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a few more words to his companion, stuck the stem of his clay pipe in his mouth and set off towards the town.
    It meant nothing, proved nothing. Maigret walked on as well, and the two men progressed in step together, one on either bank of the Amsterdiep.
    But the path Oosting was taking soon diverged from the canalside. And the Baes presently disappeared behind some more sheds. For almost a minute, the heavy tread of his wooden clogs could still be heard.
    It was night time now, scarcely a shred of light in the sky. The lamps had just been lit in town and along the canal, where the street lighting stopped at the Wienands’ house. The other bank, uninhabited, remained in darkness.
    Maigret turned round, without knowing why. He groaned as the donkey launched into another bout of desperate heehawing.
    And he glimpsed further along, beyond the houses, two
little white patches dancing on the far side of the canal. Cornelius’s gloves.
    To a casual observer, especially one who forgot that the surface of the water was covered with logs, the sight would have been ghostly. Hands waving in the emptiness. The rest of the body melting into the night. And on the water the reflection of the furthest street lamp.
    Oosting’s footsteps could no longer be heard. Maigret walked back towards the outlying houses, passing once more in front of the Popingas’ and then the Wienands’ residence.
    He was still making no effort to hide, but he realized that he too would have been swallowed up by the darkness. He followed the gloves with his eyes. Now he understood. To avoid going by way of Delfzijl, where there was a bridge over the canal, Cornelius was crossing the water using the floating logs as a raft. In the middle, there was a gap of about two metres. The white hands moved more quickly, went up in a rapid arc and the water splashed.
    A few seconds later, he was walking along the bank, and being followed, scarcely a hundred metres behind, by Maigret.
    It was not deliberate on either side, and in any case, Cornelius could not have been aware of the inspector’s presence. All the same, from the first, they were walking in step, so that their crunching footfalls on the cinder path sounded in unison.
    Maigret realized this, because his foot hit a stone at one point, and the synchronicity failed for a micro-second.
    He didn’t know where he was heading. And yet his pace
quickened as the young man speeded up. More than that: he felt he was gradually being dragged along in a sort of trance.
    At first the steps ahead of him were long and regular. Then they shortened and became hurried.
    Just as Cornelius was passing the timber yard, a veritable chorus of frogs broke out and the steps stopped abruptly.
    Was Cornelius afraid of something? The footsteps continued, but even less regularly, sometimes hesitating, then on the contrary there would be two or three rapid paces, so that it seemed he might break into a run.
    And now the silence was truly broken, as the frog chorus intensified. It filled the whole night air.
    The steps accelerated. The same process started again. Maigret, by dint of walking in step with the other man, could literally sense his state of mind.
    Cornelius was frightened! He was walking fast because he was afraid. He was anxious to get somewhere. But whenever he passed close to an unfamiliar-looking shadow, a stack of timber, a dead tree, a bush, his foot remained in the air a tenth of a second longer.
    They reached a bend in the canal. A hundred metres ahead, going towards the farm, was the short stretch illuminated intermittently by the beam from the lighthouse. The young man seemed to be disconcerted by the bright swathe of light. He looked behind him. Then he rushed across it, again turning his head.
    He had passed it, and was still casting backward glances, when Maigret calmly entered the illuminated zone, with all his bulk, presence and weight.
    The cadet could not fail to see him. He stopped. Long enough