I did.” He indicated a middle-aged woman in an astrakhan coat, dark and heavily built, with swollen legs.

“Madame Irvitch of Vilna?”

As she spoke no French, the interview was conducted in German. Madame Irvitch, the wife of a wholesale furrier, was coming to Paris to consult a specialist, and she wished to lodge a protest—

“Sit down in the place you were occupying last night.”

Two passengers remained—two men.

“Name?” Maigret asked the first, a tall, thin, distinguished-looking man with an officer’s bearing.

“Thomas Hauke, of Hamburg.”

On Hauke, Berlin had had plenty to say: Sentenced in 1924 to two years’ imprisonment for dealing in stolen jewelry… closely watched since… frequents the pleasure spots of various European capitals… suspected of engaging in cocaine and morphine smuggling.

Finally, the last one, a man of 35, bespectacled, shaven-headed, severe. “Dr. Gellhorn,” he said, “from Brussels.”

A silly misunderstanding then arose. Maigret asked him why, when his fellow passenger was discovered unconscious, he had done nothing about it.

“Because I’m not a doctor of medicine. I’m an archeologist.”

By now the compartment was occupied as it had been the previous night:

Maigret had already spent a quarter of an hour in another room with Jef Bebelmans, the acrobat from Antwerp who had appeared from under a car at Aulnoye carrying more than two million in bearer bonds. At first, when confronted with the corpse, Bebelmans had betrayed no emotion, merely asking, “Who is it?”

Then he had been found to be in possession of a third-class ticket from Berlin to Paris, although that had not prevented him from spending part of the journey hiding under a car, no doubt to avoid declaring his bonds at the frontier.

Bebelmans, however, was not a talkative fellow. His one observation revealed a touch of humor: “It’s your business to ask questions. Unfortunately, I have absolutely nothing to tell you.”

The information on him was not too helpful either: Formerly an acrobat, he has since been a night-club waiter in Heidelberg, and later in Berlin.

“Well, now,” Maigret began, puffing away at his pipe, “you, Bonvoisin, and Madame Irvitch were already in the train at Warsaw. Who got in at Berlin?”

“Madame was first,” Bonvoisin said, indicating Lena Leinbach.

“And your suitcases, madame?”

She pointed to the rack above the dead man, where there were three luxurious crocodile bags, each in a fawn cover.

“So you put your luggage over this seat and sat down in the other corner, diagonally opposite.”

“The dead man—I mean, that gentleman—came in next,” Bonvoisin asked nothing better than to go on talking.

“Without luggage?”

“All he had with him was a traveling rug.” This was the cue for a consultation between Maigret and his nephew. Quickly they made another inventory of the dead man’s wallet, in which a luggage slip was found. As the heavy baggage had by then reached Paris, Maigret sent telephone instructions that these pieces should be opened at once.

“Good! Now, this gentleman—” He motioned toward Hauke.

“He got in at Cologne.”

“Is that right, Monsieur Hauke?”

“To be preceise, I changed compartments at Cologne. I was in a nonsmoker.”

Dr. Gellhorn, too, had got on at Cologne. While Maigret, hands in pockets, was putting his questions, muttering away to himself, watching each of them in turn, Paul Vinchon, like a good secretary, was taking notes at a rapid rate.

These notes read:

Bonvoisin: Until the German frontier, no one seemed to know anyone else, except for Madame Irvitch and myself. After the customs we all settled down to sleep as best we could, and the light was dimmed. At Liège I saw the lady opposite (Lena Leinbach) try to go out into the corridor. Immediately the gentleman in the other corner (Otto Braun) got up and asked her in German what she was doing. “1 want a breath of air,” she said. And I’m sure I heard him say, “Stay where you are.”

Later in his statement Bonvoisin returned to this point: At Namur she tried once more to get out of the train, but Otto Braun, who seemed to be asleep, suddenly moved, and she stayed where she was. At Charleroi they spoke to each other again, but I was falling asleep and have only a hazy recollection.

So, somewhere between Charleroi and Jeumont, in that hour and a half or so, one of the passengers must have made the fatal move, must have approached Otto Braun and plunged a needle into his heart.

Only Bonvoisin would not have needed to get up. He had only to move slightly to the right to reach the German. Hauke’s position, directly opposite the victim, was the next best, then Dr. Gellhorn’s and finally the two women’s.

Despite the cold, Maigret’s forehead was bathed with sweat. Lena Leinbach watched him furiously, while Madame Irvitch complained of rheumatism and consoled herself by talking Polish to Bonvoisin.

Thomas Hauke was the most dignified of them all, and the most aloof, while Gellhorn claimed that he was missing an important appointment at the Louvre.

To return to Vinchon’s notes, the following dialogue appears:

Maigret, to Lena: Where were you living in Berlin?

Lena: I was only there for a week. I was staying as usual at the Kaiserhof.

M: Did you know Otto Braun?

L: No. I may have run across him in the hall or the lift.

M: Why, then, after the German frontier did he start talking to you as if he knew you?

L: (dryly) Perhaps because he grew bolder away from home.

M: Was that why he forbade you to get off the train at Liége and Namur?

L: He merely said I’d catch cold.

The questioning was still going on when there was a telephone call from Paris. Otto Braun’s luggage—there were eight pieces—contained a great amount of clothing, and so much linen and personal stuff that one might have assumed the banker was going off on a long trip, if not forever. But no money—only four hundred marks in a wallet.

As for the other passengers: Lena Leinbach was carrying 500 French francs, 50 marks, 30 crowns; Dr. Gellhorn, 700 marks; Thomas Hauke, 40 marks and 20 French francs; Madame Irvitch, 30 marks, 100 francs, and letters of credit on a Polish bank in Paris: Bonvoisin, 12 zloty, 10 marks, 5000 francs.

They still had to search the hand luggage that was in the compartment. Hauke’s bag held only one change of clothes, a dinner jacket, and some underwear. In Bonvoisin’s there were two marked decks of cards.

But the real find came in Lena Leinbach’s suitcases in which, under the crystal-and-gold bottles, the fragile lingerie, and the gowns, there were beautifully contrived false bottoms.

But the false bottoms were empty. When questioned, all Lena Leinbach said was, “I bought these from a lady who went in for smuggling. They were a great bargain. I’ve never used them for anything like that.”

Who had killed Otto Braun in the bluish half light of the compartment between Charleroi and Jeumont?

Paris was beginning to get worried. Maigret was summoned to the telephone. This business was going to cause a stir, and there would be complications. The numbers of the bonds found on Jef Bebelmans had been transmitted to the leading banks, and everything was in order—there was no record of any large theft of bonds.

It was eleven o’clock when they had started this laborious reconstruction in the railway car. It was two o’clock before they got out, and then only because Madame Irvitch fainted after declaring in Polish she could no longer bear the smell of the corpse.

Vinchon was pale, for it seemed to him that his uncle was not showing his usual composure—that he was, in fact, dithering.

“It’s not going well, Nunk?” he said in a low voice as they were crossing the tracks.

Maigret’s only response was to sigh, “I wish I could find the needle. Hold them all another hour.”

“But Madame Irvitch is ill!”

“What’s that to do with me?”

“Dr. Gellhorn claims—”

“Let him,” Maigret cut him short.

And he went off to lunch on his own at the station bar.

“Be quiet, I tell you!” Maigret snapped, an hour later. His nephew lowered his head. “All you do is bring me trouble. I’m going to tell you my conclusions. After that, I warn you, you can get yourself out of this mess, and if you don’t, you needn’t bother to ring up your nunk. Nunk’s had enough.”

Then, changing his tone, he went on, “Now! I’ve been looking for the one logical explanation of all the facts. It’s up to you to prove it, or to obtain a confession. Try to follow me.

“First, Otto Braun, with all his wealth, would not have come to France with eight suitcases and goodness knows how many suits—and, on the other hand, with precisely four hundred marks.

“Second, there must have been some reason for him to pretend during the German part of the journey not to know Lena Leinbach and then as soon as they were over the Belgian border for them to be on familiar terms.

“Third, he refused to let her get out of the train at Liége, at Namur, and at Charleroi.

“Fourth, in spite of that she made several desperate attempts to get out.

“Fifth, a certain Jef Bebelmans, a passenger from Berlin who had never seen Braun—or he would have shown some sign on seeing the corpse—was found carrying more than two million in bonds.”

And, still in a very bad temper, Maigret rumbled on, “Now I’ll explain. Otto Braun, for reasons of his own, wanted to smuggle his fortune, or part of it, out of Germany. Knowing that his luggage would be minutely searched, he came to an agreement with a demi-mondaine in Berlin, and had double-bottomed suitcases made for her, knowing that they would stand less chance of being closely examined, being full of feminine articles.

“But Lena Leinbach, like all self-respecting members of her calling, has one real love: Thomas Hauke. Hauke, who is a specialist in this line, arranged with Lena in Berlin—perhaps even in the Kaiserhof—to make off with the bonds hidden in her suitcases.

“She gets on the train first, and puts the cases where Braun, still suspicious, has told her to put them. She sits down in the opposite corner, for they are not supposed to know each other.

“At Cologne, Hauke, to keep an eye on things, comes to take his place in the compartment. Meanwhile, another accomplice, Jef Bebelmans, probably a professional burglar, is traveling third-class with the bonds, and at each frontier he has orders to hide for a while underneath the car.

“Once the Belgian frontier is crossed, Otto Braun obviously runs no further risk. He could at any moment take it into his head to open his companion’s suitcases and remove his bonds. That is why, first at Liège, then at Namur, and again at Charleroi, Lena Leinbach tries to get off the train.

“Is Braun mistrustful? Does he suspect something? Or is he just in love with her? Whichever it is, he watches Lena closely, and she begin to panic, for in Paris he will inevitably discover the theft, the empty false bottoms.

“He may even notice it at the French frontier where, having no further reason to hide the bonds, he may want to open the suitcases. Thomas Hauke, too, must be aware of the danger of discovery—”

“And it’s he who kills Braun?” Vinchon asked.

“I’m certain it is not. If Hauke had got up to do that, one or another of his traveling companions would have noticed. In my opinion Braun was killed when you went past the first time, calling, ‘Have your passports ready, please.’

“At that moment everyone got up, in the dark, still half asleep. Only Lena Leinbach had a reason to go over to Braun, press close to him to take down her suitcases, and I am convinced that it was at that moment—”

“But the needle?”

“Look for it!” Maigret grunted. “A long brooch pin will do. If this woman had not happened on someone like you, who insisted on undressing the corpse, for a long time it would have seemed to be a death from natural causes.

“Now draw up your plan. Make Lena think Bebelmans has talked, make Bebelmans think Hauke has been broken—all the old dodges, eh?”

And he went off to have a beer while Vinchon did what his uncle had told him. Old dodges are good dodges because they work. In this case they worked because Lena Leinbach was wearing a long arrow-shaped pin of brilliants in her hat, and because Paulie, as Madame Maigret called him, pointing at it, said to her, “You can’t deny it. There’s blood on the pin!”

It wasn’t true. But, for all that, she had a fit of hysterics and made a full confession.

Jeumont, 51 minutes d'arrêt
the 24th episode in the Maigret Saga
1936/1944

Georges Simenon

Translated from the French by J.E. Malcolm