The Carter of ’La Providence’ by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online

notes.
    â€˜Are you staying on board? Listen, we’ll tell you what we know. Everybody on the canals knows who we are, from Liège to Lyons.’
    â€˜I’ll meet up with you at the lock,’ said Maigret, whose bicycle was still on the bank.
    The gangplank was stowed on board. A distant figure had just appeared on the lock gates, and the sluices started to open. The horses set off with a jangle of tinkling bells, and the red pompons tied to the top of their heads bobbed and
jounced.
    Jean walked by the side of them, unconcerned.
    Two hundred metres astern, the motor barge slowed as it realized it had come too late.
    Maigret followed, holding the handlebars of his bicycle with one hand. He could see the skipper’s wife rushing to finish eating and her husband, short, thin and frail, leaning, almost lying, on the long tiller, which was too heavy for
him.

4. The Lover
    â€˜I’ve had lunch,’ said Maigret as he strode into the Café de la Marine, where Lucas was sitting at a table in the window.
    â€˜At Aigny?’ asked the landlord. ‘My brother-in-law’s the inn-keeper at Aigny …’
    â€˜Bring us two beers.’
    It had been a narrow escape. The inspector, pedalling hard, was barely in sight of Dizy when the weather had turned overcast again. And now thick rain was being drawn like curtains over the last rays of the sun.
    The
Southern Cross
was still in its berth. There was no one to be seen on deck. And no sound came from the lock so that, for the first time, Maigret was aware of being truly in the country. He could hear chickens clucking in the yard
outside.
    â€˜Got anything for me?’ he asked Lucas.
    â€˜The Russian came back with supplies. The woman put in a brief appearance in a blue dressing gown. The colonel and Willy came for a drink before lunch. They gave me some odd looks, I think.’
    Maigret took the tobacco pouch which his companion was holding out for him, filled his pipe and waited until the landlord, who had served them, had vanished into his shop.
    â€˜I didn’t get anything either,’ he muttered. ‘Of the two boats which could have brought Mary Lampson here, one has broken down about fifteen kilometres from here, and the other is
ploughing along the canal at three kilometres an hour.’
    â€˜The first one is iron-built, so no chance of the body coming into contact with pitch there.
    â€˜The other one is made of wood … The master and his wife are called Canelle. A fat motherly sort, who tried her level best to get me to drink a glass of disgusting rum, with a pint-sized husband who runs round after her like a
spaniel.
    â€˜Which leaves just their carter.
    â€˜Either he’s pretending to be stupid, in which case he does a brilliant turn, or else he’s a complete half-wit. He’s been with them for eight years. If the husband is a spaniel, he’s a bulldog.
    â€˜He gets up at half past two every morning, sees to his horses, downs a bowl of coffee and then starts walking alongside his animals.
    â€˜He does his daily thirty or forty kilometres like that, every day, at the same pace, with a swig of white wine at every lock.
    â€˜Every evening he rubs the horses down, eats without speaking a word and then collapses on to a straw truss, most times still in his clothes.
    â€˜I’ve checked his papers. An old army pay book with pages so stuck together with filth they can hardly be opened. The name in it is Jean Liberge, born in Lille in 1869.
    â€˜And that’s it … no, just a moment. The
Providence

would have had to get Mary Lampson on board on Thursday evening at Meaux. So she was alive then. She was still alive when she got here on Sunday evening.
    â€˜It would be physically impossible to hide a grown woman for two days against her will in the stable on the boat.
    â€˜In which case all three of them would be guilty.’
    The scowl on Maigret’s face showed that