The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien Read Online Free

typist – but by then he’d made him promise that if
     he did not leave Bremen that evening, they would spend it together at a well-known
     cabaret.
    Maigret found himself back in the crowd,
     alone with his thoughts, although they were in considerable disarray. Strictly
     speaking, were they even really thoughts?
    His mind was comparing two figures, two
     men, and trying to establish a relationship between them.
    Because there was one! Van Damme
     hadn’t gone to the trouble of driving to the morgue simply to look at the dead
     body of a stranger. And the pleasure of speaking French was not the only reason he
     had invited Maigret to lunch. Besides, he had gradually revealed his true
     personality only after becoming increasingly persuaded that his companion had no
     interest in the case. And perhaps not much in the way of brains, either!
    That morning, Van Damme had been
     worried. His smile had seemed forced. By the end of the afternoon, on the other
     hand, he had resurfaced as a sharp little operator, always on the go, busy, chatty,
     enthusiastic, mixing with financial big shots, driving his car, on the phone,
     rattling off instructions to his typist and hosting expensive dinners, proud and
     happy to be what he was.
    And the second man was an anaemic tramp
     with grubby clothes and worn-out shoes, who had bought some sausages in rolls
     without the faintest idea that he would never get to eat them!
    Van Damme must have already found
     himself another companion for the evening aperitif, in the same atmosphere of
     Viennese music and beer.
    At six
     o’clock, a cover would close quietly on a metal bin, shutting away the naked
     body of the false Louis Jeunet, and the lift would deliver it to the freezer to
     spend the night in a numbered compartment.
    Maigret went along to the
     Polizeipräsidium. Some officers were exercising, stripped to the waist in spite of
     the chill, in a courtyard with vivid red walls.
    In the laboratory, a young man with a
     faraway look in his eye was waiting for him near a table on which all the dead
     man’s possessions had been laid out and neatly labelled.
    The man spoke perfect textbook French
     and took pride in coming up with
le mot juste
.
    Beginning with the nondescript grey suit
     Jeunet had been wearing when he died, he explained that all the linings had been
     unpicked, every seam examined, and that nothing had been found.
    â€˜The suit comes from La Belle
     Jardinière in Paris. The material is fifty per cent cotton, so it is a cheap
     garment. We noticed some grease spots, including stains of mineral jelly, which
     suggest that the man worked in or was often inside a factory, workshop or garage.
     There are no labels or laundry marks in his linen. The shoes were purchased in
     Rheims. Same as the clothing: mass-produced, of mediocre quality. The socks are of
     cotton, the kind peddled in the street at four or five francs a pair. They have
     holes in them but have never been mended.
    â€˜All these clothes have been
     placed in a strong paper bag and shaken, and the dust obtained was analysed.
    â€˜We were thus able to confirm the
     provenance of those grease stains. The clothes are in fact impregnated with a fine
     metallic powder found only on the belongings of
fitters, metal-workers, and, in general, those who labour
     in machine shops.
    â€˜These elements are absent from
     the items I will call clothing B, items which have not been worn for at least six
     years.
    â€˜One more difference: in the
     pockets of suit A we found traces of French government-issue tobacco, what you call
     shag tobacco. In the pockets of clothing B, however, there were particles of
     yellowish imitation Egyptian tobacco.
    â€˜But now I come to the most
     important point. The spots found on clothing B are not grease spots. They are old
     human bloodstains, probably from arterial blood.
    â€˜The material has not been washed
     for years. The man who wore this suit must