Read Vertigo for Free Online Page B

knitting.
    Flavières didn’t go at once. For another minute he stood with his elbow on the desk, fidgeting with the lighter in his pocket.
    ‘I’ve lost the knack,’ he thought. ‘I no longer know how to squeeze the truth out of people.’
    He would have liked to go up and look through the keyhole of No. 19, but he knew very well he would see nothing. With a nod and a grunt to the old woman, he turned and went out.
    Why had it got to be the back room on the third floor? Unless in its day it had been Pauline Lagerlac’s bedroom. Only, if it had been, Madeleine couldn’t possibly know it. She didn’t even know of the woman’s suicide… In that case?… What mysterious appeal could have brought her to this particularroom in this particular house? Various explanations occurred to him—clairvoyance for instance—but he rejected them one after the other. Madeleine was a perfectly normal woman: there were specialists to vouch for it… No. The answer had to be sought for in some other quarter.
    At the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain he looked back, and he almost broke into a run at the sight of Madeleine walking in the opposite direction, down towards the Seine. She had been in the hotel barely half an hour. Walking briskly along the quays, she passed the Gare d’Orsay, then suddenly hailed a taxi. Flavières just had time to secure another.
    ‘Follow that Renault,’ he shouted, jumping in.
    Perhaps he ought to have brought his own car. Madeleine had almost given him the slip.
    On the Pont de la Concorde and all up the Champs-Elysées the traffic was as thick as on the busiest days before the war. Madeleine’s taxi was heading towards the Etoile. She was obviously going home. There were uniforms everywhere and big cars flying pennants as on Bastille Day. There was something a little feverish about it all which even Flavières couldn’t ignore. He didn’t really dislike this sensation of slightly heightened life on the brink of danger… No. She wasn’t going home. The taxi rounded the Arc de Triomphe and then went straight on down the Avenue de Neuilly towards the Porte Maillot. The cars were less numerous here; they dawdled along with windows down and roofs open.
    ‘Seems they’re going to cut down the petrol ration, even for taxis,’ observed the driver.
    Flavières said to himself that, thanks to Gévigne, he’d get all the coupons he wanted. He reproached himself for thethought, then proceeded to smother his conscience—a gallon or two more or less in the wholesale wastage would make no difference to anyone.
    ‘Drop me here, will you?’
    Madeleine was getting out at the far end of the Pont de Neuilly. Flavières had his money all ready in his hand, so as not to lose a moment, but this time Madeleine sauntered off with as leisurely a pace as on the previous day. She walked along the quays, apparently with no aim in view, just for the pleasure of walking. It was impossible to think of any link between the hotel in the Rue des Saints-Pères and the Quai de Courbevoie. If she just wanted to walk, why come all this way? The quays in the centre of Paris were far more beautiful. Was it the need to get away from the crowd? If she wanted to think something out, or merely to dream, it was certainly quiet enough here beside the smoothly flowing river. He thought of the days when he had wandered along the banks of the Loire, with its little islands, its tongues of sand, hot underfoot, the osier-beds in which the frogs croaked out their joy at being alive. Madeleine was like him: he felt sure of it; and he was tempted to overtake her. They wouldn’t need to talk. They would simply walk side by side watching the barges gliding through the water. It wouldn’t do, of course, and to curb the impulse he stopped altogether and allowed her to get well ahead. He even thought of going home. But there was something a little intoxicating and more than a little questionable in this pursuit which fascinated him, obsessed