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him?
    Still, they hadn’t
removed the label on the jacket. But that was obviously because they knew that he was wearing
ready-made clothes which had been sold by the thousand.
    â€˜You look worried, Maigret.’
    But all he could do was repeat:
    â€˜It doesn’t hang together
…’
    Too many details which did not fit. One detail in
particular bothered him; it quite upset him, in fact.
    At what time had the last phone call been made?
As things stood, the last sign of life the man had given was the note handed in at the post
office in Faubourg Saint-Denis.
    That had happened in the clear light of day. Ever
since eleven that morning, the nameless man had not missed any opportunity for making contact
with Maigret.
    Even in the note, he had been appealing directly
to him, and more insistently than ever. He had even asked him to alert officers on duty so that
any one of them would have been aware of the situation and been ready to come to his aid in the
street at the first sign he gave.
    But the fact was that he had been killed between
eight and ten in the evening.
    What had he been doing between four and eight
o’clock? There had been no sign of him, no trace. Just silence, a silence which had struck
Maigret the previous evening, even though he had kept his concerns to himself. It had reminded
him of a real-life underwater disaster which, as it unfolded, had been followed all over the
world minute by minute on the radio. At certain times, listeners had heard the signal sent out
by the men entombed in the submarine stranded on the ocean bed and could imaginethe rescue vessels circling on the surface. The intervals between signals grew longer. Then
suddenly, after many hours: nothing.
    But Maigret’s unnamed dead man had no valid
reason for keeping quiet. He could not have been kidnapped in full daylight in a busy Paris
street. And he had not been killed before eight o’clock.
    Everything seemed to suggest that he had gone
home, because he had changed his jacket.
    He had eaten either at home or in a restaurant.
And he had been left alone to eat his dinner because he had had enough time to consume soup,
fish pie and an apple. Everything up to and including the apple suggested peace and calm.
    So why had he not spoken for two hours?
    He had not hesitated to pester Maigret several
times and urge him to put the whole police force on high alert.
    Then suddenly, after four o’clock, it was
as if he had changed his mind, as though he had wanted to leave the police out of the reckoning
altogether.
    It nettled Maigret. That’s not the right
word perhaps, but it felt a little as if his dead man had been unfaithful to him.
    â€˜Got anything, Janvier?’
    The inspectors’ room was blue with tobacco
smoke. Four glassy-eyed men were glued to phones.
    â€˜Fish pie’s not on the menu,
sir!’ joked Janvier with a sigh, ‘and yet we’ve covered the primary area.
I’m now doing the Faubourg Montmartre, and Torrence has got as far as Place Clichy
…’
    Maigret also got on the phone
in his office, but he was calling a small cheap hotel in Rue Lepic.
    â€˜Yes, by taxi … At once
…’
    Someone had left photos of the dead man on his
desk taken during the night. There were also copies of the morning papers, reports and a note
from the examining magistrate, Coméliau.
    â€˜Is that you, Madame Maigret? … Not
too bad … I don’t know yet if I’ll be home for lunch … No, I
haven’t had time to get a shave … I’ll try and get to a barber’s …
Yes, I’ve eaten …’
    He duly went out to find a barber’s, but
not before telling old Joseph, the office clerk, to ask a visitor who would be coming to see him
to wait. He did not have far to go, just across the bridge. He walked into the first
gentleman’s hairdresser’s he came to on Boulevard Saint-Michel and stared grimly at
the large, dark-ringed eyes