The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien Read Free Page A

lines appeared the
     following morning, that information was no longer correct. In fact, while leafing
     through Jeunet’s passport, Maigret had noticed an interesting detail: on the
     sixth page, in the column listing
age
,
height
,
hair
,
forehead
,
eyebrows
and so on for the bearer’s
     description, the word
forehead
appeared before
hair
instead of
     after it.
    It so happened that six months earlier,
     the Paris Sûreté had discovered in Saint-Ouen a veritable factory for fake
     passports, military records, foreign residence permits and other official documents,
     a certain number of which they had seized. The counterfeiters themselves had
     admitted, however, that hundreds of their forgeries had been in circulation for
     several years and that, because they had kept no records, they could not provide a
     list of their customers.
    The passport proved that Louis Jeunet
     had been one of them, which meant that his name was not Louis Jeunet.
    And so, the single more or less solid
     fact in this inquiry had melted away. The man who had killed himself that night was
     now a complete unknown.
    Having been
     granted all the authorization he needed, at nine o’clock the next morning
     Maigret arrived at the morgue, which the general public was free to visit after it
     opened its doors for the day.
    He searched in vain for a dark corner
     from which to keep watch, although he really didn’t expect much in the way of
     results. The morgue was a modern building, like most of the city and all its public
     buildings, and it was even more sinister than the ancient morgue in Quai de
     l’Horloge, in Paris. More sinister precisely because of its sharp, clean lines
     and perspectives, the uniform white of the walls, which reflected a harsh light, and
     the refrigeration units as shiny as machines in a power station. The place looked
     like a model factory: one where the raw material was human bodies.
    The man who had called himself Louis
     Jeunet was there, less disfigured than might have been expected, because specialists
     had partially reconstructed his face. There were also a young woman and a drowned
     fellow who’d been fished from the harbour.
    Brimming with health and tightly
     buttoned into his spotless uniform, the guard looked like a museum attendant.
    In the space of an hour, surprisingly
     enough, some thirty people passed through the viewing hall. When one woman asked to
     see a body that was not on display, electric bells rang and numbers were barked into
     a telephone.
    In an area on the first floor, one of
     the drawers in a vast cabinet filling an entire wall glided out into a freight lift,
     and a few moments later a steel box emerged on the ground floor just as books in
     some libraries are delivered to reading rooms.
    It was the body that had been requested.
     The woman
bent over it – and was led away,
     sobbing, to an office at the far end of the hall, where a young clerk took down her
     statement.
    Few people took any interest in Louis
     Jeunet. Shortly after ten o’clock, however, a smartly attired man arrived in a
     private car, entered the hall, looked around for the suicide and examined him
     carefully.
    Maigret was not far away. He drew closer
     and, after studying the visitor, decided that he didn’t look German.
    As soon as this visitor noticed Maigret
     approaching, moreover, he started uneasily, and must have come to the same
     conclusion as Maigret had about him.
    â€˜Are you French?’ he asked
     bluntly.
    â€˜Yes. You, too?’
    â€˜Actually, I’m Belgian, but
     I’ve been living in Bremen for a few years now.’
    â€˜And you knew a man named
     Jeunet?’
    â€˜No! I … I read in this
     morning’s paper that a Frenchman had committed suicide in Bremen … I
     lived in Paris for a long time … and I felt curious enough to come and
     take a look.’
    Maigret was completely calm, as he
     always was in