The Carter of ’La Providence’ Read Online Free PDF Page A

was the best restaurant in town. People walked past while brightly lit, rattling trams trundled by.
    A few kilometres from there, the canal stretched away, and all along it, near the locks, there were barges now asleep which would set off at four in the morning, wrapped in the smell of hot coffee and stables.

3. Mary Lampson’s Necklace
    When Maigret got into bed, in his room, with its distinctive, slightly nauseating smell, he lay for some time aligning two distinct mental pictures.
    First, Épernay: seen through the large, brightly lit windows of La Bécasse, the best restaurant in town, the colonel and Willy elegantly seated at a table surrounded by high-class waiters …
    It was less than half an hour after their visit to the mortuary. Sir Walter Lampson was sitting ramrod straight, and the aloof expression on that ruddy face under its sparse thatch of silver hair was phenomenal.
    Beside his elegance, or more accurately his pedigree, Willy’s smartness, though he wore it casually enough, looked like a cheap imitation.
    Maigret had eaten elsewhere. He had phoned the Préfecture and then the police at Meaux.
    Then, alone and on foot, he had headed off into the rainy night along the long ribbon of road. He had seen the illuminated portholes of the
Southern Cross
opposite the Café de la Marine.
    He had been curious and called in, using a forgotten pipe as an excuse.
    It was there that he had acquired the second mental picture: in the mahogany cabin, Vladimir, still wearing his
striped sailor’s jersey, a cigarette hanging from his lips, was sitting opposite
Madame Negretti, whose glossy hair again hung down over her cheeks.
    They were playing cards – ‘sixty-six’, a game popular in central Europe.
    There had been a brief moment of utter stupefaction. But no shocked reaction! Both had just stopped breathing for a second.
    Then Vladimir had stood up and begun hunting for the pipe. Gloria Negretti had asked, in a faint lisp:
    â€˜Aren’t they back yet? Was it Mary?’
    The inspector had thought for a moment of getting on his bicycle, riding along the canal and catching up with the barges which had passed through Dizy on Sunday night. The sight of the sodden towpath and the black sky had made him change his
mind.
    When there was a knock on the door of his room, he was aware, even before he opened his eyes, that the bluey-grey light of dawn was percolating through the window of his room.
    He had spent a restless night full of the sound of horses’ hooves, confused voices, footsteps on the stairs, clinking glass in the bar underneath him and finally the smell of coffee and hot rum which had wafted up to him.
    â€˜What is it?’
    â€˜Lucas! Can I come in?’
    Inspector Lucas, who almost always worked with Maigret, pushed the door open and shook the clammy hand which his chief held out through a gap in the bedclothes.
    â€˜Got something already? Not too worn out, I hope?’
    â€˜I’ll survive, sir. After I got your phone call, I went straight to the hotel you talked about, on the corner of Rue de la Grande-Chaumière. The girls weren’t there, but at least I got
their names. Suzanne Verdier, goes under the name of Suzy, born at Honfleur in 1906. Lia Lauwenstein, born in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in 1903. The first arrived in Paris four years ago, started as a housemaid, then worked for a while as a model. The Lauwenstein girl has been living
mainly on the Côte d’Azur … Neither, I checked, appears in the Vice Squad’s register of prostitutes. But they might as well be on it.’
    â€˜Lucas, would you pass me my pipe and order me coffee?’
    The sound of rushing water came from the chamber of the lock and over it the chug of a diesel engine idling. Maigret got out of bed and stood at a poor excuse for a washstand where he poured cold water into the bowl.
    â€˜Don’t stop.’
    â€˜I went to La Coupole, like you