Read Online The Carter of ’La Providence’ by Georges Simenon - Free Book Online Page A

It’s happened before, now and again. Next morning we’d drink the first whisky of the day together and put it out of our minds …’
    â€˜Did you walk all the way to Épernay?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Did you drink a lot?’
    The lingering look which the colonel turned on the inspector was abject.
    â€˜I also tried my luck at the tables, at the club … They’d
told me at La Bécasse that there was a gambling club … I came back in a cab.’
    â€˜At what time?’
    With a motion of the hand he intimated that he had no idea.
    â€˜Willy wasn’t in his bunk?’
    â€˜No. Vladimir told me as he was helping me undress for bed.’
    A motorcycle and sidecar pulled up outside the door. A police sergeant dismounted, and the passenger, a doctor, climbed out. The café door opened and then closed.
    â€˜Police Judiciaire,’ said Maigret, introducing himself to his colleague from Épernay. ‘Could you get these people to keep back and then phone the prosecutor’s office …?’
    The doctor needed only a brief look at the body before saying:
    â€˜He was dead before he hit the water. Take a look at these marks.’
    Maigret had already seen them. He knew. He glanced mechanically at the colonel’s right hand. It was muscular, with the nails cut square and prominent veins.
    It would take at least an hour to get the public prosecutor and his people together and ferry them to the crime scene. Policemen on cycles arrived and formed a cordon around the Café de la Marine and the
Southern Cross
.
    â€˜May I get dressed?’ the colonel asked.
    Despite his dressing gown, slippers and bare ankles, he made a surprisingly dignified figure as he passed through
the crowd of bystanders. He had no sooner gone into the cabin than he poked his head out
again and shouted:
    â€˜Vladimir!’
    Then all the hatches on the yacht were shut.
    Maigret was interviewing the lock-keeper, who had been called out to man his gates by a motorboat.
    â€˜I imagine that there is no current in a canal? So a body will stay in the place where it was thrown in?’
    â€˜In long stretches of the canal, ten or fifteen kilometres, that would be true. But this particular stretch doesn’t go even five. If a boat passes through Lock 13, which is the one above mine, I smell water that’s released
arrive here a few minutes later. And if I put a boat going downstream through my lock, I take a lot of water out of the canal, and that creates a short-lived current.’
    â€˜What time do you start work?’
    â€˜Officially at dawn but actually a lot earlier. The horse-drawn boats, which move pretty slowly, set off at about three in the morning. More often than not, they put themselves through the lock without me hearing a thing … Nobody
says anything because we know them all …’
    â€˜So this morning …?’
    â€˜The
Frédéric
, which spent the night here, must have left around half past three and went through the lock at Ay at five.’
    Maigret turned and retraced his steps. Outside the Café de la Marine and along the towpath, a few groups of men had gathered. As the inspector passed them on his way to the stone bridge, an old pilot with a grog-blossom nose came up to him:
    â€˜Want me to show you the spot where that young feller was thrown into the water?’
    And looking very proud of himself, he glanced round at his comrades, who hesitated a moment before falling into step behind him.
    The man was right. Fifty metres from the stone bridge, the reeds had been trampled over an area of several metres. They hadn’t simply been walked on. A heavy object had been dragged across the ground. The tracks were wide where the reeds
had been flattened.
    â€˜See that? I live half a kilometre from here, in one of the first houses you come to in Dizy. When I was coming in this morning, to check if there