The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien Read Free

ordinary revolver of the most popular make in Europe.
    He seemed to have killed himself only
     because someone had stolen his suitcase! Otherwise, why would he have bought rolls
     from the station buffet but never eaten them? And why spend a day travelling, when
     he might have stayed in Brussels and blown his brains out just as easily as in a
     German hotel?
    Still, there was the suitcase, which
     might hold the solution to this puzzle. And that’s why – after the naked body
     had been photographed and examined from head to toe, carried out wrapped in a sheet,
     hoisted into a police van and driven away – the inspector shut himself up in his
     hotel room.
    He looked haggard. Although he filled
     his pipe as always, tapping gently with his thumb, he was only trying to persuade
     himself that he felt calm.
    The dead man’s thin, drawn face
     was haunting him. He kept seeing him snapping his fingers, then immediately opening
     his mouth wide for the gunshot.
    Maigret felt so troubled – indeed,
     almost remorseful – that only after painful hesitation did he reach for the
     suitcase.
    And yet that suitcase would supposedly
     prove him right! Wasn’t he going to find there evidence that the man
he was weak enough to pity was a crook, a
     dangerous criminal, perhaps a murderer?
    The keys still hung from a string tied
     to the handle, as they had in the shop in Rue Neuve. Maigret opened the suitcase and
     first took out a dark-grey suit, less threadbare than the one the dead man had been
     wearing. Beneath the suit were two dirty shirts frayed at the collar and cuffs,
     rolled into a ball, and a detachable collar with thin pink stripes that had been
     worn for at least two weeks, because it was quite soiled wherever it had touched the
     wearer’s neck … Soiled and shoddy …
    That was all. Except for the bottom of
     the suitcase: green paper lining, two brand-new straps with buckles and swiveling
     tabs that hadn’t been used.
    Maigret shook out the clothing, checked
     the pockets. Empty! Seized with a choking sense of anguish, he kept looking, driven
     by his desire – his need – to find something.
    Hadn’t a man killed himself
     because someone had stolen this suitcase? And there was nothing in it but an old
     suit and some dirty laundry!
    Not even a piece of paper. Nothing in
     the way of documents. No sign of any clue to the dead man’s past.
    The hotel room was decorated with new,
     inexpensive and aggressively floral wallpaper in garish colours. The furniture,
     however, was old and rickety, broken-down, and the printed calico draped over the
     table was too filthy to touch.
    The street was deserted, the shutters of
     the shops were closed, but a hundred metres away there was the reassuring thrum of
     steady traffic at a crossroads.
    Maigret looked at the communicating
     door, at the keyhole he no longer dared to peek through. He remembered
that the technicians had chalked the
     outline of the body on the floor of the neighbouring room for future study.
    Carrying the dead man’s suit,
     still wrinkled from the suitcase, he went next door on tiptoe so as not to awaken
     other guests, and perhaps because he felt burdened by this mystery.
    The outline on the floor was contorted,
     but accurately drawn.
    When Maigret tried to fit the jacket,
     waistcoat and trousers into the outline, his eyes lit up, and he bit down hard on
     his pipe-stem. The clothing was at least three sizes too large: it did not belong to
     the dead man.
    What the tramp had been keeping so
     protectively in his suitcase, a thing so precious to him that he’d killed
     himself when it was lost, was someone else’s suit!

2. Monsieur Van
     Damme
    The Bremen newspapers simply announced in
     a few lines that a Frenchman named Louis Jeunet, a mechanic, had committed suicide
     in a hotel in the city and that poverty seemed to have been the motive for his
     act.
    But by the time those