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

of the Beauséjour said that her visitor hardly ever came home before one o’clock.
    It was a question of finding out if he was a regular patron of nightclubs, of interrogating barmen, dance hostesses.
    Maigret, after attending the conference in the Chief’s office, was prowling about the building, with Lapointe at his side most of the time, going down to the Hotels Section, up to Moers in Criminal Records, taking a telephone call here, a statement there.
    It was just after ten o’clock when a driver from the Urbaine Company phoned. He hadn’t rung up earlier because he had made a trip out of town, to Dreux, to take an old invalid lady who did not want to go by train.
    It was he who had picked up the young lady and the little boy in the place Saint-Augustin, he remembered it perfectly well.
    â€œWhere did you take them to?”
    â€œThe corner of the rue Montmartre and the Grands Boulevards.”
    â€œWas there anyone waiting for them?”
    â€œI didn’t notice anyone.”
    â€œYou don’t know which way they went?”
    â€œI lost sight of them straight away in the crowd.”
    There were several hotels in the vicinity.
    â€œRing the Hotels boys again!” said Maigret to Lapointe. “Tell them to go over the sector around the Carrefour Montmartre with a fine comb. Do you realize now that if they don’t lose their heads, if they don’t budge, we haven’t the remotest chance of finding them?”
    Torrence, back from Concarneau, had gone for a stroll down the rue de Turenne, to get back into the feel of it, as he said.
    As for Janvier, he had sent in a report on his shadowing job and was still on Alfonsi’s heels.
    The latter had joined Philippe Liotard the night before in a restaurant on the rue Richelieu, where they had had a good dinner, chatting quietly. Two women had joined them later, who bore no resemblance to the young lady in the white hat. One was the lawyer’s secretary, a big blonde with the look of a film starlet. The other had left with Alfonsi.
    They had both gone to the cinema, near the Opéra, then to a nightclub on the rue Blanche where they had remained until two o’clock in the morning.
    After which, the ex-detective had taken his companion to the hotel where he lived in the rue de Douai.
    Janvier had taken a room at the same hotel. He had just phoned:
    â€œThey’re not up yet. I’m waiting.”
    A little before eleven o’clock Lapointe, following Maigret, was to be introduced to a region of the Quai des Orfèvres that was unknown to him, on the ground floor. They had gone down a long deserted corridor, the windows of which overlooked the courtyard, and, reaching a corner, Maigret had made a sign to the young man to keep quiet.
    A police van, passing under the entrance gate to the Depot, was entering the yard. Three or four policemen were waiting, smoking cigarettes. Two others got out of the Black Maria, from which they unloaded first a great brute of a man with a low forehead, handcuffs on his wrists. Maigret didn’t know him. This one hadn’t crossed his path.
    Next came a fragile-looking old lady who might have been the chairwoman in a church, but whom he had arrested at least twenty times as a pickpocket. She followed her policeman like an old-timer, trotting along with little steps in her extra-wide skirts, knowing the right turnings to take to reach the examining magistrate’s offices.
    The sun was bright, the air steely blue in the patches of shade, with whiffs of springtime, a few newly hatched flies buzzing.
    Frans Steuvels’s red head appeared, bare of hat or cap; his suit was rather crumpled. He stopped, as though surprised by the sun, and one guessed that his eyes were half-closed behind his thick glasses.
    He had been handcuffed, just like the brute: a regulation strictly enforced since several prisoners had escaped from this very yard, the latest of them by way of the corridors of