The Carter of ’La Providence’ by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Published: 2014-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

7. The Bent Pedal

When the inspector overtook the Southern Cross, whose wash left the reeds swaying long after it had passed, the colonel was still at the wheel, and Vladimir, in the bow, was coiling a rope.

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.

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