A Man's Head by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online Page A

Harsh daylight fell from a sky which resembled a dirty ceiling. Traces of the previous night’s rain still glistened on the pavements.
    The pedestrians had the grim air of people who have not yet adapted to winter.
    During the night, orders of the day had been typed up at the Préfecture, taken by messenger to various police stations and sent by telegraph to all gendarmerie headquarters, customs posts and the railway police.
    As a result, while the crowds walked past, all police officers, as well as uniformed constables and inspectors in the Highways Department, the Vice Squad, the hotel and drugs agencies – had the same description clearly in their minds and stared at
passers-by, hoping to find the man who fitted it.
    It was like this from one end of Paris to the other. It was the same in the suburbs. Gendarmes patrolling the main roads demanded to see the papers of every tramp and vagrant.
    On trains, at frontiers, people were surprised at being questioned more closely than usual.
    The hunt was on for Joseph Heurtin, sentenced to death by the Seine Assizes, who had escaped from the Santé prison after a scuffle with Inspector Dufour in the bar of the Citanguette.
    When he made his escape, all he had left was twenty-two francs in his pocket
, said the service notes which Maigret had written.
    The inspector left the Palais de Justice unaccompanied, without even calling in at his office on the Quai des Orfèvres, caught a bus to Bastille and rang the bell of a door on the third floor of a building in Rue du Chemin-Vert.
    There was a smell of iodoform and boiled chicken. A woman who had not yet had time even to comb her hair said:
    â€˜Ah! He’ll be ever so pleased to see you …’
    Inspector Dufour was in bed in his room. He looked dejected and tense.
    â€˜How are you, son?’
    â€˜Mustn’t grumble. They say my hair won’t grow on scar tissue and that I’ll have to wear a wig.’
    Just as he had done in the lab, Maigret paced around the room like a man who doesn’t know where to put himself. Eventually, he muttered:
    â€˜Do you blame me?’
    Dufour’s wife, who was still young and pretty, was standing in the frame of the door.
    â€˜Him? Blame you? Since first thing this morning he’s been telling me over and over how worried he is about how you’re going to get out of the fix you’re in … He wanted me to go down to the post-office and ring you
up!’
    â€˜Oh, no need to worry. Right then … I’ll be seeing you,’ said the inspector. ‘I must be off.’
    He did not go home, although he lived only 500 metres from there, in Boulevard Richard Lenoir. He began walking, because he needed to walk, needed to feel the indifferent crowd brush against him.
    As he progressed through Paris in this frame of mind, the dejected air of earlier that morning, which made him look like a schoolboy who had been caught red-handed, began to fade. His features hardened. He smoked pipe after pipe, as he did on his
good days.
    Monsieur Coméliau would have been very surprised, and doubtless indignant, if he had suspected that the least of the inspector’s worries was to find Joseph Heurtin.
    That, for Maigret, was a secondary issue. The condemned man had to be somewhere in the middle of several million people. But he was convinced that the day he needed him, he’d easily be able to get hold of him.
    No, he was thinking of the letter written at the Coupole. And also, and maybe more, of one question he reproved himself for having failed to ask during his first investigation.
    But back in July everyone had been so convinced of Heurtin’s guilt! The examining magistrate had taken over the inquiry himself from the start, thus sidelining the police.
    â€˜The crime was committed at Saint-Cloud at about two in the morning. Heurtin was back in Rue Monsieur-le-Prince before four. He didn’t take a train or a tram or any other