Inspector Cadaver

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Book: Inspector Cadaver by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online
Authors: Georges Simenon
They’re all
relatives or friends of chiefs of police, generals, judges. I don’t know if that
makes any sense. Anyway, people are scared. Sometimes, of course, they’ll talk
late at night when they’ve had a bit to drink, but the next day they regret it.
What are you going to do? You’re not going back to Paris?’
    ‘Of course not, son. Why?’
    ‘I don’t know. That other man
looks …’
    The kid bit his tongue just in time. He was
obviously going to say something along the lines of, ‘He looks tougher than
you!’
    And it was true. In the fog that was
starting to come down like an artificial dusk, Maigret thought he sawCavre’s sallow face, his fleshless lips stretched in a sardonic smile.
    ‘Isn’t your boss going to say
anything about you not being at work yet?’
    ‘Oh no! He’s not like that at
all. If he could help us prove poor Albert was murdered, he would, I tell you
…’
    Maigret jumped as a voice behind him asked,
‘The Lion d’Or hotel, please?’
    The railwayman on duty by the ticket barrier
pointed to the street that started a hundred or so metres away.
    ‘Straight ahead. You’ll see, on
your left.’
    A plump, immaculately dressed little fellow
went out, dragging a suitcase that seemed as big as him and looking around for a
non-existent porter. The inspector scrutinized him from head to toe, but without
success. He didn’t know him.

5. Three Women in a Drawing
Room
    ‘If you need me, I’ll be at the
Trois Mules
all evening,’ Pockmarks said, before he rushed off into the
fog and was swallowed up.
    It was five o’clock. With the fog,
darkness had fallen. Maigret had to walk the length of Saint-Aubin’s high street
before reaching the station and the lane leading to Étienne Naud’s house.
Louis had offered to show him the way, but you had to draw the line somewhere, and
Maigret had had enough of virtually being dragged along by the hand by the hectic,
feverish young man.
    As he was leaving him, Louis had said
reproachfully, almost sentimentally, ‘Those people,’ he meant the Nauds, of
course, ‘will fawn all over you and you’ll end up believing everything they
tell you.’
    Hands in pockets, overcoat collar turned up,
Maigret made his way cautiously towards the first light he could see, which resembled a
lighthouse in the fog. Although it seemed a long way off, the shimmering halo was so
bright it was easy to think he was heading for a major landmark. Moments later he almost
walked straight into the chilly window of the Vendée Cooperative, which he must
have already passed twenty times that day. A narrow green shop, repainted fairly
recently, its window display consisted of the sort of glass and earthenwareobjects that businesses give away as complimentary gifts.
    Further on, in the pitch dark, his coat
snagged on a hard object, and he groped around mystified for a long while, before
finally realizing that he had wound up among the carts that stood, their shafts in the
air, outside the cartwright’s.
    The bells rang out suddenly just above his
head. He was passing the church. The post office was to the right, with its dolls’
house wicket gate; facing it was the doctor’s house.
    The Lion d’Or café on one side,
the Trois Mules on the other. It was incredible to think that wherever a light showed
there were people living in a tiny circle of warmth. They were like incrustations on the
frozen wastes of the universe.
    Saint-Aubin wasn’t a big place. He
could already see the lights of the dairy like a factory ablaze in the night. A
train’s engine in the station spat fire.
    This was the miniature world in which Albert
Retailleau had lived. His mother had spent her whole life here. Apart from holidays at
Les Sables-d’Olonne, someone like Geneviève Naud had virtually never left
this little town.
    When the train had slowed down a little just
before Niort station, Maigret had seen empty, rainswept streets, rows of gaslights,
houses like blind people, and he had thought,

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