The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien by Georges Simenon

if, a few years ago, you ever knew a certain Jean Lecocq
     d’Arneville …’
    There was a quick, distinct change. Van
     Damme shuddered, but resisted turning towards Maigret, while Lombard bent abruptly
     down to pick up a crumpled paper lying on the floor.
    â€˜I … may have heard that
     name before,’ murmured the photoengraver. ‘He … From Liège,
     isn’t he?’
    The colour had drained from his face. He
     moved a pile of plates from one spot to another.
    â€˜I don’t know what became of
     him. I … It was so long ago …’
    â€˜Jef! Jef, hurry!’
    It was a woman’s voice, coming
     from the labyrinth of
stairs and
     corridors, and she arrived at the open door breathless from running, so excited that
     her legs were shaky and she had to wipe her face with a corner of her apron. Maigret
     recognized the old lady he’d seen downstairs.
    â€˜Jef!’
    And he, now even whiter from emotion,
     his eyes gleaming, gasped, ‘Well?’
    â€˜A girl! Hurry!’
    The man looked around, stammered
     something impossible to decipher and dashed out of the door.
    Alone with Maigret, Van Damme pulled a
     cigar from his pocket, lit it slowly, crushed out the match with his shoe. He wore
     the same wooden expression as in Maigret’s office: his mouth was set in the
     same hard line, and he ground his jaws in the same way.
    But the inspector pretended not to
     notice him and, hands in his pockets, pipe between his teeth, he began to walk
     around the office, examining the walls.
    Very little of the original wallpaper
     was still visible, however, because any space not taken up by shelves was covered
     with drawings, etchings, and paintings that were simply canvases on stretchers
     without frames, rather plodding landscapes in which the tree foliage and grass were
     of the same even, pasty green.
    There were a few caricatures signed
Jef
, some of them touched up with watercolours, some cut from a local
     paper.
    What struck Maigret, though, was how
     many of the drawings were all variations on one particular theme. The drawing paper
     had yellowed with age, and a few dates
indicated that these sketches had been done about ten
     years earlier.
    They were executed in a different style
     as well, with a more darkly Romantic sensibility, and seemed like the efforts of a
     young art student imitating the work of Gustave Doré.
    A first ink drawing showed a hanged man
     swinging from a gallows on which perched an enormous crow. And there were at least
     twenty other etchings and pen or pencil sketches that had the same leitmotif of
     hanging.
    On the edge of a forest: a man hanging
     from every branch.
    A church steeple: beneath the
     weathercock, a human body dangling from each arm of the cross.
    There were hanged men of all kinds. Some
     were dressed in the fashions of the sixteenth century and formed a kind of Court of
     Miracles, where everybody was swinging a few feet above the ground.
    There was one crazy hanged man in a top
     hat and tails, cane in hand, whose gallows was a lamp post.
    Below another sketch were written four
     lines from François Villon’s
Ballad of the Hanged Men
.
    There were dates, always from around the
     same time, and all these macabre pictures from ten years earlier were now displayed
     along with captioned sketches for comic papers, drawings for calendars and almanacs,
     landscapes of the surrounding Ardennes and advertising posters.
    Another recurrent theme was the steeple
     – in fact, so was the whole church, depicted from the front, from the sides, from
     below. The church portal, on its own. The gargoyles. The parvis, with its six steps
     looming large in perspective …
    Always the same
     church! And as Maigret moved from one wall to another, he could sense Van
     Damme’s growing agitation, an uneasiness fuelled, perhaps, by the same
     temptation that had overwhelmed him by the dam