Chief Inspector Maigret Visits London by Margaret de Rohan Page A

there was something dodgy about the numerical sequence. It was the same story, eventually, in the Tesco shop, but it took much longer before they heard it, because no one seemed to know who was in charge.
    â€˜So, matey, now there’s a definite connection established between Serge Vachon and the counterfeit £20 notes that Megan Lisle’s grandson found south of the River.’
    â€˜So it would seem, guv.’
    â€˜Which means the next question becomes… ’
    â€˜Who was the intended victim of the hit and run: Nicole Vachon, or Georges Martin?’
    â€˜My money’s on Nicole Vachon, Andy.’
    â€˜Mine, too, boss, but who was driving the car, Serge Vachon or one of his associates?’
    â€˜That’s the $64,000 question, my friend.’ They wouldn’t have to wait very long for the answer.
    At 7 o’clock that evening the water police pulled a body out of the Thames, just beyond Barnes bridge, very near the finish of the annual Oxford Cambridge boat race. The body had been in the water for over twenty-four hours, and fish had eaten some of the flesh, but the pathologist who did the post-mortem could still determine that the cause of death was drowning. That had been easy enough. But the interesting thing for this particular pathologist was the stomach contents of the victim: red wine, garlic bread, and half-chewed fresh garlic kernels.
    It was Serge Vachon.
    Almost exactly twelve hours later, the grey sedan that had been used to run down Georges Martin, was found abandoned in Peckham, south London. The front of the car was damaged, clearly showing the impact with Inspector Martin’s body, and his blood was visible on the front panels. Apart from that, the car held nothing remarkable by way of evidence.
    Nothing that is, apart from a small fragment of a business card that was wedged underneath the front seat. That fragment had a fingerprint on it, and the person to whom the fingerprint belonged was known to the police. In fact he was very well known: his
nom de crim
was Slippery Sam.
    However he was not the Big Fish in this criminal conspiracy. Oh no, he was just a tiny minnow. But the man he had recently been working for belonged to a very different kettle of fish: he was a piranha!
    And an extremely large,
vicious
piranha at that.

Chapter Thirteen
    â€˜I guess this guarantees Serge Vachon a place in the Guinness Book of Best Alibis,’ Andy Gillespie said, when he heard the news the next morning.
    â€˜You’re right there, Sonny Jim. It’s hard to see how he could have done the dreaded deed on Inspector Martin when he’s been brown bread in the Thames for a couple of days,’ his boss agreed.
    â€˜So what do you think happened? He had a skin-full of red wine, then went for a walk in the dark along the Thames and fell in?’
    â€˜It’s been known to happen, Andy, but it doesn’t explain all the garlic in his stomach, nor the heavy blow to the back of his head… ’
    â€˜Perhaps he had a morbid fear of the un-dead, and he hit his head on some floating timber, or some other flotsam, when he fell in the drink.’
    â€˜What? And then he obligingly rolled over in the water so the very same piece of flotsam could wallop him again on his forehead?’
    â€˜Or a different piece of wood – it
could
happen, guv,’ Andy suggested defensively.
    â€˜No, no, no: the pathologist was very clear on that point: whatever whacked him on the back of the head also inflicted the wound on his forehead. And what about all the other bruises on his body: how do you explain them? And what, apart from this far-fetched fear of zombies that you’ve dreamt up, accounts for the raw garlic in his stomach?’
    Andy shrugged. ‘It’s supposed to be good for us; maybe he was some kind of health nut.’
    â€˜And maybe you’ve strayed into clutching at straws territory now – or blasted La-La land. I don’t buy it,