Friend of Madame Maigret Read Free Page B

table in the workshop.
    â€œIt was an ordinary cheap suitcase, and I knocked against it by mistake. I was surprised it hurt so much and I realized why when I tried to lift it, because it was unusually heavy.”
    Yet at five in the afternoon, the time of the search by Lucas, the suitcase was no longer there. To be more precise, there was still a suitcase, also brown, also cheap, but Lapointe maintained that it was not the same one.
    â€œThat’s the suitcase I took to Concarneau,” Fernande had said. “We’ve never owned another one. We hardly travel at all.”
    Lapointe was unshakeable, swore it was not the same suitcase, that the first one was lighter in color, with its handle tied up with string.
    â€œIf I had had a suitcase to mend,” retorted Steuvels, “I wouldn’t have used string. Don’t forget that I’m a bookbinder and a skilled leather-worker.”
    Then Philippe Liotard had set off to collect testimonials from bibliophiles, and it had turned out that Steuvels was one of the best bookbinders in Paris, possibly the best, and that collectors entrusted their delicate work to him, especially the restoration of antique bindings.
    Everybody agreed that he was an even-tempered man who spent practically his whole life in his workshop and the police were raking through his past to no avail in search of the slightest equivocal detail.
    True, there was that episode in Fernande’s career. He had known her when she was on the streets, and it was he who had taken her away from it all. But there was absolutely nothing against Fernande either, since that already long-distant period.
    Torrence had been at Concarneau for four days. At the post office the original of the telegram had been found, printed by hand in block letters. The postmistress thought she remembered that it was a woman who had handed it across the counter, and Torrence was still searching, compiling a list of recent arrivals from Paris, questioning two hundred people a day.
    â€œWe are fed up with the so-called infallibility of Chief Inspector Maigret!” Maître Liotard had declared to a journalist.
    And he made reference to some trouble in a by-election in the Third Arrondissement, which might well have induced certain people to precipitate a scandal in the district for political ends.
    Judge Dossin, too, was getting it in the neck, and these attacks, not always discreet, made him blush.
    â€œYou haven’t a single new clue?”
    â€œI’m still looking. There are ten of us looking, sometimes more, and we’re interrogating some people for the twentieth time. Lucas is hoping to find the tailor who made the blue suit.”
    As always happens when a case arouses popular opinion, they were receiving hundreds of letters a day, almost all of which sent them off on false trails, causing them to waste a great deal of time. Nevertheless, everything was scrupulously checked, and even lunatics who claimed to know something were given a hearing.
    At ten minutes to one Maigret got out of the bus on the corner of the boulevard Voltaire and glancing up at his windows, as he always did, was a little surprised to see that the one in the dining room was closed, in spite of the bright sun shining directly on it.
    He walked heavily upstairs and turned the doorknob, which didn’t yield. Occasionally, when Madame Maigret was dressing or undressing, she would lock the door. He opened it with his own key, found himself in a cloud of blue smoke, and dashed into the kitchen to turn off the gas. In the casserole all that was left of the chicken, carrot and onion was a blackened crust.
    He opened all the windows, and when Madame Maigret, all out of breath, pushed open the door half an hour later she found him sitting there with a hunk of bread and a piece of cheese.
    â€œWhat time is it?”
    â€œHalf past one,” he said calmly.
    He had never seen her in such a state, her hat crooked, her lip quivering