Read Online Friend of Madame Maigret by Georges Simenon - Free Book Online Page A

sum up the position again.
    â€œEverybody’s been alerted, Monsieur le Juge, the stations, the airports, the Hotels Section, the highway police. Moers, up in Criminal Records, is busy looking for photos which might correspond to our customers. We’re questioning taxi drivers and, in case the gang have a car, garagemen too.”
    â€œDo you think this has some connection with the Steuvels case?”
    â€œIt’s a lead, after so many others that haven’t got us anywhere.”
    â€œI’m having Steuvels brought up this morning at eleven. His lawyer will be here, as usual, because he won’t let me exchange two words with him except in his presence.”
    â€œWill you permit me to come up for a minute during your interrogation?”
    â€œLiotard will protest, but come up anyway. Don’t let it look as if we’d planned it.”
    The curious thing was that Maigret had never met this Liotard, who had become, in the Press at all events, something like his special enemy.
    This morning all the papers again carried the young lawyer’s comments on the latest angles of the case.
    Maigret is a detective of the old school, of the period when the gentlemen of the Quai des Orfèvres could, if they chose, give a man the third degree until exhaustion drove him to make a confession, keep him in their hands for weeks, pry shamelessly into people’s private lives, in fact a period when any kind of trick was considered fair play.
    He is the only person who doesn’t realize that today tricks like these just don’t go down with an informed public.
    What is it all about, basically?
    He has let himself be fooled by an anonymous letter, the work of a prankster. He has had an honest man locked up and has been incapable ever since of pinning any serious charge on him.
    He won’t give up. Rather than admit defeat, he is trying to gain time, playing to the gallery, calling Madame Maigret to the rescue, serving up to the public slices of cheap fiction.
    Believe me, gentlemen, Maigret is out of date!
    Â 
    â€œStay here with me, son,” the chief inspector was saying to young Lapointe. “Only, tonight, before you go home, ask me what you may tell your sister, won’t you?”
    â€œI’ll never tell her anything again.”
    â€œYou’ll tell her what I ask you to tell her.”
    And from then on Lapointe acted as his aide-de-camp. That really meant what it said, for Police Headquarters was becoming more and more like a military base.
    The office of Lucas, the Grand Turenne, represented the command post, to which runners made their way from all floors. Downstairs, in the Hotels Section, several men were busy going through registration forms in search of a Levine or anybody else who might be connected with the trio and the child.
    The previous night, in most boardinghouses, the guests had had the unpleasant surprise of being awakened by the police, who had examined their identity documents; this had resulted in some fifty men and women whose papers were not in order spending the rest of the night at the Depot, where they were now queuing up for the identification parade.
    In the railway stations travelers were being scrutinized without their knowing it, and two hours after the papers came out, the telephone calls began, soon becoming so numerous that Lucas had to detail an inspector for this job.
    People had seen the little boy all over the place, in the most widely separated parts of Paris and the suburbs; some said, with the lady in the white hat, some, with the gentleman with the foreign accent.
    Pedestrians would suddenly rush up to a policeman.
    â€œHurry! The child’s at the corner of the street.”
    Everything was checked, everything had to be checked if no chance was to be overlooked. Three detectives had gone out first thing to interrogate garagemen.
    And all night long the men of the Society Section had been on the job too. Hadn’t the manageress