The Carter of ’La Providence’ (11 page)

Maigret waited for the yacht at Aigny lock. The boat entered it smoothly, and, when it was made fast, the Russian got off to take his papers to the lock-keeper and give him his tip.

The inspector approached him and said: ‘This cap belongs to you, doesn't it?'

Vladimir examined the cap, which was now dirty and ragged, then looked up at him.

‘Thank you,' he said after a moment and took the cap.

‘Just a moment! Can you tell me where you lost it?'

The colonel had been watching them carefully, without showing the least trace of emotion.

‘I dropped it in the water last night,' Vladimir explained. ‘I was leaning over the stern with a boat hook, clearing weeds which had fouled the propeller. There was a barge behind us. The woman was kneeling in their dinghy,
doing her washing. She fished out my cap, and I left it on the deck to dry.'

‘So it was left out all night on the deck.'

‘Yes. This morning I didn't notice it was gone.'

‘Was it already as dirty as this yesterday?'

‘No! When the woman on the barge fished it out she put it in her wash with the rest.'

The yacht was rising by degrees. The lock-keeper already had both hands on the handle of the upper sluice gate.

‘If I remember correctly, the boat behind you was the
Providence
, wasn't it?'

‘I think so. I haven't seen it today.'

Maigret turned away with a vague wave of his hand then walked to his bicycle, while the colonel, as inscrutable as ever, engaged the motor and nodded to him as he passed through the lock.

The inspector remained where he was for a while, watching the yacht leave, thinking, puzzled by the astonishing ease and speed with which things happened on board the
Southern Cross
.

The yacht went on its way without paying any attention to him. The most that happened was that the colonel, from the wheel, asked the Russian the occasional question. The Russian returned short answers.

‘Has the
Providence
got very far?' asked Maigret.

‘She's maybe in the reach above Juvigny, five kilometres from here. She don't go as fast as that beauty there.'

Maigret reached there a few minutes before the
Southern Cross
, and from a distance Vladimir must have seen him talking to the bargee's wife.

The details she gave were clear. The day before, while doing her washing, which she then hung out on a line stretched across the barge, where it could be seen
ballooning in the wind, she had indeed
rescued the Russian's cap. Later, the man had given her little boy two francs.

It was now four in the afternoon. The inspector got back on his bike, his head filled with a jumble of speculations. The gravel of the towpath crunched under the tyres. His wheels parted the grit into furrows.

When he got to Lock 9, Maigret had a good lead over the Englishman.

‘Can you tell me where the
Providence
is at this moment?'

‘Not far off Vitry-le-François … They're making good time. They've got a good pair of horses and especially a carter who is no slouch.'

‘Did they look as if they were in a hurry?'

‘No more or less than usual. Oh, everybody's always in a hurry on the canal. You never know what might happen next. You can be held up for hours at a lock or go through in ten minutes. And the faster you travel the more money you
earn.'

‘Did you hear anything unusual last night?'

‘No, nothing. Why? What happened?'

Maigret left without answering and from now on stopped at every lock, every boat.

He'd had no trouble making his mind up about Gloria Negretti. Though she'd done her level best to avoid saying anything damaging about the colonel, she had told everything she knew.

She was incapable of holding back! And equally incapable of lying! Otherwise, she would have made up a much more complicated tale.

So she really had heard Sir Walter ask Vladimir to find out about the
Providence
.

The inspector had also started to take an interest in the barge which had come from Meaux on Sunday evening, just before Mary Lampson was murdered. It was wood-built and treated with pitch and tar. Why did the colonel want to catch up with it?
What was the connection between the
Southern Cross
and the heavy barge which could not go faster than the slow pace set by two horses?

As Maigret rode along the canal through monotonous countryside, pushing down harder and harder on the pedals, he came up with a number of hypotheses. But they led to conclusions which were fragmentary or implausible.

But hadn't the matter of the three clues been cleared up by Madame Negretti's furious accusations?

Maigret tried a dozen times to piece together the movements of all concerned during the previous night, about which nothing was known, except for the fact that Willy was dead.

Each time he tried, he was left with a poor fit, a gap. He had the impression that there was a person missing who was not the colonel, nor the dead man, nor Vladimir.

And now the
Southern Cross
was on the trail of someone on board the
Providence
.

Someone obviously who was mixed up in recent events! Could it be assumed that this someone had had a hand in the second crime, that is, in the murder of Willy, as well as in the first?

A lot of ground can be covered quickly at night on a canal towpath, by a bike for example.

‘Did you hear anything last night? Did you notice anything unusual on the
Providence
when it passed through?'

It was laborious, discouraging work, especially in the drizzling rain that fell out of the low clouds.

‘No, nothing.'

The gap between Maigret and the
Southern Cross,
which lost a minimum of twenty minutes at each lock, grew wider. The inspector kept getting back on his bicycle with growing weariness and, as he pedalled through a deserted reach of the
canal, stubbornly picked up the threads of his reasoning.

He had already covered forty kilometres when the lock-keeper at Sarry said, in answer to his question:

‘My dog barked. I think something must have happened on the road. A rabbit running past, maybe? I just went back to sleep.'

‘Any idea where the
Providence
stopped last night?'

The man did a calculation in his head.

‘Hang on a minute. I wouldn't be surprised if she hadn't got as far as Pogny. The skipper wanted to be at Vitry-le-François tonight.'

Another two locks. Result: nothing! Maigret now had to follow the lock-keepers on to their gates, for the further he went the busier the traffic became. At Vésigneul, three boats were waiting their turn. At Pogny, there were five.

‘Noises, no,' grumbled the man in charge of the lock there. ‘But I'd like to know what swine had the nerve to use my bike!'

The inspector had time to wipe the sweat from his face
now that he had a glimpse of what looked like light at the end of the tunnel. He was breathing hard and was hot. He had just ridden fifty kilometres
without once stopping for a beer.

‘Where is your bike now?'

‘Open the sluices, will you, François?' the lock-keeper shouted to a carter.

He led Maigret to his house. The outside door opened straight into the kitchen, where men from the boats were drinking white wine which was being poured by a woman who did not put her baby down.

‘You're not going to report us, are you? Selling alcohol isn't allowed. But everybody does it. It's just to do people a good turn. Here we are.'

He pointed to a lean-to made of wooden boards clinging to one side of the house. It had no door.

‘Here's the bike. It's the wife's. Can you imagine, the nearest grocer's is four kilometres from here? I'm always telling her to bring the bike in for the night. But she says it makes a mess in the house. But
I'll say that whoever used it must be a rum sort. I would never have noticed it myself …

‘But as a matter of fact, the day before yesterday, my nephew, who's a mechanic at Rheims, was here for the day. The chain was broken. He mended it and at the same time cleaned the bike and oiled it.

‘Yesterday no one used it. Oh, and he'd put a new tyre on the back wheel.

‘Well, this morning, it was clean, though it had rained all night. And you've seen all that mud on the towpath.

‘But the left pedal is bent, and the tyre looks as if it's done at least a hundred kilometres.

‘What do you make of it? The bike's been a fair old way, no question. And whoever brought it back took the trouble to clean it.'

‘Which boats were moored hereabouts?'

‘Let me see … The
Madeleine
must have gone to La Chaussée, where the skipper's brother-in-law runs a bistro. The
Miséricorde
was tied up here, under the lock …'

‘On its way from Dizy?'

‘No, she's going downstream. Came from the Saône. I think there was just the
Providence
. She passed through last night around seven. Went on to Omey, two kilometres further along. There's good mooring there.'

‘Do you have another bike?'

‘No. But this one is still rideable.'

‘No it isn't. You're going to have to lock it up somewhere. Hire another one if you need to. Can I count on you?'

The barge men were coming out of the kitchen. One of them called to the lock-keeper.

‘Deserting your mates, Désiré?'

‘Half a tick, I'm with this gentleman.'

‘Where do you think I can catch up with the
Providence
?'

‘Lemme see. She'll still be making pretty good time. I'd be surprised if you'd be up with her before Vitry.'

Maigret was about to leave. But he turned, came back, took a spanner from his tool bag and removed both pedals from the lock-keeper's wife's bicycle.

As he set off, the pedals he had pushed into his pockets made two unsightly bulges in his jacket.

The lock-keeper at Dizy had said to him jokingly:

‘When it's dry everywhere else, there are at least two places where you can be sure of seeing rain: here and Vitry-le-François.'

Maigret was now getting near Vitry, and it was starting to rain again, a fine, lazy, never-ending drizzle.

The look of the canal was now changing. Factories appeared on both banks, and the inspector rode for some time through a swarm of mill girls emerging from one of them.

There were boats almost everywhere, some being unloaded, while others, which were lying up having their bilges emptied, were waiting.

And here again were the small houses which marked the outskirts of a town, with rabbit hutches made from old packing-cases and pitiful gardens.

Every kilometre there was a cement works or a quarry or a lime kiln. The rain mixed the white powder drifting in the air into the mud of the towpath. The cement dust left a film on everything, on the tiled roofs, the apple trees and the
grass.

Maigret had started to weave right to left and left to right the way tired cyclists do. He was thinking thoughts, but not joined-up thoughts. He was putting ideas together in such ways that they could not be linked to make a solid picture.

When he at last saw the lock at Vitry-le-François, the growing dusk was flecked with the white navigation
lights of a string of maybe sixty boats lined up in Indian file.

Some were overtaking others, some were hove to broadside on. When barges came from the opposite direction, the crew members exchanged shouts, curses and snippets of news as they passed.

‘Ahoy, there,
Simoun
! Your sister-in-law, who was at Chalon-sur-Saône, says she'll catch up with you on the Burgundy canal … They'll hold back the christening … Pierre says all the best!'

By the lock gates a dozen figures were moving about busily.

And above it all hung a bluish, rain-filled mist, and through it could be seen the shapes of horses which had halted and men going from one boat to another.

Maigret read the names on the sterns of the boats. One voice called to him:

‘Hello, inspector!'

It was a moment or two before he recognized the master of the
Éco-III
.

‘Got your problem sorted?'

‘It was something and nothing! My mate's a dimwit. The mechanic, who came all the way from Rheims, fixed it in five minutes.'

‘You haven't seen the
Providence
, have you?'

‘She's up ahead. But we'll be through before her. On account of the logjam, they'll be putting boats through the lock all tonight and maybe tomorrow night as well. Fact is there are at least sixty boats here, and more keep
coming. As a rule, boats with engines have right of way and go
before horse-boats. But this time, the powers that be have decided to let horse barges and motorized boats take turns.'

A friendly kind of man, with an open face, he pointed with one arm.

‘There you go! Just opposite that crane. I recognize its white tiller.'

As he rode past the line of barges, he could make out people through open hatches eating by the yellow light of oil-lamps.

Maigret found the master of the
Providence
on the lock-side, arguing with other watermen.

‘No way should there be special rules for boats with engines! Take the
Marie
, for example. We can gain a kilometre on her in a five-kilometre stretch. But what happens? With this priority system of theirs, she'll go through
before us … Well, look who's here … it's the inspector!'

And the small man held out his hand, as if greeting a friend.

‘Back with us again? The wife's on board. She'll be glad to see you. She said that, for a policeman, you're all right.'

In the dark, the ends of cigarettes glowed red, and the lights on the boats seemed so densely packed together that it was a mystery how they could move at all.