The Carter of ’La Providence’ by Georges Simenon

latch. The hunting dog with an overfed paunch, which prowled round the yard, turned joyful circles and greeted him deliriously, as it did all visitors.
    When he opened the door, the inspector was confronted by the landlord’s grey horse, which was no more tethered now than on the other days, and made the most of the opportunity to go for a walk outside.
    The broken-winded mare was still lying in its box, looking miserable.
    Maigret moved the straw with his foot, as though hoping to find something he had missed on his first examination of the place.
    Two or three times he repeated to himself crossly:
    â€˜Back to square one!’
    He had more or less made up his mind to return to Meaux, even Paris, and retrace step by step the route followed by the
Southern Cross
.
    There were all kinds of odds and ends lying around: old halters, bits of harness, the end of a candle, a broken pipe …
    From a distance he noticed something white poking out of a pile of hay. He went over not expecting anything much. The next moment he was holding an American sailor’s forage cap just like the one
worn by Vladimir.
    The material was spattered with mud and horse droppings and misshapen as though it had been stretched in all directions.
    Maigret searched all around but failed to come up with anything else.
    Fresh straw had been put down over the spot where the body had been found to make it seem less sinister.
    â€˜Am I under arrest?’
    As he walked towards the stable door, he could not have said why the colonel’s question should suddenly surface in his memory. He also saw Sir Walter, as boorish as he was aristocratic, his eyes permanently watering, the drunkenness always
just beneath the surface and his amazing composure.
    He thought back to the brief talk he had had with the supercilious magistrate in the bar of the café, with its tables covered in brown oilcloth, which, through a sprinkling of polite voices and refined manners, had been magically transformed for
a short time into a sophisticated drawing room.
    He kept turning the cap round and round in his hands, suspicious, with a calculating look in his eye.
    â€˜Tread carefully,’ Monsieur de Clairfontaine de Lagny had told him as he took Maigret’s hand lightly.
    The goose, still furious, followed the horse, screeching abuse at it.
    The horse, letting its large head hang down, snuffled among the rubbish littering the yard.
    On each side of the door was an old milestone. The inspector sat down on one of them, still holding the cap and his pipe, which had gone out.
    Directly ahead of him was a large dung heap, then a hedge with occasional gaps in it, and beyond were fields in which nothing was yet growing and hills streaked with black and white on which a cloud with a dark centre seemed to have rested its
full weight.
    From behind one edge of it sprang an oblique shaft of sunlight which created sparkles of light on the dung heap.
    â€˜
An enchanting woman
,’ the colonel had said of Mary Lampson.
    â€˜
Nothing if not a gentleman!
’ Willy had said of the colonel.
    Only Vladimir had said nothing. He had just kept busy, buying supplies, petrol, filling up the tanks of drinking water, baling out the dinghy and helping his employer to dress.
    A group of Flemings passed along the road, talking in loud voices. Suddenly, Maigret bent down. The yard was paved with irregular flagstones. Two metres in front of him, in the crack between two of them, something had just been caught by the sun
and glinted.
    It was a cufflink, gold with a platinum hatching. Maigret had seen a pair just like it the day before, on Willy’s wrists, when he was lying on his bed blowing cigarette smoke at the ceiling and talking so unconcernedly.
    He took no more interest in the horse or the goose or
any of his surroundings. Moments later, he was turning the handle that cranked the phone.
    â€˜Ã‰pernay … Yes, the mortuary! … This is the